WALKING WEST IN OLD ST. JOHN’S CEMETERY

This isn’t a poem, It’s my memorized map of Block 3: From Oakland's edge to Horseshoe Drive, Recorded graves orient me.

First stretch from Hotka through Donahue Grave one near our gate north to twenty two. Morrison four six, Wineke two five In between, babies who didn’t survive.

Frisbee four seven, sixty eight Cermak. Eighty eight Kirk, seventy six Slezak. Trio of Donovans in one O’three, One nineteen Mr. Barney McCarthy.

One four five Hogans, Svatos one two one. One seven one Wendling, one four six Smith: Aaron. One eighty one only Loughman and White, Neighboring block now weaves into my sight.

Farrell one ninety eight, solitary.

Two two one Bauer Joseph, Anna, Mary. Two two five: Jakub Cipera's family, Ending the row at two three eight: Loney.

Two fifty three McCune, we’re almost done. Finally O’Connor in two forty one. Records long lost or not kept for this space. We look but can’t find them, in any case.

Here I witch for graves, here I dowse for bones, Finger script shallow on white marble stones. Hot dusk among monuments knocked askew, Toppled, broken, lost; memorizing you.

hen Israel’s King David opines in Psalm 2, “Why do the nations rage and the people plot a vain thing?” he might just as easily have been referencing the social unrest we see in US cities of today as the sociopolitical tensions of the ancient world. While today’s cities burn, so do social media platforms, calling out anyone, living or dead, that offends the current cultural zeitgeist. Statues of Confederate generals like Stonewall Jackson have been pulled down in Southern states. Iconic films such as Gone with the Wind have been removed from streaming services. Historic branding icons such as Aunt Jemima and Land O’ Lakes have been retired. All this has been done in the name of “wokeness,” the new and imperative social virtue.

Neither has the Western canon evaded censure. Most ironically, shots have been fired at Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, the 1961 Pulitzer Prize–winning clarion call to human equality and empathy. Public schools in Florida and Wisconsin canceled theatrical dramatizations of Lee’s classic novel this spring, citing as reason the novel’s textual instances of historical racial slurs. Likewise, “civilized society,” which humorist Mark Twain scorns in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, validates his cynicism as it ignorantly censures his satiric novel of Reconstruction-era racism in an effort to protest modern instances of the same. One can almost see Twain’s eye roll.

This current social mood, known as “Cancel Culture,” denotes a hostility that no longer reasons for redress but rather moves with mob mentality toward the scent of blood in mindless feeding frenzies. The term “Cancel Culture,” coined in the 2010s, refers to the fashionable system of collectively shunning organizations, persons, or artistic works deemed socially offensive or politically incorrect by the vocal majority. “Cancel,” as it’s used here, stems from 1990s rap slang for murder. Cancel Culture employs group shaming as a tactic to call out and eradicate offending public figures and their works from the marketplace of ideas and economics. Participants, who defend their actions as a means of public redress, seek to obliterate the reputation, the livelihood, the contributions, even the memory of those with whom they differ.

Although the term may be relatively new, the substance of Cancel Culture is as old as civilization. Remember Hatshepsut, that ancient Egyptian regent who commissioned the great architectural wonders of Karnak and Deir el Bahri? No worries; neither did anyone else until the work of nineteenth-century Egyptologists restored her historical place in the lineage of the pharaohs. Their sleuthing suggests that, as a result of political ambition, Hatshepsut subjugated her stepson, the rightful Pharaoh Thutmose III, in order to wear the double crown herself. Yet, when Thutmose came to power at her death, he took his revenge with an act of damnatio memoriae, a condemnation of memory that attempted to obliterate all evidence of her reign from the historical documents and monuments of the period. By his decree, her cartouche was rubbed out of stone monuments. Her statues were walled off in Karnak temple. Her name was removed from the official register of pharaohs. Since Egyptian theology taught that the ka, or spirit, survived in images, the obliteration of these monuments must be construed not only as an act of vandalism, but also one of murderous revenge. Thutmose sought not only to set the record straight and make clear the injustice his stepmother did to him, but to effectively erase her from Egypt’s historical narrative.

The impulse to silence political and social enemies was a common feature of the ancient world. In fact, the fifth-century BC Roman government elected censors to the task. Their job was to protect the Roman ideal by legally banning all that was deemed dangerous to the public. This impulse likewise led to the historic trial and tragic execution of Socrates in fourth-century BC Greece. When he questioned the logic of polytheism, Socrates was tried for impiety to the gods and the corruption of Athens’ youths. A jury of peers silenced him with the most extreme form of censorship: death.

The major difference between these historical incidents of censorship and the current emergence of Cancel Culture is that the state, rather than the general public, enacted the bans. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the freedom of speech and the press, protects Americans from such government censorship. It seems that legislators recognized the importance of dissenting voices in a democratic republic. Tyrants censor. Democracies discuss. But twenty-first-century Cancel Culture didn’t get the memo. In the absence of legal censorship, cancelers try the accused in the court of public opinion, which bears great resemblance to the vicious tribunals of the French Revolution.

The year 2019 saw a backlash against this mob brutality, which argued that the quickness to judge and shame others amounted to “virtue signaling,” the calculated public announcement of a sanctioned position. This activity works on the assumption that members of a mob evade its censure; individuals band-wagon to publicly project their own “wokeness” and avoid falling afoul of the majority. Sometimes this takes the shape of a boycott. Think of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s boycott of Goya canned foods after the CEO of the company spoke in support of President Trump last July. Think too of high school senior Briones Bedell’s subsequent criticism of Trader Joe’s branding of ethnic foods like “Trader Giotto’s,” “Trader Ming’s,” and “Arabian Joe.” Virtue signaling was quickly exploited by corporate America as a manipulative marketing strategy, which likewise explains the spate of rebranding that emerged in the wake of the recent racial protests. Companies like Land O’Lakes and Aunt Jemima suddenly jettisoned historic graphics associated with their labels to align with the cancelers on hot button social issues and curry favor with the masses. Their aim, of course, was to increase revenue—and to avoid being canceled themselves by the next vocal teen with an iPhone and a Twitter account.

This history of Cancel Culture again begs King David’s question: “Why do the nations rage and the people plot a vain thing?” What is it in a man that makes a mob? What is the essence of Cancel Culture?

Although he wouldn’t have known to use the term, the great bard William Shakespeare depicts the essence of Cancel Culture as hypocrisy in his tragedy Julius Caesar. The drama depicts a group of Roman senators who, true to the spirit of censorship, assassinate the play’s ambitious namesake in what proves a futile attempt to preserve Rome’s republic. Shakespeare’s rendering of this fascinating political history pivots on a curious spectral visitation. The ghost of Caesar haunts the earnest Brutus, Caesar’s one-time friend turned lead assassin, the night before the historic Battle of Philippi. Brutus confronts the spirit with questions:

Ha! Who comes here?

I think it is the weakness of mine eyes that shapes this monstrous apparition. It comes upon me. Art thou any thing?

Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil, That mak’st my blood cold, and my hair to stare? Speak to me what thou art. (IV.iii.275–80)

Brutus finds the specter and its intentions ambiguous; is it a god, an angel, a devil? The question itself suggests this is no common haunting. Could the visitation prove hieratic? Any confrontation with the spirit world causes men to tremble, but the intentions of spirits vary. While devils subvert truth, gods and angels speak it.

“Who comes here?” With ominous irony, the answer returns, clarifying the specter’s intentions and fingering the root of Brutus’s fear: “Thy evil spirit, Brutus” (IV. iii.282). Rather than simply identifying himself, the ghost of Caesar enlarges his answer, continuing his office as friend to Brutus by holding up for him a mirror. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Prov. 27:6). Rather than prevaricate, the spirit offers a metaphorical reply that invites contemplation. His conscience touched, Brutus is primed to recognize the spirit of tyranny that animated Caesar in himself and the other conspirators. Furthermore, the oligarchy of assassins is not alone in its possession; Marc Antony and Octavius too prove to be its hosts. The spirit of the age is ubiquitous; it exploits the spirit of men. Disillusioned, the earnest Brutus turns his knife on himself, addressing the spirit that baits and eludes him: “Caesar, now be still, I kill’d not thee with half so good a will” (V.v.50–51). Sadly, even this self-conscious effort to establish Rome’s virtue fails. Society reflects the men that compose it.

Shakespeare’s trenchant insight regarding the fallen nature of men suggests the futility of the Cancel Culture movement. In an attempt to create a virtuous society by canceling the unrighteous, cancelers fail to recognize the same spirit in themselves. “As it is written, no man is righteous, not one” (Rom. 3:10). The essence of Cancel Culture is sanctimony. As the image of Caesar before Brutus exposes this self-righteousness, a survey of man and his works functions similarly.

Like the ghost of Caesar, the Great Books function as a hall of mirrors reflecting multifaceted man. Some, like the novels of Harper Lee and Mark Twain, depict man’s proclivity to racism. Others portray different forms of egocentrism. Most feature the flawed nature of men that would be gods, but live like devils. The Western canon provides a bird’s eye view of the ongoing conversation regarding the nature of man and his society, offering a map and highlighting significant landmarks to suggest an emerging narrative. When men stand before the mirror, some flinch— some flee. Cancel Culture attempts to break the glass.

If Cancel Culture prevails in silencing the great authors and their works, in deleting the repository that houses our heritage, in a single generation we would lose map and mirrors, the perspective of the greatest voices of Western civilization. Without this map, the modern traveler would be left to stumble around in ideological confusion, unaware of the mountainous landmarks, the narrow paths, or the pits they skirt. Of still greater loss, the magic mirrors of the Great Books would be shattered. No longer would readers have the opportunity to glimpse themselves in the authors and their characters, those flawed and bifurcated images of grandeur and misery, dignity and debasement, that reflect all men.

Supporters of Cancel Culture will argue that the movement does not mean to eliminate every work, but only the base works of sinners. Yet what might be lost by discarding the works of marred men? Slave holder Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence would have to go, for starters, and with it, ironically, the ideas of the “self-evident” truths of equality that spark the ire of current cancelers. The Bible too would be jettisoned, since it reports slavery among the patriarchs, and with it would go the explanation, substance, and satisfaction of the sacrifice that Cancel Culture demands. Shakespeare would be banned for his unkind racial depiction of the Jewish people in his Merchant of Venice, and with it would go his imaginative discussion of the condemning law and the atoning gospel. Honestly, the whole literary canon would have to be jettisoned, since it was written by and about fallen men and women. Where would the cancelations stop?

Remember the furor over the recent posthumous publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman? Readers from the Cancel Culture movement argued its depiction of Atticus as a racist requires the cancelation of Lee’s better-known work, To Kill a Mockingbird, a work that heralded racial equality and the end of racial segregation. Really, this is one of the big questions Lee implies in Watchman: do we treat a man according to the worst thing he has ever done, or the best? This question hinges upon another: how do you hope to be remembered? The public holds men accountable for their worst decisions and deeds. The fear of this judgment keeps some silent all their lives. What voices might be lost because of the self-righteousness of internet mobs? Who might we cancel in our attempt to justify ourselves?

Watchman’s protagonist Jean Louise Finch, affectionately called Scout, nearly cancels her father, and with him the culture he represents—the South to which she is heir:

Dear goodness, the things I learned. I did not want my world disturbed, but I wanted to crush the man who’s trying to preserve it for me. I wanted to stamp out all the people like him. I guess it’s like an airplane: they’re the drag and we’re the thrust, together we make the thing fly. Too much of us and we’re nose heavy, too much of them and we’re tail heavy—it’s a matter of balance. I can’t beat him, and I can’t join him— . . . she stepped aside to let him pass. She followed him to the car and watched him get laboriously into the front seat. As she welcomed him silently to the human race, the stab of discovery made her tremble a little. Somebody walked over my grave, she thought.

Scout comes of age when she accepts her father, which identification involves a little bit of death. Antagonism toward such identification and the self-sacrifice it requires is at the heart of Cancel Culture and the virtue signaling it begets.

The need for societies and individuals to purify themselves is as old as society itself. The God of the Old Testament validated this need when He commanded Aaron, high priest of the Israelites, to place his hands ritualistically upon the head of a goat, transferring the sins of the people onto the head of the animal before ejecting it from the camp. In this way, the Israelites were separated from their sins by the scapegoat (Lev. 16:21–22). Scapegoating shifts the sins of the individual and the society onto another. Cancel Culture re-dresses this scapegoat in pagan garb. Whereas the Levitical scapegoat prefigured the definitive Divine Atonement, the pagan scapegoat figures the systemic violence of human sacrifice.

Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” describes such a system. The story is set in a small, pious community during a harvest festival, which culminates in a lottery of sorts. Much excitement is generated by the festivities. The protagonist herself is buoyed up by the spirit of the event until her own name is drawn in the lottery and the town turns upon her:

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old

Man Warner was saying, "Come on, come on, everyone." Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

If we continue the practice of Cancel Culture, we shouldn’t be surprised if we eventually find ourselves the target. “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone” (John 8:7).

John Milton warns of the dangers of such measures in Areopagitica, his treatise against the censorship of books: “Unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book destroys reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.” Milton anticipated Cancel Culture and summed up its true murderous activity. In so doing, he anticipates the real question: what is a human being? The Great Books, in all their variety and nuance, supply the only honest answer: a mixed bag.

Once again, novelist Harper Lee gives us a vision, a method for “manning” the mob. It comes in the shape of a child, naively inserting herself between a mob and its victims. They have come in disguise to do their violent deeds, but she spots a friend in their midst: “Hey, Mr. Cunningham. How’s your entailment gettin’ along?” (153). With perfect authenticity, she continues to remind the silent and somewhat shrinking figure of the multiplicity of relationships they share. Should her daddy’s pro-bono work on his entailment fail to awaken his recognition, their mutual interest in her schoolmate, his son Walter, must serve: “Mr. Cunningham was moved to a faint nod. He did know me after all” (153).

In the light of this dawning connection, Mr. Cunningham slowly comes to himself. He remembers his place in the community—his place as Walter’s father. He is called up by the child: “Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders. ‘I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady,’ he said. Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. ‘Let’s clear out,’ he called. ‘Let’s get going, boys.’ As they had come, in ones and twos the men shuffled back to their ramshackle cars. Doors slammed, engines coughed, and they were gone” (154). When the members of the mob are recognized, they remember themselves. They recall the web of interconnectedness that joins one to another, and in the process of this recollection, they are humanized. Whereas the mob condemns from the perceived security of its anonymity and size, a man stands and falls by his own deeds. “The heart knows its own bitterness and no stranger can share its joy” (Prov. 14:10). The individual knows his humanity. The world condemns man even as man condemns himself.

Thank God that He does not judge in like fashion: “For I will forgive their iniquities and remember their sins no more” (Heb. 8:12). It’s interesting to note that the Lord effected this benevolent forgetfulness by a different type of Cancel Culture. Instead of canceling man for his sins— his deplorable failures to keep the law—He canceled the handwriting that was against man: “He forgave us all our trespasses, having canceled the debt ascribed to us in the decrees that stood against us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross! And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Col. 2:13–14). Not as the world gives does God give to us. Rather than cancel man, God canceled His Son, the true Scapegoat foreshadowed by the Levitical ritual. To those who would come to Him, He promises absolution. But some will not.

Why do the nations rage and the people plot a vain thing? David proclaims the answer: “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed” (Ps. 2:2). In the heart of every man is the desire to be God, to set himself up as Law and Judge, to justify and establish himself by the works of his own hands. Yet God brooks no contenders: He alone is the Lord. And so men rage and resist the worship of the true God as they seek to enthrone themselves. They cancel and call out and curse, scapegoating their neighbors to justify themselves, while the better Scapegoat remains. His blood alone atones for sin.

While Cancel Culture destroys community, oppressing through violence and fear, the forgiveness of Christ creates fellowship. Rather than erasing sinners through a damnatio memoriae, Jesus expunges sin and writes our names in His book of life. Instead of humiliating those He calls out, He made a spectacle of their accuser. Instead of exile, He brings adoption. Instead of hatred, He offers love. When the truth of this gospel becomes personal, the mirrors of the Great Books cease to terrorize. Gazing into their magic glass, we discover representative images of ourselves and our neighbors. Beneath their defects and in spite of them, we recognize a family resemblance, each and all sons of Adam and sons of God. In our likeness and God’s love, we find a present grace for one another, the ability to live at peace with the sinful tensions within and without us. Far from the “madding crowd” of Cancel Culture, the humble dwell in peace, honoring the image wherever it’s found, finding even in its defects the hope of redemption.

Missy Andrews is co-director of the Center for Literary Education and a homeschooling mother of six. Her books include Teaching the Classics: A Socratic Method for Literary Education, Wild Bells: A Literary Advent, and My Divine Comedy: A Mother’s Homeschooling Journey.

It is hard to quantify Marilynne Robinson’s stature at this stage in her career. By a writer’s standard, she has done it all—won the Pulitzer, been a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, and taught at the famed University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop that shaped some of the greatest writers of the past century, from Flannery O’Connor to Wallace Stegner and Raymond Carver. The list of contemporary writers influenced by Robinson during her time at Iowa (she is now professor emerita) is immense: Lan Samantha Chang, Peter Orner, and Paul Harding, to name a few. She has been interviewed by a president, won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and become a nationally known writer who comments on everything from nuclear energy to Puritan theology to life during a pandemic. When Marilynne Robinson speaks, we listen.

While her speeches and essays can be far ranging in scope, her fiction—what she is best known for—is surprisingly focused. All but one of her now five novels explore the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa (with the exception being her first and most enigmatic novel Housekeeping, set in Idaho and published in 1980). These Iowa novels center around an ailing Congregationalist minister, John Ames, whose sharp interior life is spent pondering the deepest questions that faith, love, and death evoke, questions that often come at the expense of his interpersonal life, where fear and jealousy threaten to derail his relationships. Each novel of the Gilead “trilogy” (now a quartet with the recent publication of Jack) is told from the perspective of a different character. Gilead is an epistolary novel written from the perspective of Ames; Home focuses on Glory, the daughter of Ames’s best friend and fellow minister, Rev. Boughton; and Lila focuses on its title character, who arrives in Ames’s small town, falls in love with him, and gives the elderly minister a second chance at life. Only Gilead is written in the first person, but you would hardly notice any distance caused by the limited third person point of view in the other novels—such is the love and intimacy with which Robinson writes her novels.

What is it about Robinson’s fiction, whose storylines seem so quintessentially and nostalgically American, that has cemented her place as one of the greatest living novelists of the last forty years? Her approach to fiction is best captured in her own words. Her essay “Imagination and

Community,” published in the essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books, describes the care and attention with which she approaches her characters: “I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.” She loves the recovered sex worker and the small-town minister, the prodigal son and the old men whose minds reveal racial prejudice and judgment. When we read her characters, we see ourselves—our doubts, our messes, and our potential for goodness beyond our inner natures.

Each of these novels asks profound questions with deep spiritual and epistemological significance. Gilead explores notions of legacy and redemption—how an old man surprised by love in his twilight years can also possess the ability to condemn or redeem another man of whom he is jealous, all while mourning his own impending death and the years he will miss with his son. Home is an exercise in prodigal love and longing, the extent of a father’s love for his troubled child. Lila is a meditation on shame and possibility—the fear, risk, and reward of becoming known.

Chronologically, the Iowa novels overlap, though each book begins and ends at different moments. Gilead and Home especially coincide so closely that they famously provide different perspectives on the same scenes. The ability to turn over an idea through several different lenses, to provide a kind of “polyphonic” (or multi-voiced) take on a single theological question is an understated talent of Robinson’s.

Much scholarship has been written on the “front porch predestination scene” in which the characters contemplate predestination and redemption. It’s a conversation seemingly all of us have had at different points in our lives—are some people beyond all hope? The subtext of the conversation is that Jack, the prodigal son, who poses the question “Are there people who are simply born evil, live evil lives, and then go to hell?” does not believe the Christian message, though he was raised by a minister (Boughton) and named after a minister (Ames). Jack’s hidden shame stems from a feeling of difference and the guilt of being an unbeliever in a town of believers. He is haunted by alcoholism and the ways he has abandoned the women he has known, the belief system of his father, and even his own son. As Glory notes in Home, Jack hides his “loneliness . making his estrangement literal, visible.” We can certainly read this conversation as a conversation on salvation and Calvinism, to be sure, but more importantly we can read this as one of many pleas from Jack to reach out beyond his veil of shame and find some kind of identification from the people who have known him all his life.

In The Soul of Shame, therapist Curt Thompson writes that “we all are born into the world looking for someone looking for us, and that we remain in this mode of searching for the rest of our lives.” What makes Jack such an appealing character—appealing enough to be the title character of Robinson’s new novel—is that we see ourselves in Jack’s hardness and in his brokenness. He longs to be known by those he loves, for his doubts to be recognized and identified with by people like his father’s friend, John Ames. It is this resonance he desires that causes him to form a bond with Ames’s younger wife Lila because they are both prodigals, both humans crawling out of the shells of their pasts. It is this bond that causes Ames to be suspicious and jealous, but it is also a bond that, in Gilead, shows Ames that he must be forgiving and gracious.

Depending on which side of the prodigal son story you may find yourself on, you may see yourself as the self-righteous “older brother,” smug in his or her own belief; the gracious father longing for reconciliation; or the younger brother crawling back towards home for rescue and relief. All of Marilynne Robinson’s characters circle around these three archetypes. And usually she turns the question towards the reader.

Reception and Legacy

Alex Engebretson argues that there are “two types of Marilynne Robinson readers: Housekeeping people and Gilead people.” If Robinson’s later Iowa works are centered around shame and grace and questions of religious conviction, her first novel, Housekeeping, which won the PEN/Hemingway award in 1980, is a very different novel on human nature, a work that Engebretson describes as having an “almost nihilistic” worldview.

But in Housekeeping we see the dawn of Robinson’s spiritual concerns that always have and always will be filtered through the local and particular. Her debut novel has arguably the strongest and lushest portrayal of place, the gothic and mysterious Fingerbone, Idaho. It is here where “though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smoothes our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.” Robinson articulates here, as the poet Christian Wiman explores in his essay “Varieties of Quiet,” “not only the sense of absence . . . permeating every spiritual aspect of my life, but also . . . to bestow upon it an energy and agency, a prayerful and indefinable promise.” A harbinger for her work on grace and belonging in the future, Housekeeping silently provides hope in the promise that “the world will be made whole.” It is a debut of charged absence that was not answered for twenty-four years until Gilead was published in 2004.

I would offer a third kind of reader to the pair that Engebretson presents: those who find Robinson in her numerous prose collections—from the Death of Adam to recent books like The Givenness of Things and What Are We Doing Here? In her essays, you’ll find a different stylist, though the same searching mind. Here we truly see the “cloud of witnesses” in whose company Robinson frequents—from Puritan theologians to European philosophers to the American literary figure who is her clearest influence, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Though her essays can at times be meandering and dense, her nonfiction writing is always concerned with the possibilities of community and the harms of ideology that divide us. If her fiction knits together an imaginary community, her prose fights against the “imagined competitor” that we struggle with collectively as an American nation and as individual selves (What Are We Doing Here?). Her political insight is both timeless and timely—“Contemporary America is full of fear . . . fear is not a Christian habit of mind” (“Fear”) and “This country is in a state of bewilderment that cries out for good history” (“What Is Freedom of Conscience?”). In a time of such division in our nation,

Robinson’s essays provide wisdom and direction that we should return to regularly.

The hope in the human spirit that Marilynne Robinson channels by way of Emerson is perhaps the greatest sign of the transcendental tradition she seeks to operate within. But there are other influences that readers can certainly discover in her work. You can find the sharp perception into characters’ minds and flaws that you would find in Flannery O’Connor. You can see the understatement that was trademarked by the likes of Hemingway. You can find the brooding, contemplative darkness of Faulkner, who I would argue is a clear literary ancestor in both content and form. We may even stretch back toward Nathaniel Hawthorne, and though Robinson herself describes this canonical author as “creepy,” the same issues of salvation and doubt run through Robinson’s work as it did Hawthorne’s.

I would argue, however, that Robinson’s closest literary kindred spirit is Toni Morrison, whose novel Beloved should be read alongside Robinson’s Home Beloved, while an example of magical realism and much more genre-bending than any of Robinson’s work, is a domestic story haunted at its core by the racism that Robinson merely alludes to, that which happens in the distance until it drives up to the curb in Iowa. (I say this without having read Jack, where race apparently figures heavily). For Toni Morrison, however, the comforts of home can never be fully realized because no matter where one retreats and escapes, the trauma of slavery and racism will reach you. These novels are two sides of the same coin—they contemplate American domestic identity but through two different racial lenses. What concerns Robinson’s characters may be more of a luxury to Morrison’s when matters of survival and existence are more pressing and immediate. Still, the spiritual similarities in their characters are real and fascinating to think about.

It is also helpful to think of Robinson’s polymath legacy alongside other intellectual figures outside the literary realm. Filmmaker Terrence Malick, for example, is a kindred spirit, whose exploration of “the way of nature and of grace” in his tour de force 2012 film The Tree of Life provides another complimentary piece to Robinson’s larger project. You’ll find echoes of Robinson in other icons as well—from the interdisciplinary concerns of French philosopher Simone Weil to the political and communal convictions of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and even the introspective incisiveness of St. Augustine in his Confessions.

Her teaching, while often not nearly as discussed as her prose, is equally ambitious and sweeping. Former students like Drew Bratcher have described Robinson as a prodigiously talented lecturer:

In the classroom . . . [her] intellectual powers were on full display, she spoke in long, coruscating sentences whose turns and trajectories were polished and unpredictable. She quoted Tyndale and the day’s Times. She read from Jonah, referenced Augustine, Dickinson, Heisenberg, Locke. She was up on cosmology, phenomenology, history, and linguistics.

Her teaching, just like her essays, reveals a searching mind that is alive and eager, that knows no disciplinary limits in an educational space where borders are often too quickly drawn.

Critics of Robinson have pushed back against the spiritual elements of Robinson’s stories, citing either that she is not religious or Calvinist enough to be championed as a contemporary patron saint of such labels. Jessica Hooten Wilson, writing for Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal, examines how Robinson often ignores the salvific work of the cross for a more inclusive and universal goodness found in human beings.

For Wilson, Robinson’s theology is “free . . . found everywhere, and in everything,” but it “ignores the problem of evil.” Citing John Ames’s forgiveness of Jack, Wilson traces how Ames moves too quickly beyond Jack’s past and his questionable motives. There is no true path of confession for Jack. Wilson and others have brought up legitimate concerns around Robinson’s theology: that though she is a self-proclaimed Calvinist, she says little about salvation and sin. However, it is hard to approach fiction and expect systematic theology, and I would argue that what we find in Robinson’s fiction is perhaps more true to the gray, murky matters of life. Is grace’s core message not inherently about forgetfulness, forgiveness, possibility? Robinson shows us that human interaction is less transactional and more organic, vacillating between our vices and our virtues. We are human, Robinson gently and regularly reminds us.

The kind of Calvin that Robinson appeals to is not the austere judge of Geneva steeped in issues of eternal salvation. Instead, Robinson channels the Calvin we find in Book III of the Institutes, in which he implores us to not “reflect on the wickedness of men but to look to the image of God in them, an image which, covering and obliterating their faults . . . should allure us to love and embrace them.” Ironically, Calvinist love here is inclusive rather than predestined; and similarly Robinson’s love for the Puritans is not steeped in the legalism the world seems to remember the Puritans by, not the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”–type of Puritanism but rather something more akin to Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections.

Only a great writer can inhabit as many spaces as Mar- ilynne Robinson does and still appeal to as many readers as she manages to, secular and religious alike. In her far-reaching creative intellect, Robinson reminds us that “we are unthinkable without our communities.” When I think of Robinson’s corpus, I think of the line from Housekeeping: “What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?” In an age of fragmentation and division, we would all do well to meditate on one of America’s greatest thinkers and the values she champions.

Aaron Brown is the author of Acacia Road, winner of the 2016 Gerald Cable Book Award (Silverfish Review Press). He has published work in Image, World Literature Today, Sojourners, Waxwing, and Transition, among others. Brown grew up in Chad and now lives in Texas, where he is an assistant professor of English at LeTourneau University.

Bibliography

Bratcher, Drew. “Reading Moby-Dick with Marilynne Robinson.” Gospel Coalition, May 1, 2018.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John Thomas Macneil, translated by Ford Lewis Battles. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Westminster/John Knox, 2016.

Engebretson, Alex. “Marilynne Robinson’s Singular Vision.” The Millions, Nov 24, 2014.

Milota, Megan. “Seeking Being in Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Gilead’ and ‘Home.’ ” Amerikastudien / American Studies, 61.1 (2016) 33–51.

Wilson, Jessica H. “Pushing Back against Marilynne Robinson’s Theology.” Church Life Journal, May 13, 2019.

Wiman, Christian. “Varieties of Quiet.” In My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2013.

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“God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mystical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘pagan Christs’: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spiritually, withhold our imaginative welcome.”

—C. S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact”

What are the consequences when a society displays a chronic lack of gratitude? This is one of the defining questions that Shakespeare explores in his late tragedy, Coriolanus. Using the context of the early Roman Republic, fraught with civil disobedience and violent clashes with its neighbors, Shakespeare dramatizes the political tensions of his own Jacobean London. It was an accepted moral truth in the Renaissance that ingratitude was a reprehensible vice, a breach of duty, and socially destructive. And literary critics have often studied the way ingratitude is the dynamic force that accelerates Shakespeare’s tragedies to their denouement. Nahum Tate’s version of the play, published in the late seventeenth century, was even called The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth.

Coriolanus tells the story of one noble family, that of Roman general Caius Martius (who later wins the title Coriolanus). Taken from Plutarch’s The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Shakespeare’s play begins by dramatizing the friction between the famished citizens and the compassionless general, Martius, during the early years of the Roman Republic. Despite his rejection of the Roman people, his body bears several wounds from the many conflicts in which he has fought on behalf of his country. His great military successes against Rome’s enemies, the Volscians, have given him political status which his mother and a family friend named Menenius are quick to monopolize. Proving himself incapable of the tact, reticence, and malleability required for statesmanship in this new republic, he is soon banished from Rome by the very voters who elected him, even before he puts on the title of consul. His mother, Volumnia, is in the end the only Roman able to negotiate with the exiled Martius, who has joined forces with Rome’s nemesis, Aufidius, intent on violent revenge. On her knees, Volumnia persuades her son not to attack Rome and he concedes, knowing full well that the peace treaty he will help frame will cost him his life.

This is a play that depicts self-gratification (a form of selfishness) posing as gratitude (a form of altruism). Characters in the play give thanks, praise, and honor with the expectation of some greater return. And at the heart of the drama, Volumnia, Martius’ mother, manipulates her son with praise and flattery in order to gain renown and political power in the city. Martius ungratefully seeks to deny his mother any claim on his prowess as a man and success as a warrior. He attempts to ‘‘stand as if a man were the author of himself and knew no other kin’’, denouncing all bonds of family, friendship, and military camaraderie. Further, he expresses with vitriol his ingratitude towards Rome, his mother-city, despising the people who comprise it. Rome’s citizens show their mutual ingratitude by using their newly bestowed political influence to banish Martius, the loyal warrior who defended them from their enemies. The patricians—the noble elites who rule the city—also betray Martius, forgetting their debt of gratitude to him for his service in the wars (they have crowned him with the oaken garland three times!), and fail to prevent his banishment. Lastly, the Volscian military leader Aufidius, Martius’ nemesis-turned-ally, is ungrateful to Martius for “sell[ing] the blood and labour / of [their] great action” by “making a treaty where there was a yielding” with Rome, even though Martius wins the Volscians spoils and concessions from Rome without hazarding any of their own men. Thus, Shakespeare shows us Rome (and in some sense London), destabilized by ingratitude.

The play’s central relationship is between Volumnia, who is Rome personified, and Martius Caius who represents Rome’s warrior sons. Their relationship reveals the destructive effects of the manipulative use of thanks and praise. Although Martius Caius rejects flattery as injurious when addressing his peers, claiming after the battle of Corioli that “my mother, / who has a charter to extol her blood, / when she does praise me, grieves me,” he seeks his mother’s praise in the private sphere of the maternal bond. And Volumnia is hardly subtle:

My praises made thee first a soldier, So, to have my praise for this Perform a part thou hast not done before.

The warrior who publicly presents himself as autonomous is surprisingly compliant to this manipulation in private. His rugged individualism is a fantasy that the play strips from him.

Martius later says that he finds praise embarrassing. Having won the battle of Corioli, he refuses to accept the gift of one-tenth of the spoils, although rightfully his, awarded to him by Cominius. In curmudgeonly fashion he rejects the vocal praise afforded to him by the Roman army:

Martius: I have some wounds upon me and they smart To hear themselves remembered.

Cominius: Should they not, Well might they fester ’gainst ingratitude, And tent themselves with death.

[. . .]

Martius: You shout me forth In acclamations hyperbolical; As if I loved my little should be dieted In praises sauced with lies.

Cominius: Too modest are you; More cruel to your good report than grateful To us that give you truly.

Here, Martius’ excessive humility looks a lot like pride. This is for two reasons. Firstly, he rejects the praises offered, rather than receiving them with gratitude: Martius is too proud to take a compliment. Secondly, in boasting about the paucity of his efforts, he insists upon his superiority. Later, when Cominius is lauding Martius by giving his martial curriculum vitae to the senate in the first move to make him consul, he retreats:

I had rather have one scratch my head in the sun Than idly sit to hear my nothings monstered.

Rather than accept the public recognition that is his due, Martius scoffs at it. By discrediting his military achievements as “nothings,” he undermines the valiant actions of his peers.

Nevertheless, Martius’ refusal to enter into a mercantile exchange of gratitude could be seen as a virtuous aspect of his character. Martius at times proceeds as if he is indebted to no one, and as if his actions are performed with no expectation of reciprocity. Neither of these are true. The play exposes his need for praise and his realization that he owes everything to his mother and her “womb that brought [him] into this world,” as she reminds him in their final meeting in the last act of the play. He concedes his attempt at radical individualism, “to stand as if a man were author of himself, and knew no other kin.” He is bound to repay what he owes his mother-city, which is no less than his life. He is as dependent on Rome as the plebeians are, for without Rome he has neither status nor purpose. As Menenius’ parable reveals: a plebeian may be as far from Martius as the toe is from the head, yet both are of the same body, consumed by the same stomach.

These debts of gratitude are metaphorically presented by Shakespeare as hunger. Images of a city that eats itself are at work from the outset. Starvation, surfeit, and death are presented alongside one another in the opening moments of the play: the plebeians grow lean while the patricians allegedly glut themselves on a “musty superfluity” of grain. But is there any grain in the coffers of Rome? This question remains a mystery at the heart of the play, concealing Shakespeare’s political sympathies. In their uncertainty, the plebians resolve to “revenge this with our pikes ere we become rakes” in a pointed image that likens the diminished bodies of the plebs to the very weapon they plan to use to attack their leaders. Already we see a city eating itself, even before Martius arrives to undermine their rebellion. He says:

You cry against the noble senate, who, under the gods, keep you in awe, which else would feed on one another.

This image of cannibalism brings to mind the fratricidal foundations of the city—one wolf-cub man killing another—the genesis of the dog-eat-dog culture of Rome. So not only does Shakespeare expose Rome’s violent underpinnings, but he also shows England as superior to the inspirational classical civilizations emulated in the Renaissance, suggesting that England’s civility has eclipsed this ancient barbarity.

Strengthening the comparison between the two civilizations, Shakespeare opens Coriolanus with food riots, events with which his audience would have been intimately familiar. In 1607–8 a series of poor harvests and rocketing food prices had brought peasants to the streets of Northern English cities in protest. In response, the Crown denied that famine existed and continued to reclaim arable land used for subsistence farming for pasture in the large estates of the landed gentry. Meanwhile, the king’s right of ‘‘purveyance’’ or commandeering food and supplies for the royal household, was increasing conflict between King James I and the House of Commons. This procurement had escalated to unprecedented levels. Accusations made against James were the same accusations of irresponsible stewardship raised by the plebeians about the patricians in the opening scene of the play:

They ne’er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us.

James, always keen to identify his regime with imperial Rome, loathed his parliamentary critics in the House of Commons with the same vehemence as Coriolanus loathes the tribunes. Shakespeare conceals his own political views but one cannot help but wonder if he’s making a keen political statement here.

During the openign scene, Menenius attempts to ease the political tension between the senate and the plebeians by performing some demagoguery on the subject of food. He describes Rome as a mutinous body, with the patricians as the stomach sustaining it:

That I receive the general food at first, Which you do live upon; and fit it is, Because I am the store-house and the shop Of the whole body: feeding the citizens on the citizens’ produce while keeping a portion for themselves. The hungry citizens, too famished to work more, beat their plowshares into swords and threaten to attack their leaders. Human society, always corrupted by ingratitude, fails to be self-sustaining, instead becoming self-consuming.

Martius, likewise, contributes to the conflict by repaying ingratitude with violence. That his first word in the play is “thanks” proves to be deeply ironic, Martius is not a Renaissance man, not a man for all seasons: he is a warrior. In his first arrival on stage he says he will quell the rebellion by making mincemeat of the people:

Would the nobility lay aside their ruth,

And let me use my sword, I’d make a quarry

With thousands of these quartered slaves as high

As I could pitch my lance.

The unrest in Rome is compounded by the fact that while the citizens and patricians seek to devour one another with violence, “the present wars devour” Martius. Martius’ insatiable appetite for war and disdain for dependence (which would include gratitude ) was nurtured by Volumnia. In a shocking image of feeding, she likens her son to Hector, telling Martius’ wife, Virigilia,

Though all at once cannot See what I do deliver out to each, Yet I can make my audit up, that all From me do back receive the flour of all, And leave me but the bran.

Menenius suggests that the patricians have been self-sacrificial, petitioning the plebeians to be grateful to them for food—the implication being that the food is acquired independently by the rulers. However, as the play progresses, it becomes clear that the “general food” to which Menenius refers is sown, reaped, and harvested by the Roman citizens themselves. The patricians are dependent on the manual labor of the “trades in Rome” and are

The breasts of Hecuba

When she did suckle Hector looked not lovelier

Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood

At Grecian sword contemning.

Shakepeare’s metaphor posits that Roman warriors (presumably like Grecian ones before them) were weaned abruptly from milk to blood, the Roman matron, who represents Rome itself, exclusively nourishes the valor of her sons with her own body, further compounding the metaphor of the self-consuming body: “Thy valiantness was mine, thou sucks’t it from me.”

This is a troubling statement, as Volumnia conveys that Hecuba suckling Hector or Volumnia breastfeeding

Martius was no act of gratuitous giving. In Rome’s all-consuming state, there is no creator-creature distinction. Volumnia expects repayment for every drop. It is no wonder that Martius has trouble accepting that the plebeians were given corn gratis. The roots of Martius’ ingratitude are apparent—he hates the dependence gratitude creates, so much so that he comes close to destroying Rome (and his mother with it) altogether, preferring to be “a kind of nothing, titleless, till he had forg’d himself a name of the fire of burning Rome” to escape the burden of his identity. Nietschze’s observations of motherhood in Human All Too Human are pertinent to the monstrous Volumnia; she loves herself in her son more than she loves the son himself. Once banished, this is what Martius seeks to efface. Volumnia is always aware of her own dependence on the security Martius provides. Devastated by his banishment, she claims Martius back at the first opportunity, stating: “Thou art my warrior, I holp to frame thee.” She never relinquishes her maternal bond.

When Martius Caius appears on stage in the thick of battle against the Volscians, he is smeared so heavily in his own blood that the soldiers think he has been flayed. The resemblance to Volumnia’s image of Hector is obvious. Standing for mother Rome, Volumnia’s cannibalistic appetite is keen when she rejoices at the news of her son being butchered in the wars. She cannot wait to serve him up: “there will be large cicatrices to show the people!” she gloats. The cumulative total of Martius’ wounds for Rome is twenty-seven, making him a convincing candidate for the role of consul who is both the leader of the Roman army and a member of the senate: His wounds are visible proof to the people of his undying service to Rome. Never mind that Martius has no desire to become embroiled in state politics. There is a sharp irony here as Martius himself was responsible for expelling Tarquin the Proud, the last Roman king, and making it possible for this new order to be ushered in.

In light of this, Shakespeare shows the full weight of Aufidius’ astute political observation:

So our virtues

Lie in the interpretation of the time, And power, unto itself most commendable, Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair

T’extol what it hath done.

Martius never sits in that throne of power before he meets his death. The tribunes manipulate the voters so that, instead of expressing their thanks to the newly named Coriolanus for his recent deeds in the Volscian wars, they ungratefully banish him. His historic virtues are forgotten by the time. The ingratitude of the people develops Rome’s monstrous identity, as a Roman citizen in the play admits:

Ingratitude is monstrous, and for the multitude to be ingrateful, were to make a monster of the multitude: of the which we being members, should bring ourselves to be monstrous members.

Menenius voices his fears at the banishment of the thrice-honored Martius, and finally makes an accurate prophecy:

Now the God’s forbid that our renowned Rome, whose gratitude

Towards her deserved children is enroll’d

In Jove’s own book, like an unnatural dam

Should now eat up her own.

The imagery of cannibalistic consumption reaches its zenith in Volumnia herself. Playing on the words ‘‘kin’’ and ‘‘unkind’’, Shakespeare shows that the consequences of ingratitude go against the ordained natural order. The image of Volumnia’s anorexic cannibalism prefigures the end of the play. Menenius encounters her outside the capitol, berating the tribunes for the banishment of her son. Ungratefully, she rejects Menenius’ invitation to supper and asserts: “Anger’s my meat, I sup upon myself / And so shall starve with feeding.” Similarly, Martius undergoes a monstrous transformation by his ingratitude from man to dragon. When he leaves Rome, he makes the comparison himself. “I go alone, / Like to a hungry dragon, that his fen / makes fear’d and talk’d of more than seen.”

Cominius observes that the Volscians follow him “with no less confidence / than boys pursuing summer butterflies.” In this telling metaphor, the audience is reminded of Martius’ own son at the outset of the play who, in Valeria’s words, “ran after a gilded butterfly” and in the end “set his teeth and tore it.” Later, Menenius draws the parallel between the dragon and the butterfly:

There is differency between a grub and a butterfly; yet your butterfly was a grub. This CORIOLANUS is grown from man to dragon: he has wings; he’s more than a creeping thing.

The analogy is clear: Martius will be “mammocked”, a word meaning “ripped to shreds,” reminiscent of Martius’ last words to the Volscian conspirators—“cut me to pieces.”

Leaving behind the famine of Rome, Martius arrives in Antium where the nobility of the Volscian state are feasting at Aufidius’ house. Already the contrast with Rome is apparent: this is a place of plenty and the mood is somewhat relaxed. Martius makes a telling observation which foreshadows that he will never participate in the Volscian feast either. He says, arriving under cover of darkness at Aufidius’ kitchen: “This feast smells well / but I appear not like a guest.” Martius states his campaign of vengeance to Aufidius, again employing imagery relating to feeding by promising to “pour war into the bowels of ungrateful Rome,” glutting the “thankless” patricians on a meal of his own devising that they will not be able to stomach.

Ironically, it is Martius himself who is the meal. His intangible nature, name, identity, and existence are consumed by Rome but his physical body is butchered like meat by the Volscians. The belly in Menenius’ parable smiles gravely. This is shown particularly gruesomely at the ending of Fiennes’ film adaptation of the play, with his body thrown into a pick-up truck, as if being brought back from the abattoir. The portentous image Martius’ himself employed to warn the patricians earlier in the play is tragically fulfilled: the crows peck at the eagle of Rome.

In all of this, Coriolanus is a play that speaks to our current cultural moment: ingratitude abounds. At the end of act 3, at the news of his banishment, Martius curses the people according to their deserts:

Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!

Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes, Fan you into despair! Have the power still

To banish your defenders; till at length

Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,

Making not reservation of yourselves, Still your own foes, deliver you as most Abated captives to some nation That won you without blows!

He could well be describing the populace of any Western city today. We are witnessing the banishment of our defenders. We live in a time of abundance and yet there is a poor appetite for the feast. Fearful populations fail to discern the truth from the proliferation of rumours sold as news, the state behaves as if it is sovereign, the people embrace their enslavement to it looking to the state for salvation, and, to paraphrase Aufidius’ words, our time has reinterpreted what was formerly considered virtuous. The personification of the plebeians as Hydra (a many-headed beast) is also apt. In a rare moment of self-awareness, one citizen admits to another that as a voting body, they are unable to agree or to hold steadfastly to a position:

Not that our heads are some brown, some black, some auburn, some bald, but that our wits are so diversely coloured: and truly I think if all our wits were to issue out of one skull, they would fly east, west, north, south, and their consent of one direct way should be at once to all the points o’ the compass.

This character’s lines describe the fragmented nature of today’s identity politics. Democracies falter in the face of secular individual sovereignty, and in the midst of this confusion, one cannot help but share in Martius’ yearning for the clarity of good leadership:

My soul aches

To know, when two authorities are up, Neither supreme, how soon confusion May enter ’twixt the gap of both and take The one by the other.

So at length how will this ignorance, which finds not till it feels, deliver? Many of us are often as ungrateful as Martius, as full of contempt for our Western cultural heritage, —which is our mother—and as determined to destroy it even at the cost of a total loss of identity. Thus, twenty-first-century society mirrors the play’s corrupted cost-benefit economy of gratitude.

Peter Leithart, in his essay ‘‘City of In-Gratia: Roman Ingratitude in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,’’ views the play in the light of the Thomist three-part cost-benefit calculation of gratitude as detailed by Aquinas in the Summa Theologica. The first part is to recognize the favor received, the second is to express one’s appreciation, and the third is to repay the favor at a suitable place and time according to one’s means. And since what is last in the order of generation is first in the order of destruction, it follows that the first degree of ingratitude is when a man fails to repay a favor, the second when he declines to notice or indicate that he has received a favor, while the third and supreme degree is when a man fails to recognize the reception of a favor, whether by intention or forgetfulness. Moreover, since opposite affirmation includes negation, it follows that it belongs to the first degree of ingratitude to return evil for good, to the second to find fault with a favor received, and to the third to esteem kindness as though it were unkindness.

Coriolanus lays bare Rome’s failures in living up to ancient (and Renaissance) expectations of the public duty of gratitude. Leithart concludes that Rome is constitutionally ungrateful. She fails to establish an economy of gratitude, instead demanding self-sacrifice. Revealing the theological implications of the play, Leithart posits that in dramatizing its negation, Shakespeare gestures towards St. Augustine’s City of God, the realm of genuine gratitude—full of grace—as the only viable alternative.

In the City of God, the New Jerusalem, those with Christ’s name on their foreheads will feast on the sacrificial lamb, eating the body of Christ, the bread of life. In the agonistic city of Cain, people feed on one another.

The Bible illustrates self-gratification in the gospel of John. The multitudes followed Jesus from Tiberias to Capernaum after He fed the five thousand with five barley loaves and two fishes, where He rebuked them.

Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.” (John 6:26–27).

The Lord Jesus Christ will never fail to supply all our needs. He commands us to give thanks. We are not to be like the people at Capernaum, pursuing our beastly anxieties about our lives, “what we will eat or what we will drink, and about our bodies, what we will put on.” These things will be added, but as well as giving thanks for these things, which are a great blessing, we ought to also give thanks to Him who gives us all things. As the Eucharistic prayers remind us:

It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times and in all places give thanks unto thee, O Lord, holy Father, almighty, everlasting God, through Jesus Christ thine only Son our Lord.

Without Christ, one cannot fully know what to be grateful for or to whom. Thanksgiving is the fulfillment of God’s command. Only through Christ himself are we able to give thanks; not of ourselves. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” exclaims Paul in Romans 7:25.

Andrew Kern observes that thankfulness is an attitude of receptivity and belief while complaining and ingratitude are attitudes of unbelief. Unbelief consumes; faithful gratitude replenishes. Gratitude, in the form of right worship, restores us to our identity as image bearers of the living God.

I conclude with an image from George Herbert, a rector in the Church of England, a poet, and a near contemporary of Shakespeare’s. The first poem of the section called ‘‘The Church’’ in his collection The Temple is ‘‘The Altar’’ and it is a hieroglyph in the shape of an altar. The poem reminds the reader that gratitude flows out of humility.

A broken A L T A R, Lord, thy servant reares, Made of a heart, and cemented with teares: Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; No workmans tool hath touch’d the same.

A H E A RT alone

Is such a stone, As nothing but Thy pow’r doth cut. Wherefore each part

Of my hard heart Meets in this frame, To praise thy Name; That, if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. O let thy blessed S A C R I F I C E be mine, And sanctifie this A L T A R to be thine.

Herbert uses the typological image that we are altars of stone unhewn by human hands, upon which we offer the sacrifice of thanks and praise. Our purpose as creatures is to be grateful to God, to glorify him forever with our praises. This is the new covenant anti-type of the Old Testament bloody sacrifice. The priest of the old temple feasted on the animal sacrifice. In the new covenant temples in our hearts, we feast on Jesus Christ, the bread of life, and we will never hunger.

Sarah-Jane Bentley teaches English at Eton College. She is a regular contributor to the Close Reads Podcast Network.

The tires of my car crunched their way up the length of the gravel driveway and I pulled up to what I thought was surely the wrong address. There was no garden in sight, let alone a farm. No fastidiously neat rows. No tall, rusty siloes. No open space, only a dense tree line. There was a red barn, but it was collapsing. There was an average, blue house with an equally average front yard: grass, gravel, and a sturdy-enough mailbox.

Shortly after I pulled up, the owner of the blue house walked down the gravel drive and gave me a warm welcome. He explained to me that he worked full-time in the automotive industry and spent his free time building beehives, raising animals, planting trees, harvesting fruit, and growing mushrooms. He led me back to the garage which also served as his workshop. Like his land, his workshop lacked signs of conventional farming. As did the lack of neat rows and open space, the tone and atmosphere of the workshop struck me. A dozen baskets hung from one of the rafters. Bicycles hung from another. To the right stood a large wooden table where he laid out customers’ orders, drew designs for chicken coops and beehives, and enjoyed a cool drink. More than anything this looked like a place for note-taking, drawing, designing, studying, tinkering—a place for doing a day’s work and then enjoying the fruits of that day’s work. It looked like a place for learning. From this workshop, I had my first glimpse of the land which the blue house and dense tree line had initially hid- den from view. Ten acres of fecund land stretched out behind the house in the shape of a rectangle. A dense hedge, made up of oak, poplar, cherry, pine, and pecan trees, bordered the rectangular plot. Within this hedge grew a “garden,” of a kind. I hesitate to call it a garden because it was so unlike the gardens in my suburban neighborhood. Compared to a typical suburban garden, this one looked very wild, untrimmed, and without any apparent order. This was a field with at least eight different grasses; their spikelets reached to the height of my shoulder. Brightly-colored wildflowers and various kinds of trees grew among these grasses. The chickens, pigs, and goats were free to roam throughout the field. Wildlife flourished. Bees pollinated the purplish-pink thistle flowers. Monarch butterflies fluttered around the milkweed. Grasshoppers chirped and sprang up out of grass. Here and there tufts of grass were gently bowed over where deer had rested. Unlike the simple swooshing sound heard when the wind blows across a hay field, the music of this garden was polyphonic and unspeakably beautiful. The variation in the shapes of the leaves, the heights of the plants, the kinds of wildlife, and the strength of the wind made the harmony possible. A narrow, sinuous path where the grass had been mowed was the only way to walk through the forest-field.

For six hours, the hobby-farmer gave me a tour. Almost every time he spoke to me he pointed-out a sym- biotic relationship between a specific creature and plant, or another natural element of the land. He noted that the border of trees around the property acted as a windbreak for the garden and as a barricade against the harmful chemicals used by his neighbors on their large-scale industrial farms. These trees provided the shade mushrooms needed to grow; they provided shelter for the many birds that fed on the insects in the field and the fruit on the trees. In turn, the mushrooms helped break down rotting matter into valuable nutrients for the plants, and the birds helped plant more trees in the field when they dropped the fruit seeds they had eaten. He pointed out how the trees scattered throughout the field provided nitrogen for the soil which fed the lush grass. In turn, the grasses sheltered insects and fed the chickens and the goats. On and on, he identified the relationships inherent in this ecosystem, and he expressed great delight in the harmony of the place, where everything had what it needed to thrive and in return gave back what something else needed to thrive as well.

I was overwhelmed by the great beauty and fecundity that was present in this place where everything was doing, and was allowed to do, exactly what it was made to do. This place was wild, but not chaotic. Its order was a harmony that came from the excellence of each of its parts, and the excellence of each creature and plant contributed to the excellence of the whole. The excellence of the forest-field was dependent on the excellence of each leaf and each insect; the excellence of leaf and insect were dependent on the excellence of everything else within that space.

In addition to the beauty and fecundity of such a wild place, I was also struck by the vast and intimate knowledge this hobby-farmer had of his land. Because his way of relating to his land was so different from the ways of a conventional farmer, I struggled to find a word for the role he was fulfilling. “Owner” connotes detachment and management, but this man had an intimate knowledge of all the goings-on in his forest-field and his disposition was one of satisfaction, wonder, and reverence. “Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light, love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing,” says Father Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. This man loved all of God’s creation and each separate thing within it.

Meanwhile the word “farmer” conjured images of cleared spaces, neatly tilled rows, large ploughs and tractors, and the commercial market, but this man was more interested in making sure everything could function as it was made to than he was in profit and production. Yet, his forest-field was astonishingly fruitful.

It occurred to me that he was an artist. When a painter works on his canvas, he must keep his eye on the specific subject and corner of the canvas he is working on, but he must also keep an eye on how that specific subject or corner relates to the whole.

He was also a gardener. As he was walking me through his forest-field, I was taken back to the story of creation in Genesis—not only because this land was, like Eden, a place of paradisiacal order and beauty, but because, like Eden, it was also a place for delight and praise. One common reading of Genesis draws a connection between the reality of the imago Dei and the way that God sees the goodness of his creation. Man is made in the image and likeness of God. We are told that at the end of each day of creating, God looked upon his creation and “it was very good.” One of the ways that man can reflect God in the world is by imitating his activity of delight and praise. In For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann claims that our ability to praise the good is the ability that more than any other distinguishes us from the rest of the created world:

In the Bible to bless God is not a “religious” or “cultic” act, but the very way of life. God blessed the world, blessed man, blessed the seventh day . . . and this means that He filled all that exists with His love and goodness, made all “very good.” So the only natural (and not “supernatural”) reaction of man, to whom God gave this blessed and sanctified world, is to bless God in return, to thank Him, to see the world as God sees it and–in this act of gratitude and adoration–to know, name and possess the world. All rational, spiritual and other qualities of man, distinguishing him from other creatures have their focus and ultimate fulfillment in this capacity to bless God . . . “Homo sapiens,” “homo faber,” … yes, but, first of all, “homo adorans.”

To admire and praise goodness is part of our primordial vocation. The forest-field felt like Eden because its gardener was acting as homo adorans. He was filled with delight and gratitude and praise for each beautiful thing that lived in his garden. His habitual exercise of delight, gratitude, and praise made his garden a place of abundant life. In the suburban neighborhood where I lived, thistle was a prickly, pesky weed, to be pulled out as soon as it started to grow. But in this field, it was the plant whose purplish-pink flowers beautifully complemented the golden spikelets of the tall timothy grass and allowed the bees to gather enough nectar to survive the winter in their hive; and so, the thistle grew.

As I drove back to my neighborhood that afternoon, I pondered what it would mean to translate this gardener’s the variation of talent and personality within a community are not only compatible with the unity and flourishing of that community, but they actually make the unity and flourishing possible. vision of beauty into the context of a human community. Every human community, like every ecosystem, is a complex web of unique beings and symbiotic relationships. What would it look like to move about my neighborhood, my town, my city, my church with such an eye for beauty? What does it take to habitually recognize the beauty of each human being around me? What does it demand of my heart, my mind, my disposition? What would it do to a community if all its members had the same kind of vision? What would happen if we all adopted delight and praise as a way of life? Would it also, as it did in the garden, lead to abundance?

I realized that St. Paul has exactly this kind of vision when he likens the Christian community to a body. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul writes:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one spirit we were all baptized into one body Jews or Greeks, slaves or free and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member, but many.

Paul begins his metaphor by collapsing distinctions. He points out that people with different identities—Jew and Greek, slave and free—have been transformed into one body, one entity, through Christ. But, right after he collapses these distinctions to emphasize the unity of Christ’s followers, Paul makes a surprising turn. He points out that as the body is made up of different parts, the unified community is made up of different individuals, and he emphasizes the importance of the distinctions, the differences, within the community. He asks, “If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?”

As if to clarify for anyone who would mistake the oneness of the community for the sameness of the individuals within it, Paul suggests that our unity does not mean we are all now the same. We are all parts of the body of Christ, but within this body, within this community, we have different roles. Just as a body without a functioning ear is unable to fully be what it was made to be, so too a community without the excellence of one of its members is unable to fully be what it was made to be. So, the variation of talent and personality within a community are not only compatible with the unity and flourishing of that community, but they actually make the unity and flourishing possible. The excellence of the whole is dependent upon the excellence of each individual part. Therefore, to a degree, the excellence of each part is also dependent on the excellence of the other parts. Like the gardener who recognized the beauty of each element in his garden and the symbiosis between all the elements, Paul recognizes the beauty and interdependence of each human being within a community.

If we interpret Paul’s image in terms of our unique personalities and talents and functions, this means that each of us has something very particular and valuable to contribute to the families, schools, neighborhoods, churches, towns, and cities of which we are a part. Just as a garden needs the insects and the plants, the body needs the ears and the eyes. Just as the body needs the ears and the eyes, our communities need the artist as well as the runner, the writer as well as the singer, the quieter and the more outspoken, the energetic and the mellow. Just as the ear cannot do what the eye does and the eye cannot do what the ear does, each one of us has some role which only we can fulfill. You can give to your neighbor, your sister, your child, and your colleague something which no one else can give them. Your neighbor, your sister, your child, and your colleague have something to give you which only they can give. Each one of us can say with the psalmist, “I praise you God, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Each person we encounter is unique and irreplaceable and so we can also say, “I praise you God, for they are fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Paul’s words are at once consoling and challenging. It is consoling to know that you have something to offer the world that only you can offer and that you are needed by those around you in some very particular way. You have an excellence all your own. The person next to you has an excellence all their own. It is challenging to know that if we relinquish our role in the community, we deprive the community; if another member of our community relinquishes their role, we are deprived. Paul’s words are also challenging because of the temptation to envy which exists whenever we encounter the excellence and beauty of another. Paul writes:

If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body.

Why would the foot and the ear say such things? Perhaps because they look with envy at the beauty and excellence of the hand and the eye and, forgetting their own role and excellence within the body, despair that that beauty and excellence is not theirs. Just as it would be unthinkable, however, for the foot to say to the hand, “Hand, because I am not you and cannot lift up a cup of coffee, or paint a landscape, or throw a baseball like you, I do not have a role in this body,” it would unthinkable for us to say, “Because I cannot draw, run, write, sing, speak (you can fill in the blank for yourself) like so-and-so, I have no role here.” Paul is showing us the folly of such thoughts because, as he then points out, regardless of what we think of our role and our capacities, we are still part of the community and we still have a unique role to fulfill. These are words of tough love. At the end of his analogy, Paul says, “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” This is true as an ideal; a community that is functioning as a community rejoices together and suffers together. We have to make sure that upon the rejoicing of those around us, we resist the temptation to envy and do in fact rejoice for them and with them. It requires humility to remember one’s place within a community, to accept that this place is a limited one, and to admit that you cannot do the excellent thing that this other person is doing.

Encouragement is also a fitting antidote for envy. A paraphrase of Hebrews 3:13, from Morning Prayer, reads, “Encourage one another daily, while it is still today.” What would be the effect if all of us, in all the many communities of which we are a part, continually encouraged the excellence of those around us? This activity of delight and praise, in the absence of envy and despair, would cultivate a paradisiacal order and joy. This is something St. Anselm beautifully describes at the end of his Proslogion, where he considers what it will mean to possess the fullness of joy in the world to come. He explains that in the world to come, we will experience a multiplication of delight because we will be able to love the good of others as we love the good for ourselves:

Surely if another whom you loved in every way as yourself, had that same bliss, your joy would be double, for you would rejoice no less for him than for yourself. And if two or three or many more had this same blessedness, you would rejoice for each of them as much as you do for yourself, if you loved each one as yourself. So in that perfection of charity . . . , where no one loves another any less than he loves himself, they will all rejoice for each other as they do for themselves.

In the life to come, we will be able to see others and perfectly delight in their joy. We will not have shortcomings that lead us to despair or envy. We will have our excellence and they will have theirs; we will delight in their excellence and they will delight in ours. The kind of vision, this ability to see the good in the creature before us and sing praise for that goodness, will be perfected. The gardener’s way of moving through the natural world with an eye for beauty elucidated the brilliance of Paul’s metaphor for me. You have an excellence that is all your own, as does every person you encounter. To remember this and act accordingly, delighting in one’s own excellence and delighting in the excellence of others, is to begin the practice of perfect charity and so to cultivate a community of abundant life.

Colleen Coleman completed her undergraduate studies in English and Latin at Hillsdale College. She taught middle school and high school students for the past three years at Trinity at River Ridge in Minnesota. She currently teaches classes online at Scholé Academy. She has an active interest in permaculture farming and exploring the ways ecosystems work together to enhance communities. When not teaching, she enjoys playing the violin, running, reading, and cooking.

Poetry Mary Romero

Mary Romero’s work has appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Christianity and Literature, and Crux, among others, and her chapbook Philoxenia was the recipient of the Luci Shaw prize. Mary lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she works as an Anglican deacon for the Mission Chattanooga and as a teacher, writer, and mother of two lovely hooligans.

Poetry Mary Romero

What We No Longer Know

Stooping to pluck a flecked wildflower, nameless to me as yet (which is my own fault, as such abundance is a fact, a gift)

I furrow, feeling the deficit of all the names

I cannot fathom, never having known. And more –to fully fathom: sound its depths, or sound with lips, or encompass what the arms can hold, or – the way this bee, miraculously holding itself aloft with too-small wings (how? how?) peruses the inner sanctum of these petals, and when pleased and a wee bit tipsy (hence, perhaps, the bumble?) rises, gold-dusted and delighted with its knowledge, the body of which we have mostly forgotten.

Poetry Mary Romero

When In June The Lilies Have Their Day

Daylilies, to be precise, spreading their petals for a morning and an afternoon, usher in this season of saffron noses from our sinking into the blooms, the little hairs on my daughter’s upper lip catching the pollen, staining her skin for longer than a lily lives; and still, careless of being seen, we breathe them in: a little lemon, but softer – a spray of something sweet – like honeysuckle – but less heady. A touch come-hither –willing us to bend, tempting noses to nuzzle deep, detect a whisper in that small den of scent, as if the flower craves this crush; as if a life as brief as this should never go untouched.

One Piece of Advice to a First-Year Teacher (from a Second-Year Teacher)

// by Jonathan Coleman

Just over a year ago, I began my post as a humanities teacher at Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia. I was twenty-three years old and a recent college graduate. In reflecting upon my first year, I learned that, while there are numerous helpful books and articles that exist on classical pedagogy, there are simply some things that can’t be learned until the teacher steps in front of students for the first time. The adage rings true: “If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” Classical education is the tail, and the dozens of teenagers that you stand before daily, with whom you plead to live a good life, are the cat. This is because teaching and learning is not only an intellectual experience, but an incarnational one, requiring both body and soul. My one piece of advice, then, to a teacher embarking on her first year, would be to develop a realistic understanding of what it means to be human. This begins with developing an anthropology that is both biblical and classical. My life was changed to this end when I read Jamie Smith’s You Are What You Love in college. For the first time, I began to understand myself as more than a “brain on a stick.” Humans are rational, but humans are first and foremost lovers and worshipers. Smith asserts that many modern Christians have reduced discipleship to knowing the right doctrine, and sanctification to “thinking” the right things. Christian educational institutions have been especially guilty of believing that by robotically providing the right input (facts about God) we can expect the right output (Christlikeness).

In a passage that I have my eighth graders recite daily, St. Peter contends with this truncated view of humanity by arguing that sanctification requires not only knowledge of God, but an increasing amount of virtue, self-control, steadfastness, brotherly affection, and love. The assumption underlying the “increase” is that you will be formed as you do them. He also states that you confirm your election by “practicing” these qualities (2 Pet. 1).

The ancient and medieval worlds understood that we are also formed through perception and imitation. It is fitting that the psalmist’s “one request” is to “gaze” upon the Lord (Ps 27). We become like what we behold. Our perception and subsequent practices give rise to a far more visceral, intuitive morality then mere ideology can produce. If, therefore, our bodies and our bodily senses matter in spiritual formation, then “learning” is not merely limited to the lecture outline on the board but by what your students perceive in the world around them. Dostoyevsky did not say that intellect will save the world, but beauty. You are “teaching” your students even when you are not teaching them.

The physical world in which your own students find their Being—the friends they speak with, the art they consume, and the teacher on whom they fix their eyes—is as important as the knowledge entering their minds. If Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message” is correct, then knowing that your own Being in the student’s world has formative power should significantly shape your relationship with your students. It is not knowledge of beautiful things that ultimately inspires, but subjectively experiencing the Beautiful. A teacher who exudes humility and extends grace offers a more compelling lesson in godliness than a teacher simply telling students they should be humble and gracious.

Here is some encouragement: I would wager that you were hired by your school for who you are—your character and maturity—more than for what you know—your credentials and experience. I doubt your school would hire an immoral Ph.D. in classics. This is because our schools exist for the acquisition of virtue, and virtue is acquired not solely through subject matter expertise, but through repeatedly beholding and practicing that which is transcendent and heavenly. There is no tension here: you should be qualified to teach your subject, but it is more important to see your students as human beings who, as Christ said, will become like their teacher. Therefore, the best lesson you will teach the whole year may not come through your flawless recall of the Ontological Argument, but through asking your class for forgiveness for your particularly bitter attitude on a hard day. To teach students virtue, you must be a student of virtue. To convince your students to love others, you must love your students.

Your role as an educator is not that of a public intellectual who is paid to write, speak, and then retire to the ivory tower. Get to know all your students personally. Find out what they enjoy and what they are afraid of. Go to games and concerts. Better yet, coach a team. Let your students see you actively participating in your school’s communal liturgy and hymn-singing every day. Close your eyes during prayer, and enthusiastically support the house system.

Lecture to your students in engaging ways but be neither kitsch nor too technical. You are communicating with neither infants nor doctoral students. In other words, talk to students like you would adults. Address behavioral issues in a way that displays justice but neither puts down the student nor allows him to minimize his transgression. Test your stu- dents in ways that force them to contemplate virtue: do not allow them to write whatever they want, but do not merely assess their ability to recall trivia either (see my colleague Joshua Gibbs’ book Something They Will Not Forget).

Lastly, know your anthropology. As a teacher, you are not a robot or a “brain on a stick” either. You are a human with professional, social, and spiritual dimensions and obligations. You will have bad days. You will try your best to compartmentalize, but sometimes it will be difficult. Be upfront about the fact that it hurts your pride when you are slighted by a student. The best advice I have heard on this is from my upper school dean, Robyn Burlew, who says that your cup must be filled by something other than your school-related work. If your sense of self-worth is found in the degree to which your students respect you and the level of effort they give, you will be left empty.

Teaching can be an isolating vocation. It is a unique job in that while your colleagues are adults, you spend about 90 percent of your day as the only adult in the room. It is a delightful job, but it cannot be your life. You will receive angry emails from parents. You will have a student roll her eyes at you at the length of the essay you assign. If you are younger, you will have a teenager in a class attempt to assert his or her dominance in the room. It is imperative that you develop a protocol for navigating these situations and that you establish authority in your classroom. But please, learn how to fill your cup with other things. Look to your friends, your hobbies, your church, and ultimately the Lord. Before you can teach virtue to other humans, you must know that you are one: you are body and soul, you learn by practice and imitation, and you were created to behold beautiful things.

Jonathan Coleman is a humanities teacher at Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia. He studied philosophy and religion at James Madison University.