"Symposium" (1965/1973)

Philosophical, unloved Lafferty this time.

“Symposium” is not a reader-friendly, so, unsurprisingly, no one talks about it. There is no point in summarizing it. This post will be a little unusual in that I just want to explain what it’s doing. To cut to it, it’s a story about mechanical alphabet blocks in a child’s toybox. They don’t know the most important datum: they were designed, and their final cause is to be toys. Everything that happens in the story falls under that. Lafferty puts his thumb on the scale with some flagrant petitio principii and then lets the philosophical speculation begin.

More specifically, what Lafferty is doing is dramatizing Aquinas’s arguments for the existence of God in a playful way. Let’s begin with the cosmological argument (the quinque viae), which the blocks debate from the perspective of created beings, keeping in mind that the story is an ironic (indirect) proof that a Creator exists, because the reader knows what the characters do not: they are toys, and they were made. We are not like men and women weighing Aquinas’s arguments from natural reason but like men and women who know he is right because of how Lafferty has set up the story world. We can see the toys.

Here is how the story works, beginning with the argument from contingency.

The universe is contingent. It did not have to exist, and it cannot create itself. There must be a Necessary Being (God) who caused it to be. “Symposium” begins with the Primordial Tumble (the Big Bang/Creation), whatever we want to call it. The blocks describe being disgorged from a World-Box. The blocks know that they did not create themselves. They know that they were dumped into existence by an external force. This is the little girl playing with her toys. In Catholic theology, this is creation ex nihilo, with the World-Box being the mysterious source of all matter.

From there, we move on to the argument from motion, usually just called the argument from the First Mover, which goes back to Aristotle. The idea is that nothing moves unless acted upon by another. There cannot be an infinite chain of movers, so there must be a first mover who started the process. Kant would later say that is antinomy territory, the place where the pure categories spin on themselves because they are dealing with the unconditioned, and any object of experiential knowledge must be experienced through both the senses and the concepts of understanding. When pure concepts dont have experience to process, they are like the jogger who has had his shoe laces tied to each other. Lafferty would have none of that.

We see this become an issue with Gee (G) and Zed (Z). They discuss the frame. They’re aware that their motion and existence are limited to a specific area (space/time). In other words, the blocks cannot move themselves. They are wood or whatever. When they move, it is because the Child, here playing the role of the Prime Mover, moved them, or because they are engineered. Their debate about motion just is the Aristotelian/Thomistic view that the universe requires the push from God.

From there we move on to the teleological argument, known as the argument from design. This argument has some popular recognition because of how often it shows up in the embarrassing intelligent design arguments of well-meaning Protestants and because of how hard the New Atheists went after them over a decade ago. It’s the argument that the complexity of the universe implies a designer. The best-known form of this is the 18th-century watchmaker analogy of the Anglican William Paley (1743-1805). A complex mechanism cannot arise from random chance. If you found an iPhone on the beach, you would know it was designed and someone lost or disposed of it.

In “Symposium,” it becomes the conflict between En (N) and Ex (X) regarding the electric motor. En is our theist. En argues that a "four-pole electric motor" is too complex to appear in a swamp by accident. It cannot exist without a designer. Ex is our materialist, our atheist, a figure that runs from Lucretius to Dawkins. Ex says that given enough time ("all the time in the world"), natural copper and iron just happened to fall into the shape of a motor. Lafferty here mocks abiogenesis and materialist evolution. If the reader hasn’t fallen asleep, the reader knows En is right. Ex and En are toy blocks; the motor inside them was designed by a toymaker. Lafferty’s gambit is simple: show how ridiculous Ex sounds ("two rocks rubbing together") and validate the teleological argument: intricate systems (life/cosmos) index a creator.

Then there is the argument from degree, sometimes called the argument from perfection and hierarchy. The idea is that we notice gradients in things (hotter, better, larger). This implies a maximum standard (God). It is how we get the Great Chain of Being, which is all Lafferty and a key to understanding Past Master. This phase of the dialogue is filled with Ar (R) and Thorn (Þ). They discuss size, scale, and hierarchy. They debate if atoms are solar systems and if the universe is infinite or cyclical. This is all a little funny because the characters are confused about their place in the hierarchy. They think they are the masters of the universe ("adult and intelligent"), but the reader knows they are at the bottom of the hierarchy (toys). This reflects the Catholic view of humility: man is not the measure of all things; God is. Of course, Thorn is the Anglo-Saxon letter that represented a diphthong, which is why Ye Olde Shoppe should be pronounced “The Old Shop,” even if one can forgive the coyness of “shoppe.”

Finally, we arrive at the concept of actus purus, the vivifying principle. As I have blogged about probably too much, for Lafferty, God is Pure Act. Matter is Potency. Matter cannot exist without the sustaining will of God (the soul/life). Lafferty is a Thomist on these points, and without such knowledge, a story like “Symposium” will not make sense and one will not be in a position to understand how he treats characters such as Ouden.

How does this show up in the story? You (U) argues about the vivifying principle. He says that "life and matter may have been simultaneous." The vivifying principle in the story is literally the electricity/battery in the toy. Without the juice (spirit/God's grace), the block is just dead wood (dead matter). It is a metaphor for the Holy Spirit animating the clay of Adam.

The synteleia is one of the more Catholic elements in the story because Catholicism is always focused on eschatology: the four final things. The universe is linear, not circular. It has a beginning (Alpha) and an end (Omega). Synteleia is the Greek term used in the Gospel of Matthew (24:3) for the consummation of the age or the end of the world. Pea (P) announces the synteleia: "The kid with the box.” This is a little confusing, but I think not overly so. For the Catholic, the end of the world is not a random heat death; it is a person returning (Christ). In “Symposium,” the God figure (the Child) returns to judge the living and the dead (the blocks) and put them back in the box (Heaven/Hell/Purgatory).

And that leaves us with the scandal of tradition: Thorn. Needless to say, all proud Roman Catholics see Catholicism as a historical faith rooted in tradition. Modernity often tries to smooth over the awkward or "shaggy" parts of the past like Thorn—the miracles, ancient dogmas—to make faith fit modern science. But Lafferty is saying that Thorn (Þ) isn’t going anywhere. It’s the old letter that doesn't fit the modern box. Thorn remembers the shaggy old days of giants and miracles. If there is a character in the toy box that is Lafferty, it is Thorn, the traditionalist Catholic view. He won’t be modernized or smoothed down. He is the “stumbling block" (a biblical metaphor). He is rejected by the modern world because he doesn't fit the current pattern, but he remembers the ancient truths. The other letters are amnesiac about our old pal thorn.

This will not be a Lafferty story that many people think about much, but it is one of his quirkier theological games.

Symposium Notes.pdf

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