by John Updike
“Sounds rather grisly, frankly. Like a face through a frosted bathroom door. Or like,” I offered, plucking from my subconscious an image that had been troubling me for months, “that poor young sailor from the Franklin expedition they found this past summer up in Canada, nicely preserved by the ice. He was staring right out at us, too.”
Kohler leaned toward me alarmingly, his speckled jaw bent to one side by the pressure of his conviction. “If God,” he said, “in fact created the universe, then as a fact it has to show, eventually. Let me put it another way: God can’t hide any more.”
“If He is omnipotent, I would think it within His powers to keep hiding. And I’m not sure it isn’t a bit heretical of you to toss the fact of God in with a lot of other facts. Even Aquinas, I think, didn’t postulate a God Who could be hauled kicking and screaming out from some laboratory closet, over behind the blackboard.”
The young man said, “You’re being satirical. But do you know why you’re being satirical?”
“A, I am? And B, No.”
“Because you’re afraid. You don’t want God to break through. People in general don’t want that. They just want to grub along being human, and dirty, and sly, and amusing, and having their weekends with Michelob, and God to stay put in the churches if they ever decide to drop by, and maybe to pull them out in the end, down that tunnel of light all these NDEs talk about. That’s another place He’s breaking through—all these near deaths, and all these blissful people reporting back. Until they had this modern medical equipment they couldn’t keep pulling people back from the grave. But I don’t want to use up my seventeen minutes.”
“Twelve. Let’s say ten. I have to glance over my notes.” They were on my desk; I pulled them toward me and glanced at them. Marcion excomm. Rome 144, I read to myself. Tertullian wr. Adversus Marcionem c. 207. The boy was making me rude.
He persisted. “Aren’t I right, though, sir? You’re horrified to think that God can be proven.”
“I’m horrified, if I am, to hear so much blasphemy coming out of you so serenely.”
“Why is it blasphemy? Why is it blasphemy in this day and age always to raise the possibility that God might be a fact?”
“A fact in our lives, yes, a spiritual fact—”
“That’s like a virtual particle. A piece of hot air.”
I sighed, and sincerely wished the boy dead. This tangle of suppositions about the absolute and unknowable which he had agitatedly sketched reminded me of my dead, the dead who give me my living, those murky early centuries of passionate anchorites and condemnatory prelates whose storms of fine distinction swept back and forth from Athens to Spain, from Hippo to Edessa. Homoousios versus homoiousios, the logikoi versus the alogoi. Montanism and modalism and monarchianism, hypostasis and Patripassianism. Blood-soaked discriminations now dust like their bones, those grandiose and prayerful efforts to flay, cleave, and anatomize the divine substance. “The Christian Church,” I began, then halted myself to ask the boy, “You do consider yourself a Christian?”
“Absolutely. Christ is my Saviour.”
I loathed the icy-eyed fervent way he said it. Back home such flat statements were painted on barns and needlepointed on pillows. I said to him, “The church preaches, I believe, and the Old Testament describes, a God Who acts, Who comes to us, in Revelation and Redemption, and not one Who set the universe going and then hid. The God we care about in this divinity school is the living God, Who moves toward us out of His will and love, and Who laughs at all the towers of Babel we build to Him.” I heard myself echoing Barth and the exact quotation flickered at the edge of my mind. Where? I was wearing beneath my coat a cashmere V-necked sweater (“camel” was the name of the shade on the label, amusing Esther, who thinks of my academic specialty as the Desert Fathers, when she bought it last Christmas, in Bermuda, at Trimingham’s), and abruptly I felt too warm, and began to sweat. I was trying too hard. I was dredging up beliefs I had once arrived at and long ago buried, to keep them safe.
“I know, I know, that’s great,” my inquisitor said, alert and interested but not shaken by my promulgation. “Still, if He acts as you say, if He is dynamic, then He exists in some way that a complete physical description of the basic universe, which is what we’re at most a decade short of in science, can’t avoid detecting. That’s all I’m saying. We’re almost home, Professor Lambert, and science, because it’s been atheist so long, doesn’t want to admit it; you need somebody like me, who’s willing to make the announcement—to pull all the evidence together and run it through a computer. A computer, see, is a basically simple device, but it can do its simple things over and over very rapidly—”
I interrupted, “It’s surely too simple, by the way, to say that all scientists have been atheists. Eddington wasn’t, and Newton, as I remember, was quite a zealot. Pascal, Leibniz. Einstein talked about God not rolling dice.”
“Oh, there’s been a few, sure. But by and large—you don’t deal with these guys the way I do, every day. To them the idea of anything that isn’t chance or matter is absolutely out of bounds. They hate it. Do you have a minute for just one more thing? I can see you’re getting edgy. About fifty years ago, a physicist called Paul Dirac asked himself why the number ten to the fortieth power keeps occurring. The square of the number, ten to the eightieth, is the mass of the visible universe measured in terms of the mass of a proton. The number itself, ten to the fortieth, is the present age of the universe, expressed in the units of time it takes light to travel across a proton. And, get this, the constant that measures the strength of gravity in terms of the electrical force between two protons shows that gravity is ten-to-the-fortieth times weaker! Also, ten to the fortieth to the one-fourth, or ten to the tenth, just about equals the number of stars in a galaxy, the number of galaxies in the universe, and the inverse of the weak fine-structure constant! If you—”
“Perhaps you should save all this for your computer.”
“Then you’re giving me the green light on my project?”
“Not at all. It’s not for me to give you a light of any color. If you want to apply for a special research grant from this school—which is very poorly endowed, I should state, the clergy not being a wealthy class of alumni and already having many claims on their charity—if you want to apply, I repeat, they have all the appropriate forms in the front offices downstairs. The head of the Grants Committee is a very nice bland man, I can tell you, called Jesse Closson. For myself, I must confess I find your whole idea aesthetically and ethically repulsive. Aesthetically because it describes a God Who lets Himself be intellectually trapped, and ethically because it eliminates faith from religion, it takes away our freedom to believe or doubt. A God you could prove makes the whole thing immensely, oh, uninteresting. Pat. Whatever else God may be, He shouldn’t be pat.”
“But, sir, think of the comfort to all those who want to believe but don’t dare, because they’ve been intellectually intimidated. Think of the reassurance to all those in trouble or in pain and wanting to pray.”
I said, “I doubt that reason ever kept anybody desperate enough from doing just what he wanted along those lines.”
This startled him. His brows and lids lifted and his eyes lightened like tiny rooms where the shades have been rattlingly raised. “Begging your pardon, but I’m not sure that’s true. I think people are very conscientious about trying to be up-to-date—look at all the science news in the papers, for instance, and these shows about mimetic insects on public television. You mentioned faith, and removing it and so on, but remember we’re not trying to prove anything about the Incarnation, or the Trinity—a Hindu could be just as happy with this news as a Christian; in fact, Fred Hoyle’s righthand man is a Sinhalese, Chandra Wickramasinghe. There’s still lots of room for faith and different modes of worship. I mean, all we’ve got here is the absolute basics—the bottom line, as it were. The individual still has to fill in the specifics. There would still have to be all these matters of faith. But you’ve
got to remember that faith wasn’t meant to be an everlasting virtue, just a kind of holding action until Christ came back and declared the Kingdom and everything came clear. Paul and those others didn’t expect the world to last past their lifetimes.”
“There has been, of course, some question on that, on exactly what the disciples expected. As well as on exactly what they saw. But I really must go to my class, Mr. Kohler. I will say …”
He jumped at the gap, the glimmer of light. “Yessir?”
“I probably shouldn’t say anything,” I allowed, and wondered, indeed, why I was seeking collusion, adopting a toadying, seductive tone with this pale and presuming young man, “but it would be a relief, as far as I’m concerned, to underwrite something around here other than black or feminist studies. Or these pathetic papers on ‘street religion,’ which amounts to gypsy fortunetelling and superstitions about numbers on license plates and subway cars. If you do go ahead with the application, you can say on it you talked with me and I found your ideas and facts … what shall we say—?”
“Compelling?”
“Amusing.”
I pulled my notes toward me and stood, looking down at them. Marcion a more radical Paul Galatians. Circumcision. Judaism legalistic, exclusivist. Marcion’s Christology Docetic: dokein, decent. What did they mean? I had a dizzying, dreamlike sensation of total ignorance, like a foreign traveller who has forgotten the local language.
“All I’d ask for would be something to cover my time.” The young man was rising and hurrying the words. “I’d use the computers over at the science buildings, on the sly. How can I phrase that in the application?”
“Just say you’re robbing the power-rich to give to the power-poor. Do give my regards to Verna. Ask her if there’s anything she thinks her uncle should be doing.”
“Oh, she doesn’t expect you to do anything. From her description I thought you’d be much tougher than you were.”
“Tough? Is that how she sees me? Then I think I really should seek her out. We can’t have her imagining she has a wicked uncle.”
We parted without shaking hands, the boy holding his upper body at an awkward, tense angle so that his hand could have shot out quickly if mine had made a corresponding move. Since it did not (altogether too much handshaking has been introduced into American life, along with that inane wishing virtual strangers a good day, a great weekend, a pleasant holiday, a nice night), his eyes wandered to my walls of books—sensible-spined university-press treatments of all corners of church history, yellowing pastel journals of medieval and ecclesiastical studies, sturdily bound fat German tomes and debonair Gallic paperbacks, uniform theological sets like rows of stubby organ pipes, all flecked with torn bits of paper, page markers, giving a frothy look to the massive compacted rows, rather like those Japanese bushes at Shinto shrines to which prayer strips have been thickly tied, or those smaller paper petitions tucked into the crevices of the Wailing Wall. Amid these books and their prayerful frayed markers, in this tall office riddled with gray autumnal light, while the skies beyond the lancet windows roiled, Dale and I seemed souls as understood by the Gnostics, shards of shattered Godhead captive in the darks of matter, bewildered amid these shelves as if newly released among the ladders of angels, the impalpable hierarchies, with which popular Gnosticism unaccountably cluttered its common-sense dualism twenty centuries ago. (What is stranger in the religious impulse than its passion for complication, the love of clutter that renders most churches hideous and every living creed grotesque?) We seemed to float, Dale and I, in lightly etched immensities of space.
“Good luck,” I said.
“We’ll be in touch.”
It seemed unlikely and not to be hoped for. My mind darted ahead to my lecture, its invariable close. In the history of the early church, Marcion is a giant negative. His image must be developed from the works of others: Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Epiphanius in their anti-Marcionian tracts. Marcionite churches flourished alarmingly, and some were still extant in seventh-century Syria. Marcion’s appeal not easy to fathom. Forbade marriage. Denied the physical resurrection. He did ofier his followers, interestingly, the first fixed scripture, consisting of ten sharply edited Pauline epistles and a Gospel close to Luke. This compilation goaded Valentinus and Justin Martyr and Tatian into assembling the orthodox New Testament canon with its blithe jumble of contradictions. Main point: in opposition to Marcion, Rome armored itself ever more thickly in authority and dogma. Though not a word from his hand survives, he continues to fascinate: e.g., Harnack’s two impassioned volumes. And Paul Tillich detects Marcionism in the revelationist severity of Karl Barth, my own, I must confess, rascally pet.
The seminar would titter. Barth, in this liberal seminary dominated by gracefully lapsed Unitarians and Quakers, was like sex in junior high school: any mention titillated. In the fall, the students are still open and anxious enough to be grateful for any flirtation from on high: grim gray teacher lifting his hairshirt to bare a patch of cuddly belly.
Thus foreseeing my future, I was disconcerted by a strange unwilled vision: I foresaw Dale’s as well. In one of those small, undesired miracles that infest life, like the numb sensation of hugeness that afflicts us when we stand after long sitting or the nonsensical, technicolor short subjects the mind runs preliminary to falling into sleep, my disembodied mind empathetically followed Dale Kohler down the hall, the long Divinity School hall lined with frosted classroom doors and floored with a strip of chocolate-brown linoleum. He reaches the broad stairs of carved oak, turns on the landing underneath the tall arched window, almost a slit, of bevelled granite and gray lozenge glass, and walks, in his rustling camouflage jacket, along the main hall downstairs. From behind the classroom doors arises, in binary fashion, laughter or silence. The walls are dotted with the tacky residue of old posters, with bits of Scotch tape and tinted Xeroxed paper. New, competing posters overflow the appointed display boards, advertising rallies to protest pollution in Maine and interference in Central America, and discussion groups concerning “hunger awareness” and “goddess thealogy.” Lightheaded with momentary relief that his encounter with me—me, the monster—is over, Dale proceeds back to the front offices, that warren of desks and low partitions where he has already inquired as to the whereabouts of my lair. He talks again to the receptionist; she is petite and black, with hair done up in corn rows as regular and tightly shiny as small magnetic coils. Her name is Noreen Davis, but I and not he know this. Her broadly smiling lips have been painted an electric red unexpected and lurid against the mat purplish brown of her skin. For make-up she also wears eyeshadow and blusher of a dragonfly violet. He is stirred. (I do not envision him as gay.) Regretfully he perceives that her smile has nothing to do with him but instead with some joke still hanging in the air of this large room, where everyone—a bald man by the wall, a frizzy-haired woman sorting a tray of folders—is smiling, waiting for him to leave so their nameless fun can resume. Someday, Dale thinks, this black girl will marvel at this moment, remembering his shyness and shabbiness and acne and air of confusion. For in the years to come she will live within a world he has discovered and proclaimed, the world of the evident God, Whose elusive surfaces will have been relaxed into their rightful, right-angled obviousness. Standing above her, accepting the applications she offers with so mocking and yet inviting a diffident mortal smile, he sees them both enclosed in this future perspective, in the transparency of the revelation he will bring, like two tiny plaster figures within a ball of glass.
My mind reversed current: I saw him in swift replay retrace his steps down the hall, up the stairs, toward my office, and as he opens the door I see myself as he must have seen me, my gray hair and gray jacket, my half-moon reading glasses flashing double-barrelled light and the sky behind me crammed with blinding clouds, silver dissolved in silver, I the obscure portal to money and, if his ideas prove true, immortality.
ii
And, walking home in the dusk, my seminar and a conference with a t
roublesome student behind me, I had the sensation of following in his steps. Leaving Hooker Hall (the often joked-about name of our main building—Thomas Hooker being, of course, a distinguished Puritan divine whose relatively liberal views upon baptismal efficacy and inward preparation for grace caused him to be exiled from Massachusetts into the wilderness of Connecticut), Dale would have walked the same streets as I, the streets of my own neighborhood. I live three shady blocks from my place of work, on a relatively secluded and increasingly expensive small residential street called Malvin Lane. The sidewalks are brick and, in a few stretches, slate, slabs pleasantly heaved by the swelling roots of trees that, at this early-evening hour, existed overhead as fanning depths rendered alternately brilliant and cavernous by the rays of the streetlamps—islands of light in a jagged arboreal ocean. The neighborhood consists of large wooden houses, many of them behind eight-foot wooden fences, none of them sitting on more than a fraction of the acreage that, in a suburb, would have accompanied their pretensions and scale, their dormers and chimneys, their pillared porticos and round-arched windows and gingerbreaded eaves. Aged domesticated trees—beeches and maples and locusts and oaks—fill the narrow yards to overflowing, their branches impinging on telephone wires and upstairs porch rails. At this time of year, late October, damp flattened leaves covered the sidewalk with a brocaded richness. My student conference, squeezed in at her importunity, had been with an exceptionally earnest, exceptionally unattractive female Master of Divinity candidate who has brought to her dissertation (“Helen and Monica: Two Women of the Early Church”) a complicated, challenging sexual politics it wearies me to thread my tactful way through. This would-be mistress of divinity’s face—squarish, mulish, with a distracting colorless wart near one nostril, and shy yet adamant words of protest perpetually trembling on her also colorless lips—hung depressingly in my mind as I scuffed along beneath the gold of the beeches, the rust of the oaks. I noticed at my feet, in a bright rag of light fallen between the shadows of two trees, a pink sugar-maple leaf like a small splayed hand clutching at the spilled wealth of beech leaves; and I knew that he, that tall waxy-pale intruder, had noticed this same strange emblematic leaf three hours earlier, on his way through my neighborhood to his dismal, distant own.
