John Updike can flat-out write. But his books teem with vivid sexual imagery, at least for a writer who happens to be Christian (he even won the Campion award given to him by the Catholic Book Club). I'm fascinated how he can, sans scruples, reconcile writing hard-core salacious stuff with his Christianity. I've wondered: am I being puritanical in no longer reading him?
I've gotten hints in the past of how he reconciles it. In a footnote in one of his non-fiction books he basically writes off the Gospel of Matthew, saying it depicts a harder, harsher Jesus than the other gospels and so it apparently doesn't count.
Here is what Karol Wojtyla says in Love and Responsibility about the line between art and sexuality:
Art has a right and a duty, for the sake of realism, to reproduce the human body, and the love of man and woman, as they are in reality, to speak the whole truth about them....[and] sexual aspects are an authentic part of the truth about human love. But it would be wrong to let this part obscure the whole - and this is what often happens in art.
Pornography is a marked tendency to accentuate the sexual element when reproducing the human body or human love in a work of art, with the object of inducing the reader or viewer to believe that sexual values are the only real values of the person, and that love is nothing more than the experience of those values alone.
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