"And Walk Now Genlty Through the Fire" (1971/1972)

Yes, I believe that there will be a coming of Christ, an actual physical appearance, comprising the eternal incarnation, redemption, and resurrection. So did Christ believe this and repeated it many times. It is to be believed literally, down to every jot and tittle of every letter. Those who have had visions of the Coming (the First and Second coming are non-sequential aspects of the same event and are neither first nor second), those who have had apparently authentic visions of the Coming . . . say that everything promised is fulfilled ten-thousand times beyond the expectation; but that they are not able to put it into human words yet. Part of the difficulty seems to involve the difference between time and eternity. The Kingdom of Heaven is indeed at hand always, but there is a barrier more narrow than the smallest instant of time between ourselves and it. In time there is duration, and the trouble with time is that it is so temporary. In eternity there is moment and there is simultaneity (of everything), but there is not duration any more than there is beginning or end. There is an infinitely-deepening moment . . . Everyone who has ever lived will arrive at the simultaneity of eternity, well, simultaneously. — Letter, July 7, 1987

The Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds came again and walked upon this world in that Moment. He often does so. The Moment is recurring but undivided. No, we do not say that it was Final Morning. We are not out of it so easily as that. But the moment is all one. Pleasantly into the fire that is the reality then! It will sustain through all the lean times of flimsiness before and after.

Advanced Lafferty today.

Lafferty’s short story “And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire” is one of his finest experiments, though it will probably read that way mainly to those already invested in his work. I place it within a sequence that includes “And Mad Undancing Bears,” “Horns on Their Heads,” and “Ishmael into the Barrens.” The stories share several features. Each is written against ideas Lafferty saw as utopian and, in the end, diabolical in the late-1960s and early-1970s counterculture. Each is post-apocalyptic in the science-fiction sense, yet each refuses the usual genre moves. They were all written in a period of a few years.

In place of genre conventions, Lafferty turns to heightened forms of anagogy to counter extreme cultural amnesia. Each story involves a variety of unstructuring that he associates with Flatland and drives so hard that the typological patterns of salvation history reappear. If any story in the sequence can initiate a reader into the more explicitly Christian and more difficult aspects of Lafferty’s art that these stories display, it is “And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire.”

Here, I want to set aside much else and focus on one element instead: anagogy. The aim is to put a few pieces in place to read its extraordinary ending and make Lafferty’s anagogy visible in what I am going to call Lafferty's invisibilia-and-futura stories.

The story is set thirty years after an event known as the Great Copout. Lafferty imagines the moment of complete unstructuring as one of quitting. Humans abandoned labor. They mostly stopped reproducing. They let their social institutions end. The result is a world populated by Free People or Unmakers, who live in a state of listlessness and mental disorientation. Lafferty uses a metaphor for this, calling it being wobble-eyed and disordered, drawing on the Augustinian idea of an ordo of affections. Opposing this philosophy are the Queer Fish or Ichthyans, a saving remnant committed to structure, organization, and religious institutionalism. These groups have the ability to order feral animals and birds, using them for protection and labor while being hunted by the unstructured majority who view them as carriers of a "fishy plague."

Cows, horses, dogs, people, the four artificial species. Now strange contrivances had spouted out of them all and recombined in them. They were all wobble-eyed, white-eyed, vacant-eyed, and freakish. Except the Queer Fish . . . . Mockingbirds, they all still used structured music.

The protagonists are the Thatcher family—Judy, a member of a leadership group called “the Twelve,” and her children, Gregory and Trumpet. The Thatchers travel across the high plains. One day a white wobbly-eyed cow approaches Gregory, and a minor devil named Azazel leaves it. Azazel (not the Azazel, but a nephew) then gives Gregory three temptations modeled after the temptation of Christ: turning stones into bread, casting himself down from a height, and ruling the world. Gregory rejects these, choosing his group’s ordered version of freedom. Meanwhile, a weary messenger, Brother Amphirropos, arrives to request a letter of guidance from Judy. She cannot refuse him, though he is likely a traitor. She drafts an “Epistle to the Church of Omaha in Dispersal” that tells of the necessity of constant rebuilding and institutionalized religion.

After the family has a ritual feast and gives Amphirropos the letter and supplies, tragedy happens. They are ambushed by a band of raiders. During the attack, both Judy and Trumpet are killed. The family’s ordered bulls eventually repel the attackers. Gregory is left as the sole survivor of his family. He thinks that the Twelve are broken. Suddenly, a man named Levi appears and ordains Gregory into the leadership group through the laying on of hands. Gregory joins Levi on a journey northward. He has inherited his mother’s magical insights and the ability to travel across the land at an unusual, spirit-infused speed.

The story ends with a mystical assembly in a barren region of the Dakotas. Gregory and Levi join the other members of the Twelve. This includes a twelve-year-old boy named Peter Johnson, who is recognized as their leader, as well as the Seventy-Two and hundreds of other followers. Thousands of bees arrive to provide wax for an acre of fire. It is called a structured fire—reality itself. The group moves into this fire, the beginning of a Sabbatical year.

That summary does violence to an intensely poetic story. Like the other stories in the invisibilia-and-futura sequence, it contains little humor beyond wit. Rather than work through every piece here, I will offload much of what is obvious—and much that is not—into the notes that accompany this post.

One thing must be said up front. The story works by constellation. It binds its materials into typological knots and makes the New Testament do for it what the Old Testament does for the New Testament: supply types. In traditional typological reading, Old Testament types foreshadow New Testament antitypes. “And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire” reverses and recasts that logic. It recapitulates antitypes in an eschatological setting, but with the types scrambled—the way they often are in this invisibilia-and-futura sequence.

Gregory’s temptation scene shows the method. Lafferty pulls together at least four pieces of material: the temptation of Christ, the episode of the Gadarene swine, the Catholic sacrament of confirmation, and Christ’s instruction in the temple at age twelve.

Lafferty's Twelve are obvious antitypes:

So what is going on in the rest of the story? The big piece should be no surprise. The Catholic Church understands itself as the Body of Christ, not metaphorically but ontologically. Christ has a body; the Church IS that body; therefore, the Church is necessarily visible, material, and institutional. Catholics typically put it this way: the Church is a visible Church in history. That comes with difficulties because humans are flawed and history is full of the Church making mistakes, but the Church itself isn’t a regrettable concession to human weakness. It continues the Incarnation in the sacraments. Christ took flesh; the Church is that flesh extended through time. The sacraments are material acts (water, bread, wine, oil, hands) that effect what they signify. What a sacrament does is more than signify grace; it conveys it. In “And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire,” there are many sacramental moments.

"For it is essential that religion (that old abomination) if it is to be religion at all (the total psychic experience) must be institutionalized and articulated in organization and service and liturgy and art. That is what religion is. . . . There can no more be noninstitutional religion than there can be a bodiless body. We abjure the whole business. We're well quit of the old nightmare."

The story is also concerned with apostolic succession. We see this showing up in the physical transmission through the laying on of hands, an unbroken chain from Peter to the present bishop. The Twelve in the story are the twelve apostles, but they also have the offices of bishops. The Queer Fish is Catholic ecclesiology at low ebb, but it is ecclesiology. The offices of the Twelve are protected—"it was never supposed to be broken." Dead John Thatcher rises to lay hands on Judy; Levi lays hands on Gregory. The offices are visible and physical. They are one of the seven sacraments of the Church: ordination. The Eucharist in the story, too, is real: Judy "structured, she instituted, she transformed." The ordered bulls are ordered to the ordo of creation where living beings have final ends. When the diabolical figures in the story say, "institutional religion turns me off,” Lafferty wants it to be clear that what is being rejected is the Incarnation itself—the claim that God works through matter, through structure, through visible institutions. "There can no more be noninstitutional religion than there can be a bodiless body." This IS the Catholic claim at the center of the story. The Church is not just a gathering of believers who agree on doctrines. Instead, it is Christ's body as the Church in history, and bodies have structure. It is possible to enjoy the story without knowing any of this, or only vaguely, but one is at a disadvantage because of how Lafferty is transcoding typological meaning.

"Bend down, woman," dead Thatcher said. "I am not quite dead. I lay my hands on you." John Thatcher laid his hands on his wife Judy and made her one of the Twelve."

"Are there no hands?" Gregory cried out, dry-eyed and wretched. . . . "Aye, boy, mine are the hands," came a voice . . . . "I am Levi," the man answered softly. He laid hands on Gregory. "Now you are one of the Twelve," he said.

In addition to typology, "And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire" is one of Lafferty’s great anagogical stories. Anagogy is a difficult subject, and one I keep coming back to in reading Lafferty. It seems to me that Henri de Lubac is a useful guide to what is happening in this story and in other Lafferty pieces, even if one suspects Lafferty himself would have disliked de Lubac’s theology. Lafferty is on record as disliking Yves Congar's ideas, and both men were enormously influential on Vatican II.

De Lubac (1896–1991) was a French Jesuit, a central figure in nouvelle théologie, and later a cardinal. He was one of the most influential Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century, and he still has the influence of an intellectual giant. His four-volume Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l'Écriture did as much as any modern work to renew the patristic account of anagogy as the unity of transcendence and the eschatological. It is this unity that is so important and so relevant to what Lafferty took from the Church Fathers.

Like many twentieth-century intellectual Catholics, Lafferty was deeply interested in Origen. For Origen and the early Fathers, anagogy holds together what later ages pry apart. One dimension is invisibilia: the transcendent, the heavenly, the “things above.” The other is futura: the eschatological, the “things to come.” These are two angles on the same reality, and in Lafferty they meet in the acre of fire in “And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire.” The heavenly Jerusalem is the future Jerusalem. Contemplation of the transcendent is hope for what is promised.

To put it simply, de Lubac thought that anagogy split in the Middle Ages into two (if not quite erroneous) currents that still obscure what anagogy was in the early church. There was a Dionysian drift toward transcendence without futurity, and a Joachimite drift toward futurity without transcendence. To understand Lafferty’s use of anagogy, and to see how this set of stories scrambles typological form while still aiming at eschatological vision, it is useful to name these currents.

De Lubac argues that, in the medieval period, Pseudo-Dionysius and his interpreters pursue the invisibilia while leaving the futura behind. What does that look like in practice? It looks like a mystical ascent into atemporal divine reality: the soul rises by negation toward what is “above,” with no essential tie to history or to what is “to come.” Imagine an ecstatic escape from time. In that moment of flight, “higher things” stop being the “last things.” The danger is plain. Mystical contemplation can become a form of escapism.

Meanwhile, Joachim of Fiore temporalizes the futura of eschatology while abandoning the invisibilia: a third age of the Spirit unfolding within history, an earthly utopia, the eschaton relocated from heaven to a datable future. Hope thus becomes a political program. The eschaton begins to look like utopianism.

The two are related because each is a one-sided aftereffect of dissociation. Dionysian mysticism escapes time for a transcendence that has nothing to do with history’s end. Joachimite prophecy awaits a historical consummation that is fully immanentized in the living of historical time. De Lubac thinks modernity inherits both: it privatizes spirituality (Dionysius), seeking transcendence by escaping the world, and it revolutionizes politics, seeking transformation while abandoning the transcendent.

The following table and diagram lay out de Lubac’s argument in a way that matters for anyone trying to recover the anagogical dimension in Lafferty. I think this work is necessary for readers who want to understand him, since he is more often anagogical than simply allegorical, and anagogy is one of the features that make his work difficult.

Lafferty’s story is post-apocalyptic and post-historical, but it is not quite fantasy, and it is not science fiction. It is anagogical. Lafferty so thoroughly unstructures the past that Gregory’s historical memory reaches back only about thirty years. Even so, Lafferty opens a gate onto what he often calls consensus reality that opens onto what is beyond all consensus. And then Lafferty does something he rarely does. He makes a direct statement about Reality, Prime, about what still stands after any world has died:

This acre was large enough to contain all that needed to be contained: it is always there, wherever reality is. There are tides that come and go; but even the lowest ebbing may not mean the end of the world

He has a storytelling trick. His way of showing this acre of fire—this thing that remains after the lowest ebb—is to use anagogy, so that typological patterns re-enter history from eternity. They cannot be eliminated, though they appear in altered form. Gregory is tempted by a devil in a high place with the same three offers Christ received. Judy celebrates the Eucharist with wild wheat ground on quern stones and baked over cow-chip fires. Gregory keeps a Watch Night on horseback, as the apostles once kept vigils. A tardemah descends upon him. Levi crosses the sea: “Perhaps I walked on the water. Perhaps I traveled for three days in the belly of a whale.” The Twelve gather and enter the fire.

Why do these patterns recur? Because Lafferty takes them to be the shape of reality itself. Civilization has collapsed, but the Mass is still the Mass:

She said ordered words. She did ordered things. She structured, she instituted, she transformed. She and they (including the strange Brother Amphirropos) consumed and consummated. The small bread and the small wine were finished.

The last scene is an Easter Mass. The Twelve gather. Ten thousand bees bring wax for candles. White night turns to white dawn. The people enter the fire. "The Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds came again and walked upon this world in that Moment." This is the Easter Vigil: the night watch, the lighting of candles, the movement from darkness to light, the Resurrection. Catholics will recognize it immediately. In the Exsultet, at the Easter Vigil, there is a passage praising the bees who made the wax for the Paschal candle. Lafferty alludes to this tradition: "The bees are the most building and structuring of all creatures, and they have one primacy. They were the first creatures to adore; this was on the day before man was made."

The Exsultet praises the mother bee and her work; Lafferty's bees bring wax for the acre of fire. It is a Holy Saturday night, or a typological form of it, the full presence of eternity in time: the vigil, the candles, the fire, the dawn, the risen Christ walking among his people.

"They are bringing the wax," Jim Alpha was saying . . . "The bees are the most building and structuring of all creatures, and they have one primacy. They were the first creatures to adore; this was on the day before man was made. It won't be forgotten of them."

Finally, this is a story about the Mass as an assurance against the day after the world ended. What cannot be rebuilt does not belong to any world. It comes from the World—Prime—and Lafferty’s more utopian readers must either account for it or transvalue it, because it stands at the center of his art.

To see how this plays out in the works, consider the Jesuit Maurice de la Taille's The Mystery of Faith (1940), which argues that the Last Supper and the Passion are numerically one sacrifice. The book was translated into English and published by Sheed and Ward, and may well have been one Lafferty read. He knew their catalogue well. Something very like its argument is being made in “And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire.” Taille argues that the Last Supper is the liturgical offering; the Cross is the immolation, but they are not two sacrifices; they are two phases of the same sacrifice. Christ offered himself sacramentally in the Cenacle and consummated that offering on Calvary the next day. This means every Mass participates in that single sacrifice.

Lafferty writes:

The Mysterious Master and Maker of the Worlds came again and walked upon this world in that Moment. He often does so. The Moment is recurring but undivided. No, we do not say that it was Final Morning. We are not out of it so easily as that. But the moment is all one. Pleasantly into the fire that is the reality then! It will sustain through all the lean times of flimsiness before and after.

The story’s present tense is eschatological: it holds invisibilia and futura together, and the Mass is the window where time opens onto eternity.

There are, in fact, two Masses in Lafferty’s story, and they are counterpoised for a reason: the Eucharist that Judy celebrates with the traitor Amphirropos present, and the Easter Mass at the end, where the Twelve gather in the acre of fire. The first is a last supper. It is the last supper the Thatchers will have together because betrayal is already in motion, just as it was at the original Last Supper, and it is a Last Supper because Judy celebrates the mass with the small bread and the wine. The traitor eats with them, and Judy will be dead by morning. The second is the Resurrection, where white night turns to white dawn, and the Master walks among his people. One of Lafferty’s points in “And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire” is that they are not two different things. Every Mass contains both: the Supper and the Passion, betrayal and the rising, sacrifice offered and sacrifice consummated. This is what it means for the Moment to be recurring but undivided. Each celebration is a passage of eternity into time. It is what the story calls the acre of fire:

There was, of course, the acre of fire, the field of fire. This acre was large enough to contain all that needed to be contained: it is always there, wherever reality is. There are tides that come and go; but even the lowest ebbing may not mean the end of the world. And then there are the times and tides of clarity, the jubilees, the sabbaticals.

And Walk Now Gently Notes.pdf

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