Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

Cultural pessimism is always fashionable, and, since we are human, there are always grounds for it. It has the negative consequence of depressing the level of aspiration, the sense of the possible. And from time to time it has the extremely negative consequence of encouraging a kind of somber panic, a collective dream-state in which recourse to terrible remedies is inspired by delusions of mortal threat. If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing. When panic on one side is creating alarm on the other, it is easy to forget that there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism — exactly the same grounds, in fact — that is, because we are human. We still have every potential for good we have ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect and one another’s. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and depredations, for as long as we abide on this earth. To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.

Sigmund Freud called Americans Lollards, intending no compliment. Still, I hope he was right. I hope that, whoever we are and by whatever spiritual or cultural path we arrive at Lollardy, we do and will share a generous and even a costly readiness to show our respect for all minds and spirits, especially for those whose place in life might cheat them of respect. It may be that the variety of cultures exists to show us that the histories that form them differently all yield value. The spiritual and intellectual wealth of nations has flowed into this country, enriching it in the degree that those who brought their histories and traditions have been good stewards of their special wealth and good interpreters of it to the larger society. The Reformation is another beautiful and very worthy heritage, another stream of cultural and spiritual wealth, also well deserving of advocates and interpreters.

Among the most striking sentences in the English language is one spoken by Prospero to his treacherous brother, Antonio, in the fifth act of The Tempest . He says, “For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother / Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive / Thy rankest fault — all of them.” The shock is in the language itself, the stark sequence of contempt and forgiveness. Prospero has already told his attendant spirit, Ariel, of his intentions toward Antonio and the others:

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick,

Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury

Do I take part. The rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent,

The sole drift of my purpose doth extend

Not a frown further.

And again, while those subject to his magic stand “spell-stop’d,” unable to move, he says:

Flesh and blood,

You, brother mine, that entertain’d ambition,

Expelled remorse and nature …

I do forgive thee,

Unnatural though thou art.

So there is no suspense at all about what Prospero will do, how, powerful as he is, he will treat the brother who has slandered him and usurped his dukedom, and who must have assumed that he had caused Prospero’s death and his child’s death as well. He is at Prospero’s mercy, and the mercy he receives is perfect, insisted upon in these repetitions, qualified only by the fact that in no case does it forget, minimize, or extenuate his crimes.

I propose that Shakespeare is turning over a theological problem here. How do forgiveness and grace not deprive evil of its nature, its gravity? Granted, Prospero does subject the malefactors in his power to a minor purgatory of “inward pinches,” which presumably have the effect of conscience. But no one except the king Alonso actually acknowledges fault or asks to be forgiven, nor does Prospero require it or even pause for them to ask it of him. He has already chosen virtue over vengeance before he has restored their ability to speak and to ask his pardon, if they choose to.

Debates had raged throughout Europe, at least since the time of Luther, about how sin and grace were to be reconciled. The Reformist side rejected purgatory as unscriptural, and therefore rejected indulgences and prayers for the dead as well. It rejected the canonization of saints and the treasury of merit. It rejected auricular confession and absolution by priests. It rejected “salvation by works,” by which was meant pilgrimages and donations, vows, crusades, and anything else that was undertaken with the thought that it would mitigate sin in God’s eyes. In place of all this it insisted on faith alone, Scripture alone, Christ alone, grace alone. This was a very profound stirring in the deeps of Western civilization, having to do with the structure of society and even of individual consciousness.

Rather than recruiting Shakespeare to one side or another, as critics and biographers often do, or supposing that these questions that absorbed so many of the best minds in England and Europe had no place in his thoughts, as critics and biographers do characteristically, let us say that he took an intelligent interest in them, as he did in so many things. How is guilt in others, real or imagined, to be dealt with? How is one’s own sense of guilt to be borne or relieved? Histories and tragedies, and comedies, too, turn on these issues, and on one even larger. How is life to be lived in this fallen world, with all its dangers and temptations, if grace is taken to be the standard of a virtuous life? Who can rise to such a standard or be loyal to it? What response will it find where it is manifested? And what is the soul, the human essence for which all these questions are of infinite significance?

“Grace is grace, despite of all controversy.” These words are spoken by the character Lucio in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Lucio is a fool and a scoundrel, a fantastic, according to the dramatis personae. But he is also the loyal friend who takes steps to save a man from suffering death as a penalty for an offense that is only made punishable by an extremely rigid interpretation of law. These words are part of a half-serious exchange with two anonymous gentlemen in a house of ill repute, and Lucio ends his remark with a jibe, “as for example, thou art a wicked villain, despite of all grace.”

In this scene Lucio and the gentlemen are playing back and forth between two meanings of the word “grace,” as “the thanksgiving before meat,” and as a central concept of Christian theology, by which, in Lucio’s taunting instance, a villain might be rescued from his wicked proclivities in this life. Still, Lucio’s words are worth pausing over. “Grace is grace”—simply itself, not accessible to paraphrase. This would indeed put it beyond controversy, since there is no language in which it can be controverted, and it would give it a special character, most notably in the Shakespearean world, where associations among words, figures, similes, are constant and central. Lucio’s exchanges with the gentlemen mention that table grace is to be heard in any religion, with the further implication that one would be better for hearing it. In this sense also it is put beyond controversy, and every religion is, so to speak, graced by it. I propose that, in his later plays, Shakespeare gives grace a scale and aesthetic power, and a structural importance, that reach toward a greater sufficiency of expression — not a definition or a demonstration of grace or even an objective correlative for it, but the intimation of a great reality of another order, which pervades human experience, even manifests itself in human actions and relations, yet is always purely itself. Hamlet speaks of ideal virtues, calling them “pure as grace.” Prospero, after the scene of rather detached and unceremonious reconciliations, speaks his amazing epilogue to the audience, asking them to release him from his island, “As you from crimes would pardoned be.” He says, “My ending is despair, / Unless I be relieved by prayer, / Which pierces so that it assaults / Mercy itself and frees all faults.” Prayer opens on something purer and grander than mercy, something that puts aside the consciousness of fault, the residue of judgment that makes mercy a lesser thing than grace.