"Claudius and Charles" (1983)

Paul Saka’s article on “Been a Long, Long Time” (1966/1970) argues that Lafferty’s target in that story is evolution. I touched on this in an earlier post, but since then, I have had Lafferty and evolution on my mind. Today I want to turn to his unpublished “Claudius and Charles.” The story doesn’t exist in the finished form that Lafferty usually achieved at the end of his writing process. Still, it is an intriguing story—arguably the most savage fictional statement he ever made about Charles Darwin—and one that deserves publication someday. Beyond being idiosyncratically compelling, it features Atrox Fabulinus, one of Lafferty’s most interesting characters and one of his grand statements about historiography.

First, the fantastic premise. The story purports to be a modern editor's summary of a fragment of Atrox's Parallel Lives of the Noble Egyptians and Englishmen, Atrox here described as a Roman-Barbarian and “a genuine mantic, a prophet.” Atrox, being Atrox, can write “with equal facility and accuracy of persons in his past, present, and future.”

The story uses this conceit to parallel Claudius Ptolemy, the second-century astronomer, with Charles Darwin. Atrox (again, through the modern editor) observes that they are “alike in span of life”—each living seventy-five years on Earth—and that they “look as alike as twin brothers.”

Both men experience a mystical turning point on the 9,797th day of their lives, when the Crystal Insect (one of whose 666 names is The Devil) appears. On that day, the Crystal Insect grants each a panoramic vision of the Earth and bestows upon them a scientific legacy.

In the first of Atrox's parallel lives, the Devil takes Ptolemy to "the mountain Jebel Asoteriba in Nubia" at dawn and shows him an inside-out view of Earth from its center. Ptolemy, a master of optics, recognizes this as "Crystal Madness, the most lifeless and the most unhuman of all madnesses." When Ptolemy says that "those Crystal Spheres have got to go!" and argues that "in proper proportion and humility, the Earth must be regarded as the least important and the least-central of all the Worlds," the Devil raises the stakes. He shows Ptolemy hellish tortures, and then he demands compliance. Ptolemy folds. He agrees to write the Almagest, which, of course, positions Earth as the Center of the Universe. His reward is getting to be "The God of the Ten Thousand Morning Stars." Read otherwise, of ten thousand devils.

What happens next is pure Lafferty and ties into his preoccupation with aeviternity, a topic discussed on this blog in relation to Melchisedech Duffey. Lafferty is going to combine this metaphysical concept with the biographical concept of parallel lives. Whereas Plutarch’s lives will always be dislocated in time, it works a little differently in Atrox for the Crystal Insect. In Thomistic angelology, aeviternity is the mode of existence proper to angels, which is intermediate between God's eternity (timeless, all moments present at once) and creatures' temporal existence (successive moments).

Aquinas writes,

. . . likewise in the angels, who have an unchangeable being as regards their nature, with changeableness as regards choice; moreover they have changeableness of intelligence, of affections and of places in their own degree. Therefore these are measured by aeviternity. (ST I, q.10, a.5)

And aeviternity is not lost when angels fall:

The natural gifts of the angels were not forfeited by sin . . . Hence Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. xi, 17) that ‘the devil lost nothing of his natural angelic gifts.’ (ST I, q.64, a.1)

What does this mean for the story? While still alive, Claudius and Charles experience their individual moments of scientific temptation in time, but the Crystal Insect experiences both as aeviternity as the exaltation of Satanic ego. For the Crystal Insect, the temptation scenes have the elemental succession of thought and choice, but they exist outside physical time as measured by material change. This is the kind of game that Lafferty plays in the third volume of the Argo legends, but here it is captured in its quintessence.

Lafferty writes,

Both of these men had a mystical (and quite shocking) experience on the same day. Well, in conventional time, the two experiences were about seventeen hundred years apart. But to the Crystal Insect, the author of the two experiences, all things were contemporary. And these two things were contemporary in a special way, for each mystical experience happened in the 9,797th (a mantic number) day of the life of the man, in the 27th year of the life of the man. The Claudius Experience was at dawn. The Charles Experience was at noontime of what the Crystal Insect believed was the same day.

So the Devil next takes Darwin, whom he privately assesses as "a charismatic dolt," to the mountain Jebel Snowdon in Wales and shows him the same inside-out panorama. Darwin, being "not nearly as intelligent as is Claudius," fails to detect the optical trick. When the Devil proposes "that every species and creature in the world, past, present, and future, is descended from the least distinguished glob of mud imaginable," Darwin says: "That is an insane theory. Worse than that, it is a ridiculous theory." But he, too, gets to see the hellfire, and after being promised "ten thousand Noon-Time Stars," Darwin too gives in. This requires accepting both a false grandfather "Erasmus" and the evolutionary theory the Devil prescribes, another attempt to reorient man from the divine.

The story ends with Ptolemy's death and damnation: Claudius Ptolemy dies on the Ides of July of the year 152 A.D. and he goes to Hell. There is a cute joke here with a bite: "It's too warm, of course, but it isn't as warm as is the place I died in, Alexandria in Egypt in July . . . Alexandria in July is worse than hell." He notes the straightforward rules: "Pursue your heart's Desire and you'll get it here! Oh, how you'll get it!" Lafferty leaves it up to the reader to infer where Darwin ends up.

Why did Lafferty abandon this one? Who knows. Maybe it was too on the nose, although I think the depiction of the Crystal Insect and the mountain vision, which is really a vision from the depths of the earth, is brilliant (it complements the idea of the universe being inside out in Paradiso 20). But maybe it was just the way that geocentrism is dealt with here. If the story is right, then a whole lot of Catholics would have been complicit with the morning stars. It’s going to be an obtuse reader indeed who does not think about the Catholic Church's condemnation of Galileo Galilei in 1633 for advocating heliocentrism.

After all, the Church had officially matching the geocentric Ptolemaic system as doctrinally aligned with Scripture, particularly passages like Psalm 93:1 ("the world is firmly established; it cannot be moved") and Joshua 10:13 (the sun standing still). When Galileo's telescopic observations and support for Copernican theory challenged Earth's centrality, the Roman Inquisition deemed heliocentrism "formally heretical" because it contradicted biblical interpretation.

Something is formally heretical when it contradicts a truth that is revealed by God (in Scripture or Tradition) and has been definitively proposed by the Church as divinely revealed (a de fide doctrine). This makes it opposed not merely to theological opinion or interpretation, but to the very deposit of faith itself. To persist in asserting such a proposition with full knowledge and deliberate will constitutes the canonical crime of heresy. What makes this more complicated is, well, history.

In 1616, the Congregation of the Index (with papal approval) acted on the judgment of its theological consultants that Copernican heliocentrism was contrary to faith. The consultants had censured the proposition that the sun is the center of the universe and immobile as “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical, since it expressly contradicts the sense of Holy Scripture” as then understood; they judged the claim of Earth’s motion to be at least “erroneous in faith.” These phrases are a part of the decree, but the condemnation was a disciplinary ruling, not an infallible doctrinal definition. This made heliocentrism something that was officially treated as “formally heretical” in the early 17th century, but this did not amount to the Church irreformably teaching geocentrism as dogma. Many will think this is eating one’s cake and having it too.

I'll spare you more Galileo except to say that the Church did not acknowledge its error until 1992, when Pope John Paul II admitted that the theological advisors had unduly transferred scriptural authority into the realm of astronomy. This has a weird effect on the story. Ptolemy being terrified by the Devil into writing the Almagest could be taken as a satire on how a cosmology becomes authoritative doctrine, enforced through fear rather than evidence. And who are the Devil’s partners in this?

As for Lafferty and Darwin, it is both uncomplicated and very complicated. The uncomplicated side is that he rejected Darwin, with his other bugbears. For a go-to Lafferty list of these bugbears, check out the planets in "The Forty-Seventh Island" (1977/1980):

Nietzsche Planet, Hegel, Mordecai, Darwin, Huxley, Freud, Luther, Calvin, Cromwell, Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, Hendeus, Joyce, Gide, Wilde, Mann, Russell, William B. Ziff***, Malthus, Roosevelt, Free Choice, Stamp the Rooster, Relativity, Situational Ethics, Mao, Truman, Kent State, Yellow Dog, Dialectical Materialism, Whitehead, Nader, Pauling, Teilhard, Kennedy, Bella Abzug, Punk Rock, Horse Robber, Sam Erwin, Mailer, Take Care of Number One, Tip O'Neill, Carter, Controlled Despair, Rolling Stone, Robinsonnade on which we stand.

The complicated part is how all this fits together, and how brilliantly it often does.

Lafferty’s formal invitation to accept Darwin came late, when he was thirty six, with the Church’s issuance of Humani Generis by Pope Pius XII in 1950. The encyclical cautiouslsy allowed discussion of human biological evolution while insisting the soul was directly created by God.

The central theological anxiety here was one Lafferty, as an Augustinian, would have felt acutely: Darwin seemed to undermine the Fall, which is essential to Catholic soteriology and all of Lafferty’s work. That might seem like hyperbole. It isn't. If death existed before human sin (as evolutionary paleontology seeks to demonstrate with fossil evidence), whence Original Sin? Thence, on one level, Austro and the Neandertal conspiracy in The Devil is Dead, and so much more in the Lafferty’s canon.

So Darwin is a charismatic fool manipulated by the Devil into promoting descent “from the least distinguished glob of mud imaginable,” capturing Catholic anxieties about evolution’s dehumanizing implications. Had someone else written (impossible) this unusual story, one might call it satire that mocks history by making Darwin diabolical. But RAL wrote it, then he shelved it. Perhaps he thought he yielded too much ground to the loyal opposition.

Claudius and Charles Notes.pdf

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*** He is probably here because he was a major supporter of Revisionist Zionism.