Whenever
I read a book by Marilynne Robinson, I always think of my visit to Iowa City a
number of years ago and having the chance to meet her and attend an afternoon
workshop that she presented to around a dozen ministers. It was striking to me that Robinson talks
with and embodies the same measured poise with which she writes. Robinson, the author of three novels and four
works of non-fiction (I’ve read all but two of her books), has a remarkable
mind and writes in a controlled, exact, and precise manner. I was not surprised to learn that there was
something like a twenty year gap between her first and second novel. Her writing was so perfect that I imagined her
taking a week to craft a sentence. According
to a favorable review of Robinson’s most recent book in the Wall Street Journal, “The greatest
pleasures of this book are its provocations, which are inseparable from its
prose.”
When
I Was a Child I Read Books contains ten essays, each seemingly better than the
one before it. Robinson writes as a
liberal Christian who merges Christian theology with the humanities. These essays return again and again to a
series of themes: the Biblical commandments about generosity, the sinister
ideological roots of modern economic theory, the rejection of ideologies that
would limit our humanity, and the glory of the human mind.
In
her opening essay, Robinson writes, “I realized gradually that my own religion,
and religion in general, could and should disrupt these constraints, which amount
to a small and narrow definition of what human beings are and how human life is to
be understood… For the educated among
us, moldy theories we learned as sophomores, memorized for the test and never
consciously thought of again, exert an authority that would embarrass us if we
stopped to consider them.” Immediately,
Robinson goes on to critique behaviorist psychology. Less proximately, she goes on to question the
economic ideologies of modern day capitalism, Darwinian attempts to explain
human behaviors, and the rejections of religion by the New Atheists.
Her
essays are always fascinating, and sometimes go off on puzzling tangents, as when she writes about
reclaiming the figure of Moses as an exemplar of liberalism. She considers four books that seem to hold a
negative opinion of Moses and the Old Testament. Those four books include popular religion treatments
by Bishop John Shelby Spong and Jack Miles, along with obscure scholarly titles
by Jan Assmann and Regina Schwartz. I
get what she’s doing here. A lot of the
condemnations of Jewish scripture are nothing more than the “moldy theories we
learned as sophomores.” But this essay,
unlike the other essays, is so narrow and specialized that it seems inessential
when compared to the topics she tackles elsewhere. How many people are interested in reading a
three page refutation of Jan Assmann’s Moses
the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism? (For the record, I read Assmann’s book as
part of senior-level college seminar in the history of religions. It is a wild book. It freely admits to being a wild book. And, I think that Robinson could have treated
it more generously.)
Robinson
is at her best in her essays “Who Was Oberlin?” and “Cosmology.” In “Cosmology” she thrashes Christopher
Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and other neo-Darwinians. It is Robinson’s way of thinking here that I
find most liberating and most in line with the theological thinking to which I
aspire. In “Oberlin” she considers the
historical importance of nineteenth century evangelical Christians like Johann
Friedrich Oberlin and Charles Grandison Finney, who played an important role in
the end of slavery, and in forming Midwestern intellectual and cultural institutions,
such as Grinnell and Oberlin. Robinson’s
essay provides an alternative history to the history of evangelical religion
offered by Jeff Sharlet in his exposé The
Family. Sharlet seems to treat
Jonathan Edwards and Finney as the precursors of modern day Christian
dominionists. Robinson shows this not to
be the case, but in doing so she inadvertently understates the threat of the
right wing.
Part
of the joy of Robinson is also part of what makes this amazing book a bit frustrating
in retrospect. She does not suffer fools gladly. “[A]nother
identification I hold passionately is with the academic community, which has
its fair share of skeptics and agnostics, some of whom are well enough informed
historically to mention Michael Servetus from time to time, to make an
occasional offhand remark about the Thirty Years War.” Robinson holds that the complexity of the
human mind and the complexity of the cosmos are deserving of reverence. Her efforts to praise and defend that larger reverence and wondrous love are sometimes noble and sometimes quixotic. Not all sins are equal.
Click here to see what other books I've read in 2012.
