By JUSTIN HAWKINS<\/strong><\/p>\n Marilynne Robinson\u2019s authorship of Gilead <\/em>is the most convincing argument for reincarnation that has ever entered my mind.\u00a0 That is not because the book is in any way about Eastern religion; it is not.\u00a0 Rather, it is entirely from the perspective of an Iowan pastor in his seventies.\u00a0 But Robinson makes his perspective so rich, so full of Christian joy and pathos \u2013 in sum, so very real \u2013 that one is sure she must have been just such a pastor in her former life.<\/p>\n But since reincarnation is not in harmony with Christianity, it cannot serve as an explanation for this book.\u00a0 So the second best explanation must be the case: Marilynne Robinson is a genius.\u00a0 And such a judgment would find ample support; Gilead <\/em>was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and has continued to attract a sizeable and eclectic readership, both at the popular level and among the literati, for nearly a decade since its publication. Gilead<\/em> is the epistolary reflections of Reverend Ames, an aging country parson, toward his youthful son of a second, post-widower marriage. The aging Ames is concerned that his impending death will occur before his son is of sufficient age to grasp the depths of his fatherly and ministerial wisdom, so he takes to writing it all down.\u00a0 The result is a missive of such beauty that any pastor\u2019s son would rejoice to receive it.<\/p>\n Rev. Ames is something of a Midwestern mystic.\u00a0 His meditations on the beauty of nature and its echoes of the beauty of the Creator God recall Jonathan Edwards who is, by Robinson\u2019s own admission, one of her foremost intellectual inspirations.\u00a0 In Robinson one finds a properly balanced Christian view of nature: it is neither to be pillaged for its resources (contra those libertarians and arch-capitalists for whom the only value is that which is monetarily quantifiable), nor deified in its own right (contra the neo-paganism of Wendell Berry). \u00a0He also reflects on whether the life of a country parson constitutes a life well lived, even if its ceaseless work is met with no earthly accolade. He mulls the wisdom of the Midwestern \u2018ancients\u2019 of a generation past: \u201cTo be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear. I have a lot of respect for that view\u201d (56).\u00a0 And among these scattered proverbs, the foremost characteristic of his thought is a reverent wonder\u2014wonder at both God and the world.\u00a0 And in that wonder he revels: \u201cI never could have imagined this world if I hadn\u2019t spent almost eight decades walking around in it\u201d (64).\u00a0 To be privy to his nostalgic reminiscences is to steal a glimpse into a devout man\u2019s prayer chamber; the foremost challenge is reminding oneself that this is a work of fiction.<\/p>\n That Robinson\u2019s view of reality echoes that of Edwards is no accident.\u00a0 She has dedicated herself to advancing a Calvinistic view of culture that is often so subtle as to draw the reader in almost unwittingly, as if the sheer beauty of the vision wields a seductive power.\u00a0 Yet in Gilead <\/em>we are being seduced to joy, not to heartbreak. This is the joy of Calvin himself. Yet only a theologically astute reader feels the contours of the Genevan pastor\u2019s mind in the meditations from the plains of Iowa. This Calvinism is not the reductionist version that boils down the insights of Calvin and Edwards into Five Points, or into the \u201csovereignty of God,\u201d a modern euphemism for Predestination.\u00a0 Rather, this Calvinism takes its cues from a Calvin for whom the world is the theater of God, and from an Edwards for whom every beauty we encounter is but a dim image and a fleeting shadow of the ineffable beauty of the divine \u2013 a beauty we may, by the grace of God, one day hope to enjoy perfectly.<\/p>\n Nor is this beauty only to be found in extraordinary circumstances.\u00a0 Burke and Kant have given us the language of the \u201csublime,\u201d but Robinson is embarked upon a \u201cre-enchantment of the ordinary.\u201d\u00a0 Thus Rev. Ames is impressed by the ineffable beauty of water, which he cannot consider without hearkening to the baptismal font, and of food, which always and everywhere reminds him of the powerful symbol of the Eucharist. Historic Christianity supplanted old pagan notions of sacred groves and deified rivers, but the world it describes is not thereby less enchanted. The Psalmist heard the glory of God declared from the heavens; Edwards saw it in the mechanics of a spider; Robinson sees it in the prism of a raindrop.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/driftlessareareview.files.wordpress.com\/2010\/05\/gilead1.jpg\")
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