The Death of Adam and Why We Should Laugh

In response to the post "Critical of Critical Theory?" by - and the comments on that post by Adunare, I offer up the following meditation on Marilynne Robinson's collection of essays The Death of Adam, in which many of the questions regarding critical theory and postmodern thought are explored. Before venturing into Robinson's essays, however, I'd like to re-iterate the quotation by R.R. Reno in the former post: Critical theory plays a significant and important role in contemporary society: it de-mystifies and de-legitimates inherited beliefs. [...] These days critical theory is an intellectual project, the main goal of which is to show that conventional ways of thinking are hopelessly naïve, if not malign and corrupt. It is a deck-clearing operation... . Though not responding directly to Reno, Robinson puts forward that the deck - in her discussion, belief in the Christian God - has not been cleared at all but, rather, the entire game has been abandoned. She puts it this way:

What if, in important numbers, we believe there is a God who is mysterious and demanding, with whom one is not easily at peace? What if we believe there will be a reckoning? [These beliefs do not seem to have been forsaken but they do seem to have] simply dropped out of the cultural conversation. And, at the same time we adopted the very small view of ourselves and others, as consumers and patients and members of interest groups, creatures too minor, we may somehow hope, for great death to pause over us. If we still believe in the seriousness of being human, while we have lost the means of acknowledging this belief, even in our thoughts, then profound anxiety, whose origins we would be at a loss to name, seems to me an inevitable consequence. And this may account for both the narrowness and the intensity of the fiction that contains us. It is our comfort and our distraction. We are spiritual agoraphobes. (from "Facing Reality")

The "fiction" Robinson evokes here can be seen as the idea that has somehow become a cultural worldview - that "Truths are fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten." For Robinson, this fiction we inhabit - a paranoid culture of perpetual suspician where we cannot play any game because we are continually clearing the deck - is unbearably and debilitatingly narrow. I concure with Robinson in that though we may still believe in the seriousness of being human (that we are indeed made in God's own image) that we have lost the means of acknowledging this truth as Truth. Because of this I also resonate with Adunare's decreasing enthusiasm for the possibilities supposedly put forward by the postie canon for theistic scholars.

That said, there is something valuable in interrogating inherited beliefs. The key is not to be seduced into the comfortable tautology that, "truthfully," truths are fictions that have forgotten their fictionality - a tautology Roland Barthes calls "myth." To return to Reno's metaphor: when clearing the deck becomes the game we've narrowed the possibilites of play. Play, a popular postie term, should never be separated from the conditional phrase, "so that". Here I return to Robinson, though in another essay on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in which she elucidates Bonhoeffer's distinction between Relgion and "the church."

Religion for Bonhoeffer (and for Karl Barth before him) was what Reno calls "inherited belief": man-made, fallible, but taken as Truth. To show that this "Truth" was a fiction that would not admit to its own fictionality or fallibility, Bonhoeffer put forward the idea of "the church" or authentic Christianity. To do this Bonhoeffer spoke of religion as merely the garment of biblical Christianity, not its essence. Robinson writes: That "religion" has made inappropriate claims, [and] that God and "the church" should stand in opposition to it, is not a new idea for Bonhoeffer. Surely what is to be noted in all this is Bonhoeffer's steadfast refusal to condemn the "religionless" world, and his visionary certainty that it is comprehended in the divine presence (from "Deietrich Bonhoeffer"). If I read Robinson right, Bonhoeffer de-mystified Relgion proper by interrogating it with the idea of authentic, biblical Christianity so that inherited beliefs would not take the place of the One on whom those beliefs were originally predicated.

If Derrida can be trusted, deconstructive "play" has a serious side to it: clearing the deck so that the game can continue to be played anew. De-mystification has a purpose but when it becomes an end in and of itself, when it becomes cut off from its contigent "so that," when clearing the deck becomes the game entire, we have, as Robinson asserts, lost something of the seriousness of being human. This seriousness is what keeps us from succumbing to spiritual agorophobia: it is faith. But faith, for Robinson, in all its seriousness, is given its very breath by laughture: not cynical, snide chuckling, but wholehearted belly laughing brought on by all-out, uncontrollable rejoicing in the God who has made us in His image! Robinson does not seem to negate questioning, interrogating, or de-mystifying our inherited beliefs (she does this in her essays); but this is done so that the reader is not left wandering epistomoligcally but is restored to knowing that all knowing is in God, comes from His hand, and has its being in Him alone. And God, according the G.K. Chesterton, is a God of mirth.

To borrow a question from Jean Genet, what would happen if someone started laughing? [...] What if we understood our vulnerabilities to mean we are human, and so are our friends and our enemies, and so are our cities and books and gardens, our inspirations, our errors. We weep human tears, like Hamlet, like Hecuba. If the universe is only all we have so far seen, we are its great marvel. [...] This being human - people have loved it through plague and famine and siege. And Dante, who knew the world about suffering, had a place in hell for people who were grave when they might have rejoiced. (from "Facing Reality")