Primary Graces
When I Was a Child I Read Books
by Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012
(224 pages, $24.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Mark Gignilliat
Reading Marilynne Robinson is a dangerous enterprise. The beauty and force of her prose has the ability to lull one's critical sensibilities to sleep; at the very least, I find myself wanting to agree with just about everything she says, only to rouse my critical faculties at the final moment.
Her fiction is a delight to read, as perennially rich and difficult questions of Christian theology, especially of the Reformed stripe, are brought to bear in poignant prose and arresting narratives. Who can forget the haunting character of Jack in Home, a figure who knows his Calvinist theology well enough to identify himself as a reprobate and suffer under the implications
of such?
Her essays are hospitable and tyrannical at the same time. Robinson has something to say; her criticisms are sharp, yet the air the reader breathes is crisp and clean, not the hot and heavy kind too often found in public, critical discourse.
Her most recent collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, is filled with the subjects expected from Robinson: the mystery of language, the American self, a joyful rescuing of John Calvin from modern caricature, the happy marriage of science and faith, the inability of the former to provide a meta-narrative (a larger story that connects and gives meaning to the smaller stories it contains)—and these are
but a few.
Of particular interest in this collection is her infectious delight in the Old Testament, that moribund literary deposit of the Christian canon collecting dust in the church and society either by intention or the lack thereof. The slightest whiff of Marcion moves Robinson to dip her pen in the inkwell and go on the attack: always respectful, never ad hominem, yet forceful
nonetheless.
The Sophisticated Ancients
Robinson is a contrarian who winces at modernity's churlish dismissal of the authority of the past. She is a romantic, in the best and philosophical sense of that term. She shows respect to cultures and peoples foreign to her. She is curious; she listens well. In brief, she's hospitable.
This applies especially to ancient texts and peoples. In the face of modernity's hubris, Robinson reminds readers, "Perhaps the tendency to think of classical religion as an effort at explaining a world otherwise incomprehensible to them encourages us to forget how sophisticated ancient people really were" (p. 13). This collection of essays reveals her special appreciation of the Old Testament and the sophistication present in its archaic and befuddling laws.
This does not mean Robinson is a Luddite pining for the simplicity of a bygone era (though there may be some of this present). She is fascinated by recent discoveries in the sciences and encourages people to subscribe to Scientific American for a year, simply to bask in the glories of God's creation—advice I have in fact taken. But she is also quick to point out the inability of science to provide a meta-narrative—an academically trendy term I have yet to locate in her work, though the concept is there. The Bible and her Reformation heritage provide the all-encompassing framework that science cannot. And concerning the Bible, when Robinson's well-worn one falls open to its most weathered sections, the reader can be sure he will be facing the Old Testament.
Mark Gignilliat is a professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University. He also serves as the director of Beeson’s newly launched Ph.D. program in Theology for the Church and as theologian-in-residence at St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
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