Gilson, Art, and Fourth Mansions

Advanced Lafferty.

I first read Étienne Gilson in high school. A Jesuit teacher gave me Gilson’s eloquent essay on the university, its history, what it should be, and its probable future. One of Gilson’s most accessible pieces, it made an impression on me. So did the teacher teacher who grumped, “This is from the old Norton Reader, before the Norton people let their books go to hell.” Later, I learned more about Gilson’s variety of neo-Thomism. And I learned that generations of later Thomists had made a point of driving tanks through him. But Gilson is very much worth reading.

In Fourth Mansions, he plays an unusual but significant passing role. Like Jacques Maritain’s more spiritualized ideas on art, against which Gilson argued, his own ideas were a form of radical Thomism meant to a meet art in the modern world on Catholic terms. They weren’t what I had expected. Like the university essay, his Painting and Reality (1957) is also an accessible and beautifully written work because it began as a series of lectures. Both works sought to communicate to a wide but educated audience. Painting and Reality is the book Freddy Foley is found reading shortly before his entombment at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C., the mental asylum known as the Bug. Lafferty places Gilson in Freddy’s hands:

Freddy took a book from his bag. It was a rather serious book with which he intended to put himself to sleep, Painting and Reality by Gilson, but it had one of those false jackets slipped over it. You know the kind, Safe-cracking for Pleasure and Profit, Arson Can Be Fun, Care and Feeding of the Polecat, Seduction for the Anxious Amateur. The jacket of this book was Brain-Surgery Self-Taught. Freddy read it and dozed till there was a tug on his arm.

Readers of Fourth Mansions know that art plays a large role in the novel, yet the book’s arguments about art are largely unexamined. Each Harvester/Python is assigned an artist to delineate his or her character. The toad Carmody Overlark is said to be an art collector and collector of intellectuals, but not an artist himself. Michael Fountain’s golden bowl is (in his mind) an aesthetic object. Today I wanted to work out some ideas about how Lafferty might be using art in the novel by way of Gilson.

Unsurprisingly for a Catholic metaphysician, Gilson in Painting and Reality draws a distinction that is, on its face, about aesthetics but is really about metaphysics. He makes the case that realism should not be conflated with representation, and suggests that 20th-century people can best understand why it shouldn’t through the Scholastic tradition, which is Gilson’s tradition. A painting, he argues, does not represent something that already exists but is a new being, something added to the order of reality by an act analogous to divine creation. This contrasts with what he calls the picture or the image. Whenever a painting represents something that anterior thingness is always secondary to art. A picture, unlike a painting, relies on what semioticians call iconicity. It mimics, and mimicry is the measure of pictorial significance. A picture is this a sign pointing toward something already existing outside itself; it copies that thing, represents it, and substitutes for what it depicts. One could have two painted canvases and one is a painting and the other is a picture in Gilson’s ontolog. The upshot is that the painting genuinely is, while the picture refers. An artist, as a painter, adds to the sum of being, but the perfectly adequate picture maker just redirects our attention within the world of preexistent things. It is a huge claim. It is a difference between the images inside Biddy’s eyelids and the moment they become dead paint in the novel.

Gilson underscores the magnitude of this aesthetic chasm by distinguishing the creation of art from the mere appreciation of nature:

The most exquisite sensitiveness to natural beauty requires neither science, nor philosophy, nor even any kind of intellectual culture in general; between the charm of nature and ourselves, there is nothing, but between our sensibility and any painting that we may attempt to do, there is art. In the case of painting, art is not nature seen through a temperament; rather, it is the ability to create a new being that nobody would ever see, either in nature or otherwise, unless the art of the painter caused it to exist.

Fourth Mansions does many things as a book. At its widest horizon, it pushes Lafferty’s novel-making into the space of eschatological anagogy while still maintaining enough footing in low historical mimeticism to not be too alienating. Not that people don’t bounce off it. Contrast this with an unprepared reader’s experience of something like the more painterly (in Gilson’s sense) and representationally challenging Arrive at Easterwine or Not to Mention Camels. Fourth Mansions can be enjoyed as just a conspiracy novel, just an esoteric thriller about human evolution, ancient revenants, prophetic cults, magical fountains, and a naive young reporter named Fred Foley who bumbles into all that happens. Yet from its opening pages to its final question—"still the repeating cycle, or the ascending spiral?"—the novel is also organized around the distinction Gilson makes about art, applied not to canvas and pigment but to human existence.

Recall that Freddy Foley has simple brains but good eyes. Biddy Bencher has those pictures on the insides of her eyelids. It is a novel about looking at art and wondering what art and reality are and how the two connect, and it asks the big question that Gilson asks of a painting, only in regard to eschatological purpose: does the integration of the four beasts (they are the tetramorph of ox, man, lion, and eagle, as we learn from Michael Fountain’s lecture) add a new being to reality, or does it repeat what is already there? Lafferty asks this of every character, every faction, and every human act in the novel.

Gilson's account of painting is grounded in Aristotelian hylomorphism, specifically in the doctrine of matter and form as principles of becoming. It has been called more Aristotelian than Thomist. Matter, in this account, is what Aristotle calls a substratum, a subject that is already something. It can be something further. In Gilson’s technical vocabulary, what the artist works with is a germinal form that is somehow already materialized but latently constraining. Fulfilled form is that which, when received into matter, constitutes a new and determinate being. Here, Gilson follows Aristotle's Physics, which emphasizes that matter in some sense desires the form that will actualize it: "The truth is that what desires the form is matter, as the female desires the male and the ugly the beautiful," says Aristotle. Accordingly, matter, positioned between nonbeing and full being, is constitutively oriented toward the form that will bring it to actuality.

Between matter and form is that frequent Lafferty concern: Ouden or privation. It is the absence of a form that ought to be, or the absence of what should be there, so it is a deeply normative concept connected to the idea of final causation. Gilson, being a Thomist, argues that privation, unlike pure nothingness, is indexed to a determinate good form. A blank canvas is nothing but a canvas in privation of the potential painting that its nature can receive. The process of becoming a painting is the substitution of the presence of form for privation. To illustrate this potential, Gilson asks us to consider the physical starting point of the artist:

Confronted as he is with his sheet of white paper, he sees it as the place of infinite poetic possibilities, any one of which can materialize precisely because none of them is already there. The same remark applies to the canvas, wood panel, or wall selected by the painter as the support of his future painting. Whatever its nature, the first care of the painter will be to prime it—that is, to lay on it a coating or preparation that will ensure its perfect uniformity and neutrality with respect to any possible pattern of lines and colors it may have later on to receive.

All of this, transposed from canvas to character, is quite a bit like Fred Foley as holy fool and journalist at the opening of Fourth Mansions. He is introduced early on as being like a canvas:

As all cats (and especially tigers) are loose in their skins, this Freddy Foley was loose in his face. There was room there for far more things than his winking innocence and his easy grin. There was room for multiplex character that Freddy hadn't developed yet, for expressions he had never used. It was a face unplowed, though momentarily bloodied.

An unplowed face is not an empty face. It is far more like a face in privation in which one can see absence awaiting its form. Foley is already something (an okay reporter with genuine perceptual gifts), but he is constitutively incomplete. He is oriented toward forms he has not yet received. Lafferty even gives Foley matter's characteristic, magnetic orientation toward receiving form:

All his life, people would be giving valuable things to Fred Foley unasked: gifts, powers, lives, worlds, secrets.

Freddy is one of those people who are especially receptive to form. It is probably why Foley has a chance at succeeding where the Harvesters fail. Their brain-weave is an exercise of collective willpower aimed at producing a new human being by imposition. They are essentially secular theurgists. They seem not to understand that form cannot be manufactured by the imposition of will, but has to work with what is germinal, of which they are a part, as pieces of the tetramorph. In creation, form will follow the natural fecundity of being, received into matter prepared to receive it. Lafferty explicitly points to this failure of artificial imposition at the novel's climax:

He had been called, as the patricks had not been, as the Harvesters themselves had not been, as none of the exterior creatures had been of themselves. The Harvesters, the persons of the weave, had not themselves truly mutated. They couldn't have done it; they hadn't the holy simplicity for it. Theirs was a false and premature mutation. It was Fred Foley who now became the first of the new mutation, the special sort of man.

Simplicitas is not stupidity. It is the undividedness of matter that has not predecided the form it will receive, but that awaits the integration or development of its germinal form. It is privation in its positive aspect: the readiness of the not-yet-formed. Lafferty’s recoding of the tetramorph animal natures as toad, badger, falcon, and lion is, on the one hand, Jung’s quarternity (3-1) and the reintegration of the zoon anthropikon, which is at least a partial reconstitution of preternatural grace.

That takes us back to Gilson. His central ontological claim, grounded in Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, is the Latin formula omne esse ex forma est: every being is in virtue of its form. Form is that through which a thing is at all. Again, it is the principle that individuates it, separates it from nothingness and from other beings, and constitutes it as the determinate thing it is. Where form is absent or deficient, being is absent or deficient. A painting that has received its form from the artist is a new being; the picture that copies has added no new form to reality and therefore no new being. As Gilson puts it,

Among the properties of form, the most striking one is its aptitude to confer being upon the matter that receives it. In the structure of being, the primitive element is the act in virtue of which a certain thing is, or exists; but existence itself is that of some actually existing thing, and since a thing is what it is owing to its form, it is through its form that it receives existence. Hence the classical position according to which existence comes to things through form.

Consider what Foley is told by his colleague Mary Ann about the "flatness" of Oriel Overlark:

"For what she's worth, Fred, let me tell you that she isn't worth anything to you. I've done three pieces on Oriel myself, trying to see her in three dimensions. It didn't work, though. She looks brilliant, but she's a flat person. Not even low relief. She doesn't have three dimensions."

"Carmody was an art collector, you know, before he became adviser to the advisers. Oriel is a piece of art. Not profound art, but striking new art for all that. She's a novelty piece. She's been imitated and parodied, but only in a small circle."

In Gilsonian terms, Oriel lacks received form. She appears to be something. She is "brilliant," she "looks," but appearance is what Gilson calls a picture. She is like the many pictures of Carmody Overlark that Foley sorts through, puzzling over whether they are the same man. She somehow has aspects of depth, intelligence, and individuality without fully embodying them. She lacks three dimensions because, in this usage, three-dimensionality is an ontological claim: the depth that comes from form, from esse grounded in forma. That she has been "imitated and parodied" confirms this: you imitate and parody pictures, not paintings. A painting, according to Gilson, is an individual thing that cannot be parodied. One can only copy it imperfectly. Oriel is parody-able because she is already herself a kind of imitation. She is a picture or a deficient portrait of human depth, not a realized painting. The ontological gap between the two is exactly why they cannot be judged by the same criteria. Gilson writes:

A painting has its own rule, its own justification within itself. A picture has its criterion outside itself, in the external reality it imitates. Several critics have recently made the remark that nonrepresentational art has this major defect, that, being unrelated to any external reality, it has no criterion by which it can be judged. The argument would be valid if the art of painting were the art of picturing. As it is, all judgments and appreciations of paintings founded upon their relation to an external model are irrelevant to painting.

Auclaire's formulation to Foley tracks a similar logic:

"It's like everything was doubled here, O'Claire," Freddy said. "Everything that has substance will cast shadow, Foley. My things have substance. Don't get the things mixed up. Most people's things are shadow only."

That, again, is omne esse ex forma est restated in the novel’s idiom. To have substance is to have received form; to cast a shadow is a consequence of being in the world.

If we wanted to read the novel through Gilson, Fourth Mansions' four-faction cosmology can be read as a taxonomy of failed and partial relationships to the form-matter nexus that Gilson describes.

The Returnees (Toads) represent the pure mimetic position: the world of picturing without painting. They are "mimics" by their own proud admission—"it's an ancient art"—who substitute themselves for other identities so completely that the originals are retrospectively displaced. Their ancient knowledge (the jewel in the toad's head) is genuine, but it is placed entirely in service of reproduction rather than creation. Their cosmic role is to maintain the repeating cycle. As Michael Fountain notes:

"We support, as expedient, all cyclic Orphism; and so we must support the effort of the returnees. But they were only shadows of ourselves. Their concern that the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth be repeated has been a good one up to this time. The returnees must at all cost keep the world in this cycle. They cannot permit the world to ascend. They cannot even permit the cycle to become a helix, a spiral."

This is what the picturing impulse achieves at the metaphysical scale: perfect reproduction of the existing order, the foreclosure of genuine new being. No new form enters the world through the Toads; they are the curators of an infinite regress of copies.

Let’s go through the Harvesters, whose defining traits are intentionally linked by Lafferty to specific painters.

This Arouet Manion was a Reynolds piece. Having a Reynolds face, he appeared more profound than he was. But that maker touched many of his characters with his irony.

Joshua Reynolds is, for Gilson, the exemplary figure of the gap between picturing and painting. Reynolds theorized the Grand Manner. He talked about the aspiration of portraiture toward the universal and permanent. In practice, he remained a portraitist, creating pictures of social reality elevated by aspiration rather than transformed by formal innovation. Manion's Reynolds face represents depth through inherited conventions of gravitas. It doesn’t have the substance that those conventions evolved to express. It is the physiognomy of the able picture-maker.

This Jim Bauer was in oils, in the splotchy sort of oil-painting that Eakins did do well, that should have been sketchy in result, and wasn't.

The typical Eakins portrait is neither flattering nor idealized; it is ruthlessly accurate. This places Bauer among the most honest of representationalists. Because the Eakins mode is the perfection of picturing rather than painting, Bauer is stuck within the order of the already-real. His ambition to transcend it cannot be snagged on the mode of seeing that defines him.

Letitia Bauer was the pale or moon-colored, slim woman whom Burne-Jones had painted several times: as Beggar Maid, as Norse Goddess, variously.

The Burne-Jones allusion is interesting because Burne-Jones's women are not portraits; their were subjects but they are abstracted types, idealized forms that hover in a space between the representational and the new, not quite landing in either. They have been cast in too many roles for any one of them to constitute their identity. Letitia's "variously" is her problem, it might be said. She is a matter that has received multiple competing forms and is therefore, paradoxically, less determined than matter in privation. She is Oriel's more dignified counterpart. She isn’t flat. She is unstable.

Wing Manion reminded one of a fish done by Paul Klee: not in her actual appearance, of course, but in her style. Yet she was good-looking, and Klee never painted a good-looking fish in his life. Those Klee fishes, though, they have passion.

For Gilson in Painting and Reality, Klee is one of the major examples of what modern painting achieves when it escapes the picturing impulse. A Klee painting adds new beings, charged with interior life incommensurable with anything in the natural order. Wing Manion is the most transcendent of the Harvesters, and she similarly possesses something that cannot be accounted for by her surface.

We could go through the rest of them, but I think that is enough. One can see the way the book Freddy is reading before his stay in the Bug reconfigures what has happened earlier in the novel.

One of Gilson's most important chapters concerns what he calls the causality of form in painting, so I want to say something about it. It is the way in which, once form has been received into matter, it constitutes a causal principle in its own right. It leads to the work's internal relations. At one point, Gilson says that this is why artists feel compelled to turn the sketch into a painting. A painting is a whole in which every element is determined in its meaning and value by its relation to every other element through the governing form. Remove any element and the whole is altered; alter any element and the whole adjusts. This internal coherence is the hallmark of the achieved work:

. . . still more than it is an individual, each painting that meets the requirements of a true work of art is a completely self-sufficient system of internal relations regulated by its own laws. In this sense, paintings are mutually irreducible beings, each of which needs to be understood and judged from the point of view of its own structure.

The brain-weave in Fourth Mansions can be read as a failure of this type of artistic formal causality. The seven Harvesters are a whole:

The mind of Arouet Manion had great natural energy wrapped around a void, and it contributed a new angular velocity and a mad rain of strange particles. The brain-weave would not work fully without Arouet; it would not work fully if any one of the seven were missing.

Each member of the weave contributes something incommensurable with what the others contribute. For instance, there are Arouet Manion's "new angular velocity and a mad rain of strange particles," Letitia's ashen death-joy, and Wing's helical passion. The brain-weave is, in this sense, an attempt at eschatological painting.

Then why does the brain-weave fail to produce the new human being it aims at? One reason might be that it confuses the formal unity of its own existence with the ability to impose that formal unity on the world external to it. Gilson's causality of form acts within the work, not as a power projected outward. The power fantasy of the Harvesters is thus disordered. On the Gilsonian reading, their error is to mistake the formal causality of their own collective being for a tool of intentional production. They have created a painting (the brain-weave itself is a being), but they believe this means they can make it do something it can’t.

Lafferty is always interested in world creation, as we know. The chapter in Gilson’s book that is most relevant is the sixth chapter, "The World of Paintings." It argues that a painting constitutes its own world, governed by its own formal laws, in which what counts as space, light, time, and figure is determined by the internal logic of the work rather than by correspondence to nature. That might look like some kind of idealism and the claim that paintings are subjective, but Gilson is a realist. He says that the being added to reality by the act of painting is a being of a new kind, irreducible to the natural order it may appear to depict. The world of the painting exists because the natural world differs from the artist's specific teleology:

Artists could almost be defined as the special class of persons who do not find in nature a certain class of objects that ought to be there—namely, objects whose existence, essence, and structure are exclusively justifiable by the pleasure found in apprehending them. Paintings are not simply objects that are pleasant to see; they are objects that have been produced by artists in such a way that their sight pleases the eyes. This is the cause of their existence. Because they do not find in nature objects whose exclusive raison d'être is the aesthetic pleasure derived from their perception, artists set out to produce such objects.

Fourth Mansions ends with a question about what kind of world has just been painted:

On so small a new module it might depend. What would be the shape and direction of it now: still the repeating cycle, or the ascending spiral? Would the next Mansions be the First again? Or the Fifth?

The repeating cycle is like the mimicry of pictures. The ascending spiral is akin to what Gilson’s idea of the painting produces: not a return to what already existed, not a representation of what might exist, but a new form received into prepared matter, adding to the sum of being something that was not there before. The novel ends without answering that question, whether we are trapped in the same picture or have entered a new painting, but it is one way in which Lafferty has aesthetics converge with the eschatological in the book.