IVp Prime and Totalization

“The concept of the ‘immanent Trinity’ (alternatively called the ‘ontological Trinity’) and the ‘economic Trinity’ is the result both of the distinctions of the tradition and of the unique pressures exerted by modernity. The terms ‘immanent Trinity’ and ‘economic Trinity’ themselves are modifications of the early distinction of theology and economy, in that they refer to trinitarian persons and their relations immanently in God’s being (immanent Trinity) and these persons and relations as manifested in the history of salvation (economic Trinity) . . . . The immanent Trinity and economic Trinity came to be terms referring to the two aspects of the Trinity based on the reference point taken, with the economic Trinity being the self-revelation in the world of the immanent Trinity.” — Mark P. Hertenstein, “Immanent and Economic Trinity,” St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology 

Advanced Lafferty.

A while back, I wrote a post on how Ferguson reads Lafferty on reality to clarify my own way of reading him. There is no way to sum up the disagreement without some technical language, so I’m not going to try. Basically, Ferguson uses Paul Ricoeur to argue that Lafferty’s narratives work by beginning in a world after the collapse* of the symbolic order (where bones and stones remain) and therefore must begin in mimesis 2 (configuration) rather than mimesis 1 (pre-figuration), with only later a reconstructed mimesis 1 and then mimesis 3 (refiguration). I think this has a few dire consequences.

First, it makes Ricoeur unintelligible because Ricoeur wants to account for the phenomenological aspects of mimesis 1. Lafferty, when explained in this wa,y starts to look like a levitating raft or like Baron Munchausen:

“Once upon a time, when I was riding through a bog, just at the close of evening, I found myself sinking so deep in the mire that I was obliged to quit my horse, which had already disappeared. I tried to save myself by pulling at my own hair, and in this manner, by a wonderful effort, I at length succeeded in lifting myself and the horse together out of the swamp to firm ground.”— Rudolf Erich Raspe, The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen (London: G. Kearsley, 1786), Ch. VII, “The Baron’s wonderful escape from a swamp.”

Second, if Lafferty truly believes he can do this, then the burden of history vanishes. The deposit of faith and revelation vanishes in the creative omnipotence of mimesis 2. He could, in effect, erase the Holocaust but he could also overwrite the Magisterium, which is one reason I have been troubled by how critics talk about him. Yet Lafferty clearly believed in his hobby, history—and he was too intelligent not to grasp the implications of his own ideas—so we should seek a fuller view in other parts of his thought. Had he the patience to consider the mimesis 2 argument, I believe he would see what I do given other things he wrote. In other words, we cannot build his worlds in three easy steps by just using the "The Day After the World Ended" speech. Escape is not escapism.

In The Devil is Dead, he said we should put one of his works together like a Structo set. In "Goldfish," he gave the reader a cautionary tale:

“When [Leo[ was a little boy it had happened with a gift of a ninety-eight-cent Structo set, with a picture on the cover of a girdered bridge that could only be built with the twelve-dollar-and-ninety-eight-cent set. There were just not enough pieces.”

Third, Lafferty, on the day after the world ended, suspending himself over mimesis 1 by holding onto his pigtail, would evaluate Lafferty’s metaphysical commitments. The shortest way to put it is that Lafferty thinks only Prime is real, and that Prime is the place of closure. Fictions are just fictions. This is why his narratives avoid closure, leaving it to Prime where judgment, both particular and universal, take place. His stories point to humans who live in this situation.

So, specifically, Ferguson’s reading wrongly erases any surviving pre-figurative horizon in Lafferty’s work, thereby severing the ontological continuity needed for sacramental mediation and undermining the coherence of Paul Ricoeur’s mimetic schema (which insists mimesis 1 must precede mimesis 2). In short, Ferguson’s model reduces Lafferty to something analogous to a secularist world-building postmodernist (I think the “post-postmodernist” is critical fog) rather than a metaphysical fabulist, and misplaces the origin of world-building in Lafferty’s fiction by denying the presence (even if damaged) of a foundational pre-figurative world.

Now let’s go one step further and consider Petersen’s philosophical commitment to radical kinds of ontological openness.

Lafferty talks about the end of worlds in Prime in several ways and with different timelines. In The Fall of Rome, he places one ending in the fifth century, and we still live with the consequences of that collapse. Elsewhere, he imagines a world ending around the year 1000, following the rise of Islam. In other stories, he changes the timing and meaning of these endings in still other ways.

What he says about our most recent unstructuring is that it happened in the 20th century, and it changed the conditions of writing for us. I think he’s saying our local problem is being too close to a change in mimesis 2 (configuration). We lost the most recent consensus of Christendom, and this was unlike the partial fragmentation of the early consensus during the Protestant Reformation.

What we are talking about here is the problem of totality. Does Lafferty favor some form of open-ended totality? We have ways of thinking about this, from process theology to open theism.

Any open-ended, totalizing interpretation should specify precisely what is open-ended and where the totalization occurs. It should go beyond merely recognizing that Lafferty’s work strains toward universality and prevents simplistic narrative closure. The interpretation most faithful to Lafferty’s own texts, I would argue, is one attuned to how his openness is aesthetic and epistemological rather than ontological—since he maintains firm species distinctions, conceiving of “persons” as a broader category that extends beyond the human being species.

All persons in Prime relate to the divine, self-sufficient reality that is closed and complete. The world of fiction—like every form of human understanding—is open because it is derivative, fallen, and historically conditioned by the Fall. To treat that contingent openness as intrinsic to being itself is, it seems to me, to mistake art’s provisional gestures toward truth for the perfection of truth’s own order. As Aquinas thought, perfect being is simple and complete. Perfect.

This has knock-on effects for reading Lafferty's approach to sacramentalism in art (at its simplest, material signs convey spiritual realities), because the wrong category of openness threatens Lafferty’s sacramental hierarchy, which is directionally prefigurative rather than configurative, which is why Lafferty gets increasingly drawn to the distorted forms of the Logos in the Oceanic. The sacramental requires the survival of a pre-figurative horizon: a world still capable of mediation between symbol and substance. Erasing that horizon, whether through a Ricoeurian hotwiring or through an appeal to an open ontology, breaks the ontological continuity that allows fiction to participate in grace.

Consider how much of Lafferty must be prefiguratively part of Prime.

If the symbolic order is endlessly deferred or purely self-generating, the sacramental logic of Lafferty’s philosophical realism dissolves. You lose Christian fabulism. You get the postmodern play of signs, a world without full access to Prime.

Let’s really spell it out. In a Catholic worldview consistent with first-order, non-negotiable deliverances of the Magisterium, the prefigurative horizon (Ricoeur’s mimesis 1) is the ontological ground that allows signs to mediate grace rather than become frictionless play. Creation itself is Logos-formed (intelligible through and in the Word). This means something, namely that being is already symbolic (analogia entis, vestigia Trinitatis). Humanity, which is made in the imago Dei, has faculties ordered to truth and goodness that make figuration possible, while providence and typology shape history so that events carry real, anticipatory meaning (Adam–Christ, Exodus–Pascha, Ark–Baptism, Manna–Eucharist).

The sacraments, operating ex opere operato, presuppose this field of mediation. They unite matter and spirit in the sacramentum–res–res et sacramentum hierarchy. Liturgy deepens this as anamnesis and prolepsis. Why? Because liturgy re-members history and pre-tastes eschaton within created symbols. Virtues and ascetic practices restore perception to see the world sacramentally, while ecclesial memoria (Scripture, Tradition, doctrine) keeps this prefigurative grammar stable across “world endings.” Iconic art and worship render matter transparent to glory, showing that openness in art and thought is aesthetic and epistemic, not ontological. I call this bricospolia.

Another way to put this is to say that Lafferty’s “Prime” corresponds to ipsum esse subsistens, the divine closure grounding every open human configuration. His many “ends of worlds” dramatize breakdowns in mimesis 2 (cultural orders), not the destruction of mimesis 1. The prefigurative field survives. That is why there is any mediation between symbol and substance. Any view of openness in Lafferty needs to address this constellation of ideas.

The nature of Lafferty’s openness must be carefully discerned rather than merely asserted. If, as I argue, it is epistemological and aesthetic (an openness proper to finite knowing and artistic form), it points beyond itself to real closure, analogous to the closure of the immanent Trinity. In this regard, Lafferty’s fictions are deliberately displaced configurations (mimesis 2) of the economic Trinity’s life in history, typically rendered allegorically to administer, under a palatable guise. These truths might otherwise make many readers choke.

His recurring “ends of worlds” dramatize historical reconfigurations of how humanity lives with that divine economy: whether in the fall of Rome, around the year 1000, or in the Flatland of the twentieth century. What ends in these moments are cultural forms of mimesis 2, not the Prime reality that sustains them, the “World beyond worlds.” The plurality of these worlds reveals the instability of cultural symbols, but Lafferty thinks that a set of sacramental symbols is not prone to this kind of instability, that being the deposit of faith. There could never be a total break between mimesis 1 and mimesis 2. The test is always how much concrete Lafferty can a model explain.