Marilynne Robinson on Theology and Fiction

c. 2005 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly (UNDATED) Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Gilead” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23) is about the Rev. John Ames, a Congregational minister in Iowa who in 1956 begins writing a letter to his young son, an account of himself and forebears. It won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics […]

c. 2005 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

(UNDATED) Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Gilead” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23) is about the Rev. John Ames, a Congregational minister in Iowa who in 1956 begins writing a letter to his young son, an account of himself and forebears. It won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle prize for fiction. Religion & Ethics Newsweekly editor Missy Daniel talked to Robinson about the twin arts of fiction and theology:

Q: There is such deep empathy in “Gilead” for the pastor and the preacher. What attracts you to pastors? What do you appreciate about them?


A: There are several sources for my appreciation of pastors and the way they are described in this book. One of them is reading history and realizing that they had a profound creative impact on the Middle West and the settlement of the Middle West. I was very interested in that. They established many wonderful little colleges, like Oberlin and Grinnell and so on, which were explicitly religious establishments in the first instance and were established in order to promote women’s rights, anti-slavery, universal literacy _ many excellent things.

Then, of course, there is the fact that I am interested in Scripture and theology. This is an interest that I can assume I would share with a pastor, so that makes me a little bit prone to use that kind of character, perhaps, just at the moment. Then there is also the fact that, having been a church member for many years, I am very aware of how much pastors enrich people’s experience, people for whom they are significant. I know that it’s a kind of custom of American literature and culture to slang them. I don’t think there is any reason why that needs to be persisted in.

Q: John Ames, the Congregational minister in the book, is a very theological thinker, and you have mentioned your own interest in theology. If you had to explain it to someone, what is theology and what does it mean to think theologically?

A: It’s a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. Certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself. Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that _ popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies _ because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That’s theology.

Q: Is there a connection to poetry, too? John Ames is also steeped in the religious poets, and he mentions John Donne and George Herbert throughout the novel.

A: I think the connection between poetry and theology, which is profound in Western tradition _ there is a great deal of wonderful religious poetry _ both poetry and theology push conventional definitions and explore perceptions that might be ignored or passed off as conventional, but when they are pressed yield much larger meanings, seem to be part of a much larger system of reality.

The assumption behind any theology that I’ve ever been familiar with is that there is a profound beauty in being, simply in itself. Poetry, at least traditionally, has been an educing of the beauty of language, the beauty of experience, the beauty of the working of the mind, and so on.


The pastor does, indeed, appreciate it. One of the things that is nice about these old pastors _ they were young at the time _ who went into the Middle West is that they were real humanists. They were often linguists, for example, and the schools that they established were then, as they are now, real liberal arts colleges where people studied the humanities in a very broad sense. I think that should be reflected in his mind; appropriately, it is.

Q: You write that a good sermon is “one side of a passionate conversation.” Could you say more about what you meant by that and why you value the sermon as a form of discourse, especially in this pretty inconsolable and demythologized age of ours?

A: I think we have demythologized prematurely, that we’ve actually lost the vocabulary for discussing reality at its largest scales. The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth. A sermon is a form that yields a certain kind of meaning in the same way that, say, a sonnet is a form that deals with a certain kind of meaning that has to do with putting things in relation to each other, allowing for the fact of complexity reversal, such things. Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty that are addressed to people who come there in order to hear that. The attention of the congregation is a major part of the attention that the pastor gives to his or her utterance. It’s very exceptional. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t enjoy a good sermon. People who are completely nonreligious know a good sermon when they hear one.

One of the reasons that I think that a sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one _ and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it’s a difficult form _ is because it’s so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith. This is a kind of standard of discourse that is not characteristic of the present moment. I think that it makes a sermon, when it is a good sermon, stand out in anyone’s experience.

Q: John Ames knows his hymns, too; he knows his Isaac Watts, and so do you. What do you think about Protestant hymnody, and what role does it play in the language of “Gilead”?

A: One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations. There isn’t much of that anymore either. There are very few poems people can recite, but there are quite a few hymns that, if you hum a few bars, people can at least come up with two verses. Many of the older hymns are very beautiful.


Isaac Watts, of course, is a hymn writer in the tradition of Congregationalism who lived in the 17th and early 18th century. He is very interesting and important because he was also a metaphysician. He knew a great deal about what was, for him, contemporary science. He was very much influenced by Isaac Newton, for example. There are planets and meteors and so on showing up in his hymns very often. But, again, the scale of his religious imagination corresponds to a very generously scaled scientific imagination. It makes his hymns continue to have a spaciousness and resonance that locates, for me, the religious imagination in a very beautiful way.

Q: Is “Gilead” on some level a novel about “being Christian,” about what it might mean to live a Christian life?

A: I think I can guardedly say yes. The fact is, being who I am, my definition of human life is perhaps not readily universalized. But I hope that it is not a narrow view of human life itself. I don’t have the feeling that people need to be Christian in order to understand what the novel is and what it means and so on, to recognize it’s about father-son relations, or parent-child relations. In the New Testament, of course, that’s the major metaphor for the situation of a human being in the world relative to God. I think that, in using that metaphor, the New Testament is appealing to something that people profoundly and universally know: what it is to love a child and what it is to love a parent. So that’s a big subject in the book.

Q: How much distance is there between you and John Ames, your main character?

A: I think quite a lot, actually. That’s another thing. What do you know about yourself? One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know. By contrast, you realize that you really don’t know yourself terribly well at all. I’ve put him in a very particular situation _ leaving his life, leaving a child, and so on. These things aren’t my experience yet, God forbid! In any case, his situation is exceptional _ from my point of view, invented. Then his thinking is generated out of his situation. It’s perfectly possible that if I can imagine myself in his place, I would think in that way, but it’s never been my circumstance to do that.

Q: One writer has said that perhaps our sacred scripture is the novel. I wonder what you think about that, and what fiction-writing and the novel might have to do with the life of faith.

A: The novel has more to do with the life of faith in some cases than in others, shall we say. I sometimes am discouraged by what seems to be a sort of conventional disparagement of humankind. I think often people feel that they are doing something moral when they are doing that, but that’s not how I understand morality. I much prefer the “everyone is sacred, and everybody errs” model of reality. I am delighted if people find that kind of sustenance in novels, but perhaps it’s because they don’t read the Scripture that they are comparing it to, which would perhaps provide deeper sustenance than many contemporary novels.


The Bible for me is holy writ. It’s a very straightforward thing, although I am not a literalist. Literalism is a very bizarre phenomenon. Many people are literalists about, for example, the King James Version, which was published in 1611. Anybody who has ever translated anything knows that there is no reason to be literalistic about a translation. Anybody who has read any biblical scholarship knows that every scholar struggles over completely intractable problems with the original texts, or what they have to work from. It’s one of the great, powerful, mysterious objects that have come down through history. This does not translate into literal interpretation for me.

Q: Do you read any contemporary theology?

A: I read over too wide an area as far as time is concerned to be up on many contemporary things, but my favorite theologian of the relatively recent period is Karl Barth, who died in the late ’50s, who was a very honorable figure relative to the rise of Hitler and so on _ he and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was another great theologian. They were both very serious people. I have a feeling that there has been a pressure away from seriousness in much modern thought, as if we could sort of scale reality down to a size that we are more comfortable dealing with. That might be a prejudice, but I feel that we have not come up to the standards of seriousness that others have reached at earlier moments.

The loss of seriousness seems to me to be, in effect, a loss of hope. I think that the thing that made people rise to real ambition, real gravity, was the sense of posterity, for example _ a word that I can remember hearing quite often when I was a child and I never hear anymore. People actually wanted to make the world good for people in generations that they would never see.

It makes people think in very large terms to try to liberate women, for example, or to try to eliminate slavery. … I’m really disturbed by the degree to which I don’t hear people saying, “Are we leaving the world better than we found it?” I think we are a generation that perhaps could not answer in the affirmative, and it is the evasion of the larger responsibility of being only one generation in what one hopes will be an infinite series of fruitful generations. There is a selfishness in refusing to understand that we are passing through; others will come, and they deserve certain courtesies and certain considerations from us.

Editors: Check the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for a photo to accompany this story. Also see related story, RNS-ROBINSON-BOOK, transmitted May 27, 2005. Please use the Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly credit line.

KRE/PH END DANIEL

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