Commonplacing: Marilynne Robinson and the Sacred/Secular Divide

I have thought for sometime now of using this space as a commonplace book as well as a traditional blog. A commonplace book, for those unfamiliar, was a popular classical model for collecting quotations on various subjects by the best authors. So, for example, Calvin kept a commonplace book that included the major authors from antiquity arranged categorically: quotations about love or justice or mercy or virtue. Some quotes, obviously, would qualify in more than one category. Many children were taught to read and write through the use of commonplace books. They would write out a famous oration by Cicero, learning how to write, read, and think like the great Roman republican. It has fallen out of fashion in the modern school system for lessons about... come to think of it, I can't remember much of what they taught us in school, mostly rote memorization of historical, grammatical, and scientific facts. Easy come, easy go, as they say. 


So consider this, without further learned explanation, the first entry in what will function as my online commonplace book. It will contain quotes from books, articles, and other things that I read. Not much further explanation is needed. And, fittingly, I begin with Marilynne Robinson, unequivocally my favorite living writer and one of my favorite living human beings, from her new collection of essays When I Was a Child I Read Books. 


This is from the first essay in the collection, which retreads some familiar territory for Robinson's work: the supposed antagonism between science and religion. The essay is called "Freedom of Thought."

“But almost everyone, for generations now, has insisted on a sharp distinction between the physical and the spiritual. So we have had theologies that really proposed a 'God of the gaps,' as if God were not manifest in the creation, as the Bible is so inclined to insist, but instead survives in those dark places, those black boxes, where the light of science has not yet shone. And we have atheisms and agnosticisms that make precisely the same argument, only assuming that at some time the light of science will indeed dispel the last shadow in which the holy might have been thought to linger. Religious experience is said to be associated with activity in a particular part of the brain. For some reason this is supposed to imply that it is delusional. But all thought and experience can be located in some part of the brain, that brain more replete than the starry heaven God showed to Abraham, and we are not in the habit of assuming that it is all delusional on these grounds. Nothing could justify this reasoning, which many religious people take as seriously as any atheist could do, except the idea that the physical and the spiritual cannot abide together, that they cannot be one dispensation.” (10)

My plan is to not add much to these quotations in the way of my own thoughts, especially in such a case where the excerpt does more than I could ever hope to do on my own. But Robinson is getting at something which has been almost constant on my mind for the past two years--the ridiculousness of our easy separation of the secular and the spiritual, the profane and the sacred. We have adopted a Manichean dualism, Christians specifically, that treats physical as bad, spiritual as good. Atheism treats physical as the only real and spiritual as delusion, but the effect is the same. In either case, it is bad. Also, neither position is true.