“The whole of human existence is like some sweet parable told in the most improbable place and circumstances. … God values our humanity. … One of the things that's fascinating about the Hebrew Bible is that it declared and was loyal to the fact that God is good and creation is good.” Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson joins Miroslav Volf to discuss her latest book, Reading Genesis. Together they discuss why she took up this project of biblical commentary and what scripture and theological reflection means to her; how she thinks of Genesis as a theodicy (or a defense against the problem of evil and suffering); the grace of God; the question of humanity’s goodness; how to understand the flood; the relationship between divine providence and working for moral progress; and much more.
“The whole of human existence is like some sweet parable told in the most improbable place and circumstances. … God values our humanity. … One of the things that's fascinating about the Hebrew Bible is that it declared and was loyal to the fact that God is good and creation is good.”
Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson joins Miroslav Volf to discuss her latest book, Reading Genesis. Together they discuss why she took up this project of biblical commentary and what scripture and theological reflection means to her; how she thinks of Genesis as a theodicy (or a defense against the problem of evil and suffering); the grace of God; the question of humanity’s goodness; how to understand the flood; the relationship between divine providence and working for moral progress; and much more.
About Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson is an award-winning American novelist and essayist. Her fictional and non-fictional work includes recurring themes of Christian spirituality and American political life. In a 2008 interview with the Paris Review, Robinson said, "Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I've found fruitful to think about."
Her novels include: Housekeeping (1980, Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award, Pulitzer Prize finalist), Gilead (2004, Pulitzer Prize), Home (2008, National Book Award Finalist), Lila (2014, National Book Award Finalist), and most recently, Jack (2020). Robinson's non-fiction works include Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), When I was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012), The Givenness of Things: Essays (2015), and What Are We Doing Here?: Essays (2018). Her latest book is Reading Genesis (2024).
Marilynne Robinson received a B.A., magna cum laude, from Brown University in 1966 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 1977. She has served as a writer-in-residence or visiting professor at a variety universities, included Yale Divinity School in Spring 2020. She currently teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has served as a deacon for the Congregational United Church of Christ. Robinson was born and raised in Sandpoint, Idaho and now lives in Iowa City.
Show Notes
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Marilynne Robinson: The whole of human existence is like some sweet, terrible told in the most improbable place and circumstances. God values our humanity. For example, with the Tower of Babel, he scatters people, he separates their languages, but he doesn't change people. When God remakes the world after Noah, after the flood, He does not change human beings.
He gives them exactly the same blessings and instructions that He did originally, which is simply another statement of His very deeply tested loyalty to us as we are. If you think of that scripturally, it is true that God conserves the self, that people sin and so on, but they are not intruded upon by God to make them incapable of sin.
Because if they could not do wrong, they could not act freely. I think that the fact that they are recognizably flawed creatures is what that reflects is the grace of God. He is enthralled By these people that must have been in fairly continuous disappointment. We have to understand humankind better. I think in order to understand over, plus, there is in a human being that God loves them despite, you know, despite their being so human.
Evan Rosa: This is for the life of the world, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
If you've read Marilynne Robinson's Fiction. You'd know how influenced she is by scripture and theological tradition. The author of Gilead, Lila, and Homecoming, and others, not to mention her plentiful essays, she has this wonderful way of pulling back what she would call the veil of insignificance that drapes over her ordinary characters to reveal astonishing grace and lives invested with meaning and beauty.
In 2011, she wrote an essay for the New York Times entitled, What Literature Owes the Bible. The piece begins, Quote, The Bible is the model for, and subject of, more art and thought than those of us who live within its influence, consciously or unconsciously, will ever know. Showing her appreciation of the pervasive influence of the Bible, she concludes this essay, suggesting, quote, In its emphatic insistence that the burden of meaning is shared in every life, the Bible may only give expression to a truth most of us know intuitively.
But as a literary heritage or memory, it has strengthened the deepest impulse of our literature and our civilization. Now over a decade later, she's released her latest work of nonfiction, Reading Genesis. And in today's episode, Miroslav Volf welcomes Marilynne Robinson for a discussion of this biblical text, its significance to her, and its significance to humanity.
Together, they reflect on why she took up this project of biblical commentary and what scripture and theological reflection mean to her, how she thinks of Genesis as a theodicy. Our defense against the problem of evil and suffering, an appreciation for the grace of God throughout creation, the question of humanity's goodness, how to understand the devastation of the flood narrative, the relationship between divine providence and working for moral progress, and much more.
Thanks for listening today.
Miroslav Volf: So, Marilynne, it is so good to have a chance to talk to you. I've been hoping and looking forward to talking to you about your new book. Um, it's a really wonderful book. I thought like much of your writing marked by this amazing depth. Thank you for being willing to, um, be here with me, talk with me about it, uh, on this podcast.
Some readers prefer you as novelist, other readers prefer you as essays, and I'm fond of both. But reading Genesis is in neither of these genres. It's a special kind of Bible commentary. Why did you write the book? Well, you
Marilynne Robinson: know, I've been interested, of course, in theology and, and, and scripture for many years, and I felt, uh, that the Book of Genesis is enormously important.
It establishes so many of the primary terms for the whole worldview of the Bible, you know? Um, and it seemed to me as if, if it were being read and had been read since the middle of the 19th century in a way that. disrupted and diminished its significance, you know, and sort of undermined foundational ideas that had repercussions through the whole of the Bible.
And the law, you know, having done literature for years and years and so on, when I read it, I couldn't help feeling that it was so available to being read as a very beautiful ancient literature, you know, when I've taught it. I've said to my students, you know, treat this as respectfully as you would Homer, which is simply a bizarre thing to have to say, but it's been put in a special category as if it were less weighty, you know, than other ancient literature, when in fact, I think it's, Absolutely singular in the degree to which it is, you know, a philosophic literature, an aesthetic triumph of many things, worthy of its subject, of course.
Miroslav Volf: But it's that part of it, that piece of it that you're just now describing, it being, um, literature, it being philosophical. Uh, you start the book by stating the Bible is, uh, theodicy, um, and obviously the startling sentence at the very beginning. And when I read the Bible, obviously everybody, uh, when reads the Bible, they encounter stories there, uh, and one senses theology, uh, pulsating through those, uh, stories.
What would you advise a person? a person how to approach the Bible. What would you tell me how to read the Bible so as to honor it as literature and take it seriously as theology? These two sometimes seem to push in different directions.
Marilynne Robinson: I suppose that I'm eager to make the argument that they don't push in in different directions.
You know, I mean, I think that, I mean, when I read Genesis, I'm, I feel as though I'm reading something that is, you know, very modern in the sense that modernity is very much influenced by it, you know, I mean, by which I mean the whole period of vernacular literatures, people writing in English, German, and so on, that the text was very important.
And for them, of course, that goes without saying, and that the modeling of character, the use of detail, the use of the sort of rhythms of narrative and so on, I think you can feel them. in western literature and it's like literature is not a secondary category to be retrojected onto the text but I think it's something that grew out of the text and therefore is a very legitimate way to to look at the text again.
Miroslav Volf: Obviously the book is, uh, singularly your own. Uh, I haven't read a book. Uh, I've read a lot of books on Genesis, but I haven't read one like yours. So it's yours. What were your influences in writing the book? Uh, or put slightly differently, how does your love, uh, and knowledge of too Calvin Luther shape your readings, if at all?
Marilynne Robinson: Well, I think that they, of course, do shape my reading. I mean, that's interesting to know. If you are heavily impressed by this tradition of theology, and I would say the Reformation theologies influence me very deeply, there's a certain point at which you You think in terms that they very largely construct, orchestrate, you know?
And I mean, I'm sure this is true for Catholicism, for all the, you know, for all the major thought systems, you know? And I think all of them are brilliant enough to reward the kind of understanding that would come from spending a life with them, you know? I am very I mean, I like Calvin's very close attention to the text to the point where he really re translates from Latin into Latin, a great part of the Bible, you know, um, I, I think that, you know, without question, his close attention to the text is a great influence on me.
I don't think there's another. discipline that is more essential to reading it than simply saying, you know, this is a text that I, for which I have a very great respect. And what does that imply in terms of my treatment of it?
Miroslav Volf: At one point, you are, I don't know whether complaining is the right word, but something to the, to that effect, how, Uh, various practices, including the practices of how we read Scripture in, um, in the church, have focused our attention or taught us to pay attention to individual bits and pieces of the text rather than to look, uh, uh, as on the text as a whole.
Can you, can you talk about a payoff in Genesis, uh, from looking at that text as a whole, the book as a whole?
Marilynne Robinson: Well, you know, I think that, uh, I mean, there, there are all kinds of things like the, the, the equilibrium that is reached by saying that's Joseph's enslaved the Egyptians, you know,
which people who know the Bible well have just not seen, you know, it's just there in the text, but their eyes pass over it, you know, but that the impulse of the, uh, Bible is always to complicate judgment. Always, you know, and so in preparation for the exile, we have, you know, the destruction of individual freedom on the part of Joseph, you know, what a surprise, what a, what an amazing assertion of intellectual honesty, you know, to be able to say, Karma is not only on the other side, you know, and I think that, you know, I think there's a very strong gesture toward equilibrium in the likeness of the histories of Hagar and Abraham, which are set pieces, you know, one after the other for us to certainly make the comparison if we read you know, 30 verses rather than two.
It's, um, what, what do they call it? That kind of science where everything is in images. It's fractal. Fractal. Um, and, uh, I mean, that's a beautiful aesthetic order.
Miroslav Volf: Talking about these figures, Abraham and Hagar, uh, or Joseph, uh, and the instance in particular that you mentioned, uh, about Joseph, elsewhere in the text, you also mentioned how unsparing Genesis is about kind of foundational characters in Israel's story, characters by which God is called, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
And you see that in Joseph, enslaving the entire Egypt, uh, right. Um, and doing something that clearly is against the law of Moses. And so this idea of writing a history that is sacred to you, but writing it in such a way that you don't embellish the characters in that history, but leave them to be prickly and ugly as they sometimes are.
What do you think makes that kind of writing possible?
Marilynne Robinson: Well, you know, it's just an amazing feat of honesty. That has to be said. You know, I mean, the things that, I mean, we take it to be true. I think it's fair to assume that this is a very carefully curated text, which means that anyone in a position to sort of scratch something out, you know, could have made the choice of, you know, making these people more heroic in a sort of Homeric sense or something, you know.
I think that the fact that they are recognizably flawed creatures is, what that reflects is the, is the grace of God. He is enthralled by these people that must have been a fairly continuous disappointment, you know. We have to understand humankind better, I think, in order to understand what overplus there is in a human being that God loves them despite, you know, Despite their being so human.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah, in some ways they're not, they're, though they are assessed, they're not lost in that description and our love isn't lessened for them. Uh, it's just made more human. I take it.
Marilynne Robinson: And, you know, from the point of view of ourselves, you know, they're the greatest hope we have.
Miroslav Volf: Exactly. You know, I was struck also by Isaac and Rebekah.
I don't think it ever, I ever sensed kind of a connection. as much weakness in Isaac as that comes very clearly, I think, very clearly through in your text. And then there's this incredible strength that's going against the tradition, against the expectations of Rebecca. And that too, in a sense, is kind of unsparing way to portray both of them.
Yes,
Marilynne Robinson: indeed. And again, Jacob, too, you know, I mean, I mean, it's an amazing little theater of domestic dysfunction, but the point, I mean, the point has to be that God is faithful to the covenant. And that's why the Covenant survives the fact that it seems to continuously to be slipping out of the hands of the people to whom it's literally entrusted, you know.
Miroslav Volf: Do you think it has something to do, as I was reading it, it occurred to me, I don't know whether I can justify it, but it occurred to me, I mean, it must have been awful for him to be carrying that wood up to the top of Mount, and that God must, be a terror to him. Indeed, that's how God is described in relationship to him.
And the kind of timidity that might, and insecurity that might cause, it seems that it kind of radiates throughout his life.
Marilynne Robinson: Yes, poor Isaac, who, I mean, or he could just be a plain old disappointing child. You know, he doesn't seem to aggress as much. for pride very much. But you know, I think that, I mean, you know, child sacrifice was much more common than we think it would have been, you know, I mean, it was a central function of the state, you know, and even in the new world, Mayans apparently sacrificed children and so on, you know, and so, you know, this narrative is addressing Very strong impulse in people.
What in the world would make the Carthaginians destroy their, the children of aristocratic families? You know, the male children. I think, you know, the point of it, the parable quality of it is to say, I don't want your child. You know, you might feel as if the willingness to sacrifice him is the ultimate statement of piety, that a Carthaginian who kills his child is more faithful than a, a Hebrew that would refuse to, you know, but he's saying, yes, I see that you would go to that extreme of loyalty, but I don't want you to, you know, I will, there's a ram in the bushes, you know.
Miroslav Volf: Maybe this is a, uh, is a good point at which to, uh, ask about the first, very first sentence in your, uh, book. Uh, the Bible is a theodicy. Um, and then you describe a meditation on the problem of, uh, of evil. Now, theodicy is, um, also kind of a defense of God. Um, but what kind of a defense of God do you think, or do you imagine Genesis is?
Kind of none of the usual ways in which we seem to construe theodicy kind of applies? fits really well. What did you have in mind?
Marilynne Robinson: Well, you know, one of the things that's fascinating about the Hebrew Bible is that it declared and was loyal to the fact that God is good and creation is good, you know, and when you look at surrounding literatures and classical literatures and so on, You know, it's a very different thing, you know, I mean, even to the extent that they are, when they are relatively humane, it's not the idea that the nature of God is good and is saturating all being with goodness in the way that, you know, we get in the beginning of Genesis, you know.
They create this beautiful assertion, the first creation narrative, and then The problem of fidelity to that vision comes up again and again. You know, if human beings are good, why do they act so badly? You know what I mean? And, you know, if creation is so good, why do we toil? you know, why is labor, you know, painful and so on.
And so, you know, if you set up the original Donje, you know, that everything is good and sacredly blessed as being good, then you have the world to look to account for, you know. And I think that a lot of the problem is taken in hand by the fact that God values our Humanity, you know, that, for example, with the Tower of Babel, you know, he scatters people, he separates their languages, but he doesn't change people, you know, he simply in a way sort of takes the weapons or the tools out of their hands, you know, and that's characteristic also.
I've been thinking about How many things there are in biology and so on that basically can serve the self. And you can find even in ancient writers, this awareness that intrinsically a human being has to change over and over again, even while retaining the same age and appearance and, you know, so on.
And, you know, which means if you want to speak, you know, teleologically, that there is a great deal at work that defends the existence of the self. You know, I mean, you, there's redundancy in the brain, you know, something damages one half, the other will find a way to compensate and so on, which is just amazing and really inefficient from the point of view of a sort of Darwinist view, you know, um, And I think that if you think of that scripturally, it is true that God conserves the self, you know, that people sin and so on, but they are not intruded upon by God to make them incapable of sin, because if they could not do wrong, they could not act freely.
Miroslav Volf: You know, as I was reading, it occurred to me to compare what you are doing with what Dostoevsky has done in Brothers K, in particular with what, how Zosima approaches the whole problem. Now, obviously in the, in this conversation between Alyosha and Ivan, the problem of, of the kind of the world and life in the world as it is set up, and there is a kind of rebellion against life that ends up.
being a kind of a mode of abandoning God who creates such a world. And if I read it rightly, or at least that's how I've come to think of it, I've come to think of Zosima's response, not being at the level of what was classically described as a defense of God, But at the level of urging alternative form of practice and motivating something like affection for the world, kissing the earth, every grain of sand, um, um, asking apology from the birds and so forth.
And so there, there is this, this, this. a kind of modality of relating to the world, uh, in love, which then makes it possible to read the world in a certain way in relationship to, to God. And as I was reading your book, it struck me that maybe that's also a strategy that God might have, or that God encourages us to.
to have, because God stands by creation in, in, in this, in circumstances that one would not necessarily expect that God would. And you make a great deal out of precisely that point.
Marilynne Robinson: Yes, yes, I do. I think that, you know, that our failures can be looked at through the other lens as being God's grace. You know, I mean, the patience, which might not last forever.
Sometimes I worry about coming to the end of the narrative, you know. But it's, I don't know, I mean, the thing that is so beautiful is that to set the problem, you know, of this absolute goodness, and then set all other reality against it, but not in a way that judges it, but a way that dignifies it in a, you know, in a way that I think is without comparison in literature,
Miroslav Volf: except for maybe Dostoevsky.
So you've written the book repeatedly about the humanism. in Genesis. And that doesn't make invalid any of the comments about unsparing, uh, uh, characterization of the patriarchs and matriarchs, but also Genesis describes human beings more generally in a way that is shockingly, I think, unsparing. Uh, humanity sinks so deep into evil.
that they become near incarnations of evil in Genesis 6. It is not just that human wickedness was great or that the earth was full of violence. There's this line that I was struck when I read it, and it says that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil and continually. I mean, there's three universals.
And I think you know what total depravity means either in Calvin and in Luther, and certainly nearly, not nearly as bad at all, right? Because extensive rather than intensive account of total, total depravity, it's worse than what somebody like Richard Dawkins commenting on the flood makes. It's worse even, I spent a month, a last month and a half reading Schopenhauer, I'm writing something that he is arch pessimist of the pessimist.
He doesn't have such a bleak view of, uh, of humanity. And yet you write. about the humanism of the Bible. How, how do these two things fit together?
Marilynne Robinson: You know, I treat the story of the flood as kind of a special case because I take it to be Babylonian, you know, that a borrowing, like the story of Joseph and Clodophar's wife and so on, you know, that it's, it's offered.
You know, in the philosophic conversation of the region, it is offered as a problem or as a, you know, a given that the gods destroy the world at intervals. They destroy the human world, you know, and for the Babylonians, that could very well be flooding, although it would not have been for Israel, of course.
You know, they don't have, they didn't have that problem, but they lifted the story because it's not, it's a philosophic statement that yes, indeed, it can happen that Cities and populations are treated as if they were of no worth. They're completely destroyed, you know. Why would that happen? Why would, why do the gods do that?
You know, which is, you know, a very live question for lots of early populations, no doubt. The story of Noah, I mean, who's so vastly more invested in by the story than any of, you know, than, uh, You know, what's Gilgamesh, I guess it would be. But the fact of the story being there grants that these huge desolations occur.
And it says that it's because people are evil in their hearts, et cetera, you know. But there's a very lovely turn in the story where God will repents of what he's done because they're Only evil in their hearts, you know. So you can see it's like a parent going from disappointed and severe to forgiving, you know, because the very quality that condemns the child turned in another light is the quality that it exculpates the child, you know.
And of course, this is the model for figures of fatherhood all the way through the Bible, you know, right up to the prodigal son, you know. The father sees through the apparent transgression, or the real transgression, to this sort of child that can't help transgressing, you know. And so, I mean, and I think it's very important that the first laws come, enter into the conversation at that point.
I think that there's a kind of a strange lawlessness of Genesis, you know, then just a couple of things are outright forbidden, you know. And I think that Exodus is a conscious modification of the world. That, that compensates for the problems of the world that are dealt with in Genesis in some small degree, you know, compensates for them or gives a basis for stepping beyond them.
The importance of law being, of course, that it does not intrude on the human being. When God remakes the world after Noah, after the flood. He does not change human beings. He gives them exactly the same blessings and instructions that he did originally, which is simply another statement of his very deeply tested loyalty to
Miroslav Volf: us as we are.
If I'm hearing you rightly, it might be something like humanism, is not simply a belief or need not be taken to or ought not be taken to as a belief in kind of a goodness of human beings and extolling the goodness of human beings, but finding a humane way to deal with the inhumanity of human beings. So that they can blossom into life that's truly worthy of our, of us as human beings.
Do you read this? I mean, I've been tempted to read these two texts, I think you mentioned at the very beginning of your last comment and in Genesis six, and then in Genesis eight, which the first one says because the thoughts of human beings are evil, therefore God decided to destroy humanity. After the flood, waters recede, and Noah makes a sacrifice, and God smells the sacrifice that Noah has made.
And then without talking to anyone, making any promises, God thinks. We have a kind of soliloquy of God after that event. God says to himself, Because human beings are evil, I will never destroy them. Yes, and that both are because some people use it in Genesis 9 interpreted as, even though they are evil, I will not.
But it might be interesting to think of it as a because Yes, I do. So, so, so that actually kind of punitive approach to being to humans is inhumane because it doesn't register that human beings are often incapable of doing what they themselves want to do and sink too deep to be regulated by moral oppression.
So, so. Uh, codes, you're in, you're out on the basis of moral performance, but, but, but the grace is a condition of possibility of, of human life. And that, that ends up being a highlight, uh, and, and universally applied upon all human beings.
Marilynne Robinson: Yes, that unbelievably beautiful scene of Joseph and his brothers, you know, where it says you meant this for evil, but God meant it for good, you know, the, the, the fact that we cannot understand the meaning or the value of an event.
you know, except very approximately, because it can be converted in, you know, God's intention, God's sympathies, and all
Miroslav Volf: the rest of it. I'm, I'm very sympathetic to your reading of the, of the story as a kind of hypothetical, rather than as, statement of fact, what actually has happened. Uh, I think in one point you're right.
It's a term in an argument story as a term in a, uh, in an argument, which seems plausible. And I would like to believe that's true. I talked to Ellen Davis, maybe, you know, Ellen Davis from Duke, uh, who is a Hebrew Bible scholar. And I was all excited about your, about your reading. And she asked me the question, which kind of bothered me the entire time.
And that is. She says, but how it is that ancients, we have no indication that rabbis or anybody else in the ancient world all the way until maybe recently has read it in that way. And so she takes it to be intended as being read realistically. What would you say to that?
Marilynne Robinson: One of the things that's really interesting about Genesis is that it picks up detail from other cultures, you know, like.
The story of Joseph and all the rest of it, you know, you can find what they're alluding to, you know, they're very unembarrassed about it, which implies to me that these stories floated around through that region of the world and that anyone would know, yes, that is the story that comes from Egypt, you know, or yes, that is the story for which Babylon is famous.
You know, and you know, I mean, people, literally people do this all the time, you know, where an interesting question is sort of rooted in certain terms, and then they take it and they can re examine the terms and so on. I think that, you know, these little pockets of very different theologies being so close to each other, the Canaanites so on.
It's very likely indeed that they took from each other in that way, conceptual language for their purposes, you know. I mean, there's no evidence there was ever any important flood in the region of, you know, of Israel and so on. Um, and so I think that, I mean, what I want to do in a way is treat the ancients who created the Hebrew Bible respectfully in the sense that, yes, they could think philosophically, Yes, they could take an idea and common discourse and, you know, revolutionize the interpretation of it, you know, so on.
And of course that, that goes to all of these ancient societies that they weren't just blowing smoke, you know, they were actually talking about things that, from which they could draw you. Great meaning about what human beings are and what time is and all the rest of it, you know, so obviously I decided to write on the basis of what I took to be true.
I'm perfectly willing to stand by that, you know, I mean, we all know that this is a very mysterious area that we're all delving in, you know, but the fact that the flood and what follows is treated more as naïve. Then most parts of even a very badly condescended to book are treated as naive, you know, and I think that's, that simply has to be wrong, especially because what is the greater question of theodicy?
than the fact that populations are wiped off the face of the earth every so often. It must have been so common in the ancient world with plagues and wars and all the rest of it.
Miroslav Volf: You know, I was thinking also, uh, along the lines that you are now kind of taking or, or explaining your position. I was thinking also that this very description that with these three universals, every human, every thought, Uh, all the time, evil.
Have you ever met a person like that?
Marilynne Robinson: I don't know, Mr. Frexit, I might have a very poorly informed notion of what evil amounts to.
Miroslav Volf: But still, I mean, I mean, on whatever account of evil, presumably something deserving a punishment of the sword that's being, in the context of the story, meted, in any account of that evil, it seems to me that human beings are always some kind of a mixture, or put the other way, if they were actually such beings, they may constitute evil.
exception to the original goodness, right? Because there's every single thought of heart, every moment is evil. That strikes me as a hyperbole, right? So in that sense, hypothetical term in the argument would be a very good way to describe human beings.
Marilynne Robinson: And also, I mean, I believe that the books of Moses are attributed at least to a school that could be called Moses, you know, that Genesis is a preparation for Exodus.
Because the solution to human wickedness, which nevertheless does not violate human nature, is law. You can obey a law or you can reject a law, you know, but you are, it exists and you are free in relation to it. You know, this is always true, you know. I mean, there might be external authorities that try to enforce them or so on, but there's very little suggestion of that.
In Exodus, it's basically because it's religiously based for them. It can be an ethical system, you know, based on a sort of shared assumption of justice. And, you know, I, you know, I mean, these laws, like, you know, letting widows gather ungathered grapes and all the rest of it, you don't find that anywhere else, you know, um, And it's a sort of cherishing of the individual widow, you know, which goes right through the, the whole, you know, both testaments.
Like the figure of Lamech who takes, it's so beautiful. He takes this statement of grace on the part of God and turns it into a, you know, homicidal, you know, role in life. We don't know. We don't, you know, it's like, It's imagining itself into a dark early time, which kind of resembles Joshua and Judges, you know, when there was no law except for, you know, respect of blood and, you know, and not killing each other, ideally, and so on.
So I think that we don't know what the world would be like as they imagined it without with given human nature and lacking, you know, divine instruction.
Miroslav Volf: I love the contrast that you made. Oh, by the way, back to what you said about trespassing and widows. I love this comment that you made about interpreting forgive us our debts or generally the idea of debt is trespassed.
And then the example that people were actually given permission to try and trespass. What's so sacred about not trespassing? It costs you nothing. I love that. Um, I also love the contrast that you draw between account of human beings in Babylonian literatures and Genesis in terms of the use of human beings, that human beings, uh, were created to relieve the gods of, uh, hard work and toil.
And when they are troublesome enough that They disturb siestas of gods. They can be also gotten rid of because their sole purpose is to relieve gods of work. And then in contrast to that account in Genesis, not of the use God makes of people in this sense, but of the moral purpose that he, that God has for them.
And that ends up being almost like a purpose, a moral purpose of humanity. How would you describe that moral purpose?
Marilynne Robinson: Well, you know, I think that God cherishes human beings. You know, I mean, that the, this, that wonderful scene completely opposed to everything Babylonian, you know, I mean, stands with Abraham and says, look at the stars.
I think what the stars must have looked like then when there was no ambient, you know, problem. And what God is saying is human beings, you know, lives that will unfold, you know, infinite, uncountable numbers of them, you know, and the idea that for Abraham, but certainly for God, the mere fact of the existence and the innumerable masses of human beings is a delight in the reward, you know, exceedingly great reward.
And I mean, it seems to me as if God's care and enthusiasm and so on is for us. And the instruction that we can draw from that is we got to look after people. And of course, this sort of passive welfare system of, yes, you can go through and glean whatever was left behind and all this kind of thing, you know, a beautiful, beautiful thing in antiquity.
And, you know, we would have to retool that to a certain extent. But I think that if we wanted to draw ourselves closer To what God would choose as moral, you know, it's certainly care for other human beings, just on the assumption that God is delighted by the thought of them.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah, the beautiful and kind of intrinsic value they have as a good creation that ought to be honored.
And it's a very contemporary, this contrast between moral purpose and use. In many of the instances, we have some sometimes innocent, but nonetheless real mutual use of each other. But Yeah. Uh, that, that crosses the idea or doesn't allow, doesn't honor the idea of, of actual moral pur purpose and, uh, intrinsic value of the the individual, uh, person.
You've got a phrase that I, uh, have pondered after I've read, read it, and that at one point, I'm not sure even where it is. You speak of Roaring Cosmos. And I'm not sure whether I'm going to give it now the right take, but what it made me think was of modern atheism, and modern atheism seemed to be fully formed, not when the existence of God is simply denied in the name of, say, dignity of humans and freedom.
Somebody like Karl Marx might be a good example of that. But when the world when the cosmos is seen only as kind of roaring cosmos, roaring in some ways cows. Um, uh, and then we don't see it as in any way guided by Providence. Nietzsche does that in, in one of the comments in Joyful, Joyful Science, when he talks about a kind of sturdy atheism of Schopenhauer, because he has seen that there is no space.
Unlike Hegel, he has seen that there's no space for providence. There are only these powers that are there at play. And moral purpose of humanity has simply dropped off. And both he and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, they are not there. conceive of human life as being in this little boat in a raging ocean.
And that's what one has to deal with. I always think about Jesus in the boat. Maybe that's where they got that with the storm, storm raging. But one of the key things that you do in the book, you kind of trace the providential purpose that God had with creating humanity. And with calling also, also Abraham, God is there much more, much involved and in ways that are unto us.
Yes. Almost, it seems like it isn't providence until you see that it is.
Marilynne Robinson: Yes, exactly. The moment when Joseph sees that, you know, God meant well. And I think that, you know, the standing point of human beings Looking back over this fantastic experience we've had, you know, much as we've marred it. I think a lot about the fact that there's a sense in which we never left Eden, you know, because Earth is so unlike everything around it.
Everything that we can know is existing as far as we can see in any direction, you know, and granting there are huge, you know, 95 percent of the mass of the universe, we don't know how to describe and observe and so on. But if you think about what we know, You know, about solar flares and I, you know, that this sort of complete indifference to the idea of the preservation of anything, you know, it's like what I was talking about before of the preservation of the self, you know, and here we have this preservation of being in this cocoon of atmosphere, you know, and, and, you know, and in memory and in language and in, you know, all these things that are completely anomalous over against anything that we can know about non earth.
And so, you know, I, I think it's very, in order to understand our circumstance, in order to understand creation, we have to be aware, more aware than we are of how many things of a kind of arbitrary, you know, solicitous nature allow anything like what we consider, you know, I mean, even the fact of generations, the fact that people can be enumerated, you know, like that when, you know.
Everything else in the universe is just, you know, flares and expungements and, you know, black holes, of course, that, I mean, the whole of human existence is like some sweet parable told in the most improbable place and circumstances. The idea that in a world as made as this is, you know, where so many conditions are met, you know, about carbon and everything else.
It is not inappropriate, I think, to imagine God active in it. you know, at his will, you know, I mean, as he wishes, you know, but I do think that that God's most amazing creation is a creature that is almost out of his control.
Miroslav Volf: Very nicely put. Out of creature's own control and God's as well.
Marilynne Robinson: Exactly. That's been more wonderful than we know. That has to be the starting place.
Miroslav Volf: So I've just finished reading Charles Taylor's new book, and he writes those huge tomes. And it's called Cosmic Connections, Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment.
And the book, maybe somewhat surprisingly, ends with a long chapter. in which he traces a kind of non linearly construed moral progress of humanity and places it at the very beginning under the banner of a claim which Martin Luther King made popular. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
Do you see it? Something like that in, in Genesis, or what do you think is the relationship between providence and moral progress? Do you think that if one affirms providence, one needs to be invested in moral progress?
Marilynne Robinson: Well, in the first place, I wonder a little bit about moral progress. I, you know, I don't think we could ever have come up with Deuteronomy, you know, I mean, I think those wizards would be on their own, you know, I, I, you know, I've seen these arguments like from Steven Pinker, you know, that seem to make use statistics oddly and so on.
And I have never, I mean, you know, comparing vast populations with huge, with populations, you know, and then what percentage of them would be lost in a war, you know, well, you lose one here, it's equivalent statistically to losing 20 million there, you know, but this makes no sense at all. Obviously, in any case, I think that we always have to be aware that we are sheltered from the reality of our own choices and that in many ways, you know, ecologically and militarily and God knows how many other ways that are simply shortcuts to profit that will have terrible long term effects or whatever.
We can, we're like, we're those privileged people who can. conceal from ourselves the actual consequences of what we do or what we allow. And they are terrible things, you know, the, you know, I'm, and we are, I don't know, forgiveful of them or hardened against them, you know, but I've been reading about artificial intelligence lately because people keep asking me about what I think of it.
So I thought I better think of it, you know, but they know. that if it succeeds, if it doesn't run to its own limits and so on, that it has the potential for being unbelievably destructive. And the gist of the argument seems to be, well, let's do it anyway, because it'll make it much easier to get a quick hamburger.
You know, if, you know, bad choices that we can be aware of. and ignore, you know, I mean, how much have we ransacked the rest of the world? Not, I mean, using Europe as an India and China as this sort of privileged group, you know, the rest of the world has to provide us with, lithium and all the odd things that we need for this weird reality we're creating.
Um, and you know, if you assume that God is as invested in the wellbeing of somebody in Africa as he is in somebody in Chicago, then we have to say that we're still terribly violent. Terribly violent people
Miroslav Volf: and terribly blind to our violence. Speaking of Schopenhauer, I've read him, so I know a few things come to mind from what he has said.
And generally, I tend to very much disagree with his position, but he has a critique, a very simple critique of slavery. And he says, well, just to have our sugar, A little bit cheaper. We enslave millions of people just to get our iPhones. For a few dollars cheaper, little children are slaving away. in the minds.
And that seems, and it's, it doesn't, well, we say it and it leaves no impact in terms of transforming the ways in which societies function. So I always think also talking about moral purpose, I tend to think that, say, certainly New Testament had more of an apocalyptic vision. Rather than a progress vision, it doesn't necessarily conflict with the idea of providence.
To the contrary, I think it's very clear that through the end, just read Book of Revelation, through the end, God is in control, but in the end it ends up being a rather nasty world.
Marilynne Robinson: Yeah, yes, yes, indeed. But, you know, we have to think about things at different scales, I think, you know, like, you know, these encounters that Jesus had with people, you know, the, the rich young man who said, how can I be saved, basically, and Jesus says, yeah, Moses and prophets, you know, you know, the commandments, you know, but he likes that young man.
And you can visualize that young man, all earnest and, you know. And there are these sort of, you know, the possibility of just human encounter, you know, healing, breaking bread, all the things that are reiterated so often. If you think, you know, those could very well occupy a different scale in reality. And we are aware of, and therefore displaced to a certain extent, the very disturbing things that we are aware of.
From your mouth into God's ears. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed.
Miroslav Volf: so much for this time. It's, it's always a beautiful thing to have a conversation with you. I've
Marilynne Robinson: enjoyed it very much. I appreciate all your thoughtful words about my book.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Marilynne Robinson and Miroslav Volf. Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith. yale. edu, where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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