Roger's Version by John Updike

realm of prose—the specifically Christian—usually conspicuous for intellectual limpness and dishonesty. “Man is a riddle and nothing else, and his universe, be it ever so vividly seen and felt, is a question.… Thesolution of the riddle, the answer to the question, the satisfaction of our need is the absolutely new event.… There is no way which leads to this event”: here I thought I had it, in “The Task of the Ministry,” but no, the passage, though ringing, did not have quite the ring impressed, three decades earlier, upon my agitated inner ear. Farther into the essay, I stumbled on a sentence, starred in the margin, that seemed to give Dale Kohler’s line of argument some justification: “In relation to the kingdom of God any pedagogy may be good and any may be bad; a stool may be high enough and the longest ladder too short to take the kingdom of heaven by force.” By force , of course: that was his blasphemy, as I had called it. The boy would treat God as an object, Who had no voice in His own revelation. I searched impatiently, at random; I could feel Esther’s boredom pulling at me, sucking at me, wanting me there with her in the kitchen, so we could be bored together. And at last, just as I had abandoned hope, the loose, scribbled pages opened to the page where, in triple pencil lines whose gouging depth indicated a strenuous spiritual clutching, my youthful self had marginally scored, in “The Problem of Ethics Today,” where one would least think to find it:
There is no way from us to God—not even a via negativa —not even a via dialectica nor paradoxa . The god who stood at the end of some human way—even of this way—would not be God.
    Yes. I closed the book and put it back. The god who stood at the end of some human way would not be God . I have a secret shame: I always feel better—cleaner, revitalized—after reading theology, even poor theology, as it caresses and probesevery crevice of the unknowable. Lest you take me for a goody-goody, I find kindred comfort and inspiration in pornography, the much-deplored detailed depiction of impossibly long and deep, rigid and stretchable human parts interlocking, pumping, oozing. Even the late Henry’s Opus Pistorum , so vile it was posthumous, proved not too much for me, for me had its redeeming qualities, exalting as it did and as such works do our underside, the damp underside of our ordained insomnia, crawling with many-legged demons. Lo! the rock is lifted. And what eventuates from these sighing cesspools of our being, our unconscionable sincere wishes? Cathedrals and children.
    Richie was crouching blurry-eyed over his homework while trying to keep a rerun of “Gilligan’s Island” in focus. I ruffled the back of the boy’s hair, dark brown like my own before gray infiltrated everything but my eyebrows, which remain solid, dark, long, and stern. “How’d school go?”
    “O.K.”
    “How’s your cold?”
    “ O.K .”
    “Your mother says it’s getting worse.”
    “Dad. I’m doing homework. What’s twenty-seven to base six?”
    “I have no idea. They didn’t have bases when I was in school.”
    Actually, I had tried to understand them with him, and by following his textbook closely had seemed to succeed; but the slidingness of exponentiality repelled me, and the revelation that base ten was in no way sacred opened an unnecessary hole in my universe. Thinking of mathematics, I see curves moving in space according to certain aloof and inevitable laws, generating the beauty of trajectories, expanding, carryingtruth upon the backs of their arches, like cherubs on dolphinback, farther and farther out, plunging and rising. The Gnostics’ hierarchies of angels and of human degrees of susceptibility to the pleroma, and the “measuring of the body of God” set forth with so much laborious alphabetic arithmetic in Merkabah mysticism, surely anticipated and intended to represent these sweeping immaterial formulae that mediate