Theological novels

Sorry for the unannounced absence for the past ten days - I'll be catching up with posts and replying to emails.

I have posted (immediately below) the one thing I wrote last week, on theological novels. The D.H. Lawrence novella is also known by the later and less satisfactory title of 'The Man Who Died'; the Penguin Classics edition of Lawrence's short novels has restored the original title. George Moore's The Brook Kerith is less well-known and has never gained real popularity. George Bernard Shaw brusquely dismissed the book (quoted in Tony Gray, A Peculiar Man: A Life of George Moore, 1996, p. 296):

I read about thirty pages of The Brook Kerith. It then began to dawn on me that there was no mortal reason why Moore should not keep going on like that for fifty thousand pages, or fifty million for that matter.

This is a little unfair. The characterisation is good, and the dialogue (in an imaginative vernacular) sharp.

Frank Harris's short story, a deft work written in cadences that echo the King James Bible, is now almost unknown, but is included in his collection Unpath'd Waters. I came across it only from a reference in a more recent, but still little-known, theological novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973) by Martin Gardner (who also refers to the Lawrence and Moore literature). Gardner used to write the Mathematical Games column of Scientific American; unfortunately his range of interests is not matched by literary skill. The novel traces the philosophical searching of a young divinity student, ranging from evangelical Christianity through Communism to what Gardner terms philosophical theism (a non-Christian fideism). It is highly didactic, and the reader speedily loses interest in whatever the eponymous hero happens to believe at any time.

One novelist who deals successfully with matters of Christian theology is John Updike. In his memoir Self-Consciousness Updike devotes a chapter to the evolution of his religious beliefs. He follows the uncompromising orthodox theology of Karl Barth, who believed that all we know of God is by direct revelation, i.e. the Incarnation. There are many allusions to this in Updike's novels, alongside the better-known sexual content. One example is Roger's Version (1988); a sub-plot, anticipating the more recent 'Intelligent Design' argument (an ostensibly more sophisticated variant of biblical Creationism), has an earnest student trying to prove the existence of God by building a computer model of the origins of the Universe (he fails in this, of course, as he does also in an affair with the professor's wife). Updike has also expressed his Barthianism in an excellent poem about the Resurrection, Seven Stanzas at Easter; the first stanza is:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

I am not a Christian or a theist, but I find Updike's argument refreshingly direct in comparison with much modern religious apologetic - whether the unpleasantly sanctimonious certainties of C.S. Lewis or the pallid rationalism (agnostic on the Resurrection but fervent on the immorality of the Iraq War) of liberal Protestantism. If there is no Incarnation - God made flesh - and no physical Resurrection, then the entire foundation of Christian belief is undermined, and there is no point adducing arguments from Natural Theology to make up for it.