What Are We Doing Here? By Marilynne Robinson

Contrary to the contemplative stillness at the heart of Robinson’s past novels, her new book is marked by surprising ferocity.

American author Marilynne Robinson. Picture: Getty Images

American novelist, teacher and essay­ist Marilynne Robinson is a Calvinist at heart and the revo­lutionary edge of that often mis­understood strain of Christianity finds itself in the luminous fore of this new ­collection of lucid, even aphoristic, essays.

Readers familiar only with the contemplative stillness at the heart of Robinson’s novels may be surprised at the ferocity of her writings in this book. It is almost as if she has had to go into battle with an arsenal of rhetorical talents she’d sooner never use.

It might also be true to say that the stillness of her novels is in part undone here by the sharp sense of urgency and approbation she brings to discussions of the current educational, political and wider cultural crisis in the US

What Are We Doing Here by Marilynne Robinson

“If the rise of humanism was a sunrise,’’ she writes, in the almost caustic title essay, What Are We Doing Here?, ‘‘then in this present time we are seeing an eclipse.’’

Be it in her creative or more polemical modes, Robinson has always dealt with language­ as a manifestation, and a dilution, of an expansive and godly universe. It may be best then to hear her own definitions of religion and theology straight from the start.

Religion is ‘‘a public character that can ­distract even the pious from its origins in the human intuition that reality is rooted in a profounder matrix of Being than sense and experience make known to us in the ordinary course of things’’. Theology, on the other hand, is ‘‘the attempt to realise in some degree the vastness and the atmospheres of this matrix of Being’’.

This ‘‘vastness’’ is a key idea for Robinson and she goes to great and repeated lengths here to stress the symbiotic likeness of the cosmic multiverse and the human mind. She also is keen to clarify the inherent irony that, despite its more reductionist cliques, Science, with a capital S, has most beautifully defined the ­creative and still unforeseen multiverse in which we are growing and decaying, evolving and fading away.

She abhors any attempt to reduce the immense­ mystery of everything into the lockdown logic of theories such as Richard Dawkins­’s ‘‘selfish gene’’. This kind of bleak ­intellectual shrinkage has played directly, she believes, into the hands of those in corporate and political spheres who would glorify self-­interest and the rule of law on one hand, while on the other treating the market as some kind of titular conceptual artist whose freedom of ­expression should never be curtailed.

What therefore is at stake now is ‘‘the body of learning and thought we call the humanities’’. This field she believes was best defined by Alexis de Tocqueville as the study of ‘‘poetry, eloquence, memory, the ­beauty of wit, the fires of imagination, the depth of thought’’ — and who could argue? Robinson’s sentences are fuelled by a return to these definitions but also by her frustration at the forgetting, ignoring and even destruction of such qualities in our times. She names a ‘‘fundamental slovenliness in much public discourse’’, and makes the critical point that such tendencies are spreading, even seeding, through our user-pays academ­ic institutions every bit as much as through the staccato news cycles of mainstream media.

In alarmed response, ­Robinson offers in this collection something of a masterclass in rhetoric aimed at defending the necessity of ­rigorous scholarship and the infinitudes of wonder on offer to us as creatures of the soil and stars. Her focus on the amnesia surrounding the originary pur­pose of fundamental tropes of our cultural history such as Calvinism or Puritanism is a case in point. As she says in the title essay:

We are, as we have always been, dangerous creatures, the enemies of our own happiness. But the only help we have ever found for this, the only melioration, is in mutual reverence … few gracious acts, if they really deserve the name, would stand up to cost benefit analysis.

‘‘Beauty disciplines,’’ Robinson writes in Grace and Beauty. This essay focuses on a ­consistency of wholeness she perceives as being ­always evident in great art, but is also concerned with the notion of ‘‘cosmic altruism’’ and the consoling nature of all that we don’t know in this world, as opposed to all that we think we do.

This notion, with its implications of grace and beauty beyond our ken, is Robinson’s ­‘‘parable of dark matter’’. To encounter an intellectual of such knowledge, range, rigour and curiosity extolling the benefits of all that remains outside our rather puny reach is a tonic. And it is in that sense of a more-than-human scale that the slow sagacity of her novels begins to feel of a piece with these essays, most of which are derived from ­lectures she has delivered.

In Robinson’s fourth novel, Lila, which introduces a brutalised woman from the wrong side of the tracks to the genteel rural environment of religious life in the fictional Iowan settlement of Gilead, the author’s theology of a vast and atmospheric matrix of being is dramatised in situ. Where in the essays she wields a fierce metaphysical logic, in her ­fiction the contemplative cadences at the heart of the immensity she most believes in remain the primary music.

The old Reverend John Ames, for instance, who the foundling ex-whore Lila comes to marry, in trying out his weekly sermon over the kitchen table gives a preacherly version of the type of cosmological wonder Robinson extols in her lectures.

‘‘Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvellous,’’ Ames says. ‘‘Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it’s hard to believe they are all parts of one thing.’’

In the light of such unknowing, Robinson seems almost in awe of how the lack of wit and imagination at the core of selfish-gene capitalism can get any traction in what for her is a vast and numinous cosmos proven to be expanding at an accelerating rate.

But therein perhaps lies the solution to the mystery: such is the rate of expansion, and such is our increasingly materialist manifestation of it through the internet, that it scares the living daylights out of us. Humans, for the most part, want a simple pastorale, and the oversimpli­fications of free-market capitalism since the fall of the Berlin Wall often parade as exactly that.

Robinson seems both worried by all this and completely unafraid; or, if she is afraid, her fear is continually supplanted by her rapture at the wonder of it all.

‘‘Increasingly, I think of the mind and the universe as one great system.’’ In this symbiosis she resembles one of her own favourite poets, that self-proclaimed ‘‘connoisseur of chaos’’, Wallace Stevens.

Where Stevens painted and sang on the page, however, Robinson hymns, intones and wonders. How I would love to see a live debate between her and Richard Dawkins, perhaps with Robinson’s great fan Barack Obama as the moderator.

For surely if the ‘‘beauty disciplines’’ edict is true, a bright chap such as Dawkins must have his own great solace, his own capacity for ­wonder, beyond such binary arguments as the selfish, or unselfish, gene.

Gregory Day’s new novel is A Sand Archive.

What Are We Doing Here?

By Marilynne Robinson

Virago, 336pp, $45 (HB), $27.99 (PB)