Astrobe and Aquarius

Earlier today, I shared some thoughts on how Jung’s Aion influenced Lafferty’s Past Master. I must confess I’m no admirer of Jung, and reading him closely, out of interest in Lafferty, hasn’t changed that. What it has done is make me more attentive to how often Lafferty plays with the finer details of Jung’s ideas—not to affirm them, but to preserve what is mystical and strange while keeping them consonant with his Catholic faith.

Lafferty shares with Jung a sense of the spiritual world as oceanic and patterned.

Which brings us back to Aion. Behind Aion lies Jung’s insistence that evil must be acknowledged as having real, positive existence. In Liber Novus, the private work that resulted from his spiritual crisis in the mid-1910s and from which he developed much of analytical psychology, he wrote:

“Evil is one-half of the world, one of the two pans of the scale.”

Jung never abandoned this conviction; we find it in its fully mature form in Aion, where he writes:

“If, as seems probable, the aeon of the fishes is ruled by the archetypal motif of the ‘hostile brothers,’ then the approach of the next Platonic month, namely Aquarius, will constellate the problem of the union of opposites. It will then no longer be possible to write off evil as a mere privatio boni; its real existence will have to be recognized.”

This idea became central to Jung’s later theories on the positive role evil plays in the individuation process. He returned to it repeatedly in his esoteric writings on alchemy and the transcendental function, where he sought to articulate how the self integrates the shadow. Ultimately, Jung’s move is to reify evil and integrate it into the self—a move Lafferty resists, offering instead a counterview of spiritual transmutation in Fourth Mansion’s Freddy Foley and Past Master’s Thomas More.

Although Jung insisted he was no metaphysician and concerned only with the empirical, he nonetheless treated evil as a metaphysical—and arguably Manichean—reality. He claimed to be merely describing what he found in empirical experience, but his language often suggested otherwise. Nowhere is this tension more vivid than in his correspondence with the Dominican Father Victor White.

Their exchange reached a critical point in White’s essay “Kinds of Opposites,” published in Jung’s 1955 Festschrift, Studien zur analytischen Psychologie. White attempted to clarify the Catholic position for Jung: while good and evil may be opposites in abstract thought, this does not mean that people experience evil abstractly as absence. Therefore, he argued, Jung did not need to reify evil to acknowledge its empirical impact. The Dominican position was compatible with analytical psychology, a position one finds in his God and the Unconscious (1952).  

But Jung would not yield. His rejection of evil as mere privation was absolute, and White’s carefully reasoned objections were set aside. For anyone trying to understand what Lafferty resisted in Jung, this exchange remains essential reading—especially White’s rarely cited and never reprinted “Kinds of Opposites.” It’s unfortunate that White’s association with Jung seems to have harmed his reputation, both among Catholics and within his Dominican community at Oxford.

SW3, Chelsea Embankment, Erected 1969, almost one year after the publication of Past Master. "An hour or two of crisp walking on the road and Paul was to Chelsea."

Picking up on the theme of sources Lafferty did not name in Past Master, I want to offer a few thoughts on two Catholic influences that shaped the novel, particularly in its treatment of Thomas More. His portrait of More shows signs of having been influenced by the 1912 entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

The Catholic Encyclopedia, which stood on the shelves of Lafferty’s family home, draws its entry on More directly from Erasmus’s description. Lafferty lifts the physical details almost intact: More, “not tall, though not remarkably short,” with dark brown hair and grayish-blue eyes “with some spots,” carries a slight asymmetry in his shoulders, the right rising when he walks.

In the novel, Thomas becomes a “dumpy little almost-old man,” “short and chunky,” and even a “ferret-faced little man.” Paul notes that he resembles “the Thomas More of Holbein’s portrait... but only a little.” Lafferty draws on Erasmus’s portrait and turns physical detail into symbol and satire. The slight, unassuming body marks Thomas as an outsider in a world engineered for perfection. His physical presence is a foil to Astrobe’s golden order. So is his humor.

G. Huddleston, author of the Catholic Encyclopedia entry, quotes Joseph Addison’s eighteenth-century tribute in The Spectator, where More’s mirth, so constant in life, is said not to have forsaken him in death: “His death was of a piece with his life. There was nothing in it new, forced, or affected.” Lafferty’s version of More ends on much the same note, with More going to his execution with a witticism: “Can a man have more heads than two?”

Other borrowings and influences from the Catholic Encyclopedia appear throughout Past Master, but no work shaped it more directly than a now-forgotten occasional volume: The Fame of Blessed Thomas More. Published in October 1929, the book collects commemorative addresses delivered that July at the More Memorial Exhibition in Chelsea. At the time, More had been beatified but not yet canonized, and the collection, issued with a new introduction, formed part of the wider campaign among English Catholics to secure his sainthood. Lafferty, then in his early twenties, admired several of the contributors. We tend to associate Lafferty with the cultural currents of the 1960s and after, but in 1935, when More was finally canonized, he was already an adult in his mid-twenties.

Unsurprisingly, the most direct echo in the entire book comes from G. K. Chesterton's contribution, titled "A Turning Point in History." Chesterton writes, "Utopia was partly a joke, but since his time, Utopians have seldom seen the joke" (67). Anyone who knows the novel will hear that line resound in Chapter 5 of Past Master, where More says, "Shove it, my little mechanical mentor, shove it. I made it up. I invented it. It was a joke, I tell you, a bitter joke. It was how not to build a world." Lafferty takes Chesterton's critical insight and places it directly in the mouth of Thomas More himself, who is now forced to confront a world constructed on the foundation of his bitter joke.

Also unsurprising is the influence of Hilaire Belloc’s piece, “The Witness to Abstract Truth.” Belloc argues that Thomas More accepted martyrdom not for a sweeping religious cause, but for “one particular small point of doctrine—to wit, the supremacy of the See of Peter.” He locates More’s heroism precisely in his willingness to die for what seemed a “dry, narrow intellectual point.” Lafferty echoes this view in Past Master, portraying More’s final stand against a deceptively minor piece of legislation: the “Ban the Beyond Act.” At first, Thomas objects simply to its covert inclusion, stating, “I thought it innocuous also; I only resented the attempt to slip it by me in the dark.” As he nears death, he grasps the clause’s deeper significance: “But I see now that it cannot be innocuous.”

Finally, Ronald Knox’s essay “The Charge of Religious Intolerance” is important for two reasons. First is Knox’s portrayal of More as a man witnessing the disintegration of a living civilization, replaced by a sterile rationalism that reduces Christian faith to “a mere inference from a string of Bible texts.” For Knox, More was not resisting a new belief system but a lifeless abstraction masquerading as progress. Second is Knox’s reason for reading Utopia as a satire. Knox reads it satirically, as does Lafferty. “It was a joke, I tell you, a bitter joke. It was how not to build a world.” That line, voiced by Thomas in Past Master, echoes a reading now largely out of academic fashion. Knox puts it this way: “It is clear, then, that the Utopia was a youthful jeu d’esprit, which was intended, indeed, to draw attention to some abuses of the author’s day, but not to be accepted as a serious program for their reformation.”

Other essays in the collection also find their echoes in Past Master, particularly Bede Jarrett’s “A National Bulwark against Tyranny,” which emphasizes More’s earthiness, and Thomas Chambers’s “Sir Thomas More’s Fame Amongst His Countrymen,” which reflects on the consistency of More’s character. Read together, the occasional pieces in The Fame of Blessed Thomas More form a kind of crib on many of the social, political, and religious themes that shape Lafferty’s novel. An annotated edition with passages from Chesterton and the other contributors in appendices would help new readers see not just what Lafferty was doing in the 1960s, but how he was thinking: backward through a tradition, forward into crisis.