Ladders of Being II

" . . . whether persistent and inveterate wickedness might be changed, by habit, into a kind of nature, you, reader, must judge, that is, if in any way, both in these seen and temporal ages and in those unseen and eternal ages, that portion will be wholly discordant from that final unity and harmony. In the meantime, however, both in these seen and temporal ages and in those that are unseen and eternal, all those beings are arranged in order, by reason, according to the measure and dignity of their merits, so that some at first, others second, some even in the last times and through heavier and severer punishments endured for long duration and, so to speak, for many ages, are renewed by these harsh correctives and restored, at first by the instruction of the angels, and then by the powers of a higher rank, that, advancing thus through each stage to better things, they arrive even at those things which are unseen and eternal . . ." — Origen, De Principiis (On First Principles), Book 1, Chapter 6, Section 3; as preserved in the Latin translation by Rufinus of Aquileia.

"What is it in me that survives?" Maxwell asked . . . . "How can they destroy me in one machine and I survive in another machine? They couldn't even destroy one personality, one that had no right to be in the first place. Well, what is it of Astrobe that will survive, them? You'll never know how I fought against oblivion."

The last post was abstract. As a follow-up, let's make it concrete by taking a look at the Maxwell, one of the most interesting characters in Past Master. Maxwell is a member of Thomas More’s retinue on Astrobe. He calls himself quite a few thorns, and and others call him various things. A spook, an aberration, an avatar. When we first meet Maxwell, his embodiment is that of a swarthy, good-sized being that appears somewhat sinister. It fits him loosely:

It was a good-sized, swarthy, almost sinister body that he wore, and it was a sepulchral voice he spoke with. But one had the impression that he had to stand on tiptoes to see out of his own eyes; and that he was piping a small voice into the resounding thing as though it were an independent instrument.

Maxwell has holed up inside his embodiment. What makes him so interesting is his metaphysical slipperiness as a rational being. He doesn't play by Thomistic rules. At all. There is a loose attachment to his physical form that allows him to survive the destruction of his body. During the ascent of Electric Mountain, Maxwell's body is smashed and his spirit sundered from it, yet he uses his "trick of turning up again" to survive. He shows up in the form of a "shabby old lady" we meet earlier in the novel, having found her corpse in an alley. He calls this new embodiment a "contingent" or "programmed" body that is poorly made and hardly workable, yet it does have its upside. It’s a good disguise, and he can use it to walk through walls and rejoin the group during the final events in Cosmopolis.

Maxwell’s origins are ambiguous. He says that he is partially programmed in his origin, noting this as a shared trait with the character Scrivener. He has been a hunter in at least one of his previous life aspects, and during the journey through the Feral Lands, he participates in eating the Devil's brains. About this, he says he liked them more and more as he ate them. He has a belief in Astrobe, but he also sees his own nature as being a spook. A rationalist society does not believe in spooks. In the novel's climax, he helps with the violent killing of Fabian Foreman. He is captured by programmed guards, martyred, and adds his blood to the "transcendental yeast" to bring about the rebirth of the world. We hope.

My reading of Maxwell belongs to a larger reading of Past Master, in which the Programmed Persons are devils inhabiting machines. The spirit has not descended into gel-cells yet; if the Programmed Persons are partly artificial intelligence, the rational being does not belong to the machine component but to the fallen angelic nature that spooks it.

When the Nine confess themselves to be devils, I take that moment to be one of the novel’s central ontological disclosures. We know that nine Programmed Persons direct the deepest level of the Astrobe conspiracy, and we know that their origin is somehow tied to the infested bodies of the twelve dead criminals:

"According to your ancient belief we are Devils. What we call ourselves is another thing, but we are older than our own manufacture and older than our programming. These are houses, and well-made ones, that we found swept and garnished; and we moved into them."

This is relevant to Maxwell because he began as a Programmed Person, which, of course, explains his name. Lafferty almost certainly named him after the famous thought experiment in thermodynamics, Maxwell’s demon. It imagines a small being that controls a door between two gas chambers, admitting fast molecules in one direction and slow ones in the other. The result appears to be a temperature difference produced without work, a seeming violation of the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that entropy should not spontaneously decrease. The resolution lies in information. The demon must measure, store, and erase data, and that process itself increases entropy. The law remains intact. It's a straight line from entropy to the concept of Ouden.

Maxwell worries about what, if anything, will survive of him.

"How can they destroy me in one machine and I survive in another machine? They couldn't even destroy one personality, one that had no right to be in the first place. Well, what is it of Astrobe that will survive, them? You'll never know how I fought against oblivion."

Here we see evidence of Lafferty’s radical soteriology. If the reading holds, Lafferty allows a fallen spirit to martyr itself. Even Pottscamp may be redeemable, given his spiritual agony and his heaping of ashes on his head. That would be Origenist. Rational beings are capable of ascent and descent against the backdrop of a far more developed Thomistic great chain of being. In a more Thomistic scenario, one can get stuck in a Gadarine swine. It is as if we have an Origenist scenario taking place on a Thomistic playset.