Marilynne Robinson's Beautiful Quartet: Religion made Flesh
What is religion? What does it mean to practice it deeply and authentically?
Forgive my use of “authentically”— it’s a complicated concept — but it feels right to use it here in its most common sense, that feeling we get when we’re with the truth of something. Kierkegaard, when he was walking around Copenhagen, thought most of the Christians he spoke to were winging it, saying one thing, doing another, and playing social games with their professed Christianity. He wanted the real thing. “Such attention we give to [religion] is usually vindictive and incurious and therefore incompetent” wrote the literary critic James Wood.1
I present Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead quartet — Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack— as an antidote to such incompetence. In these quasi hard-love-medicinal books she explores the lives of her characters living in a small Iowa town, running into trouble, running away from trouble, raising children, approaching death, looking back at their lives and seeing what their Christian faith has to do with it all; Christianity is the stage on which these characters act out their lives while often forgetting their lines.
These four poignantly, achingly, beautifully written books, both individually, and collectively, gave me the feeling of what “real” Christianity is about.
Thematically, they dramatize some of the most potent stories from the Bible. Jack, for example, is a struggling alcoholic —which is a rather kind phrasing we soon learn— and a prodigal son, who in the second book comes home after twenty years away from his family, giving the virtue of forgiveness a serious run for its money.
In the fourth book we learn what Jack was up to when he was away all those years. It starts with a long scene in which he spends the night with a woman he barely knows talking about the cosmos and its mysteries, a scene in which we see the way two Souls can be attracted to one another like magnets. But later on Jack takes one of many long, hard looks at himself and wonders about the impact the culmination of his poor life choices would have on her and why staying away from her would be the more ethical decision:
For a day or two he would take pleasure in the thought that her good life was unthreatened by his Jackness, Jacktitude, Jackicity. How was it possible to be encumbered with slyness, so that his blundering always ended as shrewd harm? It was a shock to his metaphysics to discover that when he had forsworn malicious intent, the effects of his actions, his mere presence, were changed very little and not reliably for the better.
If you are looking for an easy path to salvation, a comfort in “metaphysics,” Marilynne Robinson won’t be your reprieve; like Jack, you’ll feel worse first, and only, maybe, possibly, better some long time after your doubts have taken a few good shots at your face.
Most essentially, Marilynne Robinson explores Christianity by giving the atheists and atheist-adjacents as good a say as the true believers. James Wood in his review of Home, said that Robinson writes with “an uncompromising religious sensibility.” The greater the doubt, the greater the enlightenment.
What it means to be religious is a truly wonderful and provocative question — wonderful because it encourages wonder at the meaning of everything, and provocative because you are not wondering hard enough if things in your world are not being shaken up and then some. When you go inside a Church with some of the characters in Gilead, two of whom are preachers, and most are sons and daughters of preachers, it feels like lighting can still strike any moment—and does.
In reviewing Robinson’s essay “Purtians and Prigs,” Wood notes that in Robinson’s world, educated Americans are prigs, not Puritans, “Quick to pour judgement on anyone who fails to toe the right political line. Soft moralizing has replaced hard moralizing, but at least those old hard moralists admitted to being moralists.”
Robinson’s Christianity feels like one of the best examples of maturity I’ve encountered —by which I mean to a large extent, the opposite of dogmatic: it’s a patient and poetic study of life’s many troubles and doubts, consistently self-reflective, full of severe questioning so that when compassion shows up it has been earned. The character’s themselves are full of anxieties and regrets and big loves won and lost and always uncertain, while the author watches it all unfold with astonishing patience and grace and profound wisdom. But no matter how rough things get, nobody is ever beyond redemption.
Have any of our readers experienced the profound beauty of these books? If so, do you have a favorite? Or a favorite scene? Character? Passage? A lesson about How to Live? Let us know.
Krzysztof’s order of preference:
1. Gilead ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
2. Jack ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
3. Home ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
4. Lila ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Link to Gilead here. “Rapturous . . . astonishing . . . Gilead is an inspired work from a writer whose sensibility seems steeped in holy fire.” —Lisa Shea, Elle
