John Updike has written a new novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies,[1] which illustrates Pascal’s assertion that “reason’s final step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.” The novel’s religious element should be emphasized, because otherwise it would seem that Updike has strayed off into Gore Vidal territory with this lengthy saga covering four generations of an American family linked by their feelings for that pre-eminent twentieth-century American obsession, the movies.
Updike has already described his own pragmatic, Pascalian road to belief in the final chapter of his autobiographical book Self-Consciousness.
Of my own case, looked at coldly, it might be said that, having been given a Protestant, Lutheran, rather antinomian Christianity as part of my sociological make-up, I was too timid to discard it. My era was too ideologically feeble to wrest it from me, and Christianity gave me something to write about, and a semblance of a backbone, and a place to go on Sunday mornings, when the post offices were closed.
He looks at his situation less coldly, however, during the course of that chapter and presents an intelligent reflection on the universal will to believe, giving as one amusing example an argument that occurred when Picasso chastised Matisse for designing and decorating a chapel; both men had claimed to be non-believers. Matisse defended himself: “Yes, I do pray; and you pray too, and you know it all too