In the beauty of the lilies

John Updike's Lilies was published in 1996, three years after the siege of the compound of an Adventist sect in Waco Texas. It is the story of four generations beginning in 1910 with the reverent Clarence Wilmot, minister of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in an industrial town on the East coast of America and ending with the death of his great grandson Clark in the destruction by fire of the headquarters of a Christian sect modelled on the events at Waco.

We read that Clarence "felt the last particle of faith leave him" at the same time that Mary Pickford fainted on a film set in New York. The linkage of these two events signal ongoing references to the film industry throughout the novel. This loss of faith came about after Clarence had read the anti-theologians of the nineteenth century, initially to arm himself against their arguments, but eventually to be persuaded by them that God did not exist.

In those student days, hungry for knowledge and fearless in his youthful sense of God's protection close at hand, he plunged into the chilly Baltic sea of Higher Criticism – all those Germans, Semler and Eichhorn, Bauer and Wellhausen, who dared to pick up the Sacred Book without reverence…There was a tide behind these books in mad Nietzsche and sickly Darwin and boil-plagued Marx.

The universe changed with his change of mind about God.

Life's sounds all rang with a curious lightness and flatness as if a resonating base beneath them had been removed. They told Clarence Wilmot what he had long suspected, that the universe was utterly indifferent to his states of mind and as empty of divine content as a corroded kettle.

His resignation from the ministry robbed his family of social standing and economic security. He became a salesman for the Popular Dictionary that, like Diderot's initial attempt, sought to provide all knowledge to the owner. The irony is that Clarence joins those French Philosophes who championed reason and facts as the answer to the human state. On meeting a woman who had worked for the family on his rounds he tries, unsuccessfully, to convince her that owning all these volumes was a waste of time and money. He has been convinced of the Enlightenment rejection of God but knows also that reason and facts are insufficient.

Clarence has three children who must live in the shadow of their father's loss of faith. The daughter Ester uses her body to seduce married men in her place of work and succeeds in breaking up one home and marrying the husband. Of sex, he tells her father: Everybody's playing around, nobody gives a damn. Nobody cares. Jared, the oldest son reduces life to a simple axiom "pussy takes and money gives." He lives a life on the edge of criminality and is always on the brink of becoming rich. Walter the second son is confused and tentative. Life in the shadow of his father's loss of faith robs him of any confidence and he takes a job as a postman. He is so cautious that he refuses promotion to postmaster when the time comes. Nevertheless he forms a stable and loving home with a woman that all have rejected because of her withered foot. Walter clings to the known.

Walter and his wife Alma have a daughter Essie who carries most of the rest of the narrative. She, like her aunt, is a creature of the body and she becomes a model in New York and an actress in Los Angeles. On her first photo shoot we read:

Essie made love to the camera. She looked into the glass hole of its lens, tinged with lavender, and thought of heaps of dollar bills, and of all the lovely clothes those dollar bills could buy. She thought of a white Cadillac with the top down.

She will do what it takes, sexually, to smooth her way and becomes obsessed with her looks and her career. Early unstable marriages come and go but she becomes pregnant by a script writer and gives birth to a son, Clarke. It is he who, fatherless and essentially motherless, drug addled, a failure in Hollywood, who joins the cult and dies in the fire.

Thus while his great grandfather loses a highly intellectualised faith, Clark succumbs to a wild eyed bible quoting zealot who impregnates as many women in the cult that he can.

All of the characters love the movies. Indeed Updike gives us a potted history of American movie making. It is obvious that the movies become, to a large extend, a window on reality and that in doing so they displace the key role of the Church of mediating reality. The narratives of Scripture are replaced by those of Bogart and Bacall. As Clark moves towards his death he sees reality as a movie running in his head.

Clarke had little suitable parenting apart from occasional visits from his uncle. The following is indicative of the sort of world he was growing up in:

Once, when about sixteen, Clarke had asked his mother why she had married Rex and then stuck with him until 1970, by which time he had become a very pathetic drunk. She had given him a look, like And who the hell are you?, with those famous long eyebrows arched under her cap of carefully tousled platinum hair, and told him calmly "Rex was all cock." Clarke didn't think then or now that this was a suitable thing to say to a son, even a son growing up and accumulating experience of his own.

In Lilies Updike gives us a narrative of social, familial and spiritual decline that is associated with the loss of faith. In this he is no romantic, harking back to a lost and idealised Christendom. There has never been a time in which faith has not been fragile and rare. But he charts our time and finds ground to conclude that we are experiencing our very own crisis and that this is demonstrable by the isolation and foundering of the self of which Clark is the end product.

Certainly Walter, Clark's grandfather on hearing of his death in the fire reflects:

How grieved Dad used to be by the paper, all the terrible items in it, and the world then wasn't anything as bad as it is now.. Simple human decency and self-respect should do it. That's pretty much gone now, with the world so full of handy excuses. Kill a man one day and plead insanity the next.

Has the world gotten worse because of the decline of faith? Sociological analysis may point to some of this but it is a blunt tool because faith cannot be measured and may be only loosely connected to church attendance, the only measurable variable. Nobody sees the secrets of the human heart.

Most people I know, churched or not, are decent and reliable and honest. Those who proclaim atheism are perhaps even better than most because they have actually thought about the question of god. So how do we assess our culture compared to the past and as associated with the decline of the influence of the Church? Perhaps the novelist has more of an answer than the sociologist! While sociology has to deal with statistics, and there is a place for that, the novelist has to weave a believable narrative that has the ring of truth.

Updike gives us a narrative arc in Lilies that follows a family who had experienced a profound loss of faith, a professional churchman, considered, educated, comes to the conclusion that God does not exist. The effect of this event is worked out in the next three generations in detail. It is a convincing narrative. Like the gospels, it is a story that includes verifiable historical events and movements upon which a fictional overlay is placed. For me, the story resonates; I understand the connections that Updike makes. Such a narrative is able to cut through to the truth in a way that sociology finds difficult.

Of course Clark did not necessarily have to turn out to be a lost soul. There are many examples of individuals who survive a childhood lacking in love, but it is hard, and, I think rare. We cannot draw hard causal links in human psychology but we can understand a narrative that makes connections between self knowledge, healthy identity, realistic hopefulness and an accurate anthropology/sociology. We can see the connections between a faith that guards us from idolatry and inhuman outcomes. This is the stuff of art, the stuff of the novel. The hegemony of the empirical method must be challenged; there are other ways to knowledge than testable evidence.

The narrative may be supported by changes in society and our personal experience but it also has to gibe with that branch of philosophy known as the history of ideas. For example, theorists of modernity see a connection between Descartes' cogito that posits all epistemology in the thinking subject. This, it is said, has led to extreme subjectivism, a way of knowing that is cut off from the traditions of knowing represented, for example, by the Church. Jared's axiom "pussy takes and money gives" could only be proclaimed by one whose self is at the centre of life.

Elsie could not have given her body so freely whenever it was needful if she had some idea of the sanctity of marriage and the supreme task of raising the next generation. She could act as she did because she had learnt that she had to do "whatever it takes" to achieve her goals of self aggrandisement and fame. She had inherited Hollywood narcissism.

But then there is a twist towards hopefulness, Clarke, the end product of this family of unbelief, the most hopeless and disoriented, kills the cult leader when he begins shooting the women and children to launch them into heaven. He ushers the women and children to safely with the following words:

He yelled at the women, "for God's sake you idiot bitches, get out! It's over! Git! Git! He cried with his inspired certainty, "Can't you see, there is nothing here anymore! Those people outside are your friends!" He waved his gun in their faces and they scrambled towards the door, the children leading the mothers.

Something remains in Clarke that is essentially human, even Christlike. After saving the women and children he dies in the fire.

I do have a theological point to argue with Updike. He places too much emphasis on an undifferentiated monotheism and the existence/nonexistence of such. We see this in his novel Couples. A more nuanced position is leveraged on the truth of the gospel, how it illuminates the human, rather than the existence of a deity. Jesus is the Son of God, not because his existence has a causal connection with a deity but because he lives a truth that is hidden to our gaze. Our understanding of the meaning of the word "God" is turned on its head. He is revelation and that revelation is political, personal, social and spiritual. Thus faith is not based on the existence of a supernatural deity, but on the characteristics and actions of a real historical person whose continued presence among us is foretold by the resurrection.

The narrative arc of Lilies makes a lot of sense but the death of God theologians do not have the last say, faith is still possible, as Updike's hero, Karl Barth demonstrated by basing his theology firmly on Christology; the truth and continuing presence of Christ. It is our experience of Christ that matters, not lip service to a postulated deity.