Monsters Beneath the Throne

5 And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God. 6 And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. 7 And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle. 8 And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come. —Revelation 4:4–8

Good eyes but simple brains, that was Foley. He really could see at levels where many folks cannot, where Tankersley could not; where even Jim Bauer sometimes could not. —Fourth Mansions, Chapter 1.

Nobody else, coming in simplicity, had ever partaken of all four Monsters. Nobody else had had such good eyes, had ever been able to see on all the levels and into all the worlds. — Fourth Mansions, Chapter 12

Some quick thoughts about Oriel Overlark’s attempt to seduce Freddy Foley in Fourth Mansions and how Oriel’s passion might belong to the weave. What stands out to me now in the scene is that Freddy remembers what the narrator calls “certain spoof lines of Chesterton.” The lines are originally from Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx,” and they are misquoted. The misquotation leads us to Chesterton’s “The Nightmare,” collected in Alarms and Discursions (1910), an essay that gives us a substantial source for Lafferty’s arrangement of the novel’s monsters. At least one of the first reviewers recognized the tetramorph as being deep in the logic of the novel, but she didn’t connect it to Chesterton.

Some background, in case it's been a while since you read Fourth Mansions. Freddy is a young newspaper reporter caught among four groups associated with the python, the falcon, the toad, and the badger. The pythons are Harvesters, who join their minds in a psychic weave. The falcon represents coercive authority; the toad, the ancient people who return to life; and the badger, the patricks who guard a hidden Christendom. Oriel is one of the returners, a toad. Freddy learns about the extraordinary powers in all four groups. The novel ends with all the powers entering him, fulfilling the early description of Freddy as someone a little blank but capable of a “multiplex” character.

Anyone thinking about Fourth Mansions should read “The Nightmare.” Chesterton is interested in what interests Lafferty: the pleasure of frightening things and the danger of submitting to them. The many-eyed creatures of the Apocalypse suggest to Chesterton that a being more beautiful and comprehensive than ourselves would seem monstrous to our limited perception. Lafferty’s best short story on this topic is the misunderstood and totally ignored “Inventions Bright and New,” which I recommend to anyone thinking about the monsters in Fourth Mansions. Lafferty writes both stories with the eyes of Apocalypse in mind.

In any case, this is how Chesterton makes the distinction on which the essay turns:

I like those monsters beneath the throne very much. But I like them beneath the throne.

Beneath the throne, the creatures themselves worship what Chesterton calls “the likeness of the appearance of a man.” That is Christ, but it is also relevant to the monsters being integrated into Freddy. Their monstrous powers have a place within a divine order, and their strangeness does not disqualify them from heaven.

This brings me back to the question in “The Ecomonstrous” that I touched on in my last post on Dan’s view of doubles and doppelgängers: what does the monstrous do once it enters the story? I argued there that any account of strange abundance should follow it into the moral action of Lafferty’s fiction. Something may exceed our understanding without exceeding our capacities for moral judgment. This does require a little care about the word monster. Frightening appearance, extraordinary created power, and the wicked exercise of power are elements to be sorted.

So what does it mean to be beneath the throne? Well, it does not mean to express the metaphysical structure of an amoral nature. To be beneath the throne is to acknowledge an end beyond oneself.

Croll, one of the patricks in Fourth Mansions, put it memorably:

“There is a holiness in a whole person or a whole world,” the patrick Croll said. “The veriest monsters inside us may be sanctified. They were put there by Him who is ‘Father of Monsters’ also. What right have we to cut them out of us? Who are we to edit God?”

What makes sanctification possible is that these monstrous powers ultimately belong to creation, not a nature without a creator. Cutting them away would impoverish the person. Croll says that suppressed strengths return outside us, menacingly, and he says that “we cannot live without monsters’ blood coursing through us.” Their proper place should be recovered. Many people who write about Fourth Mansions touch on this point.

Does monstrous abundance have much of a place in Lafferty when severed from a theistic cosmos? The image of monsters beneath the throne suggests that it does not. These creatures possess extraordinary powers that evoke the mysterium tremendum et fascinans and the fear and trembling of Philippians 2:12–13.

What are perfect monsters in Lafferty? They are completed monsters, and their completion is only through sanctification, through being beneath the throne. The monsters must be good, if terrifyingly so, within an anterior order established by their creator. In rebellion against that order, they are still monsters, but they are what we might call monsters outside the fourth mansion, incomplete monsters. The throne is a metonym for both divine order and its personal source: only persons make thrones, in this case divine persons.

This helps explain why Freddy can laugh at Oriel while acknowledging that her passion may belong in the weave, and why his eventual mastery includes the power to ground the falcon. What makes Lafferty’s monsters Laffertian is that their sublimity reaches perfection when they become servants. Without Chesterton in view, we may give too much explanatory weight to them as just being monsters and too little to the holiness toward which their monstrosity, if worthy of love, must be ordered. At least, that seems to be how it works in Fourth Mansions, which is the closest we have to a completely worked-through teratology by Lafferty.