SIN OF OMISSION:

But much more of the book is taken up with Robinson's criticisms of a different sort of reductionism. It's not only Christians who are guilty of forgetting the splendor of the human. Scientists too--whose research has opened up windows onto dazzling, dizzying complexity in the heavens above and the equally unfathomable intricacies of the body and its microbial residents below--exhibit the same blindness. "The understandings of human nature that have been proposed to us as scientific diminish us," Robinson laments, "even as science itself is amazed by our complexity, even as science itself is a demonstration of our brilliance." That qualifier--"proposed to us as scientific"--is crucial, since Robinson does not think that real science gives reductionism any quarter. It is only a kind of misguided religious zeal that allows scientists to go beyond the evidence of their own discipline and declare that the human soul is nothing but a material process.

To combat these various assaults on human dignity, Robinson turns to some of her heroes: the 16th-century Reformer John Calvin and the English and American Puritans, Calvin's heirs. "Very characteristic of recent theories about humankind is the assumption that we are the creatures of our race or genes or the traumas we have suffered or the shape of our brain," says Robinson, pinpointing yet more forms of determinism. But the 18th-century American Puritan Jonathan Edwards, among others, "taught me how to understand that something much richer and stranger is going on than any of these schemes can begin to suggest."

To Robinson, it is no accident that New England, dominated as it was by Puritan immigrants from old England, quickly distinguished itself as more humane--more directly responsible for American democracy and progressivism--than the Anglican-dominated South, whose penal codes were far harsher. Puritans like Jonathan Edwards celebrated human dignity because they believed we were created in the image of God. And that belief, in turn, became the bedrock of their ethics, because "[h]ow we think about ourselves has everything to do with how we act toward one another." The more they cultivated awareness of the mystery of their own humanity, the more the Puritans were prepared to shelter and dignify the humanity of others. Their writings can help us do the same today, Robinson thinks. [...]

It is also striking how little Robinson's celebration of humanity is qualified with an emphasis on humanity's fallenness. She appreciates Calvin's great insistence on humanity's capacity for learning, self-consciousness, and responsibility, but she omits almost entirely the side of Calvin that says things like this:

[W]e know that, by the fall of Adam, all mankind fell from their primeval state of integrity, for by this the image of God was almost entirely effaced from us, and we were also divested of those distinguishing gifts by which we would have been, as it were, elevated to the condition of demigods; in short, from a state of highest excellence, we were reduced to a condition of wretched and shameful destitution. [...]

It's unfortunate that Robinson omits this, because--paradoxically--laying more stress on human depravity might actually advance, rather than detract from, the humanism she wants to promote. As counterintuitive as it seems, recognizing the human capacity for cruelty and injustice has the potential to make us more compassionate toward others, more forgiving of human frailty, and more ready to acknowledge that others share the same mixture of good and bad motives, the same cocktail of noble and base behavior, that we know to be characteristic of our own souls. Belief in original sin, as Alan Jacobs has argued in his book on the subject, "serves as a kind of binding agent," bringing the human family together. In a strange twist, the deterministic scientists and angry Christians that Robinson repeatedly denounces may have latched onto something to which Robinson herself is blind: For all of our glories, human beings remain trapped in vicious circles of self-infatuation, self-preservation, and self-sabotage, and only something stronger than art, scholarship, and democracy can finally rescue us.

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