Updike and Barth

Share

It's sad to wake up in a world today which is no longer home to John Updike. But as a great reader of Barth, the novelist knew what it meant to look forward to resurrection.

Here's a beautiful essay by John McTavish.

Updike told him: "I read Barth's address on Kierkegaard with the deepest interest; one of my theological heroes scrutinizing the other, and so diffidently scoring the essential defects, or limits, of him. Really, Barth's mind, so invariably earnest, always penetrates to some depth tonic for me; he makes me feel that rare thing, with authors, called love - one loves a man for thinking and writing so well."

Updike's poem, Seven Stanzas at Easter, burns with Barthian - and Christian - hope:

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.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.