Originally broadcast September 18, 2009

BOB ABERNETHY, host: We have a profile of the much-honored writer Marilynne Robinson. She received the Orange Prize for fiction this past summer, in Britain, for the best writing in the English language by a woman. Five years ago, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Gilead, and her latest book, Home, has also had glowing reviews. Robinson is a mainline Protestant with great respect for Calvinist theology and strong opinions about the world around her.

Marilynne Robinson’s view of the world was formed in the mountains of Idaho, where she grew up. In the solitude and wilderness she sensed a larger presence.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence. It always seemed as if there was something extraordinary around me. The holy is at the origins of everything that exists. Everything.

(reading aloud from one of her essays): “So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes.”

ABERNETHY: In Iowa, where she lives now, teaching writing at the University of Iowa, Robinson tells her students to think for themselves.

ROBINSON: I want them to know that they have their own testimony to offer, that if they are good observers, if they are thoughtful people, if they have the courage to evaluate things independently they will give the world something new, something worth having.

ABERNETHY: Which is exactly what her admirers say Robinson herself has done.

Robinson is a regular churchgoer at the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City, and she sometimes preaches there. She loves the old Protestant Mainline.

ROBINSON: I think of them as being people who are serious about things that deserve, you know, serious attention, for example, social problems. They are very open to acknowledging the value of other religious traditions and tend very much away from harsh judgments.

ABERNETHY: Robinson has great respect for the 16th-century reformer John Calvin, who she says was far more compassionate than his stern reputation suggests—for instance, about forgiveness.

ROBINSON: The assumption is that forgiveness is owed wherever God might want forgiveness to be given, and we don’t know, so you err on the side of forgiving. You assume your fallibility, and you also assume that anybody that you encounter is precious to God—or is God himself.

ABERNETHY: So you cannot judge. You have to forgive. But Robinson is very critical of the work of the so-called new atheists.

ROBINSON: I think this sort of avalanche of literature we have gotten lately is very second-rate. It simply is not well informed and not well considered. I mean I consider it to be kind of noise.

ABERNETHY: She is deeply worried about the degradation of the earth’s environment, especially its oceans, and she is scathing on popular, commercial culture.

ROBINSON: The idea that everything always has to push some extreme, you know, be more violent, be more sort of disrespectful of human life, and so on—there’s a cynicism about it, things that have to do with mayhem, that make it look like it would be a lot of fun, you know, to wipe out your adversaries or something like that, that really treat people like dispensable, you know, items.

ABERNETHY: Do you see it as a barrier to religious life?

ROBINSON: I think it’s a severe distraction. We have to think that people are sacred. Human beings have to be considered sacred. That’s the beginning.

ABERNETHY: And the political climate?

ROBINSON: It’s a little shocking when you hear people say, like about this health thing we’re going through now, what’s in it for me, you know? That’s a huge change in the basic values of the culture. I got sort of tired when I was a kid of hearing people say you have to leave the world better than you found it. But now I think I would burst into tears if somebody said that to me—just, what a lovely thought, you know?

ABERNETHY: In spite of her love of solitude and lonely observation, Robinson’s reputation as a novelist and her strong opinions have made her a popular speaker—a soft-spoken prophet. At a forum at Georgetown University she was asked about being a contrarian:

ROBINSON (speaking at Georgetown University): I don’t feel as if I am contrarian. I feel as if everyone else is. No, that’s an exaggeration, but I do think there is a great deal in the culture that abrades and offends people in general.

ABERNETHY: She made it clear that at the same time that she embraces Christianity she is also respectful of the secular.

ROBINSON (speaking at Georgetown University): I know many, many, many, many people who authentically deserve to be described in that word whom I cannot imagine that God would not love. I have no conception of God that would not include love for these people.

A lot of the things that I criticize, I think, are in their impact inhumane. My loyalty really is to human loveliness, and the deep experience of self that every self deserves, you know, and the deep acknowledgment that everyone owes to everyone else.

If you were to think of yourself looking back on life, I think that some of the things that would please you most deeply are that at some moment you were—you comforted your child, or in one way or another you soothed, you fed, you were adequate, you know? These things are very beautiful and, I think, sacramental.

ABERNETHY: Back in her house in Iowa City, Robinson writes in whatever room she feels will be the most supportive. She is working now on a book about the Bible. She writes fiction in longhand with a ball-point pen in a college-ruled spiral notebook. Nonfiction goes in her computer. She also walks her toy poodle, Otis, named for the late musician Otis Redding. As she walks, she says, she thinks—how to fix “the rattle,” as she called it, in a sentence she had just written. Maybe, too, how to fix the world she says, echoing Calvin, the world God has given us to enjoy.

Read more of Bob Abernethy’s August 31, 2009 interview in Iowa with Marilynne Robinson. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Gilead and Home, and she a member of the faculty at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop:

Marilynne Robinson

Q: In your teaching, what are the most important things you want your students to understand?

A: That they have their own testimony to offer, that if they think about what they perceive and what they feel carefully, if they watch other people closely and magnanimously, they will have something new to say, something that’s an actual addition to what has been said. That they have no obligation to be derivative or imitative in any way. That is absolutely not the point. I want them to know that if they are thoughtful people, if they have the courage to evaluate things independently and to enjoy the processes of their own thought, then they will give the world something new, something worth having.

Q: In your essay on Psalm Eight in The Death of Adam you wrote, “So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes.” I think it’s very central to appreciating what you’ve been doing in your work.

A: Well, yes. I read things like theology, and I read about science, Scientific American and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is intrinsically mysterious as a physical object, say, or as a phenomenon of culture, or as an artifact of the history that lies behind it. I’ve always been almost offended by the idea of mysticism, because it seems as if it diminishes what we know by every means that gives us access to it – it diminishes the simple spectacle of what we are and where we are, the complex spectacle, I should probably have said. I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence. I never had the experience of banality, as it were. It always seemed as if there was something extraordinary around me, and I think that probably has done as much to form my mind as anything could have done.

Q: What are some of those things you’ve seen that are plainly before your eyes?

A: When I came here from living in New England for quite a long time I wanted to know what I was seeing, because every landscape has a history. It is the way it is because specific layers of population have lived in it and modified it and so on. Why is it that in the Middle West so many of the oldest structures are colleges virtually, in many cases, as old as the settlement itself? Because it’s a remarkable thing that the first thing people would feel they needed would be a college, and then it turns out that there’s a whole narrative behind that, that they were almost utopian communities that were designed to do all sorts of things. Create a culture that would be immune to the slave economy, for example. Create a culture that would be disseminating education at a high level, but accessible to anybody. All these kinds of very idealistic intentions were established very early on at what looked like little New England colleges that are scattered all over the Middle West and which tend to be, to this day, institutions of very high quality, very culturally important. But you look at a building, and you think why that period? Why that style? Who made that choice? And then you can sort of unfold almost anything that you look at, and so you find out that there’s a human narrative behind it, that there was a social vision behind it. If you just look at anything as if it were just, sort of, furniture – nothing against furniture, but then you are absolutely not seeing it. Everything needs to be queried, as they say.

I think probably the major component of seeing for me is assuming that what I see is something that I can’t see adequately or see exhaustively, and what is most remarkable in it is probably something that I have to watch very carefully in order to see any fragment of. The idea, which is very important in Calvin, that people are images of God – nothing could mystify anyone more than the idea that this is, in fact, what is being encountered, you know? Then what do you do but watch? What do you do but see what you can see? I think that it tends to be enormously partial, just given the human situation. But, nevertheless, I think it also sensitizes you to the profundity of the fact of any other life – that people can’t be thought of dismissively.

Q: Lots of people have called what it is I think you’re talking about as seeing the sacramental. Is that what it is? That in everything you see there is a quality of the holy?

A: Well, yes, in the sense that I certainly think that the holy is at the origins of everything that exists, everything, and so necessarily that’s true. I mean, there’s a sense in which it’s a signature act, you know, the beauty of it, the scale of it, the intricacy of it, all that. It’s not as if holiness were something super-added to things, and that’s why I hesitate a little bit over the word “sacramental,” because there can be an implication that an unsanctified reality exists, as if there is any kind of unholy reality. I think that one of the meanings of Christianity, of the Crucifixion, is that the holy can be unvalued, abused. There’s no question about that. A great deal that you see in the world is the abuse of the sacred. But the intrinsic sacredness is invariable, is a constant.

Q: This ability and interest in seeing everything in a very intense way, what does that add up to and where do you come out, then, in a sense of what I think many people would call a worldview?

A: If I have a worldview, which I suppose I do, I would hope it’s a very open one. You know, I’m always referring to Calvinism, my vocabulary in certain ways, but just the idea that the world is continuously unfolding itself for your further understanding, with the idea, of course, that whatever understanding you bring to this experience is incomplete, is too small. Something will tell you more, you know. I think about things like the fact that nobody knows what time is. Time is what? Nobody can describe it, even physics or math or anything else. But it is what we continuously experience. It’s the state of our unfolding, in a way, and in that sense that the continuous reopening of reality is what I think of as, perhaps, a worldview.

Q: Is there a theological component? Is what you were just talking about part of a sense of the existence of God?

A: Oh, it’s absolutely central. Since I do use Calvin’s conceptual vocabulary, one of the things that is certainly true of him is that the givens of our situations are that we are given the world to enjoy. The signature of God in creation is beauty, as well as the expansion of understanding or the expansion of awareness, which is never complete precisely because it’s a manifestation of the presence of God. That life in the world is an enormous privilege, which is enhanced as privilege in the degree to which we are attentive to what is being given to us, not just as gift of prosperity or something, but what’s given us to understand, to allow us to reconceive.

Q: You’ve written with great kindness and understanding about mainline Protestants, your tradition. Why do you think they’ve suffered such losses in recent years?

A: Well, oddly enough, sometimes it seems to me as if they take every criticism that is offered of them and make it into a sort of modus operandi. So to the accusation that they are bland they respond by becoming blander. One of the things that is true of the mainline Protestant tradition is it’s a great theological tradition. It is as major a theological tradition as exists on the planet, and it’s as if that’s a responsibility that they really don’t want to live up to, in many cases, and they’ve sort of turned on themselves, I think, in that sense that the virtues that have defined them – moral and intellectual seriousness and so on, which had been their contribution to Christianity – are precisely the things that they have been running away from in too many cases. I don’t want to generalize too broadly.

Q: What do they do well?

A: I don’t know to what extent these things are being as effectively sustained as they ought to be by the institutions, or to what degree their carry-over from other traditions that have, perhaps, not been cultivated as well as they should in the modern period, but I think that they do sustain a sense of responsibility, strong value for what we, as people who work in the world can contribute to the world. I mean, as in many cases, work being the mode in which we can contribute to the world. I identify with them very strongly, in fact, because I think of them as being people who are serious about things that deserve serious attention. For example, social problems and so on, that they are very open to acknowledging the value of other religious traditions and tend very much away from harsh judgments or drawing of lines of the kind that say, “We’re the good people, and they’re the wicked ones.” There’s nothing of that in mainline tradition, and thank God for that.

Q: As one who sometimes has trouble with this himself, and I know a lot of people who do, too, I would be interested in hearing about why you believe in God.

A: I know this might not seem like the best answer in the world, but I do not not believe in God. If I were to say I don’t believe in God, I would feel that I was saying something that was not true.
I don’t think that we have a basis in our experience that allows us to put together a case for the existence of God. I don’t think that’s intended. I think that people who feel that they have to be able to put it together in that way, arrive at it rationally, as it were, simply lack acquaintance with the extreme fallibility and limitedness of human capacities for reason and for gathering relevant information and all the rest of it. I think the feeling of amazement that I think is appropriate to an alerted sense of what being is leads very naturally to deep comfort with the assumption of God.

Q: You’ve written about your childhood and how natural it was in your childhood to just assume that, yes, God exists. Is there a particular argument or a particular couple of arguments that, intellectually, provide you with conviction?

A: I like major theology. I like Karl Barth, and I like John Calvin, and I like Martin Luther. The scale of thinking and the power of integration that they’re capable of from thinking in that scale is something that’s really unique to theology. Given the assumptions that theologians proceed from, they are so much more capable of making meaningful articulations about what things are, what it is to exist, the experience of moral life, and so on. I mean that in the largest sense, of course. Nothing else touches it. Major philosophy doesn’t come close. Science — it’s like this wonderful conversation on another subject, you know, which — a theologically minded person is probably happy to read about the expanding universe and so on, but, of course, the whole human narrative is missing out of that. There’s nothing that can integrate reality in the way that theology can, and so I feel as if I’m reading something whole when I read great theology, and I feel as though I’m reading something very partial when I’m reading anything else.

Q: Can you find any words to describe God?

A: Well, I would use the basic biblical vocabulary. I would hesitate to do that.

Q: How do you answer the prominent atheists who have written so much recently that is critical of religion?

A: Atheism is such a longstanding tradition in Christian culture that I think it’s a necessary part of the conversation, and I have every kind of respect for somebody like Bertrand Russell or any considered atheist. I really think that to explore the question from that point of view and do it scrupulously is valuable. I think that this sort of avalanche of literature that we’ve gotten recently is very second-rate. It simply is not well-informed and not well-considered. I mean, I consider it to be kind of noise, a distraction from the conversation that actually can be fruitful.

Q: Let me turn your attention to the everyday cultural environment that we all live in, all the sounds and messages that are coming to us, what sometimes is called modern popular culture. You have found much to criticize in that.

A: Well, one thing that I find to criticize about it is that it’s not really popular, that it’s an industrial product that is sold by the means that any industrialist product is sold by, and the selling is very intense because the people that are making the product are also in a position to sell the product — the media and so on. I think that their idea, the idea that everything always has to push some extreme, you know, be more violent, be more sort of disrespectful of human life and so on, I mean, that is one of the major vectors of this phenomenon, and I think for most people, if they were making culture themselves, they’d be kind of sitting on the back porch singing a song that they maybe thought up the words for, and 200 years later people will be singing the same song. There’s a lot of profound work that has been done that’s truly popular. But now I think people are passive in relation to what they take to be popular culture, and they tolerate things that they would not themselves generate. It’s kind of an alienation of a culture from itself, I think.

Q: Do you think there are any ways to correct it?

A: Well, there’s this sort of day-to-day momentum of these things, that if something is supposed to be enormously scandalous people turn it on to see if it’s really scandalous, and then they can talk to each other about how scandalous it really was, and that sort of thing, and it’s a sort of chewing gum. It’s just this sort of continuous distraction that carries people from day to day in no significant way, just taking up time and space that would otherwise, I think, be used more imaginatively, more humanely.

Q: Do you see it as a barrier to a religious life?

A: I think it’s a severe distraction. One of the things — I mean, you’ve asked me to grumble, and so I’m grumbling – but one of the things that bothers me is that there’s a cynicism about it. People, I think, to a certain extent have to be instructed in things like the necessity of respect for other people, things that have to do with mayhem, that make it look like it would be a lot of fun to wipe out your adversaries or something like that, that really treat people like dispensable items. I really think if I had to say that religion depends on one thing, putting religion categorically, you know, we have to think that people are sacred. Human beings have to be considered sacred. That’s the beginning, and then anything that, it seems to me that, really departs from that, that conditions people to part from it in their thinking, I think, is antagonistic to religious life.

Q: You seem, in many ways, a lot of good ways, independent of the everyday world around you. I’ve heard you called an outsider. I wonder whether you would feel comfortable with the term “gentle prophet.” How would you describe yourself in that public role?

A: I’m a very private person, and the fact that this has sort of slipped over into a public role is very surprising to me. You know, it’s certainly nothing that I would have thought about or think about much even in the ordinary course of my life. I’m just somebody who likes to write. I think growing up in the West, in the mountains where, at least when I was a child, being an independent person was very highly valued, and what that meant was, of course, cultivating an interior life that could sustain you, that dignified you. I wrote an essay a long time ago that sort of disappeared, but the word “lonely,” when I was a little kid, had a very strong positive connotation. It was an experience to be sought, and it took me a while to learn that this was not common wisdom. But I just grew up culturally, I think, very prepared to live to myself, in a certain sense, for weal or woe. I think that that does give me a certain distance from things of a more, perhaps, praising posture toward what is taken to be popular than other people might have.

Q: Let me go back to some of these religious matters that we were talking about. The Bible – how do you read it, interpret it? The Bible often is described as God’s literal word. How do you see it?

A: Well, I find that’s really remarkable, you know, considering that surely virtually anybody that makes that claim is in the habit of reading it in translation, and anybody that has any acquaintance of the variety of translations knows that from ancient Hebrew or Greek to modern English is a very, very long and perilous step. I think that is simply not a sustainable idea. I have lots of Bibles. My house is full of Bibles, and the reason for that is that whenever I look anything up, I look it up in eight different translations to try to sort of encircle what the probable meaning is, because every one of them can make the case for the interpretation it has made. I read the Bible as an ancient literature. I read it, to the extent that I can, surrounded by other ancient literature, you know, that you can now read Hittite poetry and Canaanite poetry and all the rest of it in translations also. I think that it has a long history of tendentious interpretation of various kinds, and that for a modern reader one of the most difficult things to do is to read it as if newly, as if you could put aside the fact that certain passages have been selected and underlined over history, and in a way that discourages you from noticing what comes before and what comes afterward. The Bible as a literature of antiquity is incomparably great, I think, and frankly, I hope to write about it in a way that treats it with a different kind of respect from the respect it has tended to receive up to this point. It’s a fascinating, complicated, mysterious, endlessly suggestive literature that I, again, don’t feel that I have to arrive at hard conclusions about, and that makes it, in effect, more like the rest of reality than it would be if I felt it could be encapsulated and summarized or concluded about.

Q: Let me ask you about Calvin. Many of us hear that word and we think of an ultra-strict, judgmental, unforgiving reformer. You have done a lot of thinking and writing about this.

A: One of the first things that has to be done when you’re talking about Calvin is think about the world that Calvin lived in. Was he severe by the standard of his time? And, of course, he was living in the middle of the Inquisition, which was notoriously severe. There was a sort of punitive aspect to social organization then. The question is, was Geneva more severe than any other place in Europe? No, actually. It was the first place where the Qur’an was published in Europe, and so on. All kinds of literature that would not have been tolerated anywhere else in Europe was published for the first time in Geneva in the post-classical period. He created public education for both boys and girls in Geneva. He had institutions for the relief of poverty in Geneva. He did all kinds of things that are certainly very liberal by the standards of the time. He was basically responsible for the survival of that city which was under siege through a great part of his time there, not because of him in the first place, but because it had had a political revolution and driven out its traditional ruling family, but it became the center of the Reformation, and then it came under many kinds of threats and pressure, and not only that, but reformed populations all through Europe. So he was continuously trying to keep the city safe, trying to keep these other populations in Europe safe at the same time that he was writing scores and scores of books that were interpretations of Scripture of a very high quality, from the original. He preached, in fact, from the original Greek and Hebrew. He’s a little bit like Saint Augustine. He wrote so many books that people don’t know which book to read, perhaps. Even people who call themselves Calvinists are oddly unread in what he actually wrote. But if you read his sermons on Micah or his sermons on the Ten Commandments or something like that – extraordinarily compassionate, extraordinarily generous, certainly bears up to anything that you would find in the period, or this period. He was a lightning rod for the enemies of the reform movement who, of course, generated a huge polemic around him and around the city. Most of Calvin came into English almost immediately. He was very closely followed in England. They have begun to translate the notes from the consistories, and it turns out that what they were doing, this meeting of clergy that dealt with people who were some sort of social problem, it would do things like establish the paternity of a child and make the father support the child and the mother. In some small way, of course, it sounds very minor economics by any standard we’re used to, but nevertheless, you read things like they drowned unmarried mothers and things like that. But if you look at what they actually did and what the transcripts actually say, there’s nothing judgmental, there’s nothing cruel about it. It’s just a matter of trying to keep them from bearing the worst consequences of unwed motherhood, basically.

Q: Some of the things that you’ve written, I would imagine, are consistent with what Calvin taught about the importance of forgiveness.

A: There are two things that I think are very important. One of them is the emphasis on original sin. In earlier theology the idea was that baptism removed the effects of original sin from the higher functions, and it was basically the body that continued to bear the consequences of it. But Calvin said no. Original sin is what makes it so that we can never see clearly or understand entirely. And this, of course, undermines the assumption that secure judgments can be made, that we actually know. But how to understand something in a way to draw unforgiving conclusions about it? There’s also the fact that he does not exclude anyone. People say that he doesn’t attach importance to works, as they call it, but what that means in certain contexts is that the value God assigns to a person is not something that’s necessarily evident in how we would value their lives. The assumption is that forgiveness is owed wherever God might want forgiveness to be given, and we don’t know. So you err on the side of forgiving. Or you don’t, or who knows what God’s ultimate intentions are, in any case. But you assume your fallibility and you also assume that anybody that you encounter is precious to God, or is God himself, which is sometimes how [Calvin] describes this when you are encountered by someone, even an enemy, and when Calvin talked about somebody who wanted to kill you, that was most of Europe at that point, from his point of view. But he says this is the image of God that has approached you. And the question is what does God want from this moment? And so there’s this absolute valuing of the other that comes under all circumstances and just leaves the idea of judgment as a meaningless idea.

Q: Reading Gilead and Home and reading about those two old preachers that you described and drew so beautifully certainly took me back to my childhood in a preacher’s family. You had to have great respect for those people. You couldn’t have written about them unless you loved them and respected them. What they lived for and the way they saw the world, the way they saw each other, the way they saw their people must be something that you think is very, very important – and not just in the mid-’50s, but right now.

A: Yes, granting fallibilities, granting the fact that they’re sort of culturally blinded by the conventions that surround them. Why can’t Jack talk to his father, you know? He can’t. He can’t tell him.

Q: But I would assume that in your church and in neighborhood you find much of the same thing today, don’t you?

A: I do. Well, you know, that’s one of the things that tends not to be visible in the way that popular culture tends to represent people. I know so many people whom I admire so deeply who seem to me to be enormously sensitive and really respectful of people in general, and so on. But somehow or other, it’s as if that didn’t matter, as if that’s some sort of assumed background that doesn’t have interest or value. It’s very odd. I love and feel very much at home in my culture, whether it’s Iowa or Astoria or wherever I am. I just feel that it’s not being valued. The things that are precious in it are not being acknowledged, and I think that that’s something that depletes people’s lives of a great deal of the satisfactions that are essential.

Q: Why is that? Why are these things that are so valuable being ignored?

A: I think that perhaps, well, it requires a certain subtlety. It requires attention. It’s easy to be sensationalistic. There’s nothing easier than that, and making a narrative out of thoughtfulness, you know, to make a life of it as a considered life rather than one that’s just a slash-and-burn version of human experience is hard. I think that’s one of the reasons for a lot of this stuff, and then it becomes the norm. It becomes what people expect or think other people want, whether they want it themselves or not.

Q: You’re talking about writers now, what writers are doing, or just what the general public seems to believe is important?

A: Well, not really talking about writers. I have these impulsive, tribal loyalties, and when I’m speaking this way I’m never speaking about writers. But I mean just in terms of the general cultural ambience, you know, what you see when you are in a hotel room and do turn on the television set, and so on. I don’t want to be categorical, but I think that that’s a very important element, and it has a way of distracting people from what is substantial in their own lives and making people think that if they’ve never been involved in something dramatic in some painful way they somehow or other haven’t lived or something.

Q: There’s a wonderful quote from you. It had to do with looking back on one’s life, and you were saying we should get great comfort out of having comforted a child.

A: Well, I do think when you look back at your own life, and you realize that among the things that you remember might be some gesture of comfort that another person made or some small compliment that you received that for some reason redirected your life, and so I mean I think most people can tell those kinds of stories, and the other side of it is, of course, that those are the moments in which you have the opportunity to do something that actually changes life, you know, that someone could look back on and say “and after that things were different,” which is an extraordinary privilege That is the kind of thing that tends to be overlooked.

Q: You told us some years ago how much you missed hearing people say that they thought it was important to leave the world better than they found it.

A: Well, I think that was a major, dominant cliché of my childhood – that you were supposed to leave the world better than you found it. It’s a little shocking when you hear people say, like about this health thing that we’re going through now, “What’s in it for me?” That’s a huge change in the basic values of the culture. I got sort of tired when I was a kid of hearing people say you have to leave the world better than you found it, but now I think I would burst into tears if somebody said that to me, just – what a lovely thought, do you know? People talk about soldiers as being the standard against which things should be measured. But they, by definition, are doing things that there’s a very strong chance they will not live to enjoy. I mean, all those lovely, young people that go off and are said to be dying for freedom by definition are giving other people something that they cannot enjoy. This is a great value, so how can people have possibly got around to this “what’s in it for me?” approach to political and social life? It’s extraordinary.

Read an excerpt from the novel Home by Marilynne Robinson:

The church of their childhood was gone, the white clapboard church with the steeply pitched roof and the abbreviated spire. It had been replaced by a much costlier building, monumental in style though modest in scale, with a crenelated Norman bell tower at one corner and a rose window above the massy entrance. Someone whose historical notions were sufficiently addled might imagine that centuries of plunder and dilapidation had left this last sturdy remnant of grandeur, that the bell tower might have sunk a dozen feet into the ground as ages passed. The building was reconsidered once or twice as money ran out, but the basic effect answered their hopes, more or less. “Anglicanism!” her father had said, when he saw the plans. “Utter capitulation!” His objections startled the elders, but did not interest them particularly, so they drew discreet conclusions about his mental state. Nothing is more glaringly obvious than discretion of that kind, since it assumes impaired sensitivity in the one whose feelings it would spare. “As if I were a child!” her father said more than once, when the decorous turmoil of his soul happened to erupt at the dinner table.

This was a grief his children had never anticipated. Nor had they imagined that their father’s body could become a burden to him, and an embarrassment, too. He was sure his feebleness inspired condescensions of every kind, and he was alert for them, eager to show that nothing got past him, furious on slight pretexts. The seven of them telephoned back and forth daily for months. He was in graver pain than he was accustomed to, and his dear old wife was failing. He was not himself. Ames sat with him for hours and hours, though even he was not above suspicion. They pooled strategies for softening the inevitable blow of his retirement, which would have been a mercy if it had come about under other circumstances. Ah well. He came back to himself, finally, reconciled to loss and sorrow and waiting on the Lord.

Now Glory was the family emissary. At holidays they went as a delegation, there to signal reconciliation not quite so complete as to induce her father to struggle up those stone steps. The no longer new pastor was youngish, plump, smiling. His admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr brought him to the brink of plagiarism now and then, but he meant well. She was always the object of his special cordiality, which irritated her.

For her, church was an airy white room with tall windows looking out on God’s good world, with God’s good sunlight pouring in through those windows and falling across the pulpit where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ. That was church.

Originally published September 18, 2009

“Great theology,” novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote in an essay on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry, like epic or saga.”

Robinson’s own work—three novels and two books of nonfiction—may not approach the definition of epic or saga, yet it is infused with a theological sensibility. It stands as a contrarian, revisionist comment on modern life and thought and bids well to be seen as the most theologically acute body of work by a contemporary writer.

Born and raised a Presbyterian and always a churchgoer, Robinson has “shifted allegiances the doctrinal and demographic inch that separates Presbyterians from Congregationalists,” she has written, adding, “but for all purposes I am where I ought to be, as sociologists calculate, and I should feel right at home.” Certainly her twinned novels, Gilead and Home, which center on the families of a Congregationalist and Presbyterian minister, respectively, show her perfectly at home in the inch-apart strains of Reformed and Calvinist theology. Indeed, the seriousness with which theology in general and Calvinist theology in particular is woven through the two novels makes Robinson unique among modern writers.

Portrait of John Calvin

In some sense, the recent novels might even be considered something of a reclamation project, an effort to reassert serious theology as part of cultural discourse. As Robinson wrote in a piece on Marguerite de Navarre and John Calvin in The Death of Adam, her collection of essays on modern thought, “This great project, theology, which for so many centuries was the epitome of thought and learning, the brilliant conceptual architecture of western religious passion, entirely worthy of comparison with any art which arose from the same impulse, has been forgotten, or remembered only to be looted for charms and relics and curiosities.”

Or as she put it in an essay skewering what religious and political economic conservatives have done to the family, “Religious beliefs have not been consciously abandoned. They simply dropped out of the cultural conversation.” The result has been that Americans have “adopted this very small view of ourselves and others.” Robinson seems prescient, predicting the angry anti-government tea-baggers when she writes that “our hopes are in fact so very modest that we can be made to fear another teenager might snatch them all away. It is because we hope to acquire rather than achieve—in the old language of religion, to receive rather than give—that the good we imagine can truly be taken from our hands.”

In both her fiction and nonfiction Robinson seeks—and to a large extent succeeds, for the attentive reader—in dismantling the negative stereotypes of John Calvin, Calvinism, and Calvinism’s Puritan progeny and reasserting the value of his theology in a contemporary context. This is most explicit in the essays in The Death of Adam, where she calls Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion “the first, greatest, and most influential work of systematic theology the Reformation produced,” but it is also true of both Gilead and Home, which are rife with discussions of prayer, predestination, atonement, and even hymnody. In Home, Robinson presents a touching, wrenching scene in which the elderly and dying Rev. Boughton is apologizing to his prodigal son, Jack, for not baptizing Jack’s illegitimate daughter some two decades ago:

His father looked at him. “Maybe you didn’t realize that, that she died without the sacrament, and maybe I shouldn’t have said anything about it, since it might only add to your grief. I was reluctant to mention it. But I wanted to be sure you understood the fault was entirely mine. He put his hand to his face. “Oh, Jack!” he said. “There I was, a minister of the Lord, holding that little baby in my arms any number of times. Why didn’t I just do the obvious thing! A few drops of water! There was a rain barrel right there by the house—who would have stopped me! I have thought of that so many times.”

“Yes, and Ames says it. He’ll take down the Institutes and show you the place. And Calvin was right about many things. His point there is that the Lord wouldn’t hold the child accountable—that has to be true. As for myself, well, ‘a broken and contrite heart Thou wilt not despise.’ I must remember to believe that, too.”

Glory said, “Papa, we’re Presbyterians. We don’t believe in the necessity of baptism. You’ve always said that.”

Robinson calls Calvin “a figure of the greatest historical consequence, especially for our culture, who is more or less entirely unread,” a neglect she sees as intentional. And she takes to task those writers—Lord Acton in his pivotal History of Freedom, Max Weber in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and, more recently, historians Roland Bainton and Simon Schama—who have perpetuated the canard that Protestantism as exemplified by Calvin is essentially a persecuting faith. Robinson challenges Acton’s odd conclusion that “while Protestants did not in fact engage in persecution at nearly the rate as Catholics did, their theology required it, while Catholic theology did not. Therefore Protestantism is peculiarly the theology of persecution.”

As she does for the Geneva theologian, so also does Robinson seek to add her voice to those who would recover the Puritans from the know-nothings and the name-callers. “What does it matter if a tradition no one identifies with any longer is unjustly disparaged? If history does not precisely authorize the use we make of the word ‘Puritanism’? We all know what we mean it, so what harm is done? Well, for one thing, we make ourselves ignorant and contemptuous of the first two or three hundred years of one of the major strains of our civilization.”

Robinson is a staunch mainline Protestant, and her Calvinist Protestantism imbues her with a fierce political liberalism grounded in Scripture. “Modern assumptions about the Old Testament, now an unread classic, make it seem an improbable source for economic and social idealism,” she has written in an essay called “McGuffey and the Abolitionists.” “In fact, it is more insistent than Marx ever was in championing the poor and the oppressed.” In her nonfiction she is scathing in her critique of contemporary capitalism and the imprimatur conservative Christianity and the religious right have given to unfettered competition at the expense of the biblical value to “do justice and love mercy.” “The sin most insistently called abhorrent to God is the failure of generosity, the neglect of the widow and orphan, the oppression of strangers and the poor, the defrauding of the laborer.” In a challenge to those who baptize capitalism while maintaining a religious veneer, she says, “If an economic imperative trumps a commandment of Jesus, they should just say so and drop these pretensions toward particular holiness.”

Robinson has made the 19th-century abolitionist movement and its religious and social impact on the Middle West a special field of her study. It is a prominent theme in Gilead and a significant part of the background of Home. In the latter novel, there is a sad recognition of how much Gilead, a beloved abolitionist small town, and its would-be ecclesial keepers of the vision of justice—racial justice—have lost or forgotten the values of that past. The two novels are set in 1956, as the modern civil rights movement begins to gather momentum with the Montgomery bus boycott. The violence sparked by the effort to suppress the nonviolent demonstrations led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, another minister schooled in the social gospel of Calvinism, flickers onto the new television in the Boughton living room and generates another source of tension between father and son. The elder Boughton watches the violence surrounding the effort to integrate the University of Alabama and comments: “‘I have nothing against the colored people. I do think they’re going to need to improve themselves, though, if they want to be accepted. I believe that is the only solution.’ His look and tone were statesmanlike. He was making such an effort to be mild and conciliatory…” And a bit later: “The colored people,” his father said, “appear to me to be creating problems and obstacles for themselves with all this—commotion.” How far Gilead and its people have come from the abolitionist “commotion.” In an essay on liberalism and its failure as a movement, Robinson writes what could be a gloss on this passage from Home: “Trivial failures of courage may seem minor enough in any particular instance, and yet they change history and society. They change culture.”

Robinson’s Calvinism, however, is not just a political theology. It is aesthetic as well—not just a matter of topics and themes, but something woven into her style: the luminosity of her carefully crafted sentences, the attentive attention to detail, the respect with which she describes the small movements of character and conversation. She touches on it in Gilead, where narrator John Ames, the Congregationalist minister, writes: “Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought to be aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. … I do like Calvin’s image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us.”

In her autobiographical meditation on Psalm 8, Robinson amplifies this sense of a Protestant aesthetic: “So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”

What better description of the creative process—indeed, of her own finely wrought work—than this: “So it is possible to imagine that time was created in order that there might be narrative—event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement. A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion News Service. In 2005, he wrote “In Praise of Ordinary Time,” a review of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: We have a profile of the much-honored writer Marilynne Robinson. She received the Orange Prize for fiction this past summer, in Britain, for the best writing in the English language by a woman. Five years ago, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Gilead, and her latest book, Home, has also had glowing reviews. Robinson is a mainline Protestant with great respect for Calvinist theology and strong opinions about the world around her.

Marilynne Robinson’s view of the world was formed in the mountains of Idaho, where she grew up. In the solitude and wilderness she sensed a larger presence.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence. It always seemed as if there was something extraordinary around me. The holy is at the origins of everything that exists. Everything.

(reading aloud from one of her essays): “So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes.”

ABERNETHY: In Iowa, where she lives now, teaching writing at the University of Iowa, Robinson tells her students to think for themselves.

ROBINSON: I want them to know that they have their own testimony to offer, that if they are good observers, if they are thoughtful people, if they have the courage to evaluate things independently they will give the world something new, something worth having.

ABERNETHY: Which is exactly what her admirers say Robinson herself has done.

Robinson is a regular churchgoer at the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City, and she sometimes preaches there.  She loves the old Protestant Mainline.

ROBINSON: I think of them as being people who are serious about things that deserve, you know, serious attention, for example, social problems. They are very open to acknowledging the value of other religious traditions and tend very much away from harsh judgments.

ABERNETHY: Robinson has great respect for the 16th-century reformer John Calvin, who she says was far more compassionate than his stern reputation suggests—for instance, about forgiveness.

ROBINSON: The assumption is that forgiveness is owed wherever God might want forgiveness to be given, and we don’t know, so you err on the side of forgiving. You assume your fallibility, and you also assume that anybody that you encounter is precious to God—or is God himself.

ABERNETHY: So you cannot judge. You have to forgive. But Robinson is very critical of the work of the so-called new atheists.

ROBINSON: I think this sort of avalanche of literature we have gotten lately is very second-rate. It simply is not well informed and not well considered. I mean I consider it to be kind of noise.

ABERNETHY: She is deeply worried about the degradation of the earth’s environment, especially its oceans, and she is scathing on popular, commercial culture.

ROBINSON: The idea that everything always has to push some extreme, you know, be more violent, be more sort of disrespectful of human life, and so on—there’s a cynicism about it, things that have to do with mayhem, that make it look like it would be a lot of fun, you know, to wipe out your adversaries or something like that, that really treat people like dispensable, you know, items.

ABERNETHY: Do you see it as a barrier to religious life?

ROBINSON: I think it’s a severe distraction. We have to think that people are sacred. Human beings have to be considered sacred. That’s the beginning.

ABERNETHY: And the political climate?

ROBINSON: It’s a little shocking when you hear people say, like about this health thing we’re going through now, what’s in it for me, you know? That’s a huge change in the basic values of the culture. I got sort of tired when I was a kid of hearing people say you have to leave the world better than you found it. But now I think I would burst into tears if somebody said that to me—just, what a lovely thought, you know?

ABERNETHY: In spite of her love of solitude and lonely observation, Robinson’s reputation as a novelist and her strong opinions have made her a popular speaker—a soft-spoken prophet. At a forum at Georgetown University she was asked about being a contrarian:

ROBINSON (speaking at Georgetown University): I don’t feel as if I am contrarian. I feel as if everyone else is. No, that’s an exaggeration, but I do think there is a great deal in the culture that abrades and offends people in general.

ABERNETHY: She made it clear that at the same time that she embraces Christianity she is also respectful of the secular.

ROBINSON (speaking at Georgetown University): I know many, many, many, many people who authentically deserve to be described in that word whom I cannot imagine that God would not love. I have no conception of God that would not include love for these people.

A lot of the things that I criticize, I think, are in their impact inhumane. My loyalty really is to human loveliness, and the deep experience of self that every self deserves, you know, and the deep acknowledgment that everyone owes to everyone else.

If you were to think of yourself looking back on life, I think that some of the things that would please you most deeply are that at some moment you were—you comforted your child, or in one way or another you soothed, you fed, you were adequate, you know? These things are very beautiful and, I think, sacramental.

ABERNETHY: Back in her house in Iowa City, Robinson writes in whatever room she feels will be the most supportive. She is working now on a book about the Bible. She writes fiction in longhand with a ball-point pen in a college-ruled spiral notebook. Nonfiction goes in her computer. She also walks her toy poodle, Otis, named for the late musician Otis Redding. As she walks, she says, she thinks—how to fix “the rattle,” as she called it, in a sentence she had just written. Maybe, too, how to fix the world she says, echoing Calvin, the world God has given us to enjoy.

Marilynne Robinson

Q: In your teaching, what are the most important things you want your students to understand?

A: That they have their own testimony to offer, that if they think about what they perceive and what they feel carefully, if they watch other people closely and magnanimously, they will have something new to say, something that’s an actual addition to what has been said. That they have no obligation to be derivative or imitative in any way. That is absolutely not the point. I want them to know that if they are thoughtful people, if they have the courage to evaluate things independently and to enjoy the processes of their own thought, then they will give the world something new, something worth having.

Q: In your essay on Psalm Eight in The Death of Adam you wrote, “So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes.” I think it’s very central to appreciating what you’ve been doing in your work.

A: Well, yes. I read things like theology, and I read about science, Scientific American and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is intrinsically mysterious as a physical object, say, or as a phenomenon of culture, or as an artifact of the history that lies behind it. I’ve always been almost offended by the idea of mysticism, because it seems as if it diminishes what we know by every means that gives us access to it – it diminishes the simple spectacle of what we are and where we are, the complex spectacle, I should probably have said. I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence. I never had the experience of banality, as it were. It always seemed as if there was something extraordinary around me, and I think that probably has done as much to form my mind as anything could have done.

Q: What are some of those things you’ve seen that are plainly before your eyes?

A: When I came here from living in New England for quite a long time I wanted to know what I was seeing, because every landscape has a history. It is the way it is because specific layers of population have lived in it and modified it and so on. Why is it that in the Middle West so many of the oldest structures are colleges virtually, in many cases, as old as the settlement itself? Because it’s a remarkable thing that the first thing people would feel they needed would be a college, and then it turns out that there’s a whole narrative behind that, that they were almost utopian communities that were designed to do all sorts of things. Create a culture that would be immune to the slave economy, for example. Create a culture that would be disseminating education at a high level, but accessible to anybody. All these kinds of very idealistic intentions were established very early on at what looked like little New England colleges that are scattered all over the Middle West and which tend to be, to this day, institutions of very high quality, very culturally important. But you look at a building, and you think why that period? Why that style? Who made that choice? And then you can sort of unfold almost anything that you look at, and so you find out that there’s a human narrative behind it, that there was a social vision behind it. If you just look at anything as if it were just, sort of, furniture – nothing against furniture, but then you are absolutely not seeing it. Everything needs to be queried, as they say.

I think probably the major component of seeing for me is assuming that what I see is something that I can’t see adequately or see exhaustively, and what is most remarkable in it is probably something that I have to watch very carefully in order to see any fragment of. The idea, which is very important in Calvin, that people are images of God – nothing could mystify anyone more than the idea that this is, in fact, what is being encountered, you know? Then what do you do but watch? What do you do but see what you can see? I think that it tends to be enormously partial, just given the human situation. But, nevertheless, I think it also sensitizes you to the profundity of the fact of any other life – that people can’t be thought of dismissively.

Q: Lots of people have called what it is I think you’re talking about as seeing the sacramental. Is that what it is? That in everything you see there is a quality of the holy?

A: Well, yes, in the sense that I certainly think that the holy is at the origins of everything that exists, everything, and so necessarily that’s true. I mean, there’s a sense in which it’s a signature act, you know, the beauty of it, the scale of it, the intricacy of it, all that. It’s not as if holiness were something super-added to things, and that’s why I hesitate a little bit over the word “sacramental,” because there can be an implication that an unsanctified reality exists, as if there is any kind of unholy reality. I think that one of the meanings of Christianity, of the Crucifixion, is that the holy can be unvalued, abused. There’s no question about that. A great deal that you see in the world is the abuse of the sacred. But the intrinsic sacredness is invariable, is a constant.

Q: This ability and interest in seeing everything in a very intense way, what does that add up to and where do you come out, then, in a sense of what I think many people would call a worldview?

A: If I have a worldview, which I suppose I do, I would hope it’s a very open one. You know, I’m always referring to Calvinism, my vocabulary in certain ways, but just the idea that the world is continuously unfolding itself for your further understanding, with the idea, of course, that whatever understanding you bring to this experience is incomplete, is too small. Something will tell you more, you know. I think about things like the fact that nobody knows what time is. Time is what? Nobody can describe it, even physics or math or anything else. But it is what we continuously experience. It’s the state of our unfolding, in a way, and in that sense that the continuous reopening of reality is what I think of as, perhaps, a worldview.

Q: Is there a theological component? Is what you were just talking about part of a sense of the existence of God?

A: Oh, it’s absolutely central. Since I do use Calvin’s conceptual vocabulary, one of the things that is certainly true of him is that the givens of our situations are that we are given the world to enjoy. The signature of God in creation is beauty, as well as the expansion of understanding or the expansion of awareness, which is never complete precisely because it’s a manifestation of the presence of God. That life in the world is an enormous privilege, which is enhanced as privilege in the degree to which we are attentive to what is being given to us, not just as gift of prosperity or something, but what’s given us to understand, to allow us to reconceive.

Q: You’ve written with great kindness and understanding about mainline Protestants, your tradition. Why do you think they’ve suffered such losses in recent years?

A: Well, oddly enough, sometimes it seems to me as if they take every criticism that is offered of them and make it into a sort of modus operandi. So to the accusation that they are bland they respond by becoming blander. One of the things that is true of the mainline Protestant tradition is it’s a great theological tradition. It is as major a theological tradition as exists on the planet, and it’s as if that’s a responsibility that they really don’t want to live up to, in many cases, and they’ve sort of turned on themselves, I think, in that sense that the virtues that have defined them – moral and intellectual seriousness and so on, which had been their contribution to Christianity – are precisely the things that they have been running away from in too many cases. I don’t want to generalize too broadly.

Q: What do they do well?

A: I don’t know to what extent these things are being as effectively sustained as they ought to be by the institutions, or to what degree their carry-over from other traditions that have, perhaps, not been cultivated as well as they should in the modern period, but I think that they do sustain a sense of responsibility, strong value for what we, as people who work in the world can contribute to the world. I mean, as in many cases, work being the mode in which we can contribute to the world. I identify with them very strongly, in fact, because I think of them as being people who are serious about things that deserve serious attention. For example, social problems and so on, that they are very open to acknowledging the value of other religious traditions and tend very much away from harsh judgments or drawing of lines of the kind that say, “We’re the good people, and they’re the wicked ones.” There’s nothing of that in mainline tradition, and thank God for that.

Q: As one who sometimes has trouble with this himself, and I know a lot of people who do, too, I would be interested in hearing about why you believe in God.

A: I know this might not seem like the best answer in the world, but I do not not believe in God. If I were to say I don’t believe in God, I would feel that I was saying something that was not true.
I don’t think that we have a basis in our experience that allows us to put together a case for the existence of God. I don’t think that’s intended. I think that people who feel that they have to be able to put it together in that way, arrive at it rationally, as it were, simply lack acquaintance with the extreme fallibility and limitedness of human capacities for reason and for gathering relevant information and all the rest of it. I think the feeling of amazement that I think is appropriate to an alerted sense of what being is leads very naturally to deep comfort with the assumption of God.

Q: You’ve written about your childhood and how natural it was in your childhood to just assume that, yes, God exists. Is there a particular argument or a particular couple of arguments that, intellectually, provide you with conviction?

A: I like major theology. I like Karl Barth, and I like John Calvin, and I like Martin Luther. The scale of thinking and the power of integration that they’re capable of from thinking in that scale is something that’s really unique to theology. Given the assumptions that theologians proceed from, they are so much more capable of making meaningful articulations about what things are, what it is to exist, the experience of moral life, and so on. I mean that in the largest sense, of course. Nothing else touches it. Major philosophy doesn’t come close. Science — it’s like this wonderful conversation on another subject, you know, which — a theologically minded person is probably happy to read about the expanding universe and so on, but, of course, the whole human narrative is missing out of that. There’s nothing that can integrate reality in the way that theology can, and so I feel as if I’m reading something whole when I read great theology, and I feel as though I’m reading something very partial when I’m reading anything else.

Q: Can you find any words to describe God?

A: Well, I would use the basic biblical vocabulary. I would hesitate to do that.

Q: How do you answer the prominent atheists who have written so much recently that is critical of religion?

A: Atheism is such a longstanding tradition in Christian culture that I think it’s a necessary part of the conversation, and I have every kind of respect for somebody like Bertrand Russell or any considered atheist. I really think that to explore the question from that point of view and do it scrupulously is valuable. I think that this sort of avalanche of literature that we’ve gotten recently is very second-rate. It simply is not well-informed and not well-considered. I mean, I consider it to be kind of noise, a distraction from the conversation that actually can be fruitful.

Q: Let me turn your attention to the everyday cultural environment that we all live in, all the sounds and messages that are coming to us, what sometimes is called modern popular culture. You have found much to criticize in that.

A: Well, one thing that I find to criticize about it is that it’s not really popular, that it’s an industrial product that is sold by the means that any industrialist product is sold by, and the selling is very intense because the people that are making the product are also in a position to sell the product — the media and so on. I think that their idea, the idea that everything always has to push some extreme, you know, be more violent, be more sort of disrespectful of human life and so on, I mean, that is one of the major vectors of this phenomenon, and I think for most people, if they were making culture themselves, they’d be kind of sitting on the back porch singing a song that they maybe thought up the words for, and 200 years later people will be singing the same song. There’s a lot of profound work that has been done that’s truly popular. But now I think people are passive in relation to what they take to be popular culture, and they tolerate things that they would not themselves generate. It’s kind of an alienation of a culture from itself, I think.

Q: Do you think there are any ways to correct it?

A: Well, there’s this sort of day-to-day momentum of these things, that if something is supposed to be enormously scandalous people turn it on to see if it’s really scandalous, and then they can talk to each other about how scandalous it really was, and that sort of thing, and it’s a sort of chewing gum. It’s just this sort of continuous distraction that carries people from day to day in no significant way, just taking up time and space that would otherwise, I think, be used more imaginatively, more humanely.

Q: Do you see it as a barrier to a religious life?

A: I think it’s a severe distraction. One of the things — I mean, you’ve asked me to grumble, and so I’m grumbling – but one of the things that bothers me is that there’s a cynicism about it. People, I think, to a certain extent have to be instructed in things like the necessity of respect for other people, things that have to do with mayhem, that make it look like it would be a lot of fun to wipe out your adversaries or something like that, that really treat people like dispensable items. I really think if I had to say that religion depends on one thing, putting religion categorically, you know, we have to think that people are sacred. Human beings have to be considered sacred. That’s the beginning, and then anything that, it seems to me that, really departs from that, that conditions people to part from it in their thinking, I think, is antagonistic to religious life.

Q: You seem, in many ways, a lot of good ways, independent of the everyday world around you. I’ve heard you called an outsider. I wonder whether you would feel comfortable with the term “gentle prophet.” How would you describe yourself in that public role?

A: I’m a very private person, and the fact that this has sort of slipped over into a public role is very surprising to me. You know, it’s certainly nothing that I would have thought about or think about much even in the ordinary course of my life. I’m just somebody who likes to write. I think growing up in the West, in the mountains where, at least when I was a child, being an independent person was very highly valued, and what that meant was, of course, cultivating an interior life that could sustain you, that dignified you. I wrote an essay a long time ago that sort of disappeared, but the word “lonely,” when I was a little kid, had a very strong positive connotation. It was an experience to be sought, and it took me a while to learn that this was not common wisdom. But I just grew up culturally, I think, very prepared to live to myself, in a certain sense, for weal or woe. I think that that does give me a certain distance from things of a more, perhaps, praising posture toward what is taken to be popular than other people might have.

Q: Let me go back to some of these religious matters that we were talking about. The Bible – how do you read it, interpret it? The Bible often is described as God’s literal word. How do you see it?

A: Well, I find that’s really remarkable, you know, considering that surely virtually anybody that makes that claim is in the habit of reading it in translation, and anybody that has any acquaintance of the variety of translations knows that from ancient Hebrew or Greek to modern English is a very, very long and perilous step. I think that is simply not a sustainable idea. I have lots of Bibles. My house is full of Bibles, and the reason for that is that whenever I look anything up, I look it up in eight different translations to try to sort of encircle what the probable meaning is, because every one of them can make the case for the interpretation it has made. I read the Bible as an ancient literature. I read it, to the extent that I can, surrounded by other ancient literature, you know, that you can now read Hittite poetry and Canaanite poetry and all the rest of it in translations also. I think that it has a long history of tendentious interpretation of various kinds, and that for a modern reader one of the most difficult things to do is to read it as if newly, as if you could put aside the fact that certain passages have been selected and underlined over history, and in a way that discourages you from noticing what comes before and what comes afterward. The Bible as a literature of antiquity is incomparably great, I think, and frankly, I hope to write about it in a way that treats it with a different kind of respect from the respect it has tended to receive up to this point. It’s a fascinating, complicated, mysterious, endlessly suggestive literature that I, again, don’t feel that I have to arrive at hard conclusions about, and that makes it, in effect, more like the rest of reality than it would be if I felt it could be encapsulated and summarized or concluded about.

Q: Let me ask you about Calvin. Many of us hear that word and we think of an ultra-strict, judgmental, unforgiving reformer. You have done a lot of thinking and writing about this.

A: One of the first things that has to be done when you’re talking about Calvin is think about the world that Calvin lived in. Was he severe by the standard of his time? And, of course, he was living in the middle of the Inquisition, which was notoriously severe. There was a sort of punitive aspect to social organization then. The question is, was Geneva more severe than any other place in Europe? No, actually. It was the first place where the Qur’an was published in Europe, and so on. All kinds of literature that would not have been tolerated anywhere else in Europe was published for the first time in Geneva in the post-classical period. He created public education for both boys and girls in Geneva. He had institutions for the relief of poverty in Geneva. He did all kinds of things that are certainly very liberal by the standards of the time. He was basically responsible for the survival of that city which was under siege through a great part of his time there, not because of him in the first place, but because it had had a political revolution and driven out its traditional ruling family, but it became the center of the Reformation, and then it came under many kinds of threats and pressure, and not only that, but reformed populations all through Europe. So he was continuously trying to keep the city safe, trying to keep these other populations in Europe safe at the same time that he was writing scores and scores of books that were interpretations of Scripture of a very high quality, from the original. He preached, in fact, from the original Greek and Hebrew. He’s a little bit like Saint Augustine. He wrote so many books that people don’t know which book to read, perhaps. Even people who call themselves Calvinists are oddly unread in what he actually wrote. But if you read his sermons on Micah or his sermons on the Ten Commandments or something like that – extraordinarily compassionate, extraordinarily generous, certainly bears up to anything that you would find in the period, or this period. He was a lightning rod for the enemies of the reform movement who, of course, generated a huge polemic around him and around the city. Most of Calvin came into English almost immediately. He was very closely followed in England. They have begun to translate the notes from the consistories, and it turns out that what they were doing, this meeting of clergy that dealt with people who were some sort of social problem, it would do things like establish the paternity of a child and make the father support the child and the mother. In some small way, of course, it sounds very minor economics by any standard we’re used to, but nevertheless, you read things like they drowned unmarried mothers and things like that. But if you look at what they actually did and what the transcripts actually say, there’s nothing judgmental, there’s nothing cruel about it. It’s just a matter of trying to keep them from bearing the worst consequences of unwed motherhood, basically.

Q: Some of the things that you’ve written, I would imagine, are consistent with what Calvin taught about the importance of forgiveness.

A: There are two things that I think are very important. One of them is the emphasis on original sin. In earlier theology the idea was that baptism removed the effects of original sin from the higher functions, and it was basically the body that continued to bear the consequences of it. But Calvin said no. Original sin is what makes it so that we can never see clearly or understand entirely. And this, of course, undermines the assumption that secure judgments can be made, that we actually know. But how to understand something in a way to draw unforgiving conclusions about it? There’s also the fact that he does not exclude anyone. People say that he doesn’t attach importance to works, as they call it, but what that means in certain contexts is that the value God assigns to a person is not something that’s necessarily evident in how we would value their lives. The assumption is that forgiveness is owed wherever God might want forgiveness to be given, and we don’t know. So you err on the side of forgiving. Or you don’t, or who knows what God’s ultimate intentions are, in any case. But you assume your fallibility and you also assume that anybody that you encounter is precious to God, or is God himself, which is sometimes how [Calvin] describes this when you are encountered by someone, even an enemy, and when Calvin talked about somebody who wanted to kill you, that was most of Europe at that point, from his point of view. But he says this is the image of God that has approached you. And the question is what does God want from this moment? And so there’s this absolute valuing of the other that comes under all circumstances and just leaves the idea of judgment as a meaningless idea.

Q: Reading Gilead and Home and reading about those two old preachers that you described and drew so beautifully certainly took me back to my childhood in a preacher’s family. You had to have great respect for those people. You couldn’t have written about them unless you loved them and respected them. What they lived for and the way they saw the world, the way they saw each other, the way they saw their people must be something that you think is very, very important – and not just in the mid-’50s, but right now.

A: Yes, granting fallibilities, granting the fact that they’re sort of culturally blinded by the conventions that surround them. Why can’t Jack talk to his father, you know? He can’t. He can’t tell him.

Q: But I would assume that in your church and in neighborhood you find much of the same thing today, don’t you?

A: I do. Well, you know, that’s one of the things that tends not to be visible in the way that popular culture tends to represent people. I know so many people whom I admire so deeply who seem to me to be enormously sensitive and really respectful of people in general, and so on. But somehow or other, it’s as if that didn’t matter, as if that’s some sort of assumed background that doesn’t have interest or value. It’s very odd. I love and feel very much at home in my culture, whether it’s Iowa or Astoria or wherever I am. I just feel that it’s not being valued. The things that are precious in it are not being acknowledged, and I think that that’s something that depletes people’s lives of a great deal of the satisfactions that are essential.

Q: Why is that? Why are these things that are so valuable being ignored?

A: I think that perhaps, well, it requires a certain subtlety. It requires attention. It’s easy to be sensationalistic. There’s nothing easier than that, and making a narrative out of thoughtfulness, you know, to make a life of it as a considered life rather than one that’s just a slash-and-burn version of human experience is hard. I think that’s one of the reasons for a lot of this stuff, and then it becomes the norm. It becomes what people expect or think other people want, whether they want it themselves or not.

Q: You’re talking about writers now, what writers are doing, or just what the general public seems to believe is important?

A: Well, not really talking about writers. I have these impulsive, tribal loyalties, and when I’m speaking this way I’m never speaking about writers. But I mean just in terms of the general cultural ambience, you know, what you see when you are in a hotel room and do turn on the television set, and so on. I don’t want to be categorical, but I think that that’s a very important element, and it has a way of distracting people from what is substantial in their own lives and making people think that if they’ve never been involved in something dramatic in some painful way they somehow or other haven’t lived or something.

Q: There’s a wonderful quote from you. It had to do with looking back on one’s life, and you were saying we should get great comfort out of having comforted a child.

A: Well, I do think when you look back at your own life, and you realize that among the things that you remember might be some gesture of comfort that another person made or some small compliment that you received that for some reason redirected your life, and so I mean I think most people can tell those kinds of stories, and the other side of it is, of course, that those are the moments in which you have the opportunity to do something that actually changes life, you know, that someone could look back on and say “and after that things were different,” which is an extraordinary privilege That is the kind of thing that tends to be overlooked.

Q: You told us some years ago how much you missed hearing people say that they thought it was important to leave the world better than they found it.

A: Well, I think that was a major, dominant cliché of my childhood – that you were supposed to leave the world better than you found it. It’s a little shocking when you hear people say, like about this health thing that we’re going through now, “What’s in it for me?” That’s a huge change in the basic values of the culture. I got sort of tired when I was a kid of hearing people say you have to leave the world better than you found it, but now I think I would burst into tears if somebody said that to me, just – what a lovely thought, do you know? People talk about soldiers as being the standard against which things should be measured. But they, by definition, are doing things that there’s a very strong chance they will not live to enjoy. I mean, all those lovely, young people that go off and are said to be dying for freedom by definition are giving other people something that they cannot enjoy. This is a great value, so how can people have possibly got around to this “what’s in it for me?” approach to political and social life? It’s extraordinary.

The church of their childhood was gone, the white clapboard church with the steeply pitched roof and the abbreviated spire. It had been replaced by a much costlier building, monumental in style though modest in scale, with a crenelated Norman bell tower at one corner and a rose window above the massy entrance. Someone whose historical notions were sufficiently addled might imagine that centuries of plunder and dilapidation had left this last sturdy remnant of grandeur, that the bell tower might have sunk a dozen feet into the ground as ages passed. The building was reconsidered once or twice as money ran out, but the basic effect answered their hopes, more or less. “Anglicanism!” her father had said, when he saw the plans. “Utter capitulation!” His objections startled the elders, but did not interest them particularly, so they drew discreet conclusions about his mental state. Nothing is more glaringly obvious than discretion of that kind, since it assumes impaired sensitivity in the one whose feelings it would spare. “As if I were a child!” her father said more than once, when the decorous turmoil of his soul happened to erupt at the dinner table.

This was a grief his children had never anticipated. Nor had they imagined that their father’s body could become a burden to him, and an embarrassment, too. He was sure his feebleness inspired condescensions of every kind, and he was alert for them, eager to show that nothing got past him, furious on slight pretexts. The seven of them telephoned back and forth daily for months. He was in graver pain than he was accustomed to, and his dear old wife was failing. He was not himself. Ames sat with him for hours and hours, though even he was not above suspicion. They pooled strategies for softening the inevitable blow of his retirement, which would have been a mercy if it had come about under other circumstances. Ah well. He came back to himself, finally, reconciled to loss and sorrow and waiting on the Lord.

Now Glory was the family emissary. At holidays they went as a delegation, there to signal reconciliation not quite so complete as to induce her father to struggle up those stone steps. The no longer new pastor was youngish, plump, smiling. His admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr brought him to the brink of plagiarism now and then, but he meant well. She was always the object of his special cordiality, which irritated her.

For her, church was an airy white room with tall windows looking out on God’s good world, with God’s good sunlight pouring in through those windows and falling across the pulpit where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ. That was church.

“Great theology,” novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote in an essay on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry, like epic or saga.”

Robinson’s own work—three novels and two books of nonfiction—may not approach the definition of epic or saga, yet it is infused with a theological sensibility. It stands as a contrarian, revisionist comment on modern life and thought and bids well to be seen as the most theologically acute body of work by a contemporary writer.

Born and raised a Presbyterian and always a churchgoer, Robinson has “shifted allegiances the doctrinal and demographic inch that separates Presbyterians from Congregationalists,” she has written, adding, “but for all purposes I am where I ought to be, as sociologists calculate, and I should feel right at home.” Certainly her twinned novels, Gilead and Home, which center on the families of a Congregationalist and Presbyterian minister, respectively, show her perfectly at home in the inch-apart strains of Reformed and Calvinist theology. Indeed, the seriousness with which theology in general and Calvinist theology in particular is woven through the two novels makes Robinson unique among modern writers.

Portrait of John Calvin

In some sense, the recent novels might even be considered something of a reclamation project, an effort to reassert serious theology as part of cultural discourse. As Robinson wrote in a piece on Marguerite de Navarre and John Calvin in The Death of Adam, her collection of essays on modern thought, “This great project, theology, which for so many centuries was the epitome of thought and learning, the brilliant conceptual architecture of western religious passion, entirely worthy of comparison with any art which arose from the same impulse, has been forgotten, or remembered only to be looted for charms and relics and curiosities.”

Or as she put it in an essay skewering what religious and political economic conservatives have done to the family, “Religious beliefs have not been consciously abandoned. They simply dropped out of the cultural conversation.” The result has been that Americans have “adopted this very small view of ourselves and others.” Robinson seems prescient, predicting the angry anti-government tea-baggers when she writes that “our hopes are in fact so very modest that we can be made to fear another teenager might snatch them all away. It is because we hope to acquire rather than achieve—in the old language of religion, to receive rather than give—that the good we imagine can truly be taken from our hands.”

In both her fiction and nonfiction Robinson seeks—and to a large extent succeeds, for the attentive reader—in dismantling the negative stereotypes of John Calvin, Calvinism, and Calvinism’s Puritan progeny and reasserting the value of his theology in a contemporary context. This is most explicit in the essays in The Death of Adam, where she calls Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion “the first, greatest, and most influential work of systematic theology the Reformation produced,” but it is also true of both Gilead and Home, which are rife with discussions of prayer, predestination, atonement, and even hymnody. In Home, Robinson presents a touching, wrenching scene in which the elderly and dying Rev. Boughton is apologizing to his prodigal son, Jack, for not baptizing Jack’s illegitimate daughter some two decades ago:

His father looked at him. “Maybe you didn’t realize that, that she died without the sacrament, and maybe I shouldn’t have said anything about it, since it might only add to your grief. I was reluctant to mention it. But I wanted to be sure you understood the fault was entirely mine. He put his hand to his face. “Oh, Jack!” he said. “There I was, a minister of the Lord, holding that little baby in my arms any number of times. Why didn’t I just do the obvious thing! A few drops of water! There was a rain barrel right there by the house—who would have stopped me! I have thought of that so many times.”

“Yes, and Ames says it. He’ll take down the Institutes and show you the place. And Calvin was right about many things. His point there is that the Lord wouldn’t hold the child accountable—that has to be true. As for myself, well, ‘a broken and contrite heart Thou wilt not despise.’ I must remember to believe that, too.”

Glory said, “Papa, we’re Presbyterians. We don’t believe in the necessity of baptism. You’ve always said that.”

Robinson calls Calvin “a figure of the greatest historical consequence, especially for our culture, who is more or less entirely unread,” a neglect she sees as intentional. And she takes to task those writers—Lord Acton in his pivotal History of Freedom, Max Weber in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and, more recently, historians Roland Bainton and Simon Schama—who have perpetuated the canard that Protestantism as exemplified by Calvin is essentially a persecuting faith. Robinson challenges Acton’s odd conclusion that “while Protestants did not in fact engage in persecution at nearly the rate as Catholics did, their theology required it, while Catholic theology did not. Therefore Protestantism is peculiarly the theology of persecution.”

As she does for the Geneva theologian, so also does Robinson seek to add her voice to those who would recover the Puritans from the know-nothings and the name-callers. “What does it matter if a tradition no one identifies with any longer is unjustly disparaged? If history does not precisely authorize the use we make of the word ‘Puritanism’? We all know what we mean it, so what harm is done? Well, for one thing, we make ourselves ignorant and contemptuous of the first two or three hundred years of one of the major strains of our civilization.”

Robinson is a staunch mainline Protestant, and her Calvinist Protestantism imbues her with a fierce political liberalism grounded in Scripture. “Modern assumptions about the Old Testament, now an unread classic, make it seem an improbable source for economic and social idealism,” she has written in an essay called “McGuffey and the Abolitionists.” “In fact, it is more insistent than Marx ever was in championing the poor and the oppressed.” In her nonfiction she is scathing in her critique of contemporary capitalism and the imprimatur conservative Christianity and the religious right have given to unfettered competition at the expense of the biblical value to “do justice and love mercy.” “The sin most insistently called abhorrent to God is the failure of generosity, the neglect of the widow and orphan, the oppression of strangers and the poor, the defrauding of the laborer.” In a challenge to those who baptize capitalism while maintaining a religious veneer, she says, “If an economic imperative trumps a commandment of Jesus, they should just say so and drop these pretensions toward particular holiness.”

Robinson has made the 19th-century abolitionist movement and its religious and social impact on the Middle West a special field of her study. It is a prominent theme in Gilead and a significant part of the background of Home. In the latter novel, there is a sad recognition of how much Gilead, a beloved abolitionist small town, and its would-be ecclesial keepers of the vision of justice—racial justice—have lost or forgotten the values of that past. The two novels are set in 1956, as the modern civil rights movement begins to gather momentum with the Montgomery bus boycott. The violence sparked by the effort to suppress the nonviolent demonstrations led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, another minister schooled in the social gospel of Calvinism, flickers onto the new television in the Boughton living room and generates another source of tension between father and son. The elder Boughton watches the violence surrounding the effort to integrate the University of Alabama and comments: “‘I have nothing against the colored people. I do think they’re going to need to improve themselves, though, if they want to be accepted. I believe that is the only solution.’ His look and tone were statesmanlike. He was making such an effort to be mild and conciliatory…” And a bit later: “The colored people,” his father said, “appear to me to be creating problems and obstacles for themselves with all this—commotion.” How far Gilead and its people have come from the abolitionist “commotion.” In an essay on liberalism and its failure as a movement, Robinson writes what could be a gloss on this passage from Home: “Trivial failures of courage may seem minor enough in any particular instance, and yet they change history and society. They change culture.”

Robinson’s Calvinism, however, is not just a political theology. It is aesthetic as well—not just a matter of topics and themes, but something woven into her style: the luminosity of her carefully crafted sentences, the attentive attention to detail, the respect with which she describes the small movements of character and conversation. She touches on it in Gilead, where narrator John Ames, the Congregationalist minister, writes: “Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought to be aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. … I do like Calvin’s image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us.”

In her autobiographical meditation on Psalm 8, Robinson amplifies this sense of a Protestant aesthetic: “So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”

What better description of the creative process—indeed, of her own finely wrought work—than this: “So it is possible to imagine that time was created in order that there might be narrative—event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement. A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion News Service. In 2005, he wrote “In Praise of Ordinary Time,” a review of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead.

“A good sermon,” Marilynne Robinson writes, “is one side of a passionate conversation.” It has to be heard in that way. So, too, a good novel. It is a conversation among the novelist, the reader, and — as in the case of a sermon, perhaps, for some — God.

That may be true of all first-rate fiction, whether acknowledged or not, because the best novels are always a dialogue — perhaps an argument, perhaps a prayer — with the world and its meaning. In GILEAD, Marilynne Robinson’s second novel, God works as a second, unstated addressee, a mostly implied presence whose reality is suggested by the pervasiveness of prayer.

GILEAD is better than a good book. It is a slim, spare, yet exquisite and wonderfully realized story that will long stand as one of fiction’s finest reflections on the sacramental dimensions of life, especially the Christian life lived in the routines and wonderments of prayer. It is, like a good sermon, a passionate meditation.

The book is slender only in the number of its pages — a mere 247. Otherwise, it is a fuller, richer and more deeply textured novel than most contemporary fiction twice its size. Robinson makes use of a form — the epistolary novel — that is classic but one of the most difficult to pull off well. It can often seem forced and cumbersome and — to the contemporary reader more attuned to e-mail and instant-messaging rather than the carefully considered craft of composing a letter — irritating in its deliberate pace.

Robinson’s epistle takes the form of a letter from 76-year-old John Ames, a fourth-generation Congregationalist minister, to his just-about-seven-year-old son. Ames is suffering from heart disease, and his letter, written in 1956, is a summing up of the past sprinkled with anecdotes and advice and sketches of the present, especially of his son and his wife and his best friend, also a minister.

Robinson has given her protagonist a strong, unique voice — he disdains what he calls the pulpit talking — that seems in its own way biblical but not the Bible of the King James Version. It is rather the more vernacular English of the Revised Standard Version, the translation of the KJV published in the early 1950s that aimed to capture the plain speaking of Americans at mid-century. This “letter from John” to his young son also calls to mind the pastoral letters near the end of the New Testament in which another John addresses “my little children” and his “beloved,” and which, like John Ames’s letter, are suffused with a sense of light.

Ames’s letter is quietly but vividly told family history: the apparently disjointed recollections jotted down over time of his grandfather, a militant abolitionist given to biblical-type visions who went to Kansas to join John Brown and lost an eye in the Civil War; his father, who, recoiling from his own father, became a pacifist; his brother, whose studies in Germany led him to disbelief and alienation from their father; and his Presbyterian minister friend Boughton and his family, especially Boughton’s son and Ames’s namesake, John Ames Boughton, another prodigal whose homecoming is eagerly awaited.

Fathers and sons and their mysterious and maddening relationships — loving, prodigal, forgiving — are the spine of Robinson’s story, and the biblical resonances reinforce how timeless and wondrous those themes are. Ames himself was the good son in the prodigal parable he tells his own son, “one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained.” But, he adds, almost in the “pulpit voice” he tries to subdue, “There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal.”

Less obtrusive but also a constant theme in the novel, as it is in American life, is race. Ames’s grandfather is formed by the abolitionist vision; the Iowa town of Gilead was a stop on the Underground Railroad (Ames’s recounting of pieces of that history provides the novel with some comic elements); and race figures importantly in the novel’s denouement. Robinson’s handling of the issue is careful and tragically appropriate for the story’s time: two years after the landmark BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION school desegregation decision and just months before the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, which would launch the modern civil rights movement. In a moving passage, Ames writes about an arson fire at the black church in town: “That church sold up some years ago, and what was left of the congregation moved to Chicago. … The pastor came by with a sack of plants he’d dug up from around the front steps, mainly lilies. He thought I might want them, and they’re still there along the front of our church, needing to be thinned. I should tell the deacons where they came from, so they’ll know they have some significance and they’ll save them when the building comes down. I didn’t know the Negro pastor well myself, but he said his father knew my grandfather. He told me they were sorry to leave, because the town had once meant a great deal to them.”

Very little of the politics of the outside world intrudes directly into Ames’s letter to his son, but the events that forge and form the characters — war and the Great Depression especially — are there as a constant backdrop to what, in a liturgical calendar, would be called “ordinary time.” GILEAD is a profound, prayerful meditation on, and a joyous thanksgiving of, life in “ordinary time” — the sacramental character of physical, everyday existence as well as “the gift of physical particularity and how blessing and sacrament are mediated through it.”

“I have been thinking lately,” Ames writes, without either despair or melancholy at the approaching end, “how I have loved my physical life.” As the novel concludes, he tells his son, “It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor grey ember of Creation and it turns to radiance — for a moment or a year or the span of a life.” It is a vision of transfiguration — the ordinary stuff of life made extraordinary in the apprehension of it. Marilynne Robinson has done the same with the life of John Ames. In the imagining of it she has shown the sacramental possibilities of the world.

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion News Service.

Writer Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 novel GILEAD is about the Reverend John Ames, a Congregational minister in Iowa who in 1956 begins writing a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Watch Robinson read from the final pages of GILEAD, and read this March 11, 2005 interview with her in Washington, DC:

Q: There is such deep empathy in GILEAD for the pastor and the preacher. What attracts you to pastors? What do you appreciate about them?

Click here to read a review of GILEAD

A: There are several sources for my appreciation of pastors and the way they are described in this book. One of them is reading history and realizing that they had a profound creative impact on the Middle West and the settlement of the Middle West. I was very interested in that. They established many wonderful little colleges, like Oberlin and Grinnell and so on, which were explicitly religious establishments in the first instance and were established in order to promote women’s rights, antislavery, universal literacy — many excellent things. Then, of course, there is the fact that I am interested in Scripture and theology. This is an interest that I can assume I would share with a pastor, so that makes me a little bit prone to use that kind of character, perhaps, just at the moment. Then there is also the fact that, having been a church member for many years, I am very aware of how much pastors enrich people’s experience, people for whom they are significant. I know that it’s a kind of custom of American literature and culture to slang them. I don’t think there is any reason why that needs to be persisted in.

Q: John Ames, the Congregational minister in the book, is a very theological thinker, and you have mentioned your own interest in theology. If you had to explain it to someone, what is theology and what does it mean to think theologically?

A: It’s a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. Certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself. Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that — popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies — because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That’s theology.

Q: Is there a connection to poetry, too? John Ames is also steeped in the religious poets, and he mentions John Donne and George Herbert throughout the novel.

A: I think the connection between poetry and theology, which is profound in Western tradition — there is a great deal of wonderful religious poetry — both poetry and theology push conventional definitions and explore perceptions that might be ignored or passed off as conventional, but when they are pressed yield much larger meanings, seem to be part of a much larger system of reality. The assumption behind any theology that I’ve ever been familiar with is that there is a profound beauty in being, simply in itself. Poetry, at least traditionally, has been an educing of the beauty of language, the beauty of experience, the beauty of the working of the mind, and so on. The pastor does, indeed, appreciate it. One of the things that is nice about these old pastors — they were young at the time — who went into the Middle West is that they were real humanists. They were often linguists, for example, and the schools that they established were then, as they are now, real liberal arts colleges where people studied the humanities in a very broad sense. I think that should be reflected in his mind; appropriately, it is.

Q: You write that a good sermon is “one side of a passionate conversation.” Could you say more about what you meant by that and why you value the sermon as a form of discourse, especially in this pretty inconsolable and demythologized age of ours?

A: I think we have demythologized prematurely, that we’ve actually lost the vocabulary for discussing reality at its largest scales. The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth. A sermon is a form that yields a certain kind of meaning in the same way that, say, a sonnet is a form that deals with a certain kind of meaning that has to do with putting things in relation to each other, allowing for the fact of complexity reversal, such things. Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty that are addressed to people who come there in order to hear that. The attention of the congregation is a major part of the attention that the pastor gives to his or her utterance. It’s very exceptional. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t enjoy a good sermon. People who are completely nonreligious know a good sermon when they hear one.

One of the reasons that I think that a sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one — and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it’s a difficult form — is because it’s so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith. This is a kind of standard of discourse that is not characteristic of the present moment. I think that it makes a sermon, when it is a good sermon, stand out in anyone’s experience.

Q: John Ames knows his hymns, too; he knows his Isaacs Watts, and so do you. What do you think about Protestant hymnody, and what role does it play in the language of GILEAD?

A: One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations. There isn’t much of that anymore either. There are very few poems people can recite, but there are quite a few hymns that, if you hum a few bars, people can at least come up with two verses. Many of the older hymns are very beautiful. Isaac Watts, of course, is a hymn writer in the tradition of Congregationalism who lived in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. He is very interesting and important because he was also a metaphysician. He knew a great deal about what was, for him, contemporary science. He was very much influenced by Isaac Newton, for example. There are planets and meteors and so on showing up in his hymns very often. But, again, the scale of his religious imagination corresponds to a very generously scaled scientific imagination. It makes his hymns continue to have a spaciousness and resonance that locates, for me, the religious imagination in a very beautiful way.

Q: Catholics speak about “the Catholic imagination.” Is there such a thing as the Protestant imagination?

A: Oh, I think there is. Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions — the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life. I think, frankly, that his PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT is theology, too.

When the Reformation became established, one of the things that was a question between Catholicism and the Reformation traditions was whether there was a hierarchy of being. If you look at Thomas Aquinas, for example, you have hierarchies of angels and all the rest of it, and hierarchies even of saints and then subsaints — people who aren’t quite there, that sort of thing. The Reformation rejected all of that and created a new metaphysics, in effect, that is not hierarchical. The idea that the universe itself is physically structured around hierarchy was sort of an integration of earlier science and theology that was made by people like Thomas Aquinas, that was assumed doctrinally in that tradition. The Reformation rejected that model of reality and created a highly individualistic metaphysics in the sense that it located everything normative that can be said about reality in human perception, there being, of course, no other avenue of knowing. There is Scripture, there is conscience, there is perception itself. If you read Calvin, for example, he says, How do we know that we are godlike, in the image of God? Well, look at how brilliant we are. Look how we can solve problems even dreaming, which I think is true, which I’ve done myself. So instead of having an externalized model of reality with an objective structure, it has a model of reality that is basically continuously renegotiated in human perception. I think that view of things is pretty pervasively influential in Protestant thought.

Q: Is GILEAD on some level a novel about “being Christian,” about what it might mean to live a Christian life?

A: I think I can guardedly say yes. The fact is, being who I am, my definition of human life is perhaps not readily universalized. But I hope that it is not a narrow view of human life itself. I don’t have the feeling that people need to be Christian in order to understand what the novel is and what it means and so on, to recognize it’s about father-son relations, or parent-child relations. In the New Testament, of course, that’s the major metaphor for the situation of a human being in the world relative to God. I think that, in using that metaphor, the New Testament is appealing to something that people profoundly and universally know: what it is to love a child and what it is to love a parent. So that’s a big subject in the book.

Q: You’ve written some about mysticism and mystery and an attraction to the mystical. What might mysticism have to do with your writing and your own religious life?

A: I find the whole question of mysticism, piety, religious life, and so on very mysterious. I know that’s an evasion. I go to church every Sunday, unless I’m away or something. I am profoundly influenced in my thinking by religious concepts. I know this. I don’t know what piety means, in a sense. I feel as if I would be presumptuous claiming it. I feel that way often when people ask me about religion. Of course, mysticism is very hard to isolate because, given the kind of consciousness that I was sort of instructed in as religious consciousness; that borders on mysticism so closely that it’s hard to know whether you qualify or not, or whether mysticism is artificially isolated when it is treated as a separate thing from experience. Obviously, mysticism can be a form of madness, but then consciousness can be a form of madness.

Q: It sounds like something John Ames might say. How much distance is there between him and you?

A: I think quite a lot, actually. That’s another thing. What do you know about yourself? One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know. By contrast, you realize that you really don’t know yourself terribly well at all. I’ve put him in a very particular situation — leaving his life, leaving a child, and so on. These things aren’t my experience yet, God forbid! In any case, his situation is exceptional — from my point of view, invented. Then his thinking is generated out of his situation. It’s perfectly possible that if I can imagine myself in his place, I would think in that way, but it’s never been my circumstance to do that.

Q: What has been your own experience of pastors — their influence on you, relationships you have had with ministers like John Ames or others?

A: I really can’t claim ever to have had an exceptionally close relationship with a minister. I’m always there. I pay my pledge. I listen and observe with interest. I’m very sympathetic with the rigor and the aesthetic quality of what they do. Aside from that, I don’t have a kind of personal experience with any of them that I could consider privileged, so to speak.

A long time ago, when I was a little girl, I went to church with my grandfather on Easter Sunday, and I heard a sermon that I have thought about for years and years. I don’t know why it was so impressive to me, although the church was beautiful, with the emphasis that Easter gives. I think that probably that sermon and the memory of it was more important for crystallizing my sense of pastors and church and all the rest of it than any other single experience.

Q: You wrote about that in one of your essays in THE DEATH OF ADAM (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). At the time that collection was published, you said you wanted to “change the conversation” about modern American culture and society. Has that happened? Has the public conversation changed at all to your satisfaction?

A: It has changed to my dissatisfaction, as a matter of fact. The public conversation has changed in ways that I am not at all pleased by. Perhaps I had the slightest impact in keeping it from changing more radically in ways that I don’t approve of, but at present I can’t claim to be pleased.

You know, at one time we did some fairly unique things in this country for very interesting reasons. One of the things that we did was create bankruptcy laws that made it so that people who fell into bankruptcy were not ground into the earth for the rest of their lives. Isaiah calls it “grinding the faces of the poor.” The reforms were about simultaneous with the Second Great Awakening. We inherited British law, which is like the new “reforms” that are being made now, in the sense that people are permanently entrapped in debt, if they once fall into bankruptcy. The reason that the law was changed in American history — the whole early period of the formation of the country was moving away from British law into a law that is generated here and that conforms to the sense of what is appropriate here. The model for our early bankruptcy laws was Deuteronomy, the idea that, under certain circumstances — in Deuteronomy, it is simply the passage of seven years’ time — people are released from debt, simply because they are released from debt. No more debt. You start over again. This has been a very powerful model in this country. It’s being destroyed now. People talk about how much new employment, new wealth, and so on are continuously generated in this country. One of the reasons for that is because people can afford a risk. And the reason for that is because bankruptcy laws were written which prevented people from being permanently entrapped in poverty. If we knew what we had done, and we knew why it was done, there could be some conversation about these changes that are being made today. But there is no conversation, because nobody knows the history behind what we are giving up.

Q: One writer has said that perhaps our sacred scripture is the novel. I wonder what you think about that, and what fiction writing and the novel might have to do with the life of faith.

A: The novel has more to do with the life of faith in some cases than in others, shall we say. I sometimes am discouraged by what seems to be a sort of conventional disparagement of humankind. I think often people feel that they are doing something moral when they are doing that, but that’s not how I understand morality. I much prefer the “everyone is sacred, and everybody errs” model of reality. I am delighted if people find that kind of sustenance in novels, but perhaps it’s because they don’t read the Scripture that they are comparing it to, which would perhaps provide deeper sustenance than many contemporary novels.

The Bible for me is holy writ. It’s a very straightforward thing, although I am not a literalist. Literalism is a very bizarre phenomenon. Many people are literalists about, for example, the King James Version, which was published in 1611. Anybody who has ever translated anything knows that there is no reason to be literalistic about a translation. Anybody who has read any biblical scholarship knows that every scholar struggles over completely intractable problems with the original texts, or what they have to work from. It’s one of the great, powerful, mysterious objects that have come down through history. This does not translate into literal interpretation for me.

Q: How does the Bible inform the plainness and stateliness of the language in GILEAD?

A: I have taught Bible at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop several times. It’s something that writers feel that they need to know, no matter what their religious evaluation of it is, or the traditions they have come from. It’s always fun to read anything together with writers, because they are very sensitive to things that you might otherwise overlook. One of the narratives that is extremely beautiful and efficient and powerful is the narrative of David and Absalom in Second Samuel. I think that had a lot of influence on my thinking in this book — Absalom, of course, being the son of King David who betrays him and so on. There is an indubitable emotional power in many of the narratives in the Bible that return one to extremely basic emotions — about fathers and sons in that particular case. I think that often scriptural language is used almost ornamentally. I think that its effect is greater if its accomplishment as narrative is taken more seriously — how complex these things actually are and how straightforward at the same time they are: “Absalom! Absalom!” I hope that, in some degree, I have been influenced by that. The Bible is so pervasive in English-language literature that I think that people actually allude to it, or feel the resonance of it, without having any idea what it is that they are feeling.

Q: Do you read any contemporary theology? Has there been anyone since Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr who you think has advanced theological thinking? Is it all just about the theological past and retrieving what has been forgotten?

A: A lot of it seems to be written with that project in mind. That perhaps is the characteristic posture — that theology is written as retrieval. In many cases, this is the impetus behind the Reformation, after all, to try to reach back to a more authentic Christianity and so on. Over and over again, this is done. I can’t really keep abreast of things well enough. I read over too wide an area as far as time is concerned to be up on many contemporary things, but my favorite theologian of the relatively recent period is Karl Barth, who died in the late ’50s, who was a very honorable figure relative to the rise of Hitler and so on — he and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was another great theologian. They were both very serious people. I have a feeling that there has been a pressure away from seriousness in much modern thought, as if we could sort of scale reality down to a size that we are more comfortable dealing with. That might be a prejudice, but I feel that we have not come up to the standards of seriousness that others have reached at earlier moments.

The loss of seriousness seems to me to be, in effect, a loss of hope. I think that the thing that made people rise to real ambition, real gravity was the sense of posterity, for example — a word that I can remember hearing quite often when I was a child and I never hear anymore. People actually wanted to make the world good for people in generations that they would never see. It makes people think in very large terms to try to liberate women, for example, or to try to eliminate slavery. Of course, we have recrudescence of slavery all over the world now. It’s sort of, “Well, we won’t think about that. It’s too bad.” I’m really disturbed by the degree to which I don’t hear people saying, “Are we leaving the world better than we found it?” I think we are a generation that perhaps could not answer in the affirmative, and it is the evasion of the larger responsibility of being only one generation in what one hopes will be an infinite series of fruitful generations. There is a selfishness in refusing to understand that we are passing through; others will come, and they deserve certain courtesies and certain considerations from us.