Winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and scores of others, John Updike (1932 \u2013 2009) is best known for his graphic but lyrical portrayal of the sexual infidelities of middle America in the 1960s and beyond. It was not for nothing that he was called the poet laureate of modern adultery. The most famous of his 60-odd books was Couples<\/em>, the story of a band of spouse-trading friends, one of whom greeted her lover with the legendary words, \u201cWelcome to the post-pill paradise.\u201d[1]<\/p>\n Updike was a man of many contradictions. Spiritual and <\/em>religious, he was a serial adulterer. Widely celebrated as one of America\u2019s greatest writers, his work was dismissed by some critics as stylized pornography with nothing serious to say. Although he recognized the devastation the Sexual Revolution was wreaking on families, he abandoned his first wife and children to marry one of his mistresses. Often frustrated by a stuttering tongue, he found freedom in the written word to write about sex and love in ways that titillated and enchanted millions of readers. Yet the millions of words he produced caused some to complain that he hid behind them because what mattered more to him than either of those human mysteries was his own need to be heard.<\/p>\n Surprisingly, Updike was stubbornly religious throughout his life. He told an interviewer, \u201cI\u2019m a religious writer . . . I try to show people stuck with this kind of yearning [for other men\u2019s wives and for morality and religion].\u201d[2] \u00a0He was a regular churchgoer, recited the Lord\u2019s Prayer with his children when he tucked them in for bed at night, and defended Christian theism from his days at Harvard in the early 1950s until his death sixty years later. Even Couples<\/em> is shot through and through with religion. The two principal adulterers are the only regular churchgoers in the book; its fictional town Tarbox (modelled after Updike\u2019s real town Ipswich, MA) has streets called Charity and Divinity leading to the Congregational Church with its \u201cpricking steeple and flashing cock\u201d; and the end of the story climaxes with the destruction of the church by lightning, suggesting divine judgment. The main antagonist and adulterer Piet concludes, \u201cGod doesn\u2019t love us anymore.\u201d[3]\n<\/p> Writing as love<\/strong><\/p>\n For Updike writing, which he said was his \u201caddiction,\u201d was also an act of love. Love for God, who \u201cis the God of the living,\u201d not \u201cthe God who chastises life and forbids and says No.\u201d \u00a0He learned through his Lutheran Sunday School lessons, even in their \u201cclumsy\u201d attempts to say it, that life is a blessing, and that he was called to accept that blessing. In return for that gift, he was offering \u201conly a nickel a week and my art, my poor little art.\u201d[4]\n<\/p> The heart of that art, the heart of true writing, was imitation. To get the world and human relationships right was to imitate properly. If done right, \u201cimitation is praise.\u201d So the art of describing accurately, which means to show the beauty of all that is, even in its tragedy, is to express love. Faith in this God of blessing gave Updike courage to tell it like it is. \u201cWhat small faith I have has given me what artistic courage I have. My theory was that God already knows everything and cannot be shocked.\u201d[5]\n<\/p> Even in the grittiness of sexuality there is goodness and beauty, shocking as it is to many. His job was to show it all, especially what has been hidden from view by the worst kinds of tradition. \u201cThe world is good, our intuition is, confirming its Creator\u2019s appraisal as reported in the first chapter of Genesis.\u201d But prudery and bad art have kept us from the goodness and beauty of created life. \u201cHabit and accustomedness have painted over pure gold with a dull paint that can, however, be scratched away, to reveal the shining underbase.\u201d[6]\n<\/p> Updike\u2019s biographer Adam Begley (Updike, <\/em>Harper-Collins, 2014)concludes that Updike saw his writing as a series of \u201cacts of worship.\u201d His lyrical descriptions of ordinary human life, lovingly depicted in all of its most shocking detail, expressed love for the Creator. \u00a0His literary art was a service to God that purified all that was tawdry in the world: \u201cFrom a higher, inhuman point of view, only truth, however harsh, is holy. The fabricated truth of poetry and fiction makes a shelter in which I feel safe . . . . Such writing is in essence pure. Out of soiled and restless life, I have refined my books. They are trim, crisp, clean . . . before the reviewers leave their smudges all over them.\u201d[7]\n<\/p> Sex as divine<\/strong><\/p>\n Begley reports that Updike \u201cthrew himself with reckless enthusiasm into the tangle of Ipswich infidelities.\u201d Updike conceded in his memoirs that he had slept around in Ipswich, \u201ca stag of sorts in our herd of housewife-does.\u201d[8]\n<\/p> How could a man be so religious and yet be so enthusiastic for infidelity?<\/p>\n The answer seems to lie in his religion. It was a strange sort of Christianity that rejected the strictures of traditional faith, choosing divine comfort while rejecting divine commands. In other words, it was gospel without law, grace without repentance, the love of God without the holiness of God.<\/p>\n To be sure, Updike held on to parts of historic Christian belief. He rejected philosophical materialism as a failure to make sense of emotion and conscience, and defended Christ\u2019s divinity against his first wife\u2019s Unitarianism. But at the same time he took from Kierkegaard the idea that Christian faith is subjective in intellectual terms, not a conclusion from rationality or objectivity. So he insisted that resurrection from the dead is \u201cunthinkable\u201d to the modern mind, that God can be known only as \u201cthe self projected onto reality\u201d by our natural optimism, and that the closer one moves toward Christianity the more it disappears, \u201cas the fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it.\u201d[9]\n<\/p> Updike\u2019s Christianity was a religion of self-affirmation. His greatest fears were of death and its threat of nothingness. But religion, he wrote, \u201cenables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.\u201d \u00a0It puts us at ease, reassuring us that our efforts are not futile. So for us in this age of anxiety, God is a \u201ctranquilizer.\u201d He reinforces the \u201cendless pardon we bring to our own self.\u201d \u00a0He guarantees the meaning of our existence and serves as \u201ca protector\u201d\u2013 even in those moments when he recalled the abortion one of his lovers procured after a tryst with him. \u00a0Updike\u2019s God helped him to, as Begley puts it, \u201ccherish whatever happened to him.\u201d[10]\n<\/p> If Updike\u2019s God seemed to affirm whatever he did, this included his affairs. For in a manner not unlike that of D.H. Lawrence, Updike viewed sex as a mystical route to the divine. \u201cSex is the foremost means,\u201d he told a CBS interviewer, \u201cof conducting the moral and religious search.\u201d It brings \u201cecstasy\u201d and a sense of \u201ctranscendence.\u201d Begley reports that it was his adulterous passion that \u201cmade him feel alive.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 He said as much himself: \u201cTo give myself brightness and air I read Karl Barth and fell in love with other men\u2019s wives.\u201d[11]\n<\/p> So too for his characters in his fiction. When one of the Couples<\/em> adulterers found in his lover a beauty she did not find in herself, this reminded him of his own beauty and the way sex brought down divine power: \u201cThis generosity of perception returned upon himself; as he lay with Janet, lost in praise, Harold felt as if a glowing tumor of eternal life were consuming the cells of his mortality.\u201d In the novel A Month of Sundays<\/em> a Rev. Marshfield concludes that his first mistress helped reclaim \u201ca wedge of mankind for the Good and the Beautiful,\u201d and preaches in a sermon that \u201cthe sacrament of marriage . . . exists but as a precondition for the sacrament of adultery.\u201d Critic Marshall Boswell opines that Marshfield at this point \u201cabout two-thirds believes [this], and Updike about half.\u201d \u00a0Rev. Marshfield rationalizes the seduction of his divinity professor\u2019s daughter by proclaiming, \u201cI was slaying him that the Lord might live.\u201d Kathleen Verduin observes that for Updike illicit sex can become \u201can act of righteous punishment.\u201d[12]\n<\/p> A rather antinomian Christianity<\/strong><\/p>\n In Updike\u2019s religion, then, there are no commandments we are meant to keep except the obligation to accept what is: \u201cReligion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.\u201d Our only responsibility is to \u201cappreciate\u201d the great gift that life represents. He learned from Barth that the next life is simply this life in review, and from his Lutheranism, he wrote, \u201ca rather antinomian Christianity\u201d\u2014the idea that there are no laws we should fear or live by\u2014which he was \u201ctoo timid to discard.\u201d \u00a0There is no hint of final judgment. Nor is there any imperative to repent or improve ourselves: in Begley\u2019s words, \u201cOriginal sin may be inescapable, but any concerted effort to improve one\u2019s game resembles a righteous struggle for salvation.\u201d And if there was anything he learned from Barth, it was that all human efforts to save ourselves are wrongheaded and futile. As one critic summed it up, Updike \u201cradically divorced\u201d Christian theology from Christian ethics.[13]\n<\/p>