Christ Church Cathedral
25th Sunday after Pentecost
November 14, 2010
Proper 33
Since this was not prepared as a sermon but as a review, I have felt free to make use of the reviews of ABSENCE OF MIND by Karen Armstrong in the Guardian and Michael Dirda in the Washington Post. Their comments are indicated in the text of what follows.
What I have to say today is intended as an introduction to our Books and Ideas discussion after the 10 o’clock service and also as a general invitation to consider the questions today’s book raises and the insights it offers. To begin with, some general background...
Marilynne Robinson’s ABSENCE OF MIND is a published version of the Terry Lectures, which she gave at Yale last year. The series, intended to examine “religion in the light of science and philosophy” has had a distinguished group of participants beginning with Paul Tillich’s “The Courage to Be” and includes Erich Fromm’s “Psychoanalysis and Religion” and more recently an author who appeared in our series last year, Terry Eagleton, with his “Science, Faith and Revolution: reflection on the God Debate.”
Robinson is well known for her prize-winning novels which include “Housekeeping”, “Gilead” and “Home”. She has also produced studies on the American Transcendentalist writers and is a keen observer of the work of John Calvin that emerged in her 1998 book, “Death of Adam”. She is a person of deep Christian commitment, the flower of which is the series of themes that keep recurring in all her writing. ”What does it mean to be alive?” “What must we do to stay true to our deepest selves? “How are we to live and die?” She is thus a good example of an important trend in contemporary religious and Christian writing, namely the tendency to approach crucial theological questions without specific reference to the doctrines that are so dear to the heart of many “defenders of the faith”. Cf xi
(There is no reason to suppose arriving at truth would impoverish experience, however it might change the ways in which our gifts and energies are employed. So nothing about our shared ancestry with the ape can be thought of as altering the facts that human beings are the creators of history and culture. If ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ are entities in their own right, they Are at least terms that have been found useful for describing aspects of the expression and self-experience of our very complex nervous system. The givens of our nature, that we are brilliantly creative and as brilliantly destructive, for example, would persist as facts to be dealt with, even if the word ‘primate’ were taken to describe us exhaustively.)
In her Terry Lectures, Robinson examines what she calls in her introduction “ the venerable controversy called the conflict between science and religion in order to question the legitimacy of the claim of its exponents to speak with the authority of science and to raise questions about the quality of thought that lies behind it.” (This is quite a mouthful and is typical of her frequently tortured syntax. She is, I may add, a teacher at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop.)
In her first chapter she centers upon the sociobiologists such as E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. She challenges their contention (1) that our lives are ordered by overt or unconscious self interest, viz the myth of altruism and (2) that our minds are unreliable, constantly tricking us. On this basis they come to the conclusion that traditional religious belief is a primordial hold-over, certainly childish, frequently deluded and generally embarrassing. Moreover, it would seem that our minds are not to be trusted, that even though we thought we were standing on a static Earth, our plant is moving very fast. It is not difficult to conclude that we can never be sure that our ideas correspond to the objective reality outside our own heads so that some of our noblest ideals could be simply the product of a repressive sexuality. Even more definitively we are deluded if we imagine that we ”think”, “reason”, “learn” or “choose” for our minds are simply a passive conduit for an unknown, indifferent force. Cf. pp51-2 (When exactly did the mind begin to be aided by “factual knowledge from science’? Where is the evidence that pre-scientific people see the world ‘only in little pieces’? Is he speaking of Herodotus? Dante? Michelangelo? Shakespeare? Does knowing ‘how the machinery of the brain works’ - and. In fact, we still do not know how it works - have any implication for the effective use of the mind? Unlike science, the arts and humanities have a deep, strong root in human culture, and have had for millennia. Granting the brilliance of science, there are no grounds for the notion that in its brief history it has transformed human consciousness in the way Wilson describes. The narrowness of Wilson’s view of human history seems rather to suggest the parochialism that follows from a belief in science as a kind of magic, as if it existed apart from history and culture., rather than being, an objective truth and inevitably , their product.
These “parascientists” as Robinson calls them deliberately slight “the wealth of insight into human nature that might come from attending to the record humankind has left”. An honest inquirer into the nature of religion “might spend an afternoon listening to Bach or Palestrina, reading Sophocles or the Book of Job”. We are not, she maintains, simply the instrument of selfish genes. Indeed, she suspects that the “modern malaise”, our sense of emptiness and alienation can be attributed not to the “death of God” but rather to the promulgated and reductionist view of the self as wholly biological.
Darwinists, she suggests, have always had trouble with altruism because evolution would seem necessarily to select against benevolence to another at cost to one’s self. Thus altruism can occur only because of the “selfishness” of a gene. For example, E.O. Wilson, a soft-core altruist, expects reciprocation from either family or society; his byzantine calculations are characterized by “lying, pretense and deceit, including self-deceit because the actor is more convincing who believes his performance is real”. So every compassionate human action becomes a matter of quid pro quo.
A similar exercise in imagination is performed by the evolutionary biologist Geoffrey Miller. - “evolution cannot favour altruistic information-sharing., so the complexities of language probably evolved simply for verbal courtship, providing a sexual pay-off for eloquent speaking by the male or female”. Robinson interjects “Oh, to have been a fly on the wall (when our) “proto-verbal ancestors found mates through eloquent proto-verbal speech.” In a similar vein she notes that while art may appear to be” an elaboration of experience, of the possibilities of communication and of the extraordinary elaboration of eye and hand” to some neo-Darwinians it is simply a means of attracting sexual; partners. “Leonardo and Rembrandt may have thought they were competent inquirers in their own right, but we moderns know better.”
In effect Robinson suggests this disdainful “hermeneutics of condescension” cannot function outside of a very narrow definition of relevant data. Nowhere is this more obvious than with the positivist critique of religion. Dennett defines religion as “social system whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” He ignores deliberately the contemplative side of religion explored by William James as if Rabinson says, “religion could only be observed using the methods of anthropology or sociology without reference to the deeply pensive solitudes which bring individual into congregations.” Her exploration of the psychologist William James is one of the most satisfying section of the book and gives a data base to her conclusion that in bypassing Donne, Bach, the Sufi poets and Socrates, to name a few, Dennett, Dawkins and others are free to reduce the multifarious religious experience of humanity “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.”
Although no mention is made by her reviewers, I found her discussion of the historical background of the Vienna in which Freud grew up and worked quite illuminating. Her proposal that the source of Oedipus complex was Freud’s disgust with the cultural racism of the time with its failure to identify a deep seated source of evil and he sought a more universal grounding for human self. cf. p81 (This is not meant as criticism. Instead, I wish to draw attention to the intensity as well as the implications of his insistence, that despite this, on a human universal character with a single narrative shaping individual and collective life. To put the matter in very few words, I will suggest that, in a Europe fascinated by notions of the radical importance of the racial, cultural, and national difference, Freud is creating another, opposing anthropology, one that excludes these categories altogether.)
Her final chapter “Thinking Again” I find interesting for two reasons. The first is the extent to which it illustrates the new thinking about religion as one of the dynamic of human life. For one thing, it shifts the discussion away from the sectarian squabbles about doctrine as the identifiers of faith. These play right into the like of Dawkins et.al. because they are never forced to look beyond the inanities of these trivial disagreements. In a sense it is books such as these which may rescue religious traditions from their desire for self destruction.
In the words of Karen Armstrong, “Robinson takes the science versus religion debate a stage further. More significant than this jejune attack on faith, she argues that ‘the mind, as felt experience has been excluded from important field of human thought’ and as a result ‘our conception of humanity has shrunk’. ‘To adopt such a closed ontology ‘, she insists, is to ignore ‘the beauty and strangeness’ of the individual mind as it exists in time. ‘Subjectivity is the ancient haunt of piety and reverence and of long, long thoughts. And the literatures that would dispel such things refuse to acknowledge subjectivity, perhaps because inability has evolved into principle and method.‘”
Armstrong again: “In the past, the voices that say ‘there is something more’ have always been right. The positivist approach would marginalise religion, but also the arts, culture, history and the classical and humanist traditions. “Most prescient of all is Robinson’s contention that it is only prudent to make a very high measure of human nature. First of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.”
The other contribution of the final chapter is her restoration of the setting of the religious life. “We may gain our truest sense of the soul’s reality not from any argument but from our experience of “that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, that we awaken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to our selves, 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 I AM”.
Dirda’s review of this book concludes: “In the end, Robinson suggests that the strangeness of reality consistently exceeds the expectations of science, and that the assumptions of science, however tried and rational are inclined to encourage false expectations.” She reminds us that throughout history our most profound thinkers have been concerned with metaphysical questions and to call them insoluble or irrelevant as do her antagonists, is no reason to dismiss the process of deep inquiry. After all, religion, philosophy and not least, the arts are aspects of that exploration. At the very least, she concludes one should “encourage the imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are.”
