Gilead, Van Gogh, and Theology from Below

By Micah Hogan, Seminarian at Nashotah House 

A recent post by Jennifer Hooten Wilson has accused Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 novel Gilead of misrepresenting the Christian hope. Wilson quotes theologian Keith Johnson saying, “For Robinson, grace has become nature. Our life with God is not determined by God’s specific act to relate to us in time but by our act of recognizing our experience of creaturely being.” For Wilson, this flaw is nowhere more apparent than in the ending of the novel, where the narrator and protagonist John Ames blesses his godson Jack without Jack’s repentance. 

I do not wish to defend Robinson’s theology as a whole. I would, however, like to suggest that her novel Gilead reflects an orthodox theology when viewed as a theology “from below” rather than as a theology “from above.”

It is common for theologians to speak of christologies being either “from above” or “from below.” A christology from above begins with the creeds and dogma of the church and then understands the person and ministry of Jesus Christ in light of these. A christology from below, begins with the life and ministry of Jesus and on that foundation makes certain claims about God. These labels aren’t definitive, but they can help us to think through our theological starting place and quality of the subsequent claims which follow from that decision.

Part of Gilead’s genius is its narrative theology from below. For instance, in a striking passage, Ames meditates on water’s sacred character not through confession or catechism, but through his own experience of grace:

There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. 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.  (p. 27-28)

Robinson, through the character of Ames, does theology simply by perceiving the revelation of God’s being in creation, a la Romans 1:20. It is primarily theology as first person testimony, a method slow to yield definitive dogmatic claims but quick to stir our affections.

This artistic mode of doing theology “from below” isn’t unique to Robinson but has an early and established pedigree in Calvinism. Some of the earliest artistic commentaries on Calvin’s theology were the Vanitas paintings of the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Often, these paintings would depict lush scenes of wealth, power, or beauty, coupled with symbols of death, communicating life’s transience. Take this still life by Jacob Marrel (1614-1681). Flowers, money, and music (connoting sensuality and youth) are overtaken by death, symbolized most obviously by the prominent skull but also by the mouse in the bottom left and the wilting lilies to the right. The theology in this and other Vanitas paintings is clear: this life is not ultimate; therefore set your hope elsewhere.

Jacob Marrel, Vanitas still life (flowers, violin and skull), 1637. Oil on canvas. 93 x 80 cm. Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe.

While the Vanitas tradition sought to communicate God’s reality by pointing to the incompleteness of the creaturely realm, artists like Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) sought to communicate the divine using a different approach. While Van Gogh follows the Vanitas tradition in displaying a certain modesty in regard to religious depiction (in sharp contradistinction to his contemporary Paul Gauguin), Van Gogh radically revises the Vanitas tradition. He does this perhaps most strikingly in his Neo-iconographic portraits of peasants and his mailman, Joseph Roulin. Through these depictions, Van Gogh sought to communicate God’s hidden and sacramental presence in our perceived reality. Van Gogh claimed that he tried “to express the thought of a forehead through the radiance of a light tone on a dark background. To express hope through some star. The ardor of a living being through the rays of a setting sun.” God’s grace, Van Gogh seems to say, is manifest to us from below. “One of the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of ‘something on high,’” Van Gogh says, “is the unutterably moving quality that there can be in the expression of an old man . . . something precious, something noble, that can’t be meant for the worms.” Rather than depicting the worm hidden on a rose petal, Van Gogh seems to teach us to rejoice that roses are here at all.

Vincent Van Gogh, Portrait of Joseph Roulin. oil on canvas. 65 × 54 cm (25.5 × 21.2 ″). Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

Robinson, like Van Gogh, reimagines this Vanitas theology from below. While the Vanitas tradition sought to communicate God’s reality by pointing to the incompleteness of the creaturely realm, Robinson takes a different and more positive approach. Rather than pointing to creation’s transience to spot the mark of the Creator, Robinson draws attention to its inexplicable fullness. Gilead is, in essence, a reverse-Vanitas vignette. Rather than depicting the worm hidden on a rose petal, John Ames seems to teach us to rejoice that roses are here at all.

Where traditional Vanitas paintings depict dearth against a backdrop of fullness, Robinson takes the opposite approach. While the town of Gilead is time and again transfigured into a vision of paradise, it is not an unchanging space of eternal beauty and permanence. Its African-American church is burned to the ground out of prejudice. Ames’s father and brother leave the faith and leave Gilead. Ames’s beloved church is being torn down, and, most importantly, the narrative itself is occasioned by the impending death of its protagonist. The setting of Robinson’s novel is death and impermanence. Far from portraying a world of grace without brokenness, as Wilson and Johnson have implied, Gilead presents a world of brokenness where grace is abundantly, overwhelmingly present. Robinson’s aesthetic is not a “theology of glory” in the famous phrase of Martin Luther, but a theology of the glory of the cross. 

In light of this, we should not read the ending of Robinson’s novel like we would a systematic theology. When Ames blesses Jack at the end of the novel, it is not as a negation of his sin, nor of his apostasy. Rather it is a theology from below, a picture of a world we experience as being more complex than clear-cut distinctions between nature and grace. Jack’s blessing is not a negation of his sin but a depiction of God’s already present love for us “while we were still sinners.” Gilead isn’t the whole story of God’s dealings with humanity, nor does it need to be. It’s just one man’s life, and how he learned to be like his Father in heaven, who sends rain on the just and the unjust. 

Micah Hogan is a residential Middler and sacristan at Nashotah House, pursuing his MDiv as a postulant for holy orders in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). Micah fell in love with the “elvishness” of the Anglican tradition during his first Mass his freshman year of college and has never looked back. He was confirmed a year later and began to discern a call to Holy Orders. He is a perpetual member of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University (Class of 2019), where he studied Theology and Great Books, in addition to spending a semester abroad studying philosophical theology at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. Micah is primarily interested in the doctrines of creation and sexuality, the practices of hospitality, and the writing of poetry. His accomplishments include serving as theology editor for The PQ Review and co-hosting the infamous Polycarp Pajama Party of 2016.