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Pages 166-173
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Gilead, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Life, Death, and Beauty
Christian Faith, Mystery, and Ministry
Memory, Vision, and Conviction
Estrangement and Reconciliation
Loneliness and Love
Summary
Analysis
Gilead doesn’t look like much, but John wants his son to know that heroes and saints have lived here. Over time, those saints came to seem like mere eccentrics. John even felt this way about his grandfather, dreading his disappointment. The older generation judged people with great harshness for failing to embrace the “great cause,” and John believes they were justified.
John seems to take up this subject in the aftermath of Jack’s critical comments about his faith, as though to assure his son that although it isn’t a perfect place, Gilead has been home to exemplary Christians. It also seems that Jack’s criticisms have hit a nerve. That’s why he brings up his grandfather, implying that by not taking up his grandfather’s convictions so passionately, he’s let him down.
Themes
John remembers a certain Fourth of July when his grandfather was asked to speak. (The mayor who invited him doesn’t seem to have known just how eccentric the old man was.) John has a copy of the sermon his grandfather preached that day, and he copies it out here for his son. His grandfather wrote that the Lord came to him when he was a young man and spoke to him. He told him to free the captives. He categorizes this as a vision. Such things aren’t common anymore. In his day, General Grant called Iowa “the shining star of radicalism.” But now, only dust and ashes remain in Gilead. Most people weren’t listening very carefully, but those who did mostly just laughed at the strangeness of the speech. His grandfather knew it hadn’t done much good.
Even though he doesn’t agree with everything his grandfather said and did, John regards him as exemplary in many ways and wants his son to learn from that example. His grandfather’s eccentric Fourth of July speech can be seen as a parallel to John’s unpreached sermon about World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic. Both men held strong convictions, but the difference between the two of them is that his grandfather gave his speech knowing he’d be misunderstood and even derided, while John destroyed his sermon on the grounds that it wouldn’t do any good.
Themes
John thinks about that a lot. It seems to him that the same words that radicalize one generation often alienate the next. So while it might seem that he would feel obligated to rescue Jack from his skepticism, he feels the conversation is pretty futile. In any case, he has always declined to get involved in conversations with skeptics, because he doesn’t believe that one can speak truthfully of God from a defensive posture. It just reinforces people’s skepticism.
The alienation between John’s father and grandfather is a good example of the dynamic John discusses here. He figures that any arguments he might offer Jack might alienate him, much as his grandfather’s audience rejected his views. And in general, he doesn’t think a person can be argued into faith in God.
Themes
When John was young and Edward was studying in Germany, his father watched him like a hawk and lectured him about the faintest whiff of heterodoxy in John’s thinking. It caused tension in their relationship, but John knew that his father was really trying to find a way through to Edward.
The same dynamic that occurred between John’s father and grandfather repeated itself between John’s father and brother Edward: his father’s faith wasn’t intelligible to Edward. “Losing” Edward this way made John’s father fear the same would happen with John.
Themes
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John actually thinks that attempts to defend faith can backfire, “because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.” And it’s possible to assert something’s existence (like “Being”) without understanding what it means. And God is yet further beyond that, as the “Author of Existence.” Human understanding is too poor to grasp how a being could exist before existence. These ideas force us to speak of things of which we have no experience, like “building a ladder to the moon.” So, John advises his son not to look for proofs of God. They’ll never be enough, and over time, they can be very unsettling.
Here, John means that arguing about God ultimately can’t work—God is above human categories, so human reason can’t apply to God successfully. He also rejects the idea that it’s necessary to understand something in order to believe in it. John isn’t being anti-intellectual; he values searching, studying, and asking questions about one’s beliefs. But he’s essentially discouraging his son from mixing up reason and faith—these categories might complement each other, but they can’t take each other’s place.
Themes
