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A CALVINIST ÁPOLOGETIC FROM THE FICTION AND ESSAYS OF OUR TIME
gun in his belt; the father, returning from the Civil War, became a pacifist, and
preached loving-kindness, to the dismay of the radical grandfather. Histori¬
cally grounded and bitter, their conflict remained unresolved. The conflict of
the father and the son revolves around responding to atheism, with the father
finally losing his faith and virtually betraying his son, our testamentizing John
Ames. These are vast conflicts with no solution or reconciliation, yet they are
transcended by way of the religious consciousness more or less shared, by way
of forgiveness offered only subsequently, when too late, but offered all the same:
for all qualifications spite is un-Oedipally forgone.
The father-son conflict is played out through repudiation that the eldest
son of John Ames’ best friend, a Presbyterian minister, says nay wherever his
father says yea; he is indeed a prodigal. Much of Gilead and all of Home is a
poignant and cathartic retelling of the central Christian myth of the Prodigal
Son. Robinson has the prodigal return home for the two elderly ministers to
treat him as they preached in accordance with the word of Christ. Jack, the
prodigal son, has done everything to shame his father — stealing, fathering and
not accepting a bastard child, not coming home for the funeral of his mother,
and now the ageing father, who had been a brilliant mind and a sensitive soul,
is unable to respond to his son as he should, as his faith would require him to,
as he would want to. Feeble, indignant and wanting only to die, he is unable
to give his son what he turns out to desire: a blessing from his father. Oedipal
shame upon shame! Yet, Robinson, in an extraordinary tour de force, has John
Ames recognize what is at stake and vicariously bless his friend’s son to let him
start a new life.
What Robinson is thus capable of in these two novels is to uphold and assert
the Christian myth of reconciliation in the face of the Freudian myth without
recourse to authority. For all John Ames’ metaphysical flights, he is a reasoner.
He inherited his religion and calling from his father; he had no visionary ex¬
perience to found his faith on, all he has is the God-given faculty of his mind
— uniquely his own, unique in all the universe — to respond to and appreciate
creation, to discover the meaning of whatever and whoever is sent in his way,
“to find meaning in trouble”, as he provides a rationalizing definition of proph¬
esy.* He is grounding his religion in his mind, in his seeking to make sense of
his experience, not in any external authority, which he cannot and does not
claim to have encountered. This intensely personal approach to a life of faith
conceived of as profound mental strife is a beautiful fictional vindication of
Calvinism for our time.
4 ROBINSON, Gilead, 233.