09 East of Laughter: Laughing Christ Redivivus

[Advanced Lafferty. What follows supplements my earlier post on the Laughing Christ and what Lafferty does with it in East of Laughter. The argument, in brief, is that East of Laughter rejects three accounts of Christ’s laughter: the tradition that Christ never laughed; Chesterton’s compromise, in which Christ’s laughter exists but is hidden from human eyes; and the Gnostic Laughing Christ, whose laughter despises the flesh. In their place, the novel projects a new future in which there may be a public, sacramental, yet comic Christ. Laughter becomes an epistemic and spiritual check against demiurgic fraud, its warrant drawn from antecedent sources: Gospel wit, medieval feast, Erasmian and Rabelaisian holy folly, and the end-of-the-world comedy Lafferty specializes in.]

There are two Apocalypses of Peter. The first, and by far the better known, had a long influence on Western thought and art. It is usually called simply The Apocalypse of Peter. It makes for gristly reading. A typical passage:

This is the kind of pelvic theology Pope Francis abhored.

The document was accepted by some early Christians, and most of it is in this intensely imagined brimstone vein, a chastening vision of Hell that Christ gives to St. Peter. It is the earliest known depiction of the Hell thumped from countless pulpits in the Christian tradition, to inspire imperfect contrition with fear of punishments that reflect the nature of the sins punished. This pattern later flowers into art in Dante’s Divine Comedy. My favorite instance of this in Dante’s work can be found in what happens to the fortune tellers in Inferno. They have their heads twisted backwards and stumble, with tears running down their bare backs and between the cleft of their ass cheeks. Grimly comic stuff. There is not one iota of humor in the famous Apocalypse of Peter. There is torture as punishment.

The other Apocalypse of Peter is called the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter. It was discovered at Nag Hammadi and is gnostic. Very different, it is an apocalypse purporting to show the evil of materiality and the knitted body. Its most astonishing moment arrives when Peter sees the agonized flesh of Christ nailed to the cross. At the same moment, Peter is shown the Laughing Christ above the cross, who mocks those who crucify his body. Though the body and spirit of Christ had previously been united in Jesus Christ, they are separated begire the crucifixion: the man Jesus is a patsy who undergoes the Passion, while the real Christ spiritually laughs from above the cross at the tortured body.

It confuses poor St. Peter:

Quite a schizo-gash.

As I noted in the last post, Chapter 4 of East of Laughter really sets the plot in motion after cranking the novel hard like a truculent Model T for three chapters. It also brings the Laughing Christ into view, setting up Chapter 7 and others, and gives us Lafferty’s term of art for demiurgic deception (“Snuffles” and others): Demiourgikos Pneuma Apatelos. Counter to it is the spirit of creative truth, what we can call Pneuma Demiourgikēs Alētheias. The reader East of Laughter must move between these two spirits, embattled, learning to discern fraud from truth. That is easier said than done, but we do have Mary Brandy Manx to help us.

One related puzzle is how to distinguish the several Laughing Christs handed down by tradition; how to situate them within, and sometimes against, the proto-orthodox and orthodox tradition for which any artistic image of Christ laughing at the life affair might be theologically scandalous.

I will not try to settle here exactly where Lafferty comes down on the matter, not least because the novel keeps that question somewhat unclear, though I’ll hammer out a position in my wrap-up on the book. Still, the direction of East of Laughter seems plain enough. It rejects two inherited accounts of Christ’s laughter. The first is the hidebound orthodox tradition, found in the patristic period and throughout the Middle Ages, that Christ never laughed, a view made notorious for modern readers by Umberto Eco’s brilliant international bestsellerThe Name of the Rose. The second is Chesterton’s gentler version: that Christ’s laughter existed, but remained hidden from the eyes of men for the reason of scandal. Suffering for us, and Christ’s suffering, makes Christ’s laughter intellectually discordant. Most people in hospice wouldn’t be comforted by such an image. It jars against the reality of pancreatic cancer, murder, and crib death. The world Lafferty imagines after the end of the world that had been scripted by Atrox and the other Giants differs from both of the takes. For the giants chosen from the Group of Twelve, the laughter of Chris will not be buried. Yet world merely has to mature into a fully comic vision. Hence, East of Laughter.

We can start putting it together, I think, like this:

The vertical line that runs down the middle is obviously the time axis. The dates are set into it: first century AD; second–third centuries; fourth–sixth centuries; thirteenth–fifteenth centuries; sixteenth–seventeenth centuries; 1908; twentieth century. Behind the line is a band running the full height of the chart, with the rotated label “buried—in the ground of Italy, and in the mind.” This is the zone of Atrox and Denis, our forgers of fraud and truth, and the underground location of the buried Laughing Christ in Lecco.

The band stands for the Laughing Christ, present but subterranean throughout history, mostly safely out of sight. People do not want to see the laughing face of Christ, and it perhaps wise to recall that Atrox says Christ told Atrox to bury him, as if the issue of potential scandal were prudent to defer to in Pauline fashion. The fullness of time for Christ’s laughter had not arrived. Maybe it won’t ever arrive. Is Denis’s act of making premature? The Lafferty gamble is that it isn’t, and it can be faced. The old structure is dying or dead as the Timbuktu giant.

The right and left columns function like seismographs, registering the subterranean laughter that breaks the surface in Rabelais and returns, at last visible, in Lafferty. Rabelais could be funny about the sacred; he could not depict Christ himself laughing. In the eyes of the sixteenth-century Church, that would have looked like unambiguous blasphemy.

Now, the left column, point by point, starting from the beginning.

Luke 6:21. The locus classicus. Jesus says that those who weep now will laugh later. The point is that, in the Gospel, laughter is promised for heaven, while weeping belongs to the Christian task in this life. Laughter is deferred to the afterlife. That is certainly how the patristic period largely understood it.

Clement of Alexandria. Clement, an early Church teacher, says in the Paidagogos that Christians should barely smile and should keep laughter under discipline. The point: laughter must be restrained.

John Chrysostom and the ascetics. Chrysostom, the famous bishop, was the first to say, or at least the first to say in a form that survives in the textual record, that Jesus never laughed. The Desert Fathers, the monastic rules, and the “weeping virgins” made the avoidance of laughter part of religious self-denial. The point: by this stage, laughter is pushed almost entirely out of holy life.

Aquinas and the medieval feasts. In the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, laughter returns. Father Kirkpatrick (Father Irish Chuch) in East of Laughter says the 13th was the holiest of centuries. Aquinas treats good humor as a virtue; the old term is eutrapelia, something I have written about elsewhere on the blog. The risus paschalis was Easter laughter raised in church. The Feast of Fools and Corpus Christi produced feast-day revels and plays centered on the body of Christ. The point: laughter comes back into the Christian tradition, attached to the body, the feast, and the sacraments.

The Reformation. In much Reformation thought, the Eucharist was treated less as Christ’s bodily presence than as a sign, and laughter was reduced to controlled and cerebral forms: wit, irony, satire. That simplifies the matter, but it gives the general shape. The point: laughter is pushed out of worship again and moved into the head. Christian humor is wintry.

Chesterton, 1908. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton calls joy the Christian’s deepest secret and suggests that Christ kept his mirth hidden. The point: an orthodox writer recovers the idea of a joyful Christ, but leaves that laughter unseen. The note “a glimpse, not a surfacing” serves to distinguish Chesterton's figuration of Christ from Lafferty's. Chesterton refuses to bring the laughing Christ fully into the open, so the Laughing Christ is both Lafferty's continuation of Chesterton but his response to the end of the world that he thought Chesterton inhabited. It was past time for the laughter to be heard.

Here I want to pause. The New Testament never says that Jesus laughed; it records him weeping, not laughing (John 11:35; Luke 19:41), which is why John Chrysostom and others concluded that Jesus Christ never laughed at all. What the Gospels do show is Christ’s humor, almost all of it verbal. There is irony, exaggeration, wordplay, mockery, nicknaming, and comic image. Much of it is hyperbole pressed to absurdity: the camel squeezing through the eye of a needle (Matt. 19:24), an image Lafferty always loved, which orients Not to Mention Camels and reappears in East of Laughter as the incorrigible camel nosing into every tent, which is finally the spirit of the real Riant Giant, Lafferty’s Lord. There is the man fussing over a speck in his neighbor’s eye while a plank juts from his own (Matt. 7:3–5), the Pharisees straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel (Matt. 23:24), which Lafferty wrote a poem about, the lamp lit only to be hidden under a bed, and the slapstick of the blind leading the blind into a pit.

Christ also likes puns and names. Simon is renamed Peter, “rock,” in the play on petros and petra (Matt. 16:18); James and John are dubbed Boanerges, “sons of thunder” (Mark 3:17); Nathanael is greeted as an Israelite “in whom there is no guile” (John 1:47), a joke that could get someone in trouble with the ADL. Then there is what critics have pointed out: the pervasive diasyrm. The religious authorities are “whitewashed tombs” and “blind guides” (Matt. 23:24, 27), and Herod is “that fox” (Luke 13:32), all passages that Lafferty draws on in his own work, as we see in stories such as “Thou Whited Wall” and “And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire.”

Christ’s wit appears in argument as well. He turns hostile questions back on his questioners, first over John’s baptism (Mark 11:27–33), then over the coin owed to Caesar (Mark 12:17). He trades wit with the Syrophoenician woman in the exchange about the children’s bread and the dogs’ crumbs (Mark 7:27–28). The parables are full of humor. The point is simple: Lafferty thought this humorous part of the tradition needed to be brought forward, and so he brought it forward in his own work. It is funny, and it can look cruel, but Atrox literally means cruel in Latin.

Christ as clown. In the twentieth century, theologians such as Harvey Cox took all this and imagined Christ as a clown, while Hugo Rahner, Karl Rahner’s Jesuit brother, wrote of God at play, Deus ludens. I think Lafferty would have rejected the first view and qualified the second. Even so, the point is clear: laughter is reinfected into religion in the period when Lafferty is writing his fiction, but mainly as play and, against Lafferty's own sensibility, as humanistic therapy.

Now to the other side of the diagram.

The Sethian milieu, first century. Early Gnostic groups held that spirit is good, matter is corrupt or imprisoning, and the true God is hidden above the flawed maker of the world. Lafferty seems to have been more interested in Valentinian Gnosticism than in Sethian Gnosticism as a source for fictional inspiration, but the Laughing Christ of the Gnostic tradition is a Sethian image. The point: Gnostic religion despises the physical world. The laughter of the Gnostic Laughing Christ is not earthy in the least. In fact, the Gnostic Christ that laughs hates the flesh and laughs down spiritual folly.

The Gnostic texts, second–third centuries. In these writings, Jesus keeps laughing. In the Apocalypse of Peter, as I mentioned, the "real" Christ laughs while only his physical body is nailed to the cross. In the Hypostasis of the Archons, the spiritual Eve laughs; the Old Testament creator-god Ialdabaoth is mocked; and gnosis, saving knowledge, is figured as derisive, mirthless, recognitive laughter, the “ha-ha” meant to be gnosis's “A-ha! You goddamned idiots.” The point is that there is a Laughing Christ here, but one that laughs unsacramentally.

Condemnation and silence, fourth–sixth centuries. The Church condemned Gnosticism as heresy, and its books disappeared from public view. The dashed line down the Gnostic side, labeled “tradition silenced,” marks the long span in which this strand leaves little record until it is recovered in the 20th century.

Nag Hammadi, 1945. A buried library of Gnostic texts was discovered in Egypt, and the Gnostic Laughing Christ is read again. The point: the suppressed tradition resurfaces by accident in the twentieth century. Lafferty will know both Chesterton’s version of the Laughing Christ, who laughs alone far from the eyes of men, and the Gnostic Christ, who reveals his laughter to certain enlightened men. Lafferty will make the laughter open through many Gnostic comedies.

The dotted ties. Two faint links run from the central band to the Chesterton entry and to the early Gnostic entry. They mark the two moments in which each tradition catches sight of the buried figure.

First surfacing: Erasmus and Rabelais, c. 1500–1553. This box sits on the central band between the Reformation and Chesterton. It marks the first clear emergence of the buried laughter. The placement also fits Lafferty’s own work: in Past Master, he sends a Renaissance humanist into the future; in Fourth Mansions, he gives us his most Erasmian holy fool, Freddy Foley; and in East of Laughter, he writes his most Rabelaisian comedy about affirming life through gargantuan appetite. Erasmus found the laughter of Jesus in the Gospels as irony and sacred mockery; the rhetorical term is diasyrm. He revived the idea of holy folly: Paul’s “foolishness of God,” and the Silenus, the image of something ugly on the outside but precious within. He also made Lucian, the pagan satirist, usable for Christians. Rabelais turned this recovery into open comedy in defense of the faith, condemning the agelastes, those who never laugh. The point: the Christian humanists bring the hidden laughter of the Laughing Christ into the open. Lafferty in the book will bring him squarely into view. And, as always in East of Laughter, the question is, what does forgery as making mean in a Christian cosmos?