The God Dimension

This year Marilynne Robinson delivered the Fosse Lecture, an annual speaker series established by the National Library of Norway after Jon Fosse received the Nobel Prize in 2023. Robinson’s lecture, ‘On Faith and Freedom of Thought’, sketched an American tradition of religious humanism, a ‘deeper, purer, and more strenuous freedom than we have aspired to lately’, she claimed. She spoke in the Grand Hall of the Royal Palace to an audience that included Crown Princess Mette-Merit. Fosse, who stays away from most official functions, attended the lecture, but vanished before the reception, when a choir mounted the palace staircase and sang a hymn inspired by his poem ‘Det store andletet bøyer seg ned.’ The day before the lecture, I met Robinson and Fosse at Kaffistova, Fosse’s preferred restaurant, where we spoke about God, art, and politics. Although we did not speak explicitly about their novels, Robinson and Fosse’s theological positions anchor their art. The rippling, incantatory style of Fosse’s Septology and The Shining is the aesthetic correlative to his negative theology; his book-length sentences circle around what God is not in order to access an ineffable, invisible divine reality. (The Vaim trilogy, excerpted in ‘Granta 175: Scandinavia’, is cut from a different cloth.) Robinson’s novels are everywhere touched by her belief in the transcendental qualities of ordinary life, from Ruthie’s Emersonian communion with nature in Housekeeping, to the dialogues between family members across the Gilead quartet. Both writers insist that language can make a spiritual absence as present to our senses as the objects we can see, taste, and touch. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Merve Emre: I received no religious education, so I was interested to learn, Marilynne, that you were teaching a class on reading the Bible. What do you want to impart to your students through your readings of the Old and New Testament? Marilynne Robinson: There are many people who feel that they did not receive any religious education, so I try to give them basic terms and concepts simply so they can have an approach. The creation was the first category that I talked about. I use things like the passage in Proverbs that describes the spirit that is with God at creation, and the poem at the end of Job, in which God says, ‘Where were you’, and psalms that celebrate creation. I think that the celebratory side of the Christian tradition is very much lost; it’s thought of as being punitive. The idea of understanding the amazing beauty of being is intrinsic to the literature and part of what people have a right to. The culture has not given them the terms to express it. One of the things that is very much on my mind doing all this is that the standard translations of the Bible make God into a monster. He’s jealous. He’s vengeful. I bring up the fact that ‘vengeance’ is a bad translation. If you look at the Vulgate, it says ‘vindicator’– ‘to vindicate’, which means not only to assign innocence, but also to assign guilt. It isn’t vengeance. You see people like our horrible Secretary of War using the word vengeance and feeling that it is sanctified by a bad translation. I think a lot of what distances people from religion are the inappropriate words that have become identified with the text. Emre: Is it only a matter of bad translation that the vengeful God is the God absorbed by American culture? Robinson: They’re very frightening things in the New Testament, like the apocalypse. But I think most of the grievous things that we are threatened by are things that we have created ourselves. The prohibition against killing is one that human beings violate constantly. I think that it’s true in the world, and it’s true in the Bible, that you have to make a distinction between evil in the ancient sense and human behavior. We’re up to no good a great deal of the time, and to each other’s enormous harm. The greatest commandment in both Testaments is ‘Love the Lord.’ Yet out of traditionalism and sloppiness, we create an idea of God that’s not very lovable, so that there’s a transgression against the first commandment before anything else is launched on. I think that’s a problem. I would like to be a purely objective teacher, but I think there are certain major corrections that need to be made. Emre: Jon, was the difference between a vengeful god and a loving God important for your religious upbringing in Norway? Jon Fosse: The Old Testament talks about this vengeful God. The New Testament talks about the love of God. The only thing said about God in the New Testament is that God is love, nothing else. In the European tradition, you have an apophatic theology, a negative theology in which you cannot say anything about God. He’s hidden behind concepts. He is outside time and space. Our human language is far too limited to say anything wise about him, anything worth saying. That is my position. I cannot say anything about God, except for that I believe in God. What I mean when I say, ‘I believe in God’, is that there’s something in my life that is the truth. It’s not an intellectual truth. It has more to do with a presence, a way of experiencing life and art, than with any idea or concept or attribute that you imagine as God. The strongest believers are the agnostics, because they don’t know what God is. To me that’s a very fair and wise position. Robinson: But a great deal has been said about God. The approachability of God is related to the traditions of language that surround him. Believing in God is believing in the benevolence of God. It’s believing in the goodness of creation and in certain primary things that are said, and that we accept as truth. Then there are, for example, the ideas of God as vengeful and jealous that stand in the way of this deeper perception that one might have about the nature of God. Fosse: There’s a huge division, for me, between the creator and creation. You can still see God in what is created, but that isn’t his essential being. This is, historically, the polemical difference between positive and negative theology. Emre: Marilynne, what do you mean by the approachability of God? Robinson: Whether you can be at peace with the intuition that you have of God. Emre: I am interested in the attempts you’ve made to ground humanism in religious belief. At least since the Enlightenment, the development of humanism as a philosophy or an ethical program has involved purging it of religion. What is at stake for you in restoring the intuition of God to it? Robinson: The idea of trying to create a humanism purged of religious content is a modern project. It steps out of the tradition of humankind up to that point. If you look at the Renaissance, its idea of humanism comes directly out of the religious traditions that lie behind it. I think the most important humanists are the religious humanists, people like Pico della Mirandola and Dante. We’ve created an artificial inevitability around the modern idea that there’s something appropriate in birthing nihilism or atheism or agnosticism out of a tradition that is profoundly religious. Fosse: When we were talking about knowing something about God, the thinker who has taught me the most – the thinker, who, in a way, made me an organized Catholic – was Meister Eckhardt. He lived in the thirteenth century in Germany, and in France. The way he talked about God was very provocative at the time, but it was very close to another influence in my life: Norwegian Quakerism. The Norwegian Quakers had this concept of the inner light that emanated from inside of you, which brought you closest to God. To hear His voice, you had to listen to silence. God spoke through silence. The Quakers sit in a circle, keep quiet, and try to concentrate on the inner light. If you feel that you can say something good for others, you say it. Otherwise, you keep quiet. I’ve been to Quaker meetings, but I don’t like organizations. I’m an anarchist in that way; it’s a paradox, since I’m also a Catholic. But I’m still very close to Quakerism, which, perhaps, is an extreme form of Protestantism. You take away everything in the Catholic tradition and in the mass, and then, Catholicism and Quakerism can meet. Where do they meet? They meet in the mystery of faith. That’s at the center of Catholicism, and it’s at the center of Quakerism, which places the inner light of the Catholic vision inside the human being. Emre: Jon, what is the history of Norwegian Quakerism? Fosse: The Quakers came to Norway from England. In my family, my grandfather belonged to a group of Quakers in the southwest. It’s always been a very small community, which was part of the problem for me; there are only something like a hundred and fifty organized Quakers in this country. It’s a bit too intimate. That’s the great thing about the Catholic Church, which has a long, diverse tradition in Norway. The churches are full, not because of a few Norwegian converts like myself, but because of immigrants from Poland and the Philippines. They belong to a worldwide movement, with a history that they pretend goes back to St Peter. It’s a story, but it’s their story. If you join a community, you believe its stories, even if they are, in a sense, myths. Emre: Marilynne, how does Jon’s description of the inner light of Quakerism and Catholicism strike you? It reminds me of the revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards, who has been an important figure for you. Robinson: Edwards wrote an essay called ‘A Divine and Supernatural Light’, which is an exaltation to a higher experience of light. He’s talking about seeing light and understanding that it’s an emanation of something more exalted, which has to be apprehended by human beings to have the meaning that it has. I come from the Congregationalist tradition, which is extremely Protestant, very near Quakerism. I also write interpretations of lectionary texts for L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s newspaper. I write for them what I would write for my own church, and they seem to think it’s just fine. It’s very gratifying to know that across a great deal of difference, there is like-mindedness about very essential things. Emre: Both of you are interested in preserving lost or unappreciated traditions – in taking a text, or a thinker, who has been misunderstood by secular culture, and showing us how many of our profane ideas carry a tincture of religious belief, even if we don’t recognize it. Robinson: Talking about Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler, I think that if they were writing today, the essence of what they wrote would be the same thing. They’re not trapped in their time. I don’t feel a nostalgia for the past, but an apprehension that brilliant people were right about many things in the past. The relegation of them to another century ought not to interfere with the fact that it’s the treasure of humanity that people have said such true things. It’s not a conservative impulse of restoration. It’s simply finding gold, knowing that it’s gold. Fosse: Even Plato spoke of the One God. He based his philosophy on God. This was the beginning of the European philosophical tradition. Of course, it was before Christ and Christendom. But still, the feeling of the divine was something that you could get close to. It was independent of your way of believing. You could call it whatever you want, and you could believe in it this way or that way. You can follow this way of thinking all the way through European history, and all the way up to the eighteenth century, when you first encounter atheism and materialism and positivism and a scientific ideal, which has been proven wrong by science itself. The English and the German Romantics were very much against this concept of modernity, and were closer to a kind of religious way of understanding. The same held true for modernism, which was based on Romanticism to a large degree. Emre: But you’re both suspicious of religion as doctrine. In your novels, and in your essays, religion is rarely propositional. It’s a way of apprehending or experiencing the world. But when secular people think about religious people, they often think first and foremost about doctrine. Fosse: If you write doctrine, then you’re a bad writer. If you have some talent as a writer, you don’t do that. You create a universe. If you manage to write well, this universe and its sense of wholeness will say what has to be said. Each part of what you write can say this and that, but then, the wholeness will speak – always, of course, in a silent way. I think that in all great art, and in all great literature, you have this connection. You can see God in it. It isn’t about the subject or the doctrine or the theory. It’s about quality. If it has that quality, it has a transcendental force that is pointing to something. No one can tell exactly what that something is. Emre: Marilynne, do you think the same way? Is that how you write and how you read? Robinson: I think that the great question is: how deeply do you see? How fully do you encounter the fact that the person you’re dealing with is the image of God? The joy of being religious is that you discipline yourself in seeing more deeply than you would otherwise see. The idea of finding the sacred, of finding it implied in the existence of anyone you encounter, is like having scales fall from your eyes. My sense of religion is all bound up with the degree to which the fineness of being an image of God is something that you understand in yourself and that you see in other people. That’s humanism. Fosse: Each and every human being has something that is completely specific to them and at the same time, completely universal. That’s what I would call God, or the part of God in them. If you don’t see that uniqueness in another human being, you reduce the value of that human being to just a body. For me, it goes back how we are created with a soul, and a body, and how no one has never managed to explain the relation between them. Emre: Marilynne, do you feel that no one has ever sufficiently explained the relationship between the body and the soul? Robinson: Absolutely not. I think of the soul as being very deeply integrated with the body. The body is a splendid, beautiful, amazing thing, but the soul is not explained. I think that it’s denied as an experience because it’s not explained. Positivistic sorts of people feel that if they cannot explain something, if they cannot describe it in their own terms, that means it doesn’t exist. But I think that the soul is one of the most deeply felt experiences the human being ever has. Fosse: Yes, body and soul are integrated. That’s almost a dogma in the Christian tradition. It’s like in a work of art what you might call content and form. They have to be integrated completely to make it a great work of art, and this integration, is the spirit of a work of art. It has a purpose of its own. Emre: Jon, you’ve spoken about listening to the silence and hearing a voice. Marilynne, you’ve spoken about the voice of the Reverend John Ames, the narrator of Gilead, coming to you. What is the practice of listening more sensitively that religion has taught you? Robinson: It’s not something I acquired, like a competence in a field. It’s more a willingness; it’s not a choice. It’s an acceptance. I can’t write fiction if I don’t have a voice in my head. And I don’t know where these voices come from, but I know they develop over time. At a certain point, I think I know what to say – or the voice knows what to say. You feel that something is emerging that will matter to you, and you do your best to try to be faithful to it. To think you know where it comes from is a presumption that destroys the project. Fosse: I completely agree. Even if I don’t want to have a message or a doctrine, I still feel when writing that I had something crucial to say. If you are a real writer, then you don’t write for money, or ambition, or to be an artist or a bohemian. You write because it’s a necessity that gives itself to you. It’s a gift. Emre: Marilynne, in one of your most recent essays, you observe that people on the far right ‘believe themselves to be religious’. What is the difference between someone who merely believes himself to be religious and someone who truly is? Is there a particular political urgency to this distinction? Robinson: The problem is to defend Christianity, to defend religion. The idea that religion has been claimed by people who cut off the aid to the hungry masses of the world and called themselves Christian. You have to defend Christianity from associations with people that will abuse it. For the sake of most people who, at this point, have very little independent experience of religion, you have to tell them that the great moral energies behind the culture do not endorse cutting off food aid. They don’t endorse the impoverishment of poor or irrational hostility. Fosse: Christianity became connected to the political powers in the Roman Empire. That was how it became a world religion. And that connection has remained. But it goes back. If you go back to the roots of Christianity, it isn’t political in the sense of power struggle at all. Robinson: The politics unfolds as the care that we take of one another. That’s what it ultimately comes down to – how much latitude we give each other, how much opportunity to flourish we give each other. That’s a religious question, because we’re talking about the image of God. If you see people insulted and deprived over and over again, you know that you’re seeing something that is both political and religious in the most negative sense of both words. The idea that you actually can separate them is kind of amazing to me. We’re told very explicitly in the Bible about lending and giving and feeding. Politics is the method through which these things are done or not done. Fosse: But if literature becomes political, if it has a doctrine, then it becomes bad literature, like in social realism that was very popular in Norway, in the 1970s. If you try to adapt literature to a political intention, then it ends up as bad writing. Literature has to be there for its own sake. But, by being there for its own sake, it also has ethical and political stakes. Robinson: Well, I don’t write the political in my fiction. It’s not political, but I write political things so that that burden doesn’t fall on my fiction. Fosse: But all art is political. If it’s good art, it’s political because of its aesthetic quality. This also gives it an ethical quality, which has political implications. I think that some good writers have been very bad from a political point of view, but still, the writing isn’t. Knut Hamsun was a Nazi, no doubt, but he was an extremely good writer. You have to separate a great writer from his political thinking. Emre: Hamsun is the great Norwegian example. Marilynne, who would you say is the classic American example of a great writer with terrible politics? Pound? Robinson: The writer who excites my students and is a very destructive influence is Nietzsche. He is not a local boy, but nevertheless, he speaks to the sophomore heart. Emre: Where do you see the destructiveness? Robinson: Nietzsche encourages a kind of elitism that young people, especially people from some degree of privilege are happy to adopt. They’re happy to think that they’re excused from morality that would teach them any kind of humility. Frankly, young people are vulnerable to that. I don’t see good writers who write in his tradition. Fosse: But I think that lies in the tradition of translating the German word Übermensch into English as ‘Superman’. The Nietzsche they are thinking about isn’t the real Nietzsche. There’s a problem with the translation. Robinson: Well, I’ve read enough just to keep up with my students. Nietzsche was a sick man. Emre: Does the future of literature and religion feel like one of plenitude for each of you? Robinson: I think that religion is beautiful and that it comes very naturally to human beings. You look at the world, and everyone’s being religious in his or her own way. My church is next to a university. There are always clusters of churches around universities, and the students are attending church. The Methodist church is the church of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. And I’m not a Methodist and so, I have to deal with that. But in any case, it is a fantastically vast vocabulary of experience. The accumulation of it over time is a richness added to richness, added to richness. It’s something that human beings have made for themselves, in the sense that it’s a spontaneous product of human nature. I think that the absence of it is an artificial deprivation. But it will pass. Fosse: I think you cannot possibly explain life in a scientific or positivistic or materialistic way. There’s a space for art, and for literature. It’s the space for religion. I cannot understand people who accept the quality of literature, but don’t accept that this might have something to do also with the religious dimension of life. I was once invited to the Vatican to meet the pope. Even if the artists don’t need the church, the church needs the artists, and that has to do with the transcendental dimension of all good writing. But when I was young, I hated the Norwegian Lutheran church. I left it at sixteen. As a child, I had no belief. I thought it was pure stupidity. For a long time, in Europe, in Norway, it was impossible to be a writer and a believer at the same time. For my generation, it was a kind of rebellion. But things changed with postmodernism and the theological turn in French phenomenology, in books like Jean-Luc Marion’s God Without Being. I don’t think we will go back to atheism or positivism. It isn’t possible anymore. Emre: Marilynne, did you ever have a youthful lapse of faith? Robinson: The only moment I had of that kind was when I was still in high school, and my brother was at college. Whenever he came home, he brought all his books. And I was there reading all the books that he brought home from college and I read myself into atheism. It was as if a ceiling came down on my head, and walls came in. The reduction in scale of my imagination, of my existence, was so radical. I would have run screaming from this little room if it had been an actual little room. It was a very vivid experience for me, the feeling of loss and depletion. I’m not talking about whether I felt the absence of some sort of protection or assurance or anything, it was the closing down of the implications of experience. I just couldn’t stand it. Emre: How did you reverse out of the atheism that you had read yourself into? Robinson: My religion when I was young was basically a matter of thinking I was very much contained in my own experience. My family was not particularly religious at all. It was like something that occurred to me, that was real to me out of my own experience, which meant that when I realized how antagonistic this worldview seemed to me, I could put it aside. I could find my way back to my habitual way of thinking and perceiving. Fosse: For me, it was the other way around. I felt that the church, its doctrine, it was reducing life too much and throwing away what gave life value for me. Emre: When did you come back? Fosse: It was my own writing. I didn’t know where it came from. That opened up another dimension, and after being in that dimension, I needed to call it God. Or, at least, God had something to do with that dimension. And then, I needed company from other strange people. I’ve always been a kind of religious writer, but it’s only around fifteen years ago that I became a member of a church. I don’t have the belief of child. I have the belief of an elderly man, or a middle aged one. Marilynne Robinson is the author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, Lila and Jack, and most recently Reading Genesis. Her essay ‘The Waste Land’, published in Granta 15: The Fall of Saigon, is free to read online. Jon Fosse is the author of Septology, The Shining, and the forthcoming Vaim, an extract from which appeared in Granta 175: Scandinavia. Image © Wolfgang Hasselmann