"Faith Sufficient" (1983)
- Jon Nelson
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
“Faith Sufficient” is a late sequel to Lafferty’s 1959 short story “John Salt,” though—true to Lafferty’s crazy publication history—“John Salt” wasn’t published until 1985, two years after “Faith Sufficient.” In "John Salt," Lafferty took aim at hellfire-and-brimstone preaching and fraudulent miracle-working. In "Faith Sufficient," the target shifts a bit: the focus is religious enthusiasm, the revivalistist culture of being slain in the spirit, speaking in tongues, other theatrical manifestations of the Spirit, and the whole business of making miracles. There is also some fun had at the expense of 1960s and 1970s-style encounter groups (think of the Human Potential Movement, EST, and Esalen); attempts to sound legit by borrowing the language of science (Scientology, Christian Science, and any number of New Age groups); bureaucratic trends in mainline Christianity; corporate blather; and the God talk of the Charismatic movement and its plague of televangelists. The ending is poignant.
Rereading the story, I kept thinking of Ronald Knox’s Enthusiasm, the now-classic Catholic history of Inner Light Christianity. Enthusiasm, for Knox, names movements that elevate private inspiration over natural reason, ecclesiastical authority, and sacred doctrine. Whether or not Lafferty read Knox—and smart money would say he did—enthusiasm brings the story into focus.
A word about Ronald Knox. He was a friend of Chesterton’s. He translated the entire Bible from St. Jerome's Vulgate. He preached brilliantly, argued well, wrote competent detective stories alongside Chesterton, Sayers, and others, and he could be very funny. Enthusiasm itself sometimes snarks, and it has a good deal of erudite British humor, especially about Methodism. But its judgment is, for the most part, measured.
Take one instance of the generosity. Knox grants that most enthusiasts sincerely seek holiness. (That is more than can be said for some of the frockless characters in “Faith Sufficient,” characters like the wonderfully named Sister Specially-Esteemed-By-The-Spirit and Outreacher Preacher Jerome Healing.) Knox argues that enthusiasm tends to lead to subjectivism and spiritual instability because it rests on what he calls a different theology of grace. That is much deeper than criticizing enthusiasm for its overt emotionalism or theatricality. He writes:
The implications of enthusiasm go deeper […] at the root of it lies a different theology of grace. Our traditional doctrine is that grace perfects nature, elevates it to a higher pitch, so that it can bear its partin the music of eternity, but leaves it nature still. The assumption of he enthusiast is bolder and simpler; for him, grace has destroyed nature, and replaced it.
Knox calls this different theology of grace ultrasupernaturalism: an orientation in which private inspiration is superior to natural reason, ecclesiastical authority, and sacred doctrine. It will surprise no one that ultrasupernaturalism so often runs ultra-histrionic.
It is against this long history of outbreaks of Christian enthusiasts that I would read “Faith Sufficient,” a story Lafferty was fond of and rated among his better works.
One temptation is to read “Faith Sufficient” too narrowly, as if it were aimed only at the spiritual descendants of the Azusa Street Revival, or to treat it as merely a critique of ecstatics. Of course, Lafferty admired some ecstatics. Fourth Mansions takes its title from a revered ecstatic, St. Teresa. So it makes more sense, I think, to read the story as one that trains its sights on post-1957 American developments of what Knox documented, and to set it against the recurring question that enthusiasm raises about faith, grace, and authority.
A few passages on enthusiasm from the story:
At these encounterful meetings, the higher-ranked and most worthy of the people would stand in squealing rapture as the Spirit began to blow. Then the Spirit would sweep through the hall and ‘slay’ the select ones . . . The most worthy ones . . . would shriek and then throw themselves backwards in total ecstasy. This put the seal of acceptance on their worthiness.
“I feel, we all feel, that you have certain powers . . . I have a sudden surge of away-with-caution feeling and of what-the-hellism. We can do it now . . . Power-for-Good needs only to be present to manifest itself.”
The gibbering in unknown tongues rose in crest after crest, but the shouting was all as seemly as it was inspired.
“Faith Sufficient” has at least two primary satirical targets in Christian religion.
On one level, we are shown a religious group of boondoglers who appear, at least in part, to half-believe what they are shoveling. Here they are a little like Sinclair Lewis’s character Elmer Gantry. Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1927) influenced nearly every satirical portrait of Protestant revivalism that came after it. One of its great passages depicts Gantry believing in his own con: “He improved the details with every telling, and he began to believe it himself. He saw himself as an inexplicably wicked but inextricably popular young hero who had been snatched from the burning pit for the special purpose of making other people good.” The Mountebanks have some of this all-American Gantryism in them.
On another level, the Mountebanks take part in extreme religious enthusiasm. This matters because, to the extent that they are truly con men and women, they are people who psychologize faith; that is, they naturalize faith. This is Sister Esteemed looking over her shoulder before she falls backwards, slain by the Spirit. But to the extent that they are enthusiasts, they are doing something else; they are, in Knox’s terms, trafficking in ultrasupernaturalism.
The story opens with the introduction of Brother Gus. In another context, one might call Brother Gus telekinetic, but that isn’t quite right here. Gus is a simple handyman who can move a pecan using the strength of his faith, making the phenomenon something more than telekinesis, the odd "and" in the following:
The mouse and the handyman had a little game everyday with the pecan, the mouse pushing it with all his physical strength, and the handyman pushing it with faith and telekinesis. But then the mouse would seem to double his strength, and they would play the game to a stand still.
Brother Gus lives with and cares for Brother Mus, a hyper-intelligent laboratory mouse injected with a substance called “flaming faith toxin.” Gus formerly worked at the laboratory where experiments were conducted on Mus; he rescued the mouse and nursed him back to health through his faith.
Now outsiders together—man and mouse—they work for a group of fraudulent faith healers calling itself the “Scientific Ecumenical Psychological Encounterful Covenant For Faith Healing and For Civic Management.” Throughout the story, this group is referred to by the name John Salt gives them: the Meadow Lark Mountebanks. John Salt, the former faith healer turned faithful debunker, decides to expose the group by wagering $10,000 that he can duplicate any of their miracles through purely natural means.
To force the issue, Salt secretly shoots the covenant’s leaders with darts containing chemicals such as “overconfidence toxin” and “intrepidity,” compelling them to accept a challenge to move nearby Turkey Mountain. At the same time, Salt secures a crucial promise from Brother Gus: Gus will not use his own powers to aid the charlatans during the demonstration.
The faith healers appear to succeed. Turkey Mountain rises a hundred feet into the air before settling back down. The Mountebanks claim credit for the miracle, but the feat was actually accomplished by Brother Mus, whose “faith sufficient” brings it about. The effort, however, is exhausting. Mus falls into a deep sleep, and the healers’ subsequent attempts at faith healing fail disastrously.
Salt then proposes a second wager. He bets that he himself can duplicate the mountain-moving feat by natural means the following day. At this point, medical authorities from the laboratory arrive to seize and destroy Brother Mus. Before being taken into custody, Brother Gus slips the sleeping mouse into John Salt’s pocket. At the final showdown, the Meadow Lark Mountebanks once again fail to move the mountain. Salt steps forward and pretends to issue commands through a telephone and a slide rule, while Brother Mus, hidden in his pocket, lifts the mountain even higher than before. Salt wins the wager, but the story ends on an complicating note: he asks the Meadow Lark Mountebanks to help cure the mouse, which lies unconscious and giggling uncontrollably.
The most interesting element of the story, for me, is the faith toxin, precisely because of how utterly strange it is as a novum. It stands in for the Catholic doctrine of faith as an infused theological virtue, and in doing so it distinguishes faith from a mere psychological state. From a Catholic point of view, reducing faith to psychology is a category error. Put crudely, it confuses the vessel, the human mind, with the content, divine revelation, and with the power source, grace.
High-church and Reformed Protestants are, on this point, much closer to the Catholic position than the kind of low-church Protestantism Lafferty targets in “Faith Sufficient.” There are obvious distinctions, including the various theologies of fiducia in classical Protestantism, but the underlying structure remains similar: faith is not something one simply decides upon. It is a supernatural gift—somehow mind-exogenous, in some ways closer to receiving an injection than to deciding whether you believe a campaign promise.
One often sees it said that Lafferty was a serious Catholic and theologically literate. The claim rarely gets spelled out. “Faith Sufficient” is one of the places where religious literacy helps, since faith is a contested thing in the religious traditions at play in the story. Of course, there are major disagreements between Catholics and Protestants about faith. But, again, the story clearly plays with the Catholic idea of faith as gift and infused virtue, rendered through the grotesque novum of the mouse injection. Brother Mus does not acquire faith through reason or emotion; he gets it through a direct, external injection of “extracts from the brains of slightly insane humans,” and through the flaming part of the faith toxin.
Faith as a gift must look absurd for anyone who psychologizes faith: how can one implant faith into a person? Isn’t that equivalent to inducing a psychological state in the person? Isn’t it just manipulating cognitive biases and the dispositions of personality? But Brother Mus is not hypnotized into having faith. That is not how the story works, nor is it how Catholicism works. In Catholic theology, faith is not, finally, a feeling or a conclusion drawn from natural evidence. It isn't merely psychological or data to be naturalized. It is a theological virtue, a habit of the soul rather than an emotion, given by God rather than generated internally by man. One cooperates with grace in faith. As the Catechism puts it, faith is “a supernatural virtue infused by God,” not a product of human reasoning alone (CCC §153, §1814).
Consider the following. If a neopagan high druid says he has faith in the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Thrice-Great, the word faith is being used analogically at best. The referent of faith is just not the same as the divine faith that is the gift of God. Faith is not just a belief that hooks up to justification in the right way and is true. Obviously, it will look the same to you if you insist on naturalizing religion, and it will be unjustified and erroneous, but that is not how the Catholic tradition sees it. The Catechism says that theological faith is ordered specifically toward God as he reveals himself and is only possible by grace (CCC §1814). That faith is ordinarily received in baptism, where the soul itself is changed and elevated, then strengthened through the sacrament of confirmation and lived through participation in the sacramental life of the Church (CCC §1266, §1303, §1815). That is the kind of thing going on the story.
Look at what happens to Brother Mus. The injection does not persuade Brother Mus. Nor does it lift him into raptures of spiritual ecstasy. It just perfects nature, pulling him closer to man as imago Dei. It grants Mus total faith:
Remember that the mice in our experiment received injections of a "faith toxin," but in at least one case, that of the mouse "Bright-Eyes," it mutated into a "flaming faith toxin." This mouse has total faith, so there is nothing it cannot do.”
The story literalizes the theological infusion of faith through an injection. Grace enters from without, just as it said to do in every Catholic catechism, and it perfects the subject from within. This makes little sense as faculty psychology, but at least becomes coherent once faith is understood as an infused habit of the soul. Brother Mus does not decide to believe. He is made capable of a special kind of belief, unlike all other human cases of belief formation, in a new way. He is granted what the Christian tradition calls a charism. Then he believes flamingly. Charism is what the "Faith Sufficient" crowd minstrelizes.
Returning to Knox and staying with the idea of literalization, “Faith Sufficient” also satirizes enthusiastic religion by literalizing the theological danger Knox identified: the enthusiast’s tendency to let grace destroy nature rather than perfect it. This becomes literal when the Meadowlark Mountebanks pray over Mary Occhilucenti, one of the characters Lafferty takes a little time to develop. At the Super Faith Healing, Mary’s con-job routine of sight restoration fails. It more than fails. Her working eyes “grow shut,” the skin fusing over the sockets “as if they had grown shut ten years ago.” This reprises what happens to the con job of the crippled hand in “John Salt.” And it gives the reader a concrete image of Knox’s definition at work: a perverse form of “grace” destroying nature rather than perfecting it.
I'll wrap up by saying that there is much more to say about this story, including the chiasmus of the Mountebanks performing faith and John Salt performing a con job. I had intended this post to be about Brother Mus's giggling and how it shows something interesting about Lafferty’s Laughing Christ in Coscuin and The Fall of Rome. But the word in the title seemed worth addressing. Some other time perhaps.
