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posted on May 1, 2009 in Books | 6 Comments to Read | Print

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The Death Of Adam: Essays On Modern Thought
By Marilynne Robinson
Mariner Books

“Then felt I like some watcher of the sky when a new planet swam into his ken.”
- John Keats

Yes, that has been my reaction to Marilynne Robinson’s collection of essays. This work was first published over ten years ago but has only recently received public acclaim because of Robinson’s highly successful novels. Her novel Giliad won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and her more recent parallel novel Home has received many favorable reviews.

These Essays On Modern Thought are deserving of similar attention, and more! Adherents of Reformed Christianity should be especially grateful that at last, among public intellectuals, we have a champion. Her essays on Calvin are both revealing and revolutionary. After generations of Calvin and Calvinism’s being denigrated and ridiculed, finally Calvin and even Calvinists are being carefully reread.

Before we look at those groundbreaking essays on Calvin, it should be noted that Robinson offers insight into other critical areas of modern thought: Darwinism, capitalism, the American family, environmentalism and censorship It would seem that no name or movement is so formidable as to frighten her. In The Death of Adam, she takes on Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Herbert Spencer and many other luminaries. Citing unambiguous quotes from their writings, Robinson accuses these greats of promoting racism.

She does not dispute Darwin’s “theory of evolution”; however, she points out how Darwin and his prestigious admirers accepted the “laws” of “natural selection” as a guide for human behavior. According to Robinson, the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century were dominated by thinkers who used the idea of human evolution as an argument for population control–for the purging of the weak, the defective, and even the racially marginal. Robinson connects the dots between Darwin and the Nazis through her disturbing but careful reading of works by Darwin and others. Her essays on Darwin should enlighten all those who are concerned about the hardness, lack of compassion, and indifference to the weak and suffering within our contemporary culture.

Robinson also argues that the agenda of prevailing western thought for the last century and a half has required the discrediting of religion. Because religion–and for the west this meant Judeo-Christian religion—has offered conflicting myths regarding the beginning of all things and a conflicting ethic regarding the human response to all things, religious myths have been ridiculed and relegated to earlier, darker ages than our own enlightened one.

Marilynne Robinson does not confront the once popular “death of God.” I think she would consider that claim to be dated and already discredited. Instead, she has concerned herself with “the death of Adam” in modern thought: “how much was destroyed, when modern thought declared the death of Adam.” (p. 75)

However, in this year of celebrating the five-hundredth anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, North American Protestants should be especially grateful for Robinson’s rereading and careful reexamination of the thought and times of Reformed theology’s most important founding father.

She has entitled her Calvin essays “Marguerite de Navarre” and “Marguerite de Navarre II” because she was convinced that had they been called “John Calvin” and “John Calvin II,” most people would not have read them. For the same reason, she refers to the great theologian not by his English name, but by his French name, Jean Cauvin. It might be hard for readers of the Presbyterian Record to admit such prejudices, but remember, Robinson is not writing for an audience like ours.

Robinson is quite aware that she has her work cut out for her. She acknowledges satirically where Calvin stands in popular opinion: “all we know about John Calvin was that he was an eighteenth century Scotsman, a prude and obscurantist with a buckle on his hat, possibly a burner of witches, certainly the very spirit of capitalism.” (p. 206) Given all the editorializing on the severity of Calvin, the stodginess of Calvin and his followers, the viciousness of the Calvinist movement toward its enemies, the theological support offered by Calvinism to the oppressive establishments—aren’t Calvin and Calvinism simply to be avoided? After all, isn’t Calvinism behind most of our western unhealthy inhibitions? Isn’t Calvinism the very epitome of sexual repression? Wasn’t the execution of Michael Servetus the outstanding example of religious atrocity in the age of the Reformation? Wasn’t Calvin a staunch supporter of the oppressive establishment?
And wasn’t he a principal founder of modern capitalism? Wasn’t sixteenth century Geneva under Calvin’s autocratic hand the classic example of religious tyranny?

Robinson confronts all these popular certitudes through a careful rereading of the original sources.

She does express an interest in Marguerite de Navarre, who was, according to Robinson, “a decisive influence on the literary and religious imagination of Jean Cauvin.” Marguerite de Navarre was certainly a learned woman who defended and even promoted the Reformed cause at the risk of great danger to herself. However, Robinson’s interest in the title personage is tangential. Primarily she is determined to recover and rehabilitate the good name of Calvin himself through a thoughtful reexamination of the literature from Calvin’s era.

Perhaps the most serious charge against Calvin by his modern detractors is that he was ashamed of the human condition, that he denigrated our common humanity. Robinson meets this criticism honestly and head on. She points out that Jean Cauvin’s attack on his own humanity and on our common humanity arises from his exalted view of what we human beings were created to be and are capable of becoming. His apparently dark assessment of human nature can be understood only in light of the dialectical relationship between our sinful nature and our nature saved by grace. She argues that rather than being “inhuman and world-hating,” (p. 184), Calvin’s theology is quite the contrary. His description of our fallen nature is given only for purposes of contrast to our saved nature in Christ.

Robinson also shows that there are no grounds for the prevailing view that Calvin was against women. Concerning the Creation story in Genesis, Calvin wrote: “He [Adam] lost, therefore, one of his ribs; but instead of it, a far richer reward was granted him, since he gained a faithful associate of life; for he now saw himself who had before been imperfect, rendered complete in his wife…in the person of the woman the human race was at length complete….” (p. 185) Unlike some theologians who imply that our Mother Eve was the real culprit in the story of the Fall, Calvin finds Adam to be a self-protective hypocrite: “conscious of no evil (in himself), he puts his wife as the guilty party in his place.”
(p. 184)

According to Robinson, those who presume Calvin is anti-sexual are basing that assumption on evidence which does not exist. Unlike Augustine and other theologians who regarded sex as a necessary evil in the promulgation of the race, Calvin demonstrates no hint of that kind of thinking. For him, marriage is “the bond which God has preferred to all others.”(p. 185)

Calvin has, of course, been accused of promoting capitalism, even the unfettered capitalism now wrecking havoc on our planet. Robinson not only defends Calvin against the commonly accepted truism that he was somehow a promoter of modern capitalism but also defends Calvin’s followers. In her essay McGuffey and the Abolitionists, she discusses the influence of the Old Testament on Calvinistic New England: “In fact, it [the Old Testament] is more insistent than Marx ever was in championing the poor and the oppressed. Its influence is thought to have made New Englanders severe, yet Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), who is purported to personify their severity, preached an absolute obligation to assist the needy–before their need became urgent, before they were compelled to seek help, despite any question of their own worthiness or of the responsibility of relatives or others to assist them.” (p. 129)

Robinson goes on to quote Edwards: “We are particularly required to be kind to the unthankful and the evil.” She points out the contrast between Edwards’ sermons and some contemporary negative attitudes toward the poor which are “a supposed reclaiming of traditional values.” (p. 130)

According to Robinson, those who associate Calvin and Calvinism with an unfettered, brutal, free-market economic system have failed to understand the great Reformer’s “generosity of spirit.” She adds that “we do not do him or the generations immersed in his thought the courtesy of reading him.” (p. 131)

I must recommend to all Christians, Reformed or otherwise, Robinson’s remarkable essay on her personal experience in church going, Psalm Eight. As a Calvinist herself, she confesses: “My tradition does not encourage the idea that God would find any merit in it. I go to Church for my own gratification, which is intense.” About this gratification, she writes: “The essence of it certainly is the Bible…with which after long and assiduous attention I am not familiar. By grace of my abiding ignorance, it is always new to me. I am never not instructed.” (p. 231)

I can only say that by not getting it, Marilynne Robinson has got it. She describes her own efforts at understanding: “I have spent my life watching not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes.” (p. 243) I am grateful that she has encouraged us to watch and to see those same visible but elusive sights.

The Rev. Dr. Philip Lee is Minister Emeritus of Grace Presbyterian Church, Saint John, New Brunswick.