On Being Wrong

Over the last year of reading Lafferty, I’ve repeatedly found myself adjusting my assumptions about what he is actually saying. I thought I’d post something brief on three areas where my thinking has changed. What has me thinking about this is the Catholic American writer Donna Tartt. Someone once said that she liked Tartt more than O'Connor because O'Connor finds her artistic solutions in the catechism in a way that Tartt doesn't. Lafferty (he was, weirdly, O’Connor’s senior), O’Connor, and Tartt: three prickly southern Catholics.

First, it has become increasingly clear to me that Lafferty flirted with quite radical ideas in soteriology. He consistently kept his mind open to, if not outright universalism, at least extensions of grace that most other Catholic fiction writers have been unwilling to explore in their art.

Second, he was more open to future changes in ecclesiastical organization than I had previously allowed. I now think it is entirely plausible that he leaves it intentionally ambiguous whether Finnegan could be a pope, even if the narrative itself stacks the deck against taking that possibility too literally. At first, I thought that was absurd, having read his nonfiction and most of his short stories. But he was willing to imagine a world in which two popes could exist, the pope of Astrobe functioning as both a metropolitan and a co-pontiff. His trickster side extended to being clever about what the Magisterium is committed to upholding and what is improbable but open, which complicates his traditionalism.

Finally, the influence of Origen on Lafferty was deeper and more enduring than I had realized. What Gene Wolfe told Dan Knight about patristics was correct. It sent me back to Origen, and, again, it is a sad fact that a catalogue of Lafferty’s library was not made. A lot will always come down to inference from obiter dicta and allusions in the canon. This complicates any straightforward Thomistic reading of his thought. In the end, he comes across as more Augustinian than Thomistic, even though Thomistic metaphysical categories tend to function as the default settings throughout much of his work, and I don’t see the need to modify much. Lafferty was the product of an Augustinian formation impressed by Leonine neo-scholasticism, and this shows everywhere. It is now unclear to me whether this makes the metaphysics of Argo incoherent or, minimally, impossible to model consistently.

A note on housecleaning. I like to make things. One of my hobbies is painting miniatures and gaming with my weekly group, and my workspace is always a mess, as is the blog. I've added some digital tools I hope will be helpful for those who want to study or revisit Lafferty. The blog menu at the top now scrolls. Resources added that are more user-friendly.