Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

The fact, or at least the degree, of human exceptionalism is often disputed. In some quarters it is considered modest and seemly for us to take our place among the animals, conceptually speaking — to acknowledge finally the bonds of kinship evolution implies. Yet, in view of our history with regard to the animals, not to mention our history with one another, it seems fair to wonder if the beasts, given a voice in the matter, would not feel a bit insulted by our intrusion. History is the great unfinished portrait of old Adam. In the very fact of having a history we are unique. And when we look at it we are astonished. Only in myth or nightmare could another such creature be found. What a thing is man.

Say, however, that God is a given, the God of the psalmist and of Jesus. Then it is possible to claim a dignity for humankind that is assured because it is bestowed on us, that is, because it is beyond even our formidable powers to besmirch and destroy. Say that the one earthly thing God did not put under our feet was our own essential nature. The one great corrective to our tendency toward depredation would be a recognition of our abiding sacredness, since we are both, and often simultaneously, victim and villain. The divine image in us, despite all, is an act of God, immune to our sacrilege, apparent in the loveliness that never ceases to shine out in incalculable instances of beauty and love and imagination that make the dire assessment of our character, however solidly grounded in our history and our prospects, radically untrue.

It is not uncommon for those who are respectful of Christianity and eager to rescue some part of it from the assaults of rational skepticism to say Jesus was a great man, and no more than a man. A teacher, a martyr to intolerance, from whom we might learn compassion. He is defined in terms of an equivalence, his mystery anchored to what is assumed to be a known value. But what is man? What does it mean to say, as the Gospel writers say and insist, that Jesus was indeed a human being? What we are remains a very open question. Perhaps some part of the divine purpose in the Incarnation of this Son of Man was and is to help us to a true definition.

There is an element of the arbitrary in our experience of life on earth — nonsymmetrical time, weak gravity, and the physical properties of matter that are artifacts of the scale at which we perceive. Out of such things is constructed a reality sufficient to our flourishing, even while we are immersed in a greater reality whose warp and woof are profoundly unlike anything we experience. I am drawn to Calvin’s description of this world as a theater, with the implication that a strong and particular intention is expressed in it, that its limits, its boundedness, are meant to let meaning be isolated out of the indecipherable weather of the universe at large. A flicker of energy in the great void may dissipate in those oceans, but a flicker of energy in the small space of a human brain interacts with a mind’s history, expresses and changes a human self. It can mean insight or delusion, and they in turn can mean compassion or hostility, with consequences well beyond that self. Old John Locke understood the power that comes with constraint. Having proposed that all thought or perception is based on four simple ideas, he said,

Nor let anyone think these [simple ideas] too narrow bounds for the capacious mind of man to expatiate in, which takes its flight further than the stars, and cannot be confined by the limits of the world; that extends its thoughts often even beyond the utmost expansion of Matter, and makes excursion into that incomprehensible Inane … Nor will it be so strange to think these few simple ideas sufficient to employ the quickest thought, or largest capacity; and to furnish the materials of all that various knowledge, and more various fancies and opinions of all mankind, if we consider how many words may be made out of the various composition of twenty-four letters …

Reading the thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries makes one aware of the detour the next centuries took away from the true path of modern thought. Locke would be interested to know what we can do with 0 and 1, what nature does with A, C, G, and T. Locke makes the point beautifully that our limits are entirely consistent with our transcending them, and so it is with limitation itself wherever it occurs in this strangely constructed world. In effect limitation could be understood as leverage, a highly efficient multiplier of possibility that creates and gives access to our largest capacities. This would no doubt seem a mighty paradox, if we were not so thoroughly accustomed to the truth of it.

Here is another paradox. Positivist assumptions and methods, which seem to bring stringent standards to bear on every question, actually obliterate the kind of boundaries that are necessary to meaningful inquiry into any but the most rudimentary questions. The great and ancient axiom that a negative cannot be proved has no standing with them, because it is at odds with a notion of proof that arises out of their model of reality and reinforces it. They can say, for example, that a historical Jesus did not exist. They can say that, though he may have existed, he did not teach the things attributed to him. They can say that the whole phenomenon of Christianity was the invention of St. Paul and had little or nothing to do with Jesus. The odd power of these assertions comes from the fact that they assume the possibility of proof and interpret the absence of proof as determining, a classic error. In fact we live in a world where there is seldom anything deserving the name “proof,” where we must be content with evidence. We read the Commentaries on the Gallic Wars as the work of Julius Caesar, but who can prove that he wrote it? He had a good many officers with him, no doubt some of them highly literate. A general who has undertaken such a vast campaign and set his political hopes on its outcome would hardly be blamed for signing his name to the work of a lieutenant. We attribute the Latin Vulgate to St. Jerome, but who can prove that it was not the work of Paula and Eustochium? If Anonymous was a woman, was not Pseudonymous her mother? It is absurd to pretend that such things can be known, or that their negative corollaries — the Vulgate was not the work of Jerome, Caesar did not write the Commentaries —should be treated as true or even meaningful on the basis of the fact that they cannot be proved false. Bertrand Russell and others have made just this critique of certain arguments for the existence of God, reasonably enough. There is an interesting insight to be had here — that a very great part of what we think we know is and can only be hypothesis. Most of our beliefs about the world are unscrutinized because not much is at stake. Shakespeare is paid the great compliment of being suspected of not being who we think he was, to the glory of the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Moses has been called an Egyptian, a worshipper of the solar disk. But Jesus is unique in the energy that has been put into reducing or nullifying him by one means or another. This is understandable as a polemical strategy, but the fact is that it has had great impact on Christian thought for a century and more. It has put it awkwardly on the defensive — awkwardly, because it is difficult to make a reasonable response to an illogical challenge, especially when the intellectual high ground is uncritically conceded to the challenger.

The life of Jesus is very well attested by the standards of antiquity. How he is to be understood is a question of another kind. The essential point is that the demand for proof as the positivists understand the word, if it were made rigorously and consistently, would be disappointed in the vast percentage of cases. This would by no means justify the conclusions that whatever cannot be proved is therefore meaningless or false. And it most emphatically would not legitimize the burgeoning of fundamentalist truth claims that are themselves totally unprovable and that flourish in contempt of evidence, as a slow walk past the religion shelves in any bookstore will demonstrate. I take what comfort I can from the fact that this kind of thinking is pandemic in contemporary society, and that members of Congress participate in it or defer to it. This is the coldest of all possible comfort. Be that as it may. In light of all this, I feel free to return to the traditional vocabulary of my faith.