Reviewed in this essay:
Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium, by Pope John Paul II. Rizzoli, 172 pages. $19.95, hardcover. 2005.
Gilead, by Marilynn Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 247 pages. $23.00, hardcover. 2004.
Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
–T.S. Eliot, East Coker
THE NEW YORKER ran a praiseworthy remembrance of John Paul II near the time of his death in April 2005. It was praiseworthy as far as it could be, of a spiritual leader who battled Communism, the death penalty, the war in Iraq, and rampant materialism in the West, but also “forcefully opposed the leaders of liberation theology in Latin America, and appointed Church leaders who almost uniformly followed his conservative lead on women priests, homosexuality, birth control, and many other issues.” Among the secular intelligentsia, John Paul was admired as a dissident Eastern European intellectual, a skiing cardinal, a media maestro, a thorn in the side of the affluent, war-mongering West. But on “many other issues,” as adumbrated in David Remnick’s above litany, the late Pontiff was invariably dismissed. His drooling senescence was taken as an objective correlative to his outdated recommendations for how man ought to negotiate his way through the modern world. At the same time, more than a few conservative Christians, at least in America, adored and admired the Pope for the total fusion of his personhood with his beliefs but avoided perhaps a full reckoning with his stances on war, on the death penalty, and on the marketable, consumptive “goods” of First World living.
Indeed, looking at contemporary America via John Paul II reveals a nation full of one-eyed kings. Some pray their rosaries in gas-guzzling SUV’s and load up on crates and barrels at the outlet malls. Others guzzle organic Fair Trade coffee in bumper-stickered Subaru’s and stock up on over-the-counter abortifacients. There’s emphatically no moral equivalency intended here, only the desire that we recognize that these ways of life are together rooted in free-loving, free-spending liberal democracy, and that each discloses moments of convenient self-blinding against a fuller vision of the human person, a vision sustainable only in a culture defined by integration, consistency and sacrifice. John Paul II expresses as much in the book published shortly after his death, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium. This depth-sounding brief suggests the wisdom of a man who affirmed, to his last moments, that — and how — “the glory of God is man fully alive.”
Among many other topics, John Paul here reflects on the difficulties of achieving a God-glorifying fullness of life under the totalitarian reigns of Nazism, Communism and, in recent times, under a subtler form of coercive ideology that, in the hallow name of personal freedom,
strike[s] at the very foundation of human morality, influencing the family and promoting a morally permissive outlook…. [A] program [that] is supported by enormous financial resources…. It has great centers of economic power at its disposal, through which it attempts to impose its own conditions on developing countries. Faced with all this, one may legitimately ask whether this is not another form of totalitarianism, subtly concealed under the appearance of democracy.
Against the hard and soft currencies of libertine liberalism, John Paul emphasizes elsewhere the value of freedom properly understood, and the reviving and recollecting powers of culture properly formed. Human freedom is effectively primitive, meaning selfish, John Paul contends, unless it is regarded simultaneously as a gift from God and a responsibility to Him and to others. Enacted within the natural boundaries of human community, on familial, national and international levels, freedom can bring about encounters with those things that remind us of our double status, as created in God’s image and as creators ourselves. To anchor this idea, John Paul reaches back to God’s evaluative statements in the creation story of Genesis, suggesting that the “predicate ‘very good’ …. lies at the very heart of the culture that is expressed in works of art, whether they be paintings, sculptures, buildings, pieces of music, or other products of creative imagination and thought.”
The challenge that John Paul II bequeathed lies in how we will regard, refine, and reform these “other products” that form our culture — our politics, our economics, and our various private enjoyments. The initial answer to his lament over culture and freedom’s global diminishments under “unbridled capitalism, which makes the rich richer while forcing the poor into conditions of growing degradation,” has to be personal sacrifice. For all talk of freedom these days, there is little discussion of this its ultimate manifestation. If we seek to share with others the great gift and awesome responsibility of a genuine liberty and a vital cultural life — whether with family members, political opponents or distant peoples — we must understand that doing so with any lasting success will demand donations of self through sacrifice. As much could manifest itself, for example, in willed refusals to indulge in all that is available to us, whether at the pharmacy counter or at the car dealership. Better off would secular liberals and religious conservatives alike be if they dared to regard John Paul the Great’s witness as more than a confirmation of their settled visions of each other and of themselves. Reading his latest book with both eyes open would be a promising start.
The op-eds, obits and commemorative issues, the pastors, politicos and talking heads collectively outdid each other in rightly praising John Paul II. But for my money, Marilynne Robison has offered, inadvertently of course, the finest of encomiums to the late Pope. This, from her long overdue and quickly adored second novel, Gilead:
He was just afire with old certainties, and he couldn’t bear all the patience that was required of him by … the aging of his body and by the forgetfulness that had settled over everything. He thought we should all be living at a dead run. I don’t say he was wrong. That would be like contradicting John the Baptist.
The aged narrator is here describing his grandfather, a warlike abolitionist preacher, in a novel-length letter to his young son. Gilead sets as its task the elaboration of a fine symmetry: in closing the distance between himself, his grandfather, and his father through looping recollections of life in the American heartland, dating from its harboring of escaped slaves through its installations of television antennae, the Reverend John Ames seeks to bridge the gap between himself and his own son before passing on. Moreover, he simultaneously readies himself to encounter his Heavenly Father, through much theological reflection and a just, charitable settling of accounts with the others in his orbit. The resultant work, while not matching the sonorous depths of Robinson’s Housekeeping, manages to be a lovely record of an old man’s last days. Just a little too lovely, perhaps.
Ames holds that “the right worship of God is essential because it forms the mind to a right understanding of God,” and for him, right worship seems to consist in two forms; first, in words, whether in sermons or in a letter (“For me writing has always felt like praying”); second, in taking much delight in dappled things. Robinson achieves something of a Cather-like theology of nature; her novel is suffused with lyrical celebrations of the simple beauties to be found in grassland Iowa, which testify repeatedly to the narrator’s inexhaustible and eloquent sense of wonder at the world:
As I was walking up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial … and I thought of another morning … when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost …. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees …. and I thought, It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.
The simple prose is lambent without coming off as precious or mannered, because Robinson has endowed her narrator with a sacramental imagination: Ames’s wonder at created things leads him to and comes from his awe at their Creator.
Ames’s pastoral sensibility is well-suited to a winning synthesis of serenity and astonishment in the novel’s evocations of nature, in its theological deliberations, and in the gripping, fantastic stories-within-the-story that appear periodically. But the novel’s voice falters in one vital area. Through the narrative voice of Ruth, the wise-beyond-her-years narrator of Housekeeping, Robinson provided a rich and complex study of distaff family relationships at work in a magnificent and terrible landscape of lake and bridge and house and town. While she again summons a host of arresting images, intricate private histories, inevitable family parallels, and partial repetitions across the generations in Gilead — this time on the patrimonial side — their expression is, at times, simply too soft and lovely to be believably the testament of a 1950’s Iowa preacher, a descendant of spilled blood and pulpit brimstone, an old man who plans to vote for Eisenhower.
The stylistic fissures that open up on the novel’s closing pages suggest as much. Surveying all that he has just shared with his boy, Ames wonders “What have I to leave you but the ruins of old courage, and the lore of old gallantry, and hope?” The next paragraph begins, “I love the prairie!” This simple ejaculation seems more in line with Ames’s sensibility than the passionate evocation that precedes it, though one senses that the novel could use more Faulkner and less Cather. In the main, the novel has a thoughtful, literary, faith-informed feminine voice; in other words, there’s just a little too much Marilynn Robinson, and just never enough fire and gravel, in John Ames’s throat. That having been said, Robinson’s is inarguably an intelligent and lovely voice, and Gilead’s Pulitzer Prize is well-deserved. Perhaps, in a minor parallel to the attention accorded to John Paul II at his passing by The New Yorker and other such organs, this novel’s preeminence on the American literary scene this past year can be taken for a sign that secular elites can still recognize the unmatched insights of wise Christianity in conversation with the world and its wonders and wickedness.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.3.