Perhaps because his father was not religious, Beckett seems to have felt no anguish in turning away from the Anglican beliefs of his youth; his mother, on the other hand, was deeply religious in a rather narrow evangelical way. Loss of faith, however, clearly has not prevented him from exploiting his Protestant heritage, any more than it prevented James Joyce from exploiting his Catholic one….

A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man has made millions of readers aware of the thoroughness of Joyce's Catholic education under the Jesuits. It is not generally known, however, that Beckett's Anglican training was almost as thorough. The religious education he received at his mother's knee is vividly dramatized by the famous photograph of him kneeling to pray there at an early age. His years from four to nearly fourteen doubtless saw little slackening in that training, and the ensuing three-and-a-half years as a boarder at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, unquestionably subjected him to a sternly evangelical regime. Founded by none other than the King James I of England who gave his "special command" for the famous Bible translation, Portora has usually had a Church of Ireland clergyman as Headmaster. (p. 266)

One could argue that all his Portora religious training was wasted on Beckett because he lost his faith soon after leaving the school. I believe, on the contrary, that it reinforced his earlier upbringing in certain ways and helps to explain why, at different stages of his literary development, different aspects of his religious heritage come to the fore. One thing at least is certain: there is no stage of that development which does not possess a religious dimension. Much has been written by critics about the influence of Dante on Beckett's writing, but surely it is most unlikely that he would have become susceptible to that influence at Trinity if he had not first received such a thorough grounding in the Bible?

It was natural, given his loss of faith, that Beckett's early works should treat his religious heritage with self-conscious irony. We have seen something of this already in More Pricks Than Kicks. His next important work, Murphy,… is positively sly in its biblical allusions. Take this passage, for example:

"I greatly fear," said Wylie, "that the syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary."

The idea of life as a syndrome made up of innumerable symptoms is clear enough, but who is "the horse leech's daughter"? In Proverbs (30:15), we read, "The horseleech hath two daughters, crying, Give, Give." Although "horseleech" could mean "veterinarian" when the King James was written, the horseleech referred to is a large bloodsucker. Clearly the proverb stuck in Beckett's mind because of the oddity of its expression and its quaint image of insatiable desire.

In the same chapter of Murphy he uses a more familiar quotation in the same disrespectful style. On learning that all the bars in Dublin are closed for the "holy hour" between 2:30 and 3:30 p.m., Wylie's friend Neary "leaned against the … railings and cursed, first the day in which he was born, then—in a bold flash-back—the night in which he was conceived." No hint is given that these were not original remarks, but I need hardly refer readers to the Book of Job (3:3) "Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, there is a man child conceived."

Obviously quotations like these do not take the Bible or its message very seriously: Job's cry of utter despair has nothing in common with the temporary inconvenience being undergone by Neary. It is not until after World War II that Beckett confronts the basic teachings of Christianity in his work. At first sight, this confrontation may be mistaken for a total denial and rejection. One could quote, for example, the notorious line from Endgame. Hamm, Clov and Nagg pray silently to God; they are disappointed when they get no response; Hamm shouts, "The bastard! He doesn't exist!" (Clov answers, "Not yet.") This blasphemy affirms God's existence even in denying it: how can He be a bastard (or un salaud, as the French put it) if He doesn't exist? All That Fall takes a bleaker view: after Mrs. Rooney quotes "The Lord upholdeth all that fall …," (Psalm 145 in the King James—144 in the Vulgate) she and her husband "join in wild laughter." God does exist, they imply, but He never intervenes in the workings of His universe.

Yet the meaning of Beckett's first play, Waiting for Godot, is deeply ambiguous. Beckett has remarked that if he knew who or what Godot is, he would have said so in the play, but it certainly can be read as a play about waiting for God, or the Revolution, or the Millennium: although Godot seems not to come, who is to say that he won't turn up tomorrow? I myself have suggested more than once that Pozzo is in fact Godot, and therefore Godot arrives in both acts without being recognized. The first time, he is rather cruel, like the God of the Old Testament. In the second act, he is blind and long-suffering, almost Christlike. At the end of Act Two and of the play, Didi and Gogo are still waiting, like Jews expecting the Messiah, or Christians awaiting the Second Coming. One of the great ironies of the New Testament, from the Christian point of view, is that Jesus was not recognized as the Messiah by most of the Jews he came to save. Christians are also warned that the Second Coming of Christ may be as stealthy as "a thief in the night." Waiting for Godot suggests that when the Savior comes he is never recognized, but this is perhaps less depressing than the idea that he does not care enough for us to come at all.

After mockery and serious confrontation there comes the third stage of religious influence upon Beckett's literary development, dating from the publication of Comment c'est in 1961…. Beckett has given up wrestling with the angel: instead of continuing his love/hate relationship with Christianity, he is now writing a sort of Scripture of his own…. How It Is, itself a text of barely 150 pages, has been followed only by very much shorter prose works: all of them are described by their author as fragmentary, as Residua or Fizzles. Among these shorter works, several seem to offer a prophetic vision of the end of a world that has not yet quite ended, or (to put it another way) the moments before entropy, or (to put it yet another way) time just before it stops.

I am deliberately mixing religious and scientific terms to convey the paradoxical style of these late works. Stretches of them are written without verbs and read like notes for a coldly precise scientific report, but suddenly we find a turn of phrase that reminds of the King James Bible, without being in any way a quotation. These phrases would not be out of place among the Minor Prophets or in the Book of Revelation. My favorite, both for its rhythm and for its ironic message of hope, comes from Lessness: "He will curse God as in the blessed days face to the open sky the passing deluge." Roll that on your tongue while you consider its implications: God and Man together again, believing in each other, blaming each other, afflicting each other. Not "happy days" exactly, but blessed days, and certainly happier than those after the recent greatly exaggerated death of God, when Man suddenly found it hard to believe in his own existence. (pp. 267-68)