RELIGION: MARK PATRICK HEDERMANreviews Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the SelfBy Marilynne Robinson Yale University Press, 158pp. £16.99
THIS IS A WONDERFUL little book, full of wisdom, warmth and wit. The author is a famous novelist. Her book Gileadwon the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2004. She has also written some important non-fiction works, including The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought(1998). Like Iris Murdoch, Robinson has all the brilliance and erudition necessary to be a philosopher but has eschewed such an avenue in favour of her more demanding and inclusive vocation. "Unlike philosophy, science, and religion, which only address 'part' of us, DH Lawrence avers, the novel gives us 'the whole hog' ".
Robinson, as novelist, is able to apply her astute intellect, delicious sense of humour, incisive insight into human nature and down-to-earth philosophy of life as it is really lived to the so-called comprehensive explanations of our universe provided by the mandarins – mostly men – of postmodern atheism. She has little time for their omniscient posturing or pompous declarations of infallibility, or their line drawn in the sand between themselves as fully enlightened atheists and the billions of benighted simpletons who went before them. Do they imagine, she marvels, that Herodotus, Dante, Michelangelo or Shakespeare knew less about what it means to be a human being than they do?
In 2009 she held the Dwight H Terry Lectureship at Yale University and gave a series of talks that make up this book. The purpose of these lectures is “the assimilation and interpretation of that which has been or shall be discovered . . . into the structure of a broadened and purified religion”. The problem both for the author and for the Yale University Foundation is that recent “discoveries”, popularised to wide acclaim by such authors as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, would claim to have abolished religion altogether, even religion “of the broadest and most purified” variety. From this time forward and forever more, according to this group of influential preachers, religion must be seen as an obsolete manifestation of atavistic instinct, causing violence and vituperation and preventing humanity from reaching some form of peaceful coexistence on the planet.
Robinson challenges these postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. Being a novelist, she understands that the human condition is far more subtle and complicated than their cerebral, abstract and simplified version of it. One of her fundamental intuitions is that life in its human manifestation is unique, unpredictable and uncategorisable. Trying to capture it and freeze-frame its essence, as a butterfly collector might display specimens in a cabinet, is a waste of energy. The mystery of human existence is too mercurial and elusive to be trapped in any butterfly net, however fine the mesh.
Knowledge of God is not simply an intellectual activity; it involves also the experience and sensibilities of billions of people, many of whom have recorded in ungainsayable testimonies their first-hand connection with an unseen deity. The condescending hermeneutics of postmodernism seems to suggest religion can only be observed by using the instruments of anthropology or sociology. These grand projects of generalisation, translated into an abstract automaton language, “solemn efforts to tell our species what we are and what we are not”, can thus bypass John Donne and the Sufi poets as irrelevant. Should these authors not, Robinson wonders, in their comprehensive account of all religious manifestation, spend an afternoon listening to Bach or Palestrina? Scientific analysis of a seed might reveal everything except the possibility of a flower.
"The characterization of religion by those who dismiss it tends to reduce it to a matter of bones and feathers and wishful thinking, a matter of rituals and social bonding and false etiologies and the fear of death, and this makes its persistence very annoying to them." Ours seems to be the first generation of preachers and teachers who claim to have definitively superseded all who preceded them. Avant moi le délugewould seem to be the conviction; from here on, they suggest, we have "real thought" to sustain us, which obliges us "to rethink the world in its new light, assuming pervasive error in previous thought and its survivals". Such triumphalism, Robinson suggests, was never the friend of reason. She finds the tone of too many of these books patronising. The prefixes "neo" and "post", as used in such popularised handbooks of modernity, proclaim the crossing of some threshold which makes all that went beforehand redundant.
In one of the most powerful and moving pages of this book, Robinson speaks as a great novelist and deserves to be heard without interruption: “For the religious, the sense of soul may have as a final redoubt, not as argument but as experience, that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the day lit motives whose behests we answer so diligently. Our religious traditions give us as the name of God two deeply mysterious words, one deeply mysterious utterance: I AM.”
Being as such, and being as me, superimposed in such startling midnight serendipity, raise us to the power of two, and press us towards infinity.
Mark Patrick Hederman is abbot of Glenstal Abbey, in Co Limerick. His latest book, Underground Cathedrals, was published by Columba Press earlier this year
