“The Courage to See It”: Toward an Understanding of Glory

Abstract

Wherever you turn your eyes world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have courage to see it? --Marilynne Robinson (Gilead 245) And since glory of [God's] power and wisdom shine more brightly above, heaven is often called his palace [Ps. 11:4]. Yet ... wherever you cast your eyes, there is no spot in universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory. You cannot in one glance survey this most vast and beautiful system of universe, in its wide expanse, without being completely overwhelmed by boundless force of its brightness.... Certainly however much glory of God shines forth, scarcely one man in a hundred is a true spectator of it. --John Calvin (Institutes of Christian Religion 52, 61) If one generalization might be made about Marilynne Robinson's body of work, both fiction and nonfiction (risky and presumptuous as I realize such a gesture to be), it is that her writing urges us again and again to pay attention to what she calls in her first novel, Housekeeping, resurrection of ordinary (18). As anyone with even a passing familiarity with Robinson's work knows, her project is deeply embedded in a rich Christian theology--one that considers fragments of quotidian (64) (another winsome phrase from Housekeeping) integral to any conception of holy. Significantly, Robinson's theology is explicitly and insistently Calvinist; in interview after interview, in her essays and speeches, she invokes John Calvin as central to her artistic mission. As she explained in a June 2009 interview with Andrew Brown of Britain's Guardian newspaper, One of things that has really struck me, reading Calvin, is what a strong sense he has that aesthetic is of divine. If someone in some sense lives a life that we can perceive as beautiful in its own way, that is something that suggests grace, even if by a strict moral standard ... they might seem to fail. (Robinson, Comment Is Free) If Robinson's goal is to explore this signature of divine, then, her essay on Psalm Eight articulates what I believe might be taken as a sort of credo. She writes: I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, scene of miracle is here, among us. (The Death of Adam 243) Thus, although Psalm 8 opens with majestic declaration of God's heavenly splendor: (O LORD, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all earth! who hast set thy glory above heavens) (1), importantly, Psalm is not merely one of praise, but one that examines in verses three through five how an exalted view of God affects humanity's view of itself: 3 When I consider thy heavens, work of thy fingers, moon and stars, which thou hast ordained; 4 What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and son of man, that thou visitest him? 5 For thou hast made him a little lower than angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Here, what Robinson calls the strategy of Psalmist ... to close infinite distance between God and humankind (Adam 240) has profound consequences, as she articulated while on a panel with Robert Alter at New York's 92nd Street Y: One of things that is so striking to me about Bible, literature of Bible altogether, is that it has named human writers. And they are human: you know, Psalms despair and prophets lament and all that sort of thing. They feel weakness--and you feel burden of their humanity in something that is, nevertheless, received as being a sacred testimony. It seems to me that that's one of poignant and powerful things about Scripture: that it situates testimony of sacred in fallible human voices--which are only extraordinary, only more beautiful, because you sense frailty. …

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