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A CALVINIST ÁPOLOGETIC FROM THE FICTION AND ESSAYS OF OUR TIME
In 2010 Marilynne Robinson went on to publish a book-length essay Absence
of Mind," carrying further the idea that the human mind is a unique faculty
in the universe. She takes to task what she mockingly calls “parascience”, i.e.
scientific journalism claiming philosophical import, as distinct from genuine
science. She targets and refutes its reductionism, which insists that what we
do and think, our decisions and judgments, indeed our very selves, are actually
self-deceptions, delusions: mere biological or genetic functions, or impersonal
drives of the psyche. The most important disproof of these attempts is the re¬
cord of insight into human nature we have from ancient times, the testimonies
of culture and history. And thus Robinson calls for an account of reality that
includes the “felt life of the mind”, “the beauty and strangeness of the individual
soul”, the “world as perceived in the course of a human life, of the mind as it
exists in time”.” Such an account will not shrink from raising the final questions
of old, and will not at all disrupt scientific inquiry, as the most recent achieve¬
ments of the latter have come round to re-addressing these very questions,
though at a much higher level of complexity and scientific truth.
The concept of mind Robinson puts forward goes back to or is corroborated
by Calvin’s own extraordinary exaltation of the human mind, even reprobate or
unredeemed pagan minds, whose achievements he had no qualms about admir¬
ing and putting to good use. Furnished with this concept, Robinson also relates
to Freud, as she implicitly did in Gilead and Home. She has great admiration
for the father of psychoanalysis insofar as his attempt to provide an account
of mental reality based on the unconscious was a response to the racial myth
increasingly engulfing German thought since the middle of the nineteenth
century. Had Freud, as Robinson argues, seriously encountered Protestant
thinkers, Jonathan Edwards for instance, he might have promulgated a more
balanced concept of the mind.
Robinson’s extolling of the mind might seem to be an unqualified espousal
of Enlightenment confidence in rationality, which is certainly unwarranted in
the light of both investigations into human thinking over the past two hundred
years and the experience of history. For all her serene wisdom, however, her
tragic sensibilities dispose her to a longing for the hereafter, which is so mani¬
festly evident in Ames’ alter ego, the Presbyterian minister Robert Boughton.
This combination of serene wisdom and tragic sensibility is her way of mak¬
ing modern sense of the arch-Calvinian doctrine of predestination, which,
of course, has little to share with the hubris of Enlightenment rationality. As
6° RoBINsOoN, Marilynne, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of
the Self, New Haven - London, Yale University Press, 2010.
7 Ibid., 35.