In Marilynne Robinson’s latest book, Reading Genesis, she carries the theology implicit in her fiction back to its scriptural source. “So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word ‘good’ so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing,” marvels the pastor John Ames in Gilead. Passages like these provide the opportunity to inhabit, if only for a moment, a mind that can sustain such a vision of goodness—distilling the most hopeful and joyous parts of Christianity without lapsing into hokeyness. Part of what makes Robinson’s sense of goodness so plausible, and so compelling, is that even characters of astounding decency like Ames are also as clearly fallen as anyone else. Like Robinson’s novels, the Book of Genesis is about the faithfulness of God that surrounds human striving and suffering. The latest of Robinson’s attempts at resurfacing the beauty and truth of Christian faith in the face of its popular distortion and devaluation, Reading Genesis aims high: to establish the absolute goodness of God. 

Robinson opens Reading Genesis with the suggestion that “the Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil.” For Robinson, this entails the reconciliation of “the darkest aspects of the reality we experience” with “the goodness of God and of Being itself against which this darkness stands out so sharply.” Already in the third sentence of the book, Robinson is speaking to both religious and secular readers: even if they have no interest in God, there remains the pressing question of the justification of “Being itself.” As in her fiction, Robinson is ecumenical, translating her theological outlook for the religiously alienated. She understands that theodicy is not merely a religious problem but that secular questions about the meaning and worthwhileness of life have the very same structure. 

In Genesis, God walks the selfsame ground as God’s creatures, makes covenants with them, even bargains with them. There is nothing strange, Robinson tells us, in the fact that Genesis moves from cosmology and the origin of the universe to petty human squabbles in just a couple of chapters. “Human beings are at the center of it all,” she writes. “Love and grief are, in this infinite Creation, things of the kind we share with God. The fact that they have their being in the deepest reaches of our extensionless and undiscoverable souls only makes them more astonishing, over against the roaring cosmos. That they exist at all can only be proof of a tender solicitude.” Evil is not the only thing that needs explaining. Love is harder to reconcile with a merely material universe than evil is with a God-governed one. This is why, for Robinson, love unceasingly discloses the divine—not merely some alien transcendent organizing principle, but an immanent and personal God. 

For Robinson, everything follows from this idea of love. The very “narrative sequence” of Genesis “establishes a profound and essential assertion of the sacred good”: creation precedes the Fall. When God created the world, God “saw everything that He had made, and indeed, it was very good.” How could human trifles ever touch the fundaments of God’s designs? In this view, the world and especially the human beings who inhabit it are unshakably sacred. Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, she notes, does nothing to alter the fact that Cain was created in the image of God. After Cain kills Abel, God forgives him and protects him, marking him and saying, “Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” Traditionally, the mark of Cain has been considered a curse. But with characteristic grace and optimism, Robinson remarks, “For all we know, it could have made him disarmingly beautiful.” Not just Cain but all creation is essentially beautiful, for Robinson. “This world is suited to human enjoyment,” she writes, “in anticipation of human pleasure which the Lord presumably shares.” Even after the Fall, nature arrests our gaze: “The world is imbued with … reminders that there is a beautiful intention and assurance expressed in every perception we have of loveliness in the natural world.”  

There is great comfort in Robinson’s conviction that the share of goodness in creation is far greater than whatever evil may be found in humankind. But despite her generally pluralistic outlook, she implies that this comfort is superior for religious people (particularly for Christians) than for nonbelievers. “To propose a divine actor in any account of things is widely assumed to be ignorant, childish, and primitive,” she writes. “This might be fair, the judgment true and deserved, if the theist view that divine origins have implanted a sacredness in existence could be disproved, and if theism were barren of great thought, high aesthetic achievement, humane influence. Atheism is a relatively minor element in world culture, so its contributions are harder to assess.” This is an apologetic book, a defense of a fundamentally Christian view of life. The beauty and goodness of the world are and must be, she insists, sustained by transcendent intention.  

But as Robinson recognizes in the first paragraph of the book, positing transcendent intention poses some problems. As many have asked before her: If God knows everything and if God is all powerful, then why should there be evil at all? Couldn’t God have prevented the Fall? Couldn’t God have created Cain to coexist with his brother, rather than cut him down in cold blood? Robinson answers: God would not be God if we understood. And yet isn’t understanding precisely what theodicy is after? What does it mean to say that God is good if we don’t know what we mean when we say it? 

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Rather than moving verse by verse, Robinson treats Genesis as a narrative whole. Her commentary itself forms a unity—no chapters, no section headings, just an occasional paragraph break. Robinson attacks secular scholarship for trying to break Genesis down. Academic religious-studies scholars tend to treat Genesis as an all-too-human text edited together not quite coherently from multiple sources. Robinson does not oppose the idea that Genesis has multiple authors, but she regards the text as meticulously designed.¹1 And though she does not adopt the old tradition that Moses was the author of the Torah, she comes close, affirming her belief that “Moses, he to whom the Lord spoke face-to-face, and his tradition are primary influences on the composition of Genesis.” To affirm that Moses was a historical person is already to scandalize a healthy portion of Hebrew Bible scholars. 

The secular mind sustains the idea of the whole only with great difficulty. Religiously speaking (or at least, Christianly speaking), the whole is the original, essential thing. Disunity is an event, an aberration: all that is began with the All in All, and though we suffer many modes of alienation, God’s inscrutable will subtends it all. But secularly speaking (that is, materially, scientifically), the cosmos does not usually present itself to us as a whole, but rather as ever-intensifying chaos with little pockets of order. 

The problem of the whole is literary as well as cosmological. If the universe is, at bottom, chaos, then Nietzsche is right to say that “the poet’s whole conception is nothing but precisely that bright image which healing nature projects before us after a glance into the abyss.” Stories are a means of falsifying existence so that we might bear it better. And since on this view, literature is merely therapeutic, it is ultimately arbitrary, infinitely interpretable. The wholeness of literature is illusory—we can and should do with it what we see fit. So there is something seductive about Robinson’s suggestion that Genesis must be read as a real unity. The distinctly religious vision that Robinson offers her secular readers consists not just in her meditations on beauty or goodness, but rather in her conviction that Genesis is a whole text that points to something beyond itself. And this wholeness is nothing less than a glimpse of God.  

But the idea of the whole is ugly. If our existence is part of a rational whole, it becomes difficult not to ascribe all sorts of nasty business to God. Robinson does not, largely, shy away from this fact. She draws it out by contrasting the Israelite and Babylonian conceptions of the universe. In the Babylonian flood story, the gods flood the earth because human beings were too noisy and kept interrupting their sleep. But in Genesis, God floods the earth as “a judgment brought on by human evil,” as Robinson puts it—not arbitrary destruction, but calculated punishment. “The character of everything, good fortune and bad, is changed when its ultimate meaning awaits the great unfolding of His intention,” Robinson writes. But even if God does have a plan, the immensity of it is unfathomable to us: “So the problem of evil is not solved but is instead infinitely complicated.” 

While the whole of creation escapes our understanding, Robinson illustrates how God’s faithfulness continually shows up in human affairs. In the story of Jacob, for instance, when Jacob steals his brother Esau’s blessing, deceiving his dying father and betraying his brother‚ Jacob’s sins do nothing to damage the covenant that God made with his grandfather, Abraham: “The covenant is not contingent upon human virtue, even human intention,” Robinson writes. “It is sustained by the will of God, which is so strong and steadfast that it can allow space within providence for people to be who they are, for humanity to be what it is.” Or as Martin Luther reputedly put it, “God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick.” Our cruelty and selfishness and depravity and weakness will, somehow, be put to good use by God.   

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Despite the beauty of Robinson’s interpretation, the biblical narratives of providence can sometimes seem a little thin beside her fiction. Compare poor forsaken Esau with Robinson’s depiction of Jack Boughton in Home. We get to hear Jack reflect on his own felt disfavor by God. We see everything from his anguish over his sins to his quirks. By the end of the novel, I felt that I knew Jack, at least in some small way. So Jack’s estrangement from God is palpable, I can feel it for myself and consider how similar it is to my own. I can understand Jack Boughton, but I will never be able to understand Esau—not without imagining details that scripture does not give me. Perhaps in certain ways, then, poetic enlargements of biblical stories (Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, Kierkegaard’s portraits of Abraham in Fear and Trembling) are more theologically productive than straightforward commentary. Insofar as theological problems are personal problems, we need to understand them through people, not exegesis. 

God’s faithfulness to Jack presents itself rather more ambiguously than it does in Robinson’s account of Esau. Early in the novel, Jack invites his sister Glory to try and save his soul, to inspire the right feelings so that he might change his ways. Glory meekly replies, “I think I like your soul the way it is.” Glory here mediates a grace unexplained. Later in the novel, when Jack’s sins are more apparent, she repeats herself, saying, “Your soul seems fine to me. I don’t know what that means, either.” The only honest thing one can say about grace is “I don’t know what that means.” Though we are totally depraved, by nature utterly apart from God, Jack is accepted and loved, and the particulars of that love need not and cannot be said. All we know is that goodness will abide in its unsteady ways. 

But in Robinson’s reading of Genesis, goodness is not unpredictable. Every event serves for the strengthening of God’s chosen people, who “will instruct and bless multitudes.” This fact of providence, for Robinson, is “the world’s best hope.” It is a beautiful vision. I would love to believe that the worst things I have done will all eventually turn out for good. I would love to believe that God is straightforwardly faithful in the way that Robinson describes. I would love to believe that our hope lies within, not beyond, the vale of tears in which we live, that the world will gradually be redeemed within history. I would.  

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When I was a teenager, my younger sister got leukemia and died a year later. Ten years on, I have yet to see anyone suffer more protractedly and senselessly. I was an atheist at the time, so her illness and death did not raise theodical questions for me. But it did instill in me a sense that there is something evil in nature, and insofar as we are a part of nature, something evil in us.  

In The City of God, St. Augustine gives an account of the evil that’s inside us. For Augustine, the first sin was pride: an unwillingness to be a mere part of the whole of creation, which breeds the impudent desire to transcend one’s given position in the divine order. The punishment for our pride is that our bodies disobey us. The human being’s punishment “is nothing but his own disobedience to himself, so that because he would not do what he could, he now wills to do what he cannot … against his volition his mind is often troubled; and his flesh experiences pain, grows old, and dies, and endures all manner of suffering.” Our bodies possess a will of their own because we wanted to be God. We were, in Augustine’s account, cursed for this.  

It’s a cliché to say that sin is like cancer—it grows and grows and eats everything good and beautiful and healthy. But really, cancer is like sin. One cell decides that it no longer wants to be a mere part of the whole, so it goes mad reproducing itself and corrupts everything, as if pride itself were being written into the body. And not just in adults, who we could at least imagine are receiving some sort of desert, but children too. The idea of the whole commits you to this sort of logic. God’s providence cannot simply be the surprisingly good results of evil acts. It must also be present in the suffering and death of children. And yet that is no reason to believe or disbelieve in Him. If God is, God is. As Robinson understands well, God is not an explanatory system, not a consolation, not an idea. God is He Who Is. My failure to understand God is no more an argument for God’s nonexistence than my failure to understand why anything exists at all. 

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For a long time, I thought I might eventually read something that would make me believe. Plenty of books helped me understand the believers in my life and convinced me of the worth of faith. But as Jack Boughton puts it, “It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them.” The world seemed cold and senseless to me, but I could feel the faith of others and took some small consolation in that. Years ago, a man I stood next to in church asked me why I didn’t say the creed or take communion. I told him that I didn’t believe in any of it. He told me, “Don’t worry, I’ll believe it for you.”  

I worry that Robinson’s Reading Genesis will function like that for its secular audience. Robinson is as compelling as believers come. Reading Genesis is clever, morally serious and sincere. But I wonder if this sort of book can prevent readers from becoming serious and sincere themselves. I don’t mean to say that Reading Genesis would have been a better book if it were more neatly concerned with making people convert to Christianity. Its problem is that it makes Christianity seem more palatable than it really is. Just as Robinson’s presentation eclipses God’s wrath with God’s forgiveness, her book sometimes risks making Christianity seem as if it were all consolation. But if Christianity is only a consolation, then it is just one more tranquilizer on offer in the marketplace of ideas. One more means of poetizing life into something bearable. 

After my sister died, I put my faith in the salvific power of interpretation. What I needed, I felt, was to find a meaning for it all. What I wanted was not finally knowledge or self-understanding, but rather a story to inhabit—the man who won wisdom from loss. My atheism was no obstacle to finding beauty or goodness in the world—I found it in art; in the human spirit; in moments of blistering, absolute presence. The trouble was rather that atheism has just as much difficulty as religion with explaining evil. Intellectually, I understood that my sister died because one of her cells failed to replicate properly. But understanding that is no more satisfying than believing that God willed it. 

But whether evil is a witness against God or merely an intractable puzzle in its own right, what is one to do about it? For Robinson, we must forgive evil. Robinson stresses that God had to forgive Creation for Creation to continue. In Robinson’s reading of the flood story, God “repented of the destruction He had caused, and even though, being God, He could have remade the world so that evil and violence were excluded from it, He forgave, or forbore, the corrupt thoughts of human hearts … He chose to let us be, to let time yield what it will—within the vast latitude granted by providence.” And the redemption of the world, in Robinson’s reading, is not just God’s job; it takes place through human forgiveness. Just as Joseph forgave his brothers for their treachery, permitting them to “assume their essential, though unexplained and unrecorded role in sacred history,” every act of forgiveness “is rewarded by consequences that could not have been foreseen or imagined.” 

This might seem like easy wisdom, after the words “turn the other cheek” have been floating around for a couple millennia. But the forgiveness that Robinson is after is the real deal. Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery. There was no sense in which Joseph could have understood, could have fully empathized with his brothers’ decision to cast him out. Evil like that is unintelligible. Which means that Joseph’s forgiving them had nothing to do with understanding them or their motives.  

What is forgiveness, if not understanding? Robinson describes God’s decision not to wipe out all of humanity this way: “The Lord, in the thoughts of His heart, has yielded to His love for the incorrigible—in Old Testament terms, His Absalom; in New Testament terms, the Prodigal; in theological terms, the lot of us.” Forgiveness is to yield to love, even and especially when it is insane to do so. I won’t pronounce judgment on whether yielding to love is always rewarded externally, as Robinson thinks it is. When you forgive, you love what you do not and cannot understand. There’s no explanation for how one might come to love like this. There are no psychological tricks, no spiritual recipe. Either one does or one does not. If one loves absurdly, it is only by grace. And if one wants to love absurdly but cannot, it is a stark reminder of our smallness. Love is a duty that the will cannot fulfill.   

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It is there, in experiencing absolute limits within myself, in my failure to love and forgive, that I found God. Of course, I never found a story that redeemed my sister’s death. I had thought I could busy myself with the poetry of living, but after a while, I discovered that I could not live on narrative alone. Not only did I fail to find a story that could explain the evil outside of me, I could not even manage the evil within me. I have long sought to discover why I am as selfish and dishonest as I am; why I am so callous toward my neighbor; why I love to hold a grudge. I have found a hundred convincing explanations. And yet none of them have ever changed me to my satisfaction—my will is something apart from any story I can tell about it. “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Or as Wittgenstein put it, “Explanations come to an end somewhere.” When you experience yourself as being entirely beyond your own control and forgiveness feels out of reach, prayer is all you have.  

After all, who am I supposed to forgive? Should I forgive my sister for dying? Should I forgive the doctors for not doing more? Should I forgive everyone who has ever cursed the ground upon which we live and die? Should I forgive God? (Blasphemous thought!) Forgiveness has its limits, at least for fallen creatures like us. But I think we can get by without Robinson’s optimism; we can do without simple affirmations of God’s goodness. If I say, “God is good,” the only thing I can understand by those words, if I am granted the grace to understand them, is: I am guilty. As Father Zosima suggests in The Brothers Karamazov, “There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friend, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all.” This need not be cause for despair; there can be joy in guilt. I might not be able to locate myself within a providential whole or witness the healing of the world (or of my sister). I cannot forgive what they’ve suffered. But I can ask for forgiveness.