On John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies

I recently read John Updike’s 1996 novel In the Beauty of the Lilies. The late John Updike was one of the most empathetic writers who ever lived, at least as empathetic as Anton Chekhov. In this novel, Updike traces four generations of the Wilmot family: from a minister to a mail carrier to an actress to a religious cult member. Updike got inside the minds of these fictitious people, just the way he got inside the mind of a fictitious young Muslim in his novel Terrorist. What a diversity of people Updike could understand, and explain to us! In the Beauty of the Lilies was obviously inspired by the Branch Davidian event of 1993 just as Terrorist was inspired by the September 11 attacks.

Updike, in his autobiography Self-Consciousness, explained his religious views; they could be described as Christian agnosticism. Furthermore, Updike, more than any other mainstream novelist, was interested in the revelations about the world that science provides.
Updike began this novel in a way that editors would permit no other writers to begin: with religious and political concepts. But it was not mere exposition. The story of the Wilmot family begins about 1910 when a Presbyterian minister, Clarence Wilmot, suddenly realizes that he no longer believes in God. He wanted to, but could not. His loss of faith was a palpable event to him. When his faith evaporated, the world became simpler and clearer for Clarence, but also horrifying. Updike wrote:

The clifflike riddle of predestination—how can Man have free will without impinging upon God’s perfect freedom? how can God condemn Man when all actions from alpha to omega ate His very own?—simply evaporated…And yet the depths of vacancy revealed were appalling. In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal’s fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence’s own life would soon be, in a wink of earth’s tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sheerly horrible and disgusting…The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy—the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem… There is no God. With a wink of thought, the universe had been bathed in the pitch-smooth black of utter hopelessness… [Theological books were] pathetic testimony to belief’s flailing attempt not to drown…How little, could Darwin not have but noticed, had he left “Him” [God] to do. “His” laws as elicited by the great naturalist’s observation were so invariable, as well as so impersonal and cruel, as to need no executor… [Theological books were] paper shields against the molten iron of natural truth.

I have never read such a beautiful description of what it feels like to lose faith in a Biblical sort of God.

A church official talked with Clarence about his loss of faith, and tried to get him to see that he could remain a clergyman even if he was an agnostic, because we cannot define the terms we are using anyway, and besides, a clergyman is supposed to minister to the needs of people here and now. The official told Clarence that the new insights from physics (e.g. Einstein) showed how little we understood the world just by looking at it. He also told Clarence that the Bible was not the end but the beginning of our explorations. But Clarence realized that the skeptics within Christianity had “burnt the ship beneath them and then [found that they] couldn’t walk on water.”

So Clarence eventually quit the ministry and ended up selling encyclopedias door to door, which was a dismal failure. In addition to the financial failure, Clarence felt an intellectual one: the encyclopedias boasted of being facts, all facts, just facts. Clarence felt “sunk deep in a well of facts, all of which spelled the walled-in dismal hopelessness of human life. The world’s books were boxes of flesh-eating worms, crawling sentences that had eaten the universe hollow.”

Clarence Wilmot eventually died in poverty and with TB, and in utter hopelessness. How can we, even if we end up seeing the universe as agnostically as Clarence, avoid such hopelessness? What would I have said to someone like Clarence? At the very least, I would encourage him to not see the universe as just facts. I write encyclopedias, and my encyclopedias consist of more than just facts, but the structure of meaning that they create. Somewhere, in this meaning, one can find religious affirmation, even if not in a personal God.

I know this conclusion is not logically satisfying, but it is what I can do for now. Please feel free to share comments.

The conclusion of the novel comes almost full circle, when the pathetic playboy son of the actress (Clark Wilmot) undergoes a religious conversion in a cult. At the end, he realizes that it is a mental trap, and during the climax scene, he does not give up as his great-grandfather had done, but plays a heroic role. You have to read it to find out what it was.