Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

Perhaps because I am sometimes a writer and sometimes a scholar I think I have a little sense of the labor and concentration represented in all these books. I know I can’t imagine the care that went into the Bibles the Lollards carried, made small to be easily concealed, each one handwritten since there was still no printing press, and each one ornamented with delicate strokes in its margins. I have a collection of Calvin’s writings, nowhere near complete but daunting all the same, dozens of volumes of disciplined and elegant explication from the hand of a man whose health was never good, who shouldered for decades the practical and diplomatic problems of Geneva, a city under siege, and whose writings inspired and also endangered the individuals and populations across Europe who read them, whether or not they were persuaded by them. To say these things are humbling would be to understate the matter wildly.

I do happen to know what goes into the writing of a book — granted, not a book that requires a mastery of ancient languages, or that addresses the endless difficulties of translation — nor one that sets out to make literary use of a disparaged language or that attempts to render or to interpret a sacred text. I have no idea what it would be like to write in prison or in hiding or in a city full of refugees. I have no idea what it would be like to live with the threat of death while trying to write something good enough to justify the mortal peril others accepted in simply reading it. I have just enough relevant experience to inform my awe. I find the achievements of these writers unimaginable. When I see Calvin in his commentaries pausing once again over the nuances and ambiguities of a Hebrew word as if his time and his patience and his strength were all inexhaustible, I am touched by how respectful he is, phrase by phrase and verse by verse, of the text of Scripture, and therefore how respectful he is of any pastor and of all those to whom that pastor will preach.

And this is why it seems important to me to remember the special popular origins of the movement that became the English Reformation, and the Reformation in general. Indeed, the intellectual genealogy of the movement is straightforward — Professor John Wycliffe of Oxford was read by Professor Jan Hus of Prague, who in turn was read by Professor Martin Luther of Wittenberg, whose work exerted enormous influence on William Tyndale. And it deeply influenced the brilliant young humanist scholar John Calvin, who would echo the psalmist and anticipate Hamlet in his praise of “the manifold agility of the soul, which enables it to take a survey of heaven and earth; to join the past and the present; to retain the memory of things heard long ago; to conceive of whatever it chooses by the help of imagination; its ingenuity also in the invention of such admirable arts.” He is describing the universal and defining mysteries of human consciousness, which he says are “certain proofs of the divinity in man.”

The argument could be made that we are now living among the relics or even the ruins of the Reformation. One relic is a continuing attachment to the Bible that is culturally particular to America, even in the absence of any great impulse to honor the Promethean work of the Reformers by reading it. A ruin may be the respect for one another as minds and consciences that is encoded in the First Amendment to the Constitution and institutionalized in the traditionally widespread teaching of the liberal arts, the disciplines that celebrate human thought and creativity as values in their own right and as ends in themselves. The fine colleges founded in the Middle West when it was still very much a frontier — Oberlin, Grinnell, Knox, and so many others — offered demanding curricula from the beginning, assuming that the young men and women who found themselves on the prairie would want to be educated to the highest standards. Rather than tuition, the colleges required all their students to do the chores necessary to the functioning of these little academic outposts, to make logic and classical history available to the figurative — or literal — Ploughman on equal terms with anyone.

It seems these days as if the right to bear arms is considered by some a suitable remedy for the tendency of others to act on their freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, and especially of religion, in ways and degrees these arms-bearing folk find irksome. Reverence for the sacred integrity of every pilgrim’s progress through earthly life seems to be eroding. The generosity to the generality of people that gave us most of our best institutions would be considered by many pious people now to be socialistic, though the motives behind the creation of many of them, for example, these fine colleges, was utterly and explicitly Christian. If I seem to have strayed from my subject, it is only to make the point that forgetting the character of the Reformation, that is, the passion for disseminating as broadly as possible the best of civilization as the humanist tradition understood it, and at the same time honoring and embracing the beauty of the shared culture of everyday life, has allowed us to come near to forgetting why we developed excellent public libraries, schools, and museums.

We tend to break things down into categories that are too narrow. It is hard to call the motives behind the development of these institutions self-seeking, though there can be no doubt that they have contributed mightily to our prosperity and have in some cases redounded to the credit of philanthropists. We cannot call the motives altruistic, though many people have given selfless and devoted support to them. The motives were and are of another order. We are moved to respond to the fact of human brilliance, human depth, in all its variety, because it is the most wonderful thing in the world, very probably the most wonderful thing in the universe. The impulse to enjoy and enhance it is by no means originally or exclusively — or consistently — Protestant or Christian. It has its roots in Renaissance humanism, in classical tradition, and before either of them in the ancient Hebrews’ assertion that a human being is an image of God.

In the forms we have known it, however, it is especially related to the Reformation because the rise of the vernacular languages with all they embodied in unacknowledged beauty and in the capacity for profound meaning made the broad dissemination of learning possible and urgent, and a labor of aesthetic pleasure and very great love. Isaac Watts wrote of one who teaches that “he should have so much of a natural candour and sweetness mixed with all the improvements of learning, as might convey knowledge into the minds of his disciples with a sort of gentle insinuation and sovereign delight, and may tempt them into the highest improvements of their reason by a resistless and insensible force.” He recommended the reading of poetry so that one may “learn to know, and taste, and feel a fine stanza, as well as to hear it.”

Now we are more inclined to speak of information than of learning, and to think of the means by which information is transmitted rather than of how learning might transform, and be transformed by, the atmospheres of a given mind. We may talk about the elegance of an equation, but we forget to find value in the beauty of a thought. At the same time we live, if we choose, in what amounts to a second universe. With the rise of mass literacy, printing, and publishing came an outpouring of books of many kinds, at first religious, classical, philosophical, polemical, and quasi- or protoscientific. Then there came as well any number of newly created works of the literary imagination. To this day the phenomenon accelerates. The universe of print we live in now, on page and screen, is an infinitely capacious memory and an inexhaustible reservoir of new thought. That its best potentialities are not often realized, that its best moments often pass unobserved or unvalued, only certifies its profound humanity.