Ladders of Being

This is because, in another sense, who [Origen[ was and what he achieved have been hidden for the better part of the Christian era behind a false mythology and an even falser historical record. Though, as I say, he towers over the landscape of Christian thought, he has done so invisibly ever since his putative "condemnation" in 553 at the Fifth Ecumenical Council. — David Bentley Hart, Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies (2020)

Advanced Lafferty.

I have a theory about why the ontologies in Past Master are so provocative and oddly contemporary. In brief, Lafferty draws on two Catholic traditions that pull in different directions at the level of detail. Their differences produce an openness in his metaphysics that makes him worth thinking with, even against something like Western ontotheology, against Lafferty's intentions, if one is so inclined. What follows is a diagnostic diagram for Past Master (far too neat but meant to show the idea), along with a diagram of the great chain of being as it appears through two of Lafferty’s major theological sources: Thomas Aquinas and Origen of Alexandria.

A clarification is in order. Lafferty’s Origen is not quite the historical Origen, though it is not clear that there is a single historical Origen, given the complexities of textual transmission. Lafferty’s Origen more closely resembles the figure found in G. W. Butterworth’s translation of First Principles than the Origen reconstructed in the more exacting contemporary work of John Behr. For understanding that difference, Behr is the best guide I know, and his introduction to First Principles is exemplary. But you can get a sense of the issues involved from David Bentley Hart:

The greater obstacle to a clear assessment of the treatise in its own terms has, for a long time, been the prevailing assumption that the reports of Origen’s enemies in the patristic period are generally trustworthy and the consequent conclusion that the virtual absence of what came to be called “Origenism” from his extant works must be the result of expurgation on the part of the translators. Thus, the version of De Principiis that for a long time was the standard critical edition—that of Paul Koetschau from 1913—came annotated with passages from Origen’s detractors, presented more or less as fragments of the original text or as testimonies to the content of the original Greek version. In two cases, Koetschau actually synthesized an “original” Greek text from dubious secondary sources and offered it as Origen’s own words. What until now, moreover, was the standard English translation of the text—that of G. W. Butterworth from 1936—followed the Koetschau edition.

In other words, Origen has been substantially reinterpreted since Lafferty wrote. How Lafferty fits into those developments, I will set aside. Instead, I turn to a source he clearly internalized: the entry on Origen and Origenism in his Catholic Encyclopedia.

The Lafferty diagram has two columns. The left, Thomistic inheritance, shows one pole of his metaphysical thinking: what each entity is, its fixed nature. The right, Origenist inheritance, shows the other pole: what happens to each entity, and the possibility of movement up, down, or out of the chain.

The Catholic Encyclopedia explains that for Origen, these "different rungs" are not fixed by God, but are the result of the spirit’s own choices:

In the beginning all intellectual natures were created equal and alike, as God had no motive for creating them otherwise . . . Their present differences arise solely from their different use of the gift of free will. The spirits created good and happy grew tired of their happiness, and, though carelessness, fell, some more some less.

To make this visible, I went with five rungs. They descend from spirit to manufactured matter. Between the rungs, arrows in the left rail show what happens: descent (↓), ascent (↑), a held boundary (—), or an open question (?). A vertical line on the right margin tracks taibhse, the condition of ghostly displacement that cuts across all levels. Remember that Thomas More is ontologically askew of characters such as Paul and Foreman. More is a taibhse. He can’t be seen on the Astrobe surveillance technology. He can be seen through in candlelight. He bears the double mark. More may well be a Lafferty schitzo gash, which would explain why the original Thomas More still goes to the Tower and is beheaded in our timeline, his disappearance unnoticed in Elizabethan England. God sits above the ladder, offstage.

This ghostly displacement is related to what the Catholic Encyclopedia describes as Origen’s theory of the "aerial" vehicle used by spirits:

As is well known many ancient ecclesiastical writers attributed to created spirits an aerial or ethereal envelope without which they could not act. Though he does not venture to decide categorically, Origen inclines to this view . . . it seems to Origen . . . that created spirits even the most perfect cannot do without an extremely diluted and subtle matter which serves them as a vehicle and means of action.

Ouden, the Void, sits below it in dashed lines, not a being but an absence. Some readers treat Ouden as a real character. I treat him as part of the ontological conspiracy of the novel: the programmed persons have concocted him as a principle that turns the ladder of being upside down, as ontological fall and privation is the order of the cosmos. This is the replacement of the beatific vision at the top of the Thomistic ladder with the Astrobe vision at the bottom of the ladder. Below the ladder, the consummation section shows how the two inheritances converge in Thomas More's death and the planting of the mustard seed.

From Aquinas, Lafferty inherits a universe of real nature and essential difference. Spirit is spirit, soul is soul, animal is animal, machine is machine. These categories are not metaphors. The Nine tell Thomas: "According to your ancient belief, we are Devils." That means that they have fallen angelic natures. More is a rational animal whose consciousness cannot be erased even when the Dream of Astrobe works on him. He dies human. Rimrock the ansel, with the possible exception of Scriviner, is the hardest case for the Thomistic ladder: he is a creature that seems to cross from animal into personhood. The Thomistic column shows that this is theologically impossible. Lafferty acknowledges this in-text by writing that "It cannot be that a creature in full life will sometimes receive a soul and intelligence." Programmed Persons are machines. "We are not conscious. We are machines."

Organizing the Thomistic column is Aquinas's view of eternity as the nunc stans (the now that stands still). For Aquinas (ST I, Q.10), eternity is tota simul, simultaneously whole: no before, no after, no succession. God does not experience sequence because God does not change. There is one world, one history, one developmental line that runs from creation to eschaton. No world endings but the one in Revelation. Each being has a fixed nature within this created order.

Worlds begin and end. Rational beings move into bodies by free choice. We see this in Past Master. The Nine found houses "swept and garnished; and we moved into them." Animals ascend: Rimrock's people "climbed all the way to the sky, broke holes in it." Worlds die and are reborn in Foreman's five hundred-year cycles. The spirit that once came down on water and clay might come down on gel cells and flux-fix.

The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that Origen viewed matter as this kind of flexible, "indefinite" substrate for the soul:

Matter which is susceptible of indefinite transformations is adapted to the varying condition of the spirits. When intended for the more imperfect spirits, it becomes solidified, thickens, and forms the bodies of this visible world. If it is serving higher intelligences, it shines with the brightness of the celestial bodies.

Also organizing the Origen column is Origen’s understanding of eternity as inexhaustible creative abundance. For Origen (De Principiis III.5–6), an infinite cause cannot exhaust itself in a finite effect. Souls exist "in the many and endless periods of duration in the immeasurable and different worlds." They ascend or descend by free choice. Each world ends and leads to the next. At the same time, Origen rejects Stoic eternal return. For instance, Origen writes that it will not happen that "Adam and Eve will do the same thing" or that "Judas will also a second time betray the Lord." Each successive world is genuinely new. Foreman's speech is Origenist: "The worlds do die periodically" and "After that, I do not know what happens."

This hope for a new end (apokatastasis) is defined by the Catholic Encyclopedia as the final goal of Origen's system:

The universal restoration (apokatastasis) follows necessarily from these principles . . . "We think that the goodness of God, through the mediation of Christ, will bring all creatures to one and the same end."

Like Origen, Lafferty was interested in radical soteriology, an interest he seems to have taken from Origen himself. We find this in several places, but probably most articulated in what he told Sheryl Smith in 1976:

There was a medieval belief (probably true) that after the general judgement every person will know all about every other person who ever lived, each thought and act, however hidden, which in its totality will redound to the glory of all those saved and to the shame of all those damned. And then there is a corollary (probably true also) that there are either seven or nine exceptions to this case, that there are either seven or nine persons of such strong passions and agonizing involvement that their details may not be revealed ever, not even after the last judgement, but must remain under the seal and known only to God and the seven or nine passionate persons. Not only will we not know the details of them but we will never know whether they are saved or damned. A couple of hard cases are on this latter list, Lucifer himself and Judas. The Emperor Tiberius is another. And Saul is on most of the lists.

The Origenist and Thomistic columns do not lock together. They talk to each other at every rung. Thomas's nature is fixed (Thomistic), but his mind is occupied and retrogressed (Origenist). Rimrock's ascent is real (Origenist), but theologically impossible (Thomistic). The Nine are devils by nature (Thomistic) who chose to descend into manufactured bodies (Origenist). The novel's spiritual drama is tied up in how variations of this are developed and how the variations point to hope. The contested threshold box at the bottom of the ladder — "We be souls in agony. What must we do to be saved?" — is the moment where the reader hears a plea. The Thomistic axis says Programmed Persons are machines, and machines have no souls. The Origenist axis says the spirit moves where it will. The novel does not resolve this, but ends with eschatological hope.

One last point. The matched dots at Rung 1 (The Nine as Spirits) and Rung 5 (Programmed Persons) show these are not two populations but one entity at two altitudes on the ladder. The Nine begin as spirits and choose to incarnate in a manufactured substrate.

This movement from the top to the bottom of the ladder is the "ontological descent" described by the Catholic Encyclopedia:

"Hence the hierarchy of the angels; hence also the four categories of created intellects: angels, stars, . . . men, and demons. But their rôles may be one day changed; for what free will has done, free will can undo."

The four-layer structure the novel describes (human, animal, machine, ghost at core) is a composite ontos that spans the entire ladder from top to bottom. Their counterfeit claim, "We are the extrapolation of mankind," is a view taken from the bottom looking up. Their true nature should be from the top looking down. The vertical distance between those two dots is the measure of their ontological descent.