John Updike has written a new novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies,1 which illustrates Pascal’s assertion that “reason’s final step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.” The novel’s religious element should be emphasized, because otherwise it would seem that Updike has strayed off into Gore Vidal territory with this lengthy saga covering four generations of an American family linked by their feelings for that pre-eminent twentieth-century American obsession, the movies.

Updike has already described his own pragmatic, Pascalian road to belief in the final chapter of his autobiographical book Self-Consciousness.

Of my own case, looked at coldly, it might be said that,...

 

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