Tongues of Ash and Fire: Immanence and the Acts of the Apostles in Marilynne Robinson’s "Gilead"

December 9, 2019

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is a novel awash in fire. There are candle-flames, fireflies, sparks and gasoline; the churches burn; and the people are all destined to burn, too—said to be “incandescent” in life (Robinson 44) and reduced to “ember[s]” in death (245). The metaphors are multi-layered, taking on a plurality of different meanings as the novel progresses. Their sheer volume makes it difficult to establish a unified theory of Robinson’s use of fire. However, the most obvious interpretation advanced explicitly by the narrator, John Ames, is that of firelight as “a metaphor for the human soul” (119). Past scholarship has very rightly connected this conceit to the Old Testament’s Genesis narrative, which (according to the very handsome scholar Chad Wriglesworth) depicts the creation of human consciousness and bodily form through the “animating breath-wind-spirit of God” (Wriglesworth 107); it is this fire that “ignites Ames's mind and enables him to recognize and respond to God's voice in creation” (108). This essay does not contest this point but instead offers a secondary interpretation of fire grounded in the Holy Spirit’s appearance outside Genesis, looking instead at the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles. In it, Christ’s followers are showered in fire and gain the power to speak in tongues, positioning the substance not only a way of recognizing God's voice in creation, but as a means of dialogue between the voices of God’s creations—that is to say, people—for good or ill. This essay will demonstrate how Robinson aligns fire with the biblical power of tongues as a means of understanding; how she associates the product of fire—ashes—with ineffable physical communion; and how in doing so she devalues the direct communication of the former in favour of the more indirect mutual understanding bestowed by the latter as a more tacit expression of God’s immanence. This creates a symbolic framework through which one can interpret the novel, specifically Ames’s burning of sermons; the inability of Ames’ father and grandfather to understand one another; and the inadequacy of language in the dialogue between John Ames and Jack Boughton.

The Acts of the Apostles is the fifth book of the New Testament, chronicling the birth of the early Christian Church, and so is invoked most often by the religious patriarch of the Ames’ family: John’s grandfather. Robinson describes him as defined by heavenly contact: “a man everlastingly struck by lightning” (Robinson 49) who is said to receive messages from “Creation” via “thunder and lighting” (46) and visitations from Jesus while sleeping “by the fire” (49). Through this characterization, Robinson suggests that he has (or at least perceives himself to have) a direct line of contact with God. It is thus no surprise that in his recounting of one of his visions, he slips Acts 2:17 into his speech, saying: “Your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams” (Robinson 176). By not explicitly invoking it (taking the words as his own) and omitting the preceding phrase “your sons and daughters shall prophecy,” Reverend Ames effectively positions himself as the one making the prophecy (Joel, in this case), reinforcing his self-proclaimed role as a representative of God “preach[ing] the good news to the poor” at Christ’s command (175). This is reinforced by the content of Acts itself, in which “tongues like as of fire” reign down from the sky, producing the “sound … of a rushing mighty wind” (a clear manifestation of the breath-wind-spirit of the Holy Ghost) which grants Christ’s followers the ability to speak in ‘tongues’—languages they do not know—to better spread the word of God (Acts 2:3). Given Reverend Ames’ role as a preacher, his alignment with biblical prophets, and his direct connection to the Holy Spirit in the same fiery manner as Christ’s apostles in Acts (Robinson even notes that he is able to conjure “the sound of fire” from a bag of licorice, presumably taken to his tongue) one would assume he is supposed to fill the role of a moral mouthpiece: the reader’s direct line to God (46). However, this does not happen. The people he preaches to do not listen. John Ames’ father even alludes to him having the “tongue [of] a fire” (6), yet his fiery tongue yields no product: “Only a few people seemed to have been paying attention” (176). This suggests that the people are either deaf to the spirit of God; or, given the many ways that God is available to others throughout the novel, Robinson is attempting to suggest that the power of preaching—using language to communicate or force opinions on others—is not the ideal path by which one might a receive true understanding of God and his immanence.

This is contrasted with John Ames’ preaching, as he also relates to the reader a dream in which he is “preaching to Jesus Himself”—however, instead of casting judgement on the people of Gilead or exercising his tongue of fire as his grandfather did, he is instead interrupted by the entrance of his future wife (68). She appears to him as a silent, physical, unnamed presence, and suddenly his words turn to “ashes in [his] mouth” (68). The similarity of these two scenes suggests that Robinson is trying to draw a parallel between John and his grandfather in their similar roles as preachers to illustrate their dissimilar attitude towards the world in exercising that ability. While the grandfather persists in his mode of communication to no end, John quiets his tongue, opens himself to the world as it is presented to him, and finds communion in a wife. This association of ash with physical communion is reinforced again in John’s account of cleaning his “grandfather’s church,” apparently “struck by lighting” in the same way his grandfather was said to (99). The young John Ames is approached by his father who gets “down on his heels in the rain” (as though in prayer) and gives John a biscuit covered in soot from his “scorched hand,” saying “'there's nothing cleaner than ash”—an act that John explicitly views as an act of “communion” (95). In contrast to his father and grandfather, who are constantly at odds with one another in their respective convictions, John is able to find that connection with his father in a ritual sanctified by ash, and thus he explains that “much of [his] life was comprehended in that moment” (95). There are no visitations, no tongues of fire, no preaching the word of God—and yet John, in receiving that ash, is brought into an awareness of the rain, the men working, the women’s untied hair, and recognises God in a biscuit. He is able to see the immanence of God through His world, in a way that those listening to his grandfather’s speech never could.

This association between John Ames and ash—his ability to forgo the act of spoken communication in favour of simple understanding through communion—is also reinforced throughout the narrative in his burning of language. He burns the letter in which his father writes “the tongue is a fire” (6); he burns a sermon the night before he intends to read it rather than shamelessly “thunder [it] from the pulpit” (42); and he suggests that “it might be best to burn” his entire life’s work as a preacher (40). Nearly every time he does so, Robinson writes tellingly that they are not burnt outside, but in the kitchen: “I dropped it right in the stove” (6). John wants to reduce his words to ash, that they might be eaten in an act of communion. Even those things which are supposed to be cooked in the kitchen—grilled cheese sandwiches, for instance—are always burned, “smoked and sputtered” over the stove, and yet John’s son is said to eat them “a little more happily for the scorch” (37); towards the middle of the book, John recounts for a second time how his mother always burned their sandwiches, and yet he claims “we ate them anyways” (76). Ames consistently dwells on and tries to invoke these moments of communion, even suggesting once or twice that the entire novel—his writing to his son—may too be “lost or burned” in the way he burns everything else (40). It is a clear inverse of the language of tongues and fire invoked by Acts that those things consumed by fire are almost always transformed by Robinson into objects of consumption.

One could argue that this focus on ash is still complicit in the dynamic promoted by Acts and Ames’ grandfather, as ash cannot be created without first having fire, just as one cannot come to see God in the world without first hearing of God’s existence. However, there is a crucial distinction to be made in that this biblical fire is unnatural. As Lisa M. Siefker Bailey points out: "The fire of [Acts] is a contrary symbol because it flames but does not burn” (Bailey 266). By this she means it is fire without object, without fuel; there can be no tangible product (i.e. ash) made from it. This clearly marks it as a substance of divine communication, as God similarly speaks to Abraham via a bush that “burn[s] with fire … but [is] not consumed” (Exodus 3:2). By not participating in the act of ‘consumption’ which defines life and communion, this fire is therefore divorced from the world and the people in it. This is contrary to the message Robinson seems intent on conveying through the novel, as she repeatedly indicates through John Ames’s musings that he prefers to see God through the primordial elements as they occur in nature: “water, sunlight, soil and air” (Wriglesworth 107). This is made explicit in the final pages of the novel when John reveals that the sermon which was turned to ash in his mouth was composed for “the Pentecost” (Robinson 185), the holiday explicitly celebrating the biblical passage in question: Chapter 2 of Acts. John thus dismisses the content of his original speech in which he advocated the idea of people as embers blown into radiance through divine intervention, instead saying: “The Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than [this view] seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration” (245). John Ames rejects the mode of understanding God advanced by his grandfather and seen in Acts, advising that people instead look for Him in “the world” itself. Tellingly, he finds his Pentecost sermon placed “beside [his] plate,” and promptly suggests that it and his other sermons would “make a good fire” for “hot dogs and marshmallows” (245). Again, John sees godly language as useful only for those moments of communion it might create. By ending on an image of hotdogs and marshmallows, he effectively concludes the book with the message that there is more to be understood in the product of the flame than in the fire itself.

This idea manifests itself also in the relationships between characters, providing a symbolic framework through which the relationship between Ames’s father and grandfather can be better understood. As previously mentioned, the first instance of ‘tongues of fire’ in the novel is from Ames’ father, who warns: “'Behold how much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire” (6). While he speaks generally, offering advice, the ‘fiery’ relationship between the two elder Ames men suggests that the line comes from their experience of mutual conflict rooted in the pure faith of their respective beliefs (i.e. the grandfather’s abolitionist visions from Christ, and the father’s New Testament pacifism). The line is also a direct biblical quotation, which continues: “[The tongue is] a world of iniquity … it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature” (James 3:5). This suggests that their fiery discourse does not merely cut them off from a deeper understanding of one another (as John says, “A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but … mutual incomprehension”), but is actively detrimental to their ability to see God’s immanence in ‘the course of nature’ as John does (Robinson 7). When the two men try to bury their differences, John of course locates their failure to do so in their refusal to extinguish the divine flames of their respective belief systems: “they buried [their differences] not very deeply, and perhaps more as one would bank a fire than smother it” (34). The two men are unable to put aside their fervent preaching and share in the ashes together, to break bread over the remains of the flames. Thus, the only moment of communion we get between the two characters is at the grandfather’s grave, once he has been reduced to ashes himself: “It was the most natural thing in the world that my grandfather's grave would look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire,” John says (50). As suggested in the introduction, this likely operates on one level as the conceit of ‘people as flames’—embers to be breathed into by God or put out. If we accept this, it suggests that the only possible way the father-son pair could find communion in each other and recognize the beauty in the world is through one of their deaths. In finding his father’s fire extinguished, John Ames’ own father is finally able to recognize God’s immanence in the setting sun and rising moon, saying: “I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I'm glad to know that” (15).

This same dynamic is seen—and resolved—in the relationship between John Ames and his namesake, John (Jack) Boughton. This naming exists so as to set up a comparison between the two father-son pairs in the language of fire surrounding them. Like the two elder men, John and Jack begin their relationship unable to understand one another. Their dialogue is similarly fiery, manifesting itself through passive-aggression and pranks, such as the time Jack destroys John’s mailbox with wood-shavings: “I heard a poof and looked up, and just then flames came pouring out of the mouth of that box” (181). Once again, we see fire associated with mouths as a means of dialogue. However, the fact that Jack chooses to burn mail in the same way that John seeks communion in rendering his own sermons into ash indicates a possibility of reconciliation between them through the destruction of language. This is acknowledged explicitly by Jack later on in the novel, when he bemoans the lack of “common language” between them, wondering: “Should there by no way to bring a drop of water to those of us who languish in the flames…?” (170). He frames the possibility of their understanding one another through the image of a fire being put out, turned into smoking ash through water in an interaction between the fundamental elements of nature. Unlike John’s father and grandfather, Jack recognizes that the only way for them to find communion in one another is to abandon dialogue altogether—to put aside language and instead recognize each other physically, in nature. At the end of the novel, John thus returns this will by recognizing Jack physically, laying his “hands upon him” in the same way that the Apostles learn to do in acts, sharing “the Holy Ghost” not through tongues of fire, but through simple human connection (Acts 8:17). When the blessing is over, and Jack looks at John “as if he were waking out of a dream” (Robinson 241) it recalls the scene of preaching at the beginning of this essay in which the grandfather laments that people no longer have visions or “dream dreams” as the Apostles did upon receiving the Holy Spirit through tongues of fire (176). Here Robinson indicates that dreaming and ecstatic visions might indeed be the problem—that they orient people up towards the heavenly powers of the sky rather than the ground below. Jack Boughton wakes up from a dream, opens his eyes, and sees God’s immanence for the first time in His people, as John Ames does.

Ultimately, Robinson invokes the flames of Acts for the purpose of defining the right and wrong ways of seeing God. She writes a novel that advocates for a certain kind of relationship with the world, one which emphasises godliness in people. In writing, John Ames uses fire in all its meanings to articulate a vision of communion that might allow his son to avoid the mistakes made by his forebears, and to appreciate those in his life and the things they do together—be it physical affection, the laying of hands, or the eating of burnt grilled cheese. In his prophesizing speech, John’s grandfather remarks: “What is left here in Gilead? Dust. Dust and ashes” (176). While for him it is a sorrowful thing—Gilead’s flame of radicalism put out—the ashes are precisely the reason why John Ames choses to stay.

Works Cited

Bailey, Lisa M. Siefker. “Fraught with Fire: Race and Theology in Marilynne Robinson's

Gilead.” Christianity and Literature, vol. 59, no. 2, Winter 2010.

Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. Harper Perennial, 2004.

The Bible. Authorized King James Version, Oxford UP, 1998.

Wriglesworth, Chad. “Becoming a Creature of Artful Existence: Theological Perception and

Ecological Design in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead.” This Life, This World: New Essays

on Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Gilead and Home, edited by Jason W. Stevens.

Brill Academic Publishers, 2015.