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The Givenness of Things: Essays by Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 304 pp., $26.

In the impassioned polemic, "Darwinism," that opens The Death of Adam (1998), the first of her four philosophical/theological essay collections, Marilynne Robinson hurls a flaming spear at all of modern thought:

Now that the mystery of motive is solved - there are only self-seeking and aggression, and the illusions that conceal them from us - there is no place left for the soul, or even the self. Moral behavior has little real meaning, and inwardness, in the traditional sense, is not necessary or possible. ...[T]here is little use for the mind, the orderer and reconciler, the artist of the interior world. Whatever it has made will only be pulled apart. The old mystery of subjectivity is dispelled; individuality is a pointless complication of a very straightforward organic life. Our hypertrophic brain ... that house of many mansions, with ... all its deep terrors and very rich pleasures, which was so long believed to be the essence of our lives, and a claim on one another's sympathy and courtesy and attention, is going the way of every part of collective life that was addressed to it - religion, art, dignity, graciousness. Philosophy, ethics, politics, properly so called. ... [H]ow much was destroyed, when modern thought declared the death of Adam.

Robinson has not ceased from mental fight since then, nor has her sword slept in her hand, though she has also, over the same period, published three exquisitely beautiful, wholly untendentious novels, the acclaimed Gilead trilogy. With an equal abundance (though varying proportions) of eloquence and lyricism, her essays have made a case for her Calvinist theological vision, while her novels have made a world out of it.

Religious thinkers have tried to beat back rationalism in many and various ways. Pascal cajoled; De Maistre snarled; Kierkegaard mocked; Newman preached; Chesterton punned; C.S. Lewis allegorized. Robinson mystifies. I don't mean that she's ever willfully misleading or obscure, but rather that she looks at the commonplace and continually finds the uncanny, the ineffable, the mysterious. The idea that human nature and behavior are lawlike and predictable, that sociobiology or psychoanalysis can even begin to account for the complexity and depth of a single personality, she regards as a fatal failure of imagination. Like Blake shuddering at a clockwork universe, she prays: "May God us keep/From Single vision and Newton's sleep"; though her own bêtes noires are Darwin and Freud.

More particularly, it's their contemporary epigones she objects to, especially evolutionary psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists, who draw out and embrace the supposedly anti-religious implications of the Darwin's and Freud's discoveries. Evolution may be unimpeachable, she acknowledges: we may have descended from creatures without minds, through modifications caused by accidental genetic mutations that conferred advantages or disadvantages in the competition for survival. Yet we have minds, and souls too, she insists, however we got them; and not all of life is a competition for survival. There may be no thought without brain activity, but brain activity is not all there is to thought.

"Merely" is a fighting word in Robinson's lexicon. The self is not "merely" physical; virtues are not "merely" adaptations. The gravest intellectual sin in her catechism is reductionism: of mind to computation, generosity to self-interest, beauty to functionality, love to desire. We don't even know what "physical" means, she protests: "On scrutiny the physical is as elusive as anything to which a name may be given." [P. 8] It "frays away into dark matter, antimatter," and beyond; it is "a pure artifact of the scale at which, and the means by which, we and our devices perceive." [9] It is sheer arrogant pretense to employ such an unstable category to discredit the idea of the soul, whose character was "established in remote antiquity, in many places and cultures, long before such a thing as science was brought to bear on the question." [9]

Evolutionary psychology is equally pretentious and vacuous, with its insistence that any traits not obviously necessary to "establish and maintain homeostasis ... to live and propagate" are somehow less real than those that are. "So generosity is apparent and greed is real, [and] the great poets and philosophers toiled in the hope of making themselves attractive to potential mates." Like cognitive neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists are soul-deniers.

The soul is Robinson's guiding idea, her master concept (not to mention her stock in trade as a novelist). "A very great deal depends, perhaps our humanity depends, on  our sensing and acknowledging that quality in our kind we call the soul." [235]Nonphysical, it is and is not the self; it is stained by moral failings but "untouched by the accidents that maim the self or kill it." The soul is "sacred" and "immortal," a "statement of the dignity of a human life and of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience." Heroism, creative fire, immortal longings are irrefutable evidence of the soul. That science will someday be explain it in terms of "nuts and bolts ... signals and receptors" is an empty promise.

Science is, in any case, no longer in a position to make promises. With recent developments in quantum physics and cosmology, Robinson declares, our conception of Being has exploded and all bets are off. Undecidability, indeterminacy, non-locality, entanglement, multiple universes - nowadays the scientifically literate must be prepared to swallow ten impossible things before breakfast. Reality is so very strange, it appears, that believing in God, immortality, and free will is hardly a stretch anymore. If even space and time are utterly mysterious, why expect that grace or the soul will be any less so? "Anyone who has spent an hour with a book on the new physics knows that our old mechanistic thinking, useful as it is for so many purposes, bears about the same relation to deeper reality that frost on a window pane bears to everything beyond it, including the night sky and everything beyond that." [210]

What might Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, or E. O. Wilson (all of whom Robinson pillories in one essay collection or another) say in response to her anathemas? They would first of all, I imagine, reject her insinuation that Darwinism logically implies Social Darwinism and indeed was partly inspired by Malthusianism. The fact that the forceful and cunning usually win the contest for survival in the state of nature does not guarantee them equal success in the state of culture. Indeed, there is no contest for survival in the state of culture, since culture is simply a society's way of spending its surplus over subsistence. Moreover, force and cunning are not the only successful strategies even in the state of nature; cooperation often trumps them. On the primeval savannah, teamwork sometimes outwitted tooth and claw.

Neuroscientists might point out in their defense that the up-to-date among them no longer refer to the brain as a hunk of meat (which greatly annoyed Robinson) but as a design space, and to the mind as a software module. (Though this may annoy her only slightly less.) As for the soul, they may respectfully reply that while they're perfectly comfortable with the vernacular sense of "soul" or "spirit," the metaphysical sense - something "untouched by the accidents that maim the self or kill it," and which will be reunited with the body at the Last Judgment - is just a blank to them, so could Robinson please try once more to explain it?

And the new physics - does it license Robinson's ontological maximalism? Some physicists think so; some don't; most have no opinion and no interest. But even those who agree with her generally limit their wilder imaginings to the subatomic or intergalactic spheres. Few would agree that because quarks may have free will, people have free will; or that because an electron may be in more than one place at the same time, a mountain may be in more than one place at the same time; or that because subatomic events may have no cause, everyday events may have no cause. Very freaky things do happen at quantum scales, but statistically they cancel out. In any case, wouldn't it be a bit perverse of God to have made His existence seem so implausible from Laplace to Bohr?

The Givenness of Things is by no means wholly polemical. Much of it is devoted to theological discussion, or meditation, about the interpretation of scripture, the nature of Christ, and the inexhaustibly inventive and persevering love of God for humanity. The prose is as finely wrought as in any of Robinson's novels, though less relaxed and elegiac. Not every reader will be convinced by her arguments, or even understand them, but any reader not tone-deaf will be enchanted by her grave, urgent music.

The surest way to take the moral measure of a professedly devout Christian is to ask how she feels about Matthew 25, where Jesus says to the saved and the damned: "What you have done to the least of my brothers and sisters, you have done to me." Robinson feels very strongly about it. "The souls we let our theories and our penuries frustrate are souls still, and, if Jesus is to be trusted, they will be our judges, they are now our judges." [235]

Amen.

                                                            [END]

George Scialabba is a contributing editor of The Baffler and the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and For the Republic.

             "Man was created a rebel," Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor admonished the silent Christ in his prison cell, "and how can rebels be happy?" The burden of freedom, the responsibility of finding - or creating - one's own purpose and meaning without the guidance of authoritative inherited creeds and values, is too heavy for all but a few. The rest of us cannot endure for long the tensions of uncertainty. We must, at some point, stop questioning, quiet our doubts, turn away from moral and metaphysical inquiry and toward life. Untrammeled skepticism ends in paralysis.

            That is true of societies as well as individuals. No purely rational justification can be offered for trust and self-sacrifice. But without them, social life is chaos, a war of all against all.

            Until a few hundred years ago, this problem scarcely existed. The authority of communities and traditions, though often enough evaded or defied, was rarely put in radical question. There were sinners, doubters, even heretics, but dogma and hierarchy, as the foundation of individual morality and social organization, were unchallenged.

            Then modernity happened. Beginning in fifteenth-century Europe, a critical, experimental, libertarian spirit began to flourish, which came to be known as "humanism." A crescendo of scientific discoveries, artistic innovations, geographical explorations, and political reforms ensued until, at the end of the eighteenth century, Kant hailed "humankind's emergence from its self-imposed minority" and baptized it "Enlightenment." At the same time, the prestige of the sacred and the supernatural, of what the Grand Inquisitor called "miracle, mystery, and authority" and declared indispensable to ordinary people's happiness, was correspondingly diminished.

            In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, humanism's luster was tarnished. First came the blight of early industrialization, then colonial brutality, totalitarian repression, and the technologies of extermination in concentration camps and global wars. Even after these horrors passed, in the midst of unprecedented prosperity, an epidemic of spiritual emptiness descended: alienation, consumerism, and the loneliness of mass society. Perhaps, as a minority of modern thinkers have always believed, we cannot live by reason alone. Perhaps modernity is a mistake.

            Criticism of modernity is a distinguished intellectual tradition. In the first half of the twentieth century, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer formulated such criticisms with great subtlety and learning, as have Christopher Lasch, Philip Rieff, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Gray more recently. The Australian sociologist John Carroll makes a small but significant addition to this tradition with The Wreck of Western Culture, published in 1993 but now revised and appearing for the first time in the United States.

            Carroll is a different kind of sociologist. Not only does he not make a fetish of data and method; he eschews them altogether. The Wreck of Western Culture is nothing so pedestrian as social theory; it is a (sometimes) inspired vaticination, a dramatic and portentous reading of the entrails of Western high culture from Homer to Hollywood. Proceeding from one representative masterwork to the next, Carroll meditates them intensely, laying siege to each one's inner meaning, pitting them against one another, and wresting from the sequence a hidden narrative of Western decline. It is an audacious performance, sometimes electrifying but just as often erratic and tendentious. It is hard not to be frequently impressed, but even harder not to be continually exasperated.

            Boldly (or rashly), Carroll begins with a proclamation of universal ruin. "Our culture is a flat expanse of rubble." [QUOTE FROM PAGE 1] In our depths, we "are desperate, yet don't care much anymore. We are timid, yet we cannot be shocked. We are inert underneath our busyness. We are destitute in our plenty. We are homeless in our own homes." [p. 1] If you do not recognize yourself in this desolate portrait, you will simply have to take Carroll's word for its accuracy; no attempt is made to substantiate, or even elaborate on, the book's initial, apocalyptic paragraph.

            Not diagnosis but etiology is Carroll's concern. How have we arrived at this civilizational cul de sac? It started five centuries ago, Carroll answers, with our adoption of the false myth of humanism. The ambition of humanism was "to found an order on earth in which freedom and happiness prevailed, without any transcendental or supernatural supports - an entirely human order." [p. 2] In humanism's glory days, the eras of Socrates, Leonardo, and Newton, this was a pardonable illusion. But now, in the wake of Auschwitz, the Gulag, Hiroshima, and 9/11, the bankruptcy of humanism is manifest. We need a new cultural myth. Since none is yet available, Carroll proposes to sift through the wreckage, retracing the path to catastrophe and prospecting for glimmers of a different future.

            Before Socrates, the Greeks were not humanists, they were fatalists. The gods - and behind them, a dimly discerned cosmic order - determined human destiny. Philosophical speculation about the good life and right action was irrelevant; culture rested on mythos, the "timeless archetypal narratives that carry the eternal truths," the "ancient currents of shape and form that move in the unconscious dreamtime of the people." [p.70] Myths and stories give a culture and its members "a place to stand" - an indispensable function, which mere human reason and will cannot fulfill.

            Likewise, reason and will cannot withstand the annihilating necessity of death. But Jesus's resurrection was "the death of death": that is, an end to death as the meaning, or negation, of life. For Carroll, Jesus's key affirmations are "Before Abraham came to be, I am" and "I am the way, the truth, and the life." With these, he offered himself as a place to stand, transcending the Law. His disciples Paul, Luther, and Calvin would become humanism's greatest opponents.  

            The first humanist masterpiece Carroll ponders is Donatello's 15^th-century sculpture of a Venetian general on horseback, the Gattamelata. The figure's ease, grace, and power "anticipate the Renaissance ideal, 'we can become what we will,' and project it in three-dimensional form." [p. 14]

            The virtu embodied in the Gattamelata also animates Brutus in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Brutus acts; Hamlet, famously, does not. The two plays are the day and night sides of "humanism's quintessential genius." [p. 15]

            In Hamlet and Hans Holbein's painting, The Ambassadors, a skull appears. This is the sort of detail from which Carroll conjures far-reaching interpretations of cultural health or malaise. The gravedigger scene in Hamlet is not merely a comic interlude; the trompe l'oeil skull in The Ambassadors is not merely a visual trick. On the contrary, Carroll claims, their significance is momentous. "When culture is reduced to the skull, death takes over.  ... Once faith is gone, fate is reduced to necessity - and the ultimate necessity is death." [p. 32] In Carroll's reading, the painting and the play acknowledge that "there is no humanist solution." [p. 33]

            The Protestant Reformation is usually seen as a religious parallel to the Renaissance, a movement of liberation from authority and tradition. Carroll sees it differently. Luther opposed faith and grace to reason and will; he and Calvin "preached darkness and suffering against the reasonable and the comfortable." Against the hope, common to secular and Catholic humanism, that a measure of wisdom and righteousness might be attained through human effort, Luther and Calvin insisted on our radical depravity, folly, and helplessness.

            Through lengthy commentaries on paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Poussin, and Velazquez, Carroll traces the achievements and failures of the Protestant Reformation and its less well-known Catholic counterpart. Descartes and Kant advanced the humanist project, undermining notions of cosmic order and setting reason in command of philosophy. Bach and Jane Austen founded their art on perceptions of human insufficiency and dependence. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche subjected themselves fully, heroically, to the spiritual tensions between humanist light and anti-humanist darkness. After them, the deluge: the frank "degradation of Western culture," illustrated by Edvard Munch's Madonna and Marcel Duchamp's Urinal. In its "death throes," the only vital works that Western culture yields are futile protests against modern homelessness, either ironic (the novels of Henry James) or wistful (the movies of John Ford).

                                                ***************

            To produce - in fewer than 300 pages - a passionate, imaginative, richly detailed interpretation of the spiritual history of the modern West is not a small achievement, even if that interpretation is, as I believe, profoundly wrong. At a time when cutting-edge cultural criticism is often about ephemeral effluvia, it apparently takes a maverick Aussie sociologist to don the prophet's mantle. Let him be praised, if only for forcing us to look once again at our cultural monuments, this time as harbingers of life or death.

             But is it true that "without God, without a transcendental law, there is only death"? [p. 32] And - and entirely separate question - even if that is true, does that make it any more likely that either God or a transcendental law actually does exist? Like virtually all other anti-modernists, Carroll does not even assert - much less attempt to prove - the existence of God or transcendental law. He merely deplores the consequences of not believing that they exist. This is not, it seems to me, a grown-up position.

            In any case, there are grounds for a truce between believers and unbelievers. Why not lay aside questions of ultimate meaning for as long as there is unnecessary suffering in the world? I don't mean necessary suffering, like disappointed love or the infirmities of age. I mean wholly unnecessary suffering, like undernourished, illiterate, or malarial children. When there are no more such, then let us begin asking again about the meaning of life and the existence of God.

                                                            ************

            Carroll's latest book, The Existential Jesus, is an anticlimax. It bears roughly the same relation to The Wreck of Western Culture as Finnegan's Wake does to Ulysses, or Norman Brown's Love's Body to his Life Against Death. In each of these pairs, the first book was rewardingly adventurous, the second frustratingly self-indulgent.

The Existential Jesus is an emotionally fervent but intellectually slack reading of Mark's "enigmatic" gospel. Here is Carroll's solution to the enigma:

Why is he the "existential" Jesus? Because the normal identifying markers of the self have been stripped away from him - family, friends, a past, an occupation, and even an anticipated life-path. In effect, all he can proclaim about himself is: "I exist." His story then becomes a quest for the I that exists. [p.2]

            Anyone who has read Geza Vermes or Hyam Maccoby or E.P. Sanders - virtually any New Testament scholarship, in fact - will have very little patience with the notion that Jesus came from nowhere and was concerned above all with the nature of his own being. Jesus was a devout Jew, probably a radical Pharisee. He was no more an existentialist than he was a Zoroastrian. If you're just getting to know him, read Garry Wills and leave John Carroll alone with his enigmas.

                                                            [END]

George Scialabba  is the author of Divided Mind and What Are Intellectuals Good For?