The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

Christian Century, Nov 18, 1998 by Kathleen Norris

The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. By Marilynne Robinson. Houghton Mifflin, 254 pp., $23.00.

Marilynne Robinson's essays fully live up to her own description: "They are," she writes, "contrarian in method and spirit. They assert ... that the prevailing view of things can be assumed to be wrong, and that its opposite ... can also be assumed to be wrong. They undertake to demonstrate that there are other ways of thinking, for which better arguments can be made." In reading this rigorous but invigorating book, I realized that it is something I have been waiting for. As the forces of polarization all but overwhelm us, a bracing book of truly contrarian essays is useful medicine.

Since reading Robinson's gem of a novel, Housekeeping, in the mid-'80s, and giving at least ten copies away to friends, I have been waiting for her to write another novel. Housekeeping is one of those quiet American masterpieces (James Welch's Winter in the Blood is another) that I suspect will emerge from our present clutter as a novel that continues to be well worth reading. It is one of the best evocations of childhood and provincialism ever written.

But as Robinson explains in her essay "Facing Reality," she finds herself feeling smothered as a novelist by the collective fictions of contemporary American life, rigid notions of "reality" which have "educated our audience, as surely as the pulpit educated Emerson's," and leave the novelist "little to build on and little of interest to explore." With a novelist's sharp eye, Robinson exposes our bland acceptance of capitalist brutalities, our addiction to anxiety, our idolization of success, and our attendant loss of the ability to comprehend the significance of events. "I think we are not taking responsibility for making ourselves reasonable, either individually or collectively.... Now it is as if public discourse exists only to be disrupted, as if gaffes and scandals ... were the real substance of collective life."

While Robinson sometimes rants, as a contrarian is wont to do, her book is large in spirit. She ranges through a wide variety of subjects, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the experience of hearing Psalm 8 in a Presbyterian church as a child, the origins of the McGuffy Reader in the abolitionist, pacifist and early feminist movements, and the implications of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution for our time. "The strain in Western civilization that is expressed in Malthus / Darwin / Nietzsche / Freud," she writes, "has no place in it for the cult of the soul, that old Jacob lamed and blessed in a long night of struggle."

A rigorous thinker, blessedly conscious of history, Robinson makes a frontal assault on the easy, dismissive stereotypes of religion that abound in our culture. In the Darwin essay she asserts, "Surely it is fair to say that science is to the `science' that inspired exterminations as Christianity is to the `Christianity' that inspired Crusades."

I could have used Robinson's ideas when, on my last book tour, I dared to speak favorably about religion on public radio. After I had defined the word "righteous" in its biblical sense, as doing justice for the poor and oppressed, a caller angrily stated that Christians have no right to the word justice, as theirs is an inherently evil and unjust religion. I am aware that Christians speak to each other about justice, and sometimes even practice it, but I agree with Robinson that many American Protestants have lost touch with their historical claim on the word. When speaking about justice as foundational to biblical religion, pastors tend to cite Amos or Isaiah, but seldom remind us that Christian thinkers like John Calvin or Jonathan Edwards also had a good deal to say about the topic.

Robinson does cite them both and in good measure. One of the most valuable things that she does is to share what she has learned through her extensive reading. "Think how much less stupefying the last fifty years might have been," she writes, "had people actually read Marx." She openly challenges the view easily picked up from history texts that "the merger of Christian pretensions and bullyboy economics" by which our culture thrives "has its origins in Calvinism and Puritanism. Well," Robinson says, both traditions "left huge literatures. Go find a place where they are guilty of this vulgarization."

Robinson's greatest contribution may be her insistence on restoring the good name of John Calvin--or, as Robinson slyly calls him, aiming to "free the discussion," Jean Cauvin. I am typical of many Presbyterians in that I have never read much Cauvin, and have blindly assented to the culture's overwhelmingly negative assessment of him. Robinson has made it impossible for me to continue to do so, and I am profoundly grateful. I am glad to have discovered, through Robinson, Cauvin's statement on the need to "remember not men's evil intention but to look upon the image of God in them, which cancels and effaces their transgressions, and with its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them."