The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don't know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it.
It is a wonderful, luminous passage, typical of Robinson's ability to discover the poetic even in the most mundane. Robinson is a Christian, indeed a Calvinist (though, improbably, she tends to see John Calvin more as a kind of Erasmus-like humanist than as the firebrand preacher who railed against the human race as constituting a "teeming horde of infamies"), whose life and writing is suffused with religious faith. Robinson's fiction possesses an austere beauty, "a Protestant bareness" as the critic James Wood has put it,[1] that recalls both the English poet George Herbert and "the American religious spirit that produced Congregationalism and nineteenth-century Transcendentalism and those bareback religious riders Emerson, Thoreau and Melville".
There is in Robinson's writing a spiritual force that clearly springs from her religious faith. It is nevertheless a spiritual force that transcends the merely religious. "There is a grandeur in this vision of life", Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, expressing his awe at nature's creation of "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful". The springs of Robinson's awe are different from those of Darwin's. And yet she too finds grandeur in all that she touches, whether in the simple details of everyday life or in the great moral dilemmas of human existence. Robinson would probably describe it as the uncovering of a divine presence in the world. But it is also the uncovering of something very human, a celebration of our ability to find the poetic and the transcendent, not through invoking the divine, but as a replacement for the divine.
There is in Robinson's writing a spiritual force that clearly springs from her religious faith. It is nevertheless a spiritual force that transcends the merely religious. "There is a grandeur in this vision of life", Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, expressing his awe at nature's creation of "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful". The springs of Robinson's awe are different from those of Darwin's. And yet she too finds grandeur in all that she touches, whether in the simple details of everyday life or in the great moral dilemmas of human existence. Robinson would probably describe it as the uncovering of a divine presence in the world. But it is also the uncovering of something very human, a celebration of our ability to find the poetic and the transcendent, not through invoking the divine, but as a replacement for the divine.
One does not, of course, have to be religious to appreciate religiously inspired art. One can, as a non-believer, listen to Mozart's Requiem or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's qawwli, look upon Michaelangelo's Adam or the patterns of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan in Iran, read Dante's Divine Comedy or Lao Zi's Daode Jing, and be drawn into a world of awe and wonder. Many believers may question whether non-believers can truly comprehend the meaning of religiously-inspired art. We can, however, turn this round and ask a different question. What is it that is "sacred" about sacred art? For religious believers, the sacred, whether in art or otherwise, is clearly that which is associated with the holy and the divine. The composer John Tavener, who died at the end of last year, was one of the great modern creators of sacred music. A profoundly religious man – he was a convert to Russian Orthodoxy – Tavener's faith and sense of mysticism suffused much of his music. Historically, and in the minds of most people today, the sacred in art is, as it was with Tavener, inextricably linked with religious faith.
There is, however, another sense in which we can think about the sacred in art. Not so much as an expression of the divine but, paradoxically perhaps, more an exploration of what it means to be human; what it is to be human not in the here and now, not in our immediacy, nor merely in our physicality, but in a more transcendental sense. It is a sense that is often difficult to capture in a purely propositional form, but which we seek to grasp through art or music or poetry. Transcendence does not, however, necessarily have to be understood in a religious fashion – that is, solely in relation to some concept of the divine. It is rather a recognition that our humanness is invested not simply in our existence as individuals or as physical beings, but also in our collective existence as social beings and in our ability, as social beings, to rise above our individual physical selves and to see ourselves as part of a larger project, to cast upon the world, and upon human life, a meaning or purpose that exists only because we as human beings create it.
Image: Richard Pluck. Source: Flickr
