Fourth Mansions Thoughts

Short post. Quickly sketched thoughts. Gregorio Montejo (I assume) has posted an essay on Fourth Mansions. It is worth reading. Vastly stronger than his first one. I’m unconvinced that the Alumbrados serve as direct source material for the novel, though I wish they did; even so, the direction he points to by using them is sound. I may well change my mind if I find any evidence that convinces me. Part of the reluctance is that the Pythons need to be integrated into the Fourth Mansion, and I don’t see how Montejo's argument makes that integration possible, since the binary it creates is so hard-and-fast. I hope he says more about this at some point because each of the four factions has reserves of spiritual power.

If the Alumbrados are to be understood as loosely gnostic and loosely antinomian—already a muddy historical question, given that figures like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila came under Dominican suspicion—they can be treated as cousins of the Harvesters. Montejo does not mention it, but Andrew W. Keitt’s Inventing the Sacred is useful for thinking through the problems of discernment raised by Fourth Mansions. I spent my Saturday afternoon reading it.

After thinking about the argument in the essay, here are the points I find myself considering:

1. Alumbradismo is a difficult historical category. It covers different groups and different practices. It was a prosecutorial label during the Spanish Inquisition. What did Lafferty know about this? I've read the entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia and looked at the sources I know he consulted. Still, I wonder what justifies treating it as a coherent spiritual type that one can use for one-to-one analogy with the Harvesters? Does knowing it teach us something about Lafferty's novel, or is it projecting a category onto a messy early-modern phenomenon to make a point about the novel, one that might obscure its immediate concerns? I worked through probable Lafferty sources, but I lean toward the second.

2. My hesitation comes from the pythons themselves. They have to be integrated into the Fourth Mansion, and the argument’s rigid binary leaves no room for that. A more useful key to the Harvesters lies, I think, in Jung’s Aion and in the popular subcultural spiritualities circulating when the novel was written. The Harvesters’ defining features—a seven-person critical mass, measurable physical effects, “brain-weaving” as a technique, a rhetoric borrowed from engineering—fit naturally into the mid-twentieth-century language of psionics and parapsychology. Given that context, why bootstrap a sixteenth-century heresy over the milieu Lafferty was writing in? I know the answer: the title of the book. Still, the nearer sources seem more likely, given that the novel does not deeply track The Interior Castle but uses it as a launching pad. In short, the Harvesters are aimed at the contemporary world. If you have half an hour, you can learn everything you need to know about St. Teresa to understand the Interior Castle in Fourth Mansions.

3. The essay does a good job tracing resemblances—illumination, elitism, apocalyptic ambition. But resemblance is not explanation. What accounts for the Weave’s behavior? Why is group work its signature feature? It is a quasi-magical group working made possible by a demonic infestation (Baubo). Why does the working have to take a coven-like form? In contemporary terms, what the Weave produces looks like an egregore. The term belongs to the same popular New Age spirituality Lafferty is satirizing. A Jungian account that builds on a known source quoted by Lafferty in Fourth Mansions, Aion, can throw light on what is going on: ego inflation, projection, collectivized archetypal power, the serpent as collective. Why treat the Alumbrado analogy as explanatory rather than analogical?

4. If the novel itself never refers to the Alumbrados, if there are no subtle allusions we can track, and if Fourth Mansions gives us the Harvesters as a group that treates spirituality as spiritual technology (for them, it is all about expertise, instrumentation, power, collective technique, curiositas, summoning, parapsychology), what evidence shows that Spanish illuminism is doing more explanatory work than other available ideas (the spiritualist tradition, fantasy and sf-style psionics, technocracy, Jungian psychology, de Chardin, pop tropes) that we know Lafferty is drawing on?

I’ll conclude by agreeing that Freddy Foley is a holy fool. I don’t agree, however, that his experience in the Bug amounts to a full-scale kenosis. It seems to me instead a Christianized katabasis. There was only one kenosis. I catch a trace of von Balthasar in Montejo’s Lafferty (as I often do) and for a von Balthasarian (not that Montejo is one), nearly every Christian katabasis can look like a kenosis. I won’t press the point further. Whether what Freddy experiences should be called a kenosis is something the reader can decide after reading the essay. What makes Freddy hard to interpret is that he really is a fool-fool. I don’t take him to be a Christ figure. There is no Freddy at Gethsemane. It would be interesting to know what Lafferty himself thought of Erasmus. I suspect Lafferty's view was complicated.