AFTER CHRISTIANITY, WHAT?

...Updike too intimates in Couples and A Month of Sundays* that the withdrawal of the Christian God from the minds and hearts of all but a few of contemporary, acquisitive men is ultimately not a matter of clear-cut human choice and determination...

...If Marshfield, unlike Hanema in Couples, is unrelieved by the absenting of God from the innermost human recesses of his flock, he is somewhat relieved by the call of a new humanism which would leave us the needs of the body and their assuagement without Transcendence...

...But in Marshfield Barthianism is self-evident...

...The fatalism in A Month of Sundays emerges less explicitly in Marshfield's perception and, at times, exemplification of a contemporary wasteland, a "desert beyond reclamation, a feeble and featureless wilderness where none but the most regenerate of demonic superstitions-astrology, augury, Hinduism-spring up in the hearts of the young...

...Religion has become a sack of private feelings and opinions-at its worst self-indulgence, at its best a poignant Pas-calian poetry, as in Hammarskjold's Markings...

...In general," his diagnosis reads, "the churches . . . bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola: they promoted thirst without quenching it...

...The adulterous but religious Prynne, newly emergent from the pages of Hawthorne, and now devoted to the repair of "American religious dislocation," undresses before him "without comment," after having knocked on his door in a manner that was not "the knock of doom after all...

...There is no consolation, though Marshfield attempts to contrive one as when he says "No man, unless it was Jesus, believes...

...He has his memory and he still has a soul...

...In the person of the believer Mrs...

...Is there a more than accidental connection between the idea of a Transcendent Ground outside human experience and the ideal of present-day America's recovering its roots in the political order of its Founders...

...I had no choice but to follow my father into the ministry...

...Perhaps, then, the question "After Christianity, what...

...But Updike never quite delivers the goods-a situation which in part may account for his appeal...

...On this score Barth has been charged with a theological picture in which Divine Transcendence is unable to permeate the skin of the human social organism...

...Yet, such reconciliation proves to be transient and superficial, unable to fathom the essence of the antipathy of the new humanism and Marshfield's Barthian sense of Divine Transcendence...

...yet, "The cloth of the adulterous couch," he insists, is interwoven "with the glowing, living filaments of transience, of time itself, our element, our only element, which Christ consecrated by entering history, rather than escaping it, as did Buddha...

...As with his soul in preaching, so with his body in sexual liaison: he is driven, impelled, fated, permitted no moral confidence either in his beliefs or his adulteries...

...Why this fatalism both about the absence of God and about the "preservation" of that democratic, republican being still vaguely but staunchly associated with the American social experiment...

...The answer in its multifariousness reduces, it would seem, to the immediacy of sexuality, the cult of the well-being of the human body and the worshipful nurture of its possibilities, and the occasional, faint, but persistent remembrance of Divine Transcendence as the ground of all too human being-an uneasy, troubled, but continuing marriage in an "age between the death and rebirth of gods...

...In his actions, he is willing and reluctant to follow the scent of sexual coupling to its limit ("No partner and I ever tried the nave and its pews...

...And if there be an abiding tension between the idea of Divine governance of Creation and the ideal of America's Founders, or what Lincoln called "the capability of a people to govern themselves," is this tension itself ultimately productive...

...Updike persists, it would seem, in raising the same question and exploring more permutations of the same answer in his most recent novel...

...Updike alludes to the privatized being of religion ever so briefly...

...The question, however, of whether the present American fatalistic attitude about itself and its meaning is a temporary phenomenon, itself contrived, or a telltale mark of a new Dark Age in Western Civilization, the question of the reciprocity of fatalism in religious and political matters, has yet to assume embodiment in Updike's words...

...yet his willingness to proclaim combines with his unwillingness to act upon his proclamation and leads him to cry out: "I am stripped and anonymous, and feel mighty...

...Marshfield is deeply perplexed and pained at God's absenting himself from the "clearing" of the world of contemporary man, yet he holds no towering, unambiguous faith in this "Deus ab-sconditus" with which to call back those in his care...

...Nonetheless, Tillich's words are telling...

...As, at once, feeble prophet and microcosm of a dark age, Marshfield would like to reconcile, if he could, singlehandedly, the new humanistic dream of the longevity and well-being of the human body with the corpuscles of Transcendence flowing in his blood...

...the furniture forced me to do it...

...is only a superficial rendition of a more momentous question hopelessly tucked away in what lies unspoken in Updike's intriguing words...

...In Tarbox a cross section of its male occupants feverishly adhere to the glue of the new humanism...

...The sense that religious belief, when it can somehow be maintained, cannot soak into the interstices of society is ever present in A Month of Sundays and Couples...

...In doing this, Updike teases us with the enigma of American cultural experience itself...

...in his latest novel, only the wayward minister is depicted as practicing the new form of ritual activity with a female sampling of his congregation...

...Barth has simply read the writing on the wall...

...He is willing, as he writes his memoirs in his desert place of confinement and cure, to preach the God of his fathers...

...So, "Away with personhood...

...The new twist of his latest contribution, however, centers in the discomfort rather than relief the Divine withdrawal effects in the hero, the chastised Reverend Tom Marshfield...

...Martin Heidegger, a commentator of a very different ilk on the fate of Christianity, wrote in his "Letter on Humanism" that "whether and how God and the gods . . . enter, presenting and absenting themselves in the clearing of Being, is not determined by man...

...Updike appears compelled to examine the fate of Christianity in an age when the gods have absconded, leaving man to ponder his groundless experience...

...But if there is a more momentous question locked inside Updike's creations, perhaps it pertains to a "why" rather than a "what...

...For the moment, and only for the moment, one hopes, these words remain as they have remained in Updike's prior works, pinned on the Procrustean bed of sexual adventure and misadventure...

...Not without cause does Updike create Marshfield as a Barthian "in reaction" to his father's "liberalism...

...Marshfield's soul is a battleground of competing allegiances: the vocation of sex as surrogate for God and the call of guilt in his adulterous pursuits ("How intuitively religious," he remarks, was his consorts' "view of sex . . . Where was their guilt...

...We can only profess to believe...

...Barth's alienation of human discourse and the Word of God has been criticized as entailing a necessary disjunction between the Divine Word and human social realities...

...The burning of the Congregationalist Church, the remnant of American Puritanism, toward the close of Couples, is seductively proffered to those who would look for some evidence in Updike of a probing of the character, meaning, and "fate" of the "destiny" of American Civilization...

...for, Christianity is as much blood to the American soul as it is to the body of the sexually restless Marshfield...

...Yet a kind a blessing remains...

...it has taken me forty of my years to begin to transfer my sense of the Divine outdoors...

...Marshfield is left to wonder not at a new revelation of God to his wasted psyche, no less to that of wasteland-fated America, but at this all too "human contact, this blank-browed thing we do for one another...

...There is a marriage of sorts but there is no reconciliation...

...Prynne, the directress of his place of clerical recuperation, into his bedroom...

...like Feuerbach, Karl Barth is skeptical of men's ideas of God and treats them as mere wish-fulfillments, God is the "wholly other...

...There is no "after...

...The answer explored in "its many permutations" in Couples was sex as "the glue ambience, and motive force of the new humanism" replacing Christianity...

...Harlow, Marshfield confronts his sexual impotency for the first time and greets it "as the survivor within me of faith, a piece of purity amid all this relativistic concupiscence, this plastic modernity, this adulterate industry, this animated death...

...there can be no traditionally theological "analogy of being" -no being that is common by nature to God and man...

...the lingering of belief and the intrusion of disbelief in the God of Abraham (Marshfield confesses to his senile father, himself a minister, "I have no faith...

...The novel concludes with the coming, at the last hour of his stay, of Ms...

...A faint political air provides a point ot reference for both novels: in Couples, the assassination of President Kennedy, in A Month of Sundays, the "unravelling" of Richard Nixon...

...there is only some kind of distillation or mutation of Christianity, beautiful or monstrous, creative or destructive...

...There is in Updike's writing a kind of fatalism about the withdrawal and what assumes the role of the Divine "glue...

...The splendor of space and the splendid waste of time enter my self-negation...

...yet he is constrained to admit his "own captivity within a God I mocked, within a life I abhorred...

...Only God's totally free Grace bestowed in Revelation establishes any connection between God and man...

...Let growing darkness of this age...

...In essence, Marshfield is driven and fated to preach, but he can only selfconsciously preach his struggle with the God of old who sent angels to wrestle in his stead...

...But such is at best an anemic symbol, more likely a paltry substitute, for Divine Transcendence rather than a powerful symbol thereof...

...Even when his guilt is mitigated, he is plagued by the oddity, so contrary to many of the unbelieving of his congregation, that "feeling good and being good don't seem to be the same thing...

...See Saints, Lives of...

...Is there what approaches an inherent connection between the God of our fathers and the Republic of our founders, their deism notwithstanding...

...In that interview eight years ago, Updike held out the bait...

...But "let us pray," he tells us, "the two not prove at the end of time to be synonymous...

...Or rather, I have faith, but it doesn't seem to apply...

...They serve to lead him "out of the wilderness where I did not know that our acts, every one, are homage . . . There is a grandeur, an onslaught of Nous and of dizzying altitude, in the act of placing a communion wafer between the parted lips of a mouth, that, earlier in the very week of which this was the Sabbath day, had received one's throbbingly ejaculated seed...

...It is "our station to be visible and to provide men with the opportunity to profess the impossible that makes their lives possible," he says...

...Mop up spilt religion...

...Even if it isn't, Updike has for all practical purposes answered the question he proposed...

...Thus the frontispiece to Couples is taken from Paul Tillich's The Future of Religions: "There is a tendency in the average citizen, even if he has a high standing in his profession, to consider the decisions relating to the life of the society to which he belongs as matters of fate on which be has no influence-like the Roman subjects all over the world in the period of the Roman Empire, a mood favorable for the resurgence of religion but unfavorable for the preservation of a living democracy...

...The God of Abraham once manifested his Being unto him but now, as in the situation of his flock, speaks no more...

...as such, it could be construed as Marshfield's attainment of a reconciliation...

...What he couldn't quite account for, so he said, was that the "withdrawal and wrath of God" was ultimately experienced by the hero of Couples, Piet Hanema, as "a relief...

...The new humanism and the remnants of the old churches cannot, even in contrived combination, liberate him from either his pain or his inability to feel pain...

...But sexual penetration becomes possible only with the real unbelievers, as exemplified in his wife Jane and his paramour Alicia...

...There is a sense," he said, aping his creation Freddy Thorne in Couples, "I have of God having removed his blessing from America...

...GALGAN TN an interview in The New York Times Book Review on April 7, 1968, John Updike observed that in his first novel, Poorhouse Fair, and in his then most recent novel, Couples, he was posing the question of "After Christianity, what...

...This fatalism is given its baldest expression in Couples by the priest-figure, Freddy Thome, when he speaks of the fate of dwellers of exurban Tar-box as suspension "in this one of those dark ages that visits mankind between millennia, between the death and rebirth of gods, when there is nothing to steer by but sex and stoicism and the stars...

...The kind of religion addressed by this excerpt, however, is an essentially private one...

...Thus have we Updike's continuing and latest treatment of the question of "After Christianity, what...

...There is a bed of another kind crying to be "made" in contemporary American literature...

...Marshfield, alas, is an all too willing prophet of he knows not what: the new humanism or the God of his fathers...

...As a boy, the furniture in his father's house was "a constant proof of, as it were, a teleologic bias in things...