The Universe. All of the cosmos, time, and existence drips with the lushness of profound and ineluctable mystery, according to Robinson. These realities warrant perennial attention. They persist as live and momentous quandaries in the modern mind no less than the ancient one. The sheer existence of the natural order, which has never needed to “hear the word, ‘Eureka,’ or, for that matter, even the word ‘nature,’” is astounding.

Nevertheless, to Robinson’s chagrin, the mere fact of the universe has come to explain itself away in our time. In the cautionary words of Ruth, the protagonist of Housekeeping, “All this is fact. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.” What does it mean, then, that a star, a cloud, a river, a flower, a skyscraper, and a baby exist? For starters, “we have no way of knowing the true nature of the reality in which we are immersed”; thus, Robinson writes, “If we do not know the character of being itself—I have never seen anyone suggest that we do know it—then there is an inevitable superficiality in any claim to an exhaustive description of anything that participates in being.”

The lack of absolute comprehension, or omniscience, encourages humility. Robinson, following the theological genius of Jonathan Edwards, underscores the ineffable beauty of being-in-general. In short, being is the start of perception and wonder. As Reverend John Ames, in Gilead, proclaims, “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?” Per Robinson, science cannot pretend to offer the solution or resolution to this mystery, but only a variety of detailed articulations of it. The question of the good or the true or the beautiful “has by no means gone into abeyance since we learned to make penicillin or to split the atom.” Science, like theology and culture, is a strategy of narration. “Every grand venture at understanding is hypothesis, not so different from metaphysics.”

The Mind. The vastness of the wonders of being, for Robinson, substantiates the subjective mind. The locus of apperception is, consequently, interwoven with external grandeur. Yet, the “presence of human consciousness is a radical, qualitative change in the natural order.” Therefore, the self, the spirit, the soul, the mind’s eye, this sanctuary constitutes a point of dynamic convergence.

“It may have been perverse of destiny to array perception across billions of subjectivities, but the fact is central to human life and language and culture, and no philosophy or cognitive science should be allowed to evade it.” Interpenetrative mystery of this order invigorates human exceptionalism; on the other hand, it forewarns of presumptuous egoism. “By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view.” Far from being debilitating, the exigencies of wonderment in the universe and in the subjective mind stimulate awe.

Only from a posture of modesty before the complexity and mystery of depth crying out to depth can Christian uncertainty blossom. Robinson seems to view her writing as an apologia for this sort of exalted or unfathomable meekness. From another angle, her works are an apologia contra cynicism. In the postmodern era, “we feel increasingly sunk in a world of mere things, in a hard-edged Reality that disallows imagination except to exact tribute from it.” Gracious truth and dignity counteract the uncharitable programs of critique and suspicion. The former are costly; the latter are cheap. The former, as miraculous gifts, present a “way of maintaining an appropriate humility in the face of what we think we know.”