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Reading Genesis
A Review of Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis.
In a conference given at the École des sciences politiques in 1948 Paul Claudel spoke of tendencies in contemporary exegesis by drawing on the gruesome story told at the end of Judges about the Levite’s concubine given up to the delinquents of Gibeah. Her dead body was cut into pieces and sent to Israel’s tribes with the message: ‘Has such a thing ever happened since the day the Israelites came from the land of Egypt until this day? Consider it, take counsel, and speak out.’
Claudel asks if the biblical body has not likewise been violated, reduced to a corpse whose fragments are dispatched across the land as troubling, in themselves meaningless codes for consideration — of what?
The image is drastic, probably inadmissible. But it spoke to me when I first read Claudel’s talk after many years of dissecting and reorganising biblical texts, questioning their origin and authorship, breathing the thick air of hermeneutic scepticism. In retrospect I ask myself how I could have invested so much time in careful biblical study yet be left with such a tenuous sense of coherence, of how the whole thing fitted together. And, yes, Scripture did end up seeming lifeless, cold.
Monastic life taught me ways of approaching the Bible differently. First by patient lectio divina, which is simply a matter of remaining submerged in the Word, soaking there like muddy overalls in a Persil admixture. The enzymes did their work. I started seeing Scripture from within. Then I read, with delight, the Fathers’ commentaries. Ah, the discovery of Origen! Dead bones started rattling, coming together, bone on bone, and there was breath in them. Origen instilled the courage I needed to read the Cistercians — Bernard, Guerric, and the rest — many both poets and philosophers, attentive to the text’s particular letter and to the unifying Spirit within it. Louis Bouyer’s The Meaning of Sacred Scripture was oxygen; so were the translations and biblical essays of Martin Buber. Again and again I read Dei Verbum, unquestionably the most seminal text to issue from Vatican II.
‘In composing the sacred books’, the council affirmed, ‘God chose men and while employed by Him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted.’ In a Catholic view, the Bible is not reducible to a collection of oracles given by dictation. Such do occur — in the case of the proclamation of the Law or in that of the words of Jesus — but the Bible is more; and God is at work in the whole, inspiring, too, recording and redaction, never cancelling human creativity, but guiding it to serve his blessed purpose. On these terms, the minute analysis of Scripture becomes exhilarating. One sees that the skill set of modern exegesis does not undermine a doctrine of divine inspiration. It prepares us to see inspiration’s subtlety. It is well to establish the sequence by which a text was composed, to scrutinise contributing influence, but this is propaedeutic exercise. The decisive task is to discern what the ensuing whole means, then to interpret that meaning as a present, gracious word to the Church here and now.
Had it not been for the kerfuffle of intercontinental travel and anxiety about my carbon footprint, I should have flown to Iowa this
summer to give Marilynne Robinson a bunch of yellow roses as thanks for showing us elegantly how such a way of reading Scripture is applied in practice. Were I a seminary rector or the dean of a divinity school, I would make her Reading Genesis mandatory reading. I’ve already recommended it to several friends for the sheer pleasure of it.
In a sense there is little about this book that is new. Robinson does not present radically novel theories. She simply sets out from the premiss that Genesis forms a coherent whole and must, if we are to understand it responsibly, be studied as such. So rare has this approach become that it seems revolutionary. Fragments are reassembled. An integral body emerges. A beautiful body. Which breathes.
In no way does Robinson dismiss the accomplishments of textual scholarship. She honours them, curtsies in their direction, but stresses their auxiliary nature. She does not parade as a biblical scholar. She is, quite simply, as the book’s title says, a reader — and reading is something she happens to be fiercely good at.
Outlining her approach, Robinson remarks that ‘for us moderns there is a kind of safety in finding a taint of factionalism and self-interest in anything human beings have done’. She sees this tendency at work in the excesses of a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ tending to equate faith with credulity.
No one wants to be found among the credulous. Belief itself exists in disturbing proximity to credulity, a fact that has afflicted the church with a species of tepid anguish for generations. I am proposing here that there is a hermeneutics of self-protectiveness that has disabled interpretation and that has generalised into an abandonment of metaphysics as a legitimate mode of thought.
No tepid anguish here. By risking interpretation, fearless of metaphysical deduction, seeing ‘ongoing history as meaningful and revelatory’, she draws sense out of the Bible’s first book and makes that sense come across as contemporarily pertinent.
Robinson brings out the three-dimensionality of character. The Bible, after all, shows ‘an interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature’. Regarding the exposure of Noah’s nakedness, which provoked a violent reaction, she writes, ‘the fact that there is no fault here, only his humiliation, is consistent with common human behaviour’. She enables us to hear the ‘very distinctive voice of Rebekah’. I had never noticed it! Considering Jacob’s dealings with Laban, she observes, ‘This clan of Padan-aram folk are a slippery lot. Jacob might be said to have come by his foibles honestly.’ She posits the Egyptianisation of Joseph by examining his dreams, which are ‘like the dreams of the Egyptians, little fragments of allegory with veiled meaning, rather than Hebrew dreams, in which God is a speaking presence’.
Scrutinising foibles and apparent happenstance no less than sublime ideals, examining their consequence, she develops an account of providence that makes of this book a work of theology, showing God’s loyalty to humankind and the irony that providence is often ‘served by just those steps that are taken to defeat it’.
Robinson’s interpretive intention is partly to ask what Genesis might say to us now. An even more essential part of her intention, though, which takes one aback in a wonderful way, is praise: ‘I am as intent’, she writes, ‘on magnifying the Lord as if I were a painter or a composer’, only to add, ‘but my first obligation in commenting on the text is to be faithful to the text’. She is.
Much can be learned from this book, which, like Genesis, often communicates using ‘the art of showing rather than telling’. Robinson is given to working in series. Gilead has so far given rise to three further novels in a cycle. I shall reread Reading Genesis hoping for the appearance, one providential day, of Reading Exodus.
This review was published in this week’s (17/24 August) The Tablet.