Reclaiming a Sense
of the Sacred
OVER THE YEARS of writing and teaching, I have tried to free myself of constraints I felt, limits to the range of exploration I could make, to the kind of intuition I could credit. I realized gradually that my own religion, and religion in general, could and should disrupt these
constraints, which amount to a small and narrow definition of what
human beings are and how human life is to be understood. And I have
often wished my students would find religious standards present in
the culture that would express a real love for human life and encour-
age them also to break out of these same constraints.
B6 THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
A writer contemplates religion,
science, art, and the miraculous
By MARILYNNE ROBINSON
I should probably have tried raising the stakes. The idea was, in
any case, that behavior was conditioned by reward or its absence, and
that one could extrapolate meaningfully from the straightforward
demonstration of rattish self-interest promised in the literature, to the
admittedly more complex question of human motivation. I have read
subsequently that a female rat is so gratified at having an infant rat
come down the reward chute that she will do whatever is demanded of
her until she has filled her cage with them. This seems to me to complicate the definition of self-interest considerably, but complexity was
not a concern of the behaviorism of my youth, which was reductionist
in every sense of the word.
It wasn’t all behaviorism. We also pondered Freud’s argument that
primordial persons, male, internalized the father as superego by actu-
ally eating the poor fellow. Since then we have all felt bad—well, the
FEBRUARY 17, 2012
