The Camiroi
- Jon Nelson
- Jun 15
- 6 min read
Updated: Nov 4
I’ve been thinking about Aurelia, one of my favorite works by Lafferty, even though much of it continues to puzzle me. Today, I want to share a few thoughts on Lafferty’s two Camiroi stories: “The Primary Education of the Camiroi” and “The Polity and Customs of the Camiroi” and the novel. I’ll also explain a way I’ve been organizing the Camiroi material in my mind, and how I think these pieces fit together. This will be a rushed account, to be sure. Still, my hope is that it conveys why the Camiroi stories should be included in a revised edition of Aurelia, along with notes explaining how they function as a kind of two-decade thought experiment on Lafferty’s part about Athens and Jerusalem.
Anyone who reads the Camiroi stories will quickly notice the prominence of the Greek theme. One of the central jokes is that the Camiroi are responsible for many of the achievements that earthlings most admire in classical antiquity. In “The Primary Education of the Camiroi,” we learn that they were behind the Dorian invasion. This detail implies that humans might never have developed the concepts of paideia and polity without Camiroi intervention. Readers familiar with both the short stories and Aurelia have likely noticed the tonal shift between them. The earlier pieces are framed as reports, funnily concise and formal, while Aurelia takes on the structure of a theological picaresque, borrowing freely from the literary patterns of both the canonical and apocryphal gospels.
Recently, I read a charming book by Walter Farrell, whose work Lafferty drew on while writing Aurelia, called My Way of Life. It is a handsome book from the 1950s, the kind that no longer gets made, a pocket-sized explanation of the Summa Theologica. As in his A Companion to the Summa, Farrell includes homely examples to explain Aquinas, and I found myself wondering whether any of these exempla had inspired Lafferty. Nothing especially revealing came to light, but the exercise helped clarify how Aurelia fits within the broader Camiroi sequence.
The haunting figure behind “The Primary Education of the Camiroi” and “The Polity and Customs of the Camiroi” is Aristotle. When reading these stories, it helps to remember that Aristotle’s Politics was never meant to stand alone. It continues the line of thought begun in the Nicomachean Ethics. One moves from his lectures on the ethical life to the political life as one thread coming off a single spool. Modern readers often treat the two works as separate, but that is a matter of convention. An old professor of mine once remarked that we were at a disadvantage reading the Politics without a firm grounding in the Nicomachean Ethics. He told us this just as we were beginning to work through the Politics over the third of a semester. Everyone who hadn't studied it before had to go out and catch up.
This, I think, is one piece of the puzzle. “The Primary Education of the Camiroi” is a riff on the Nicomachean Ethics, with St. Augustine’s theology of education serving as the underlying normative contrast. That’s how I would interpret its double satire: a travesty of Greek excellence in the form of Camiroi golden mediocrity, and a sharp critique of American schooling, which leads to unvarnished mediocrity. "The Polity and Custom of the Camiroi" does the same with Aristotle's Politics.
I hope to unpack this further at some point, though the satirical targets are so close to the surface. Still, if you want a sense of what I think Lafferty is doing, look at how “Primary Education” blends the conventions of Greek Old Comedy with its playful treatment of the Nicomachean Ethics. Compare this to the "symboleutic posts" in “Polity,” and take note of the role of deliberative rhetoric (symbouleutikon) as treated in the Rhetoric and Politics.
Those familiar with Aristotle’s Politics will recall that he undertook a wide-ranging survey of Greek constitutions, an empirical groundwork that survives outside the standard Corpus Aristotelicum. Most scholars believe it was preparatory research for the Politics. “Polity” reads as a parody of that intellectual spadework, both in method and tone. Which brings us back to the question: where does this leave Aurelia?
If the two short stories represent the Aristotelian strand of the picture, with a nod to Plato in the way the Camiroi prefer to have only one of everything, as if in its eidos, and if that vision remains untouched by Aquinas, then at some point Lafferty seems to have decided to offer a response through Aristotle’s greatest Catholic student, who was, of course, Thomas Aquinas. The Thomist-inflected homilies in Aurelia are supplements to what the Camiroi lack in the stories. What Lafferty appears to be doing in the novel is revisiting and expanding on a specific piece of moral mythology that he first introduced in “Polity.” I want to quote the passage in full, since abridging it would diminish its force, though I'll reformat it for emphasis:
The legend is that men (or whatever local creatures) were tested on all the worlds. On some of the worlds, men persevered in grace. These have become the transcendent worlds, asserting themselves as stars rather than planets, and swallowing their own suns—becoming incandescent in their merged persons, living in grace and light. The more developed of them are those closed bodies which we know only by inference—so powerful and contained that they let no light or gravity or other emission escape them. They become of themselves closed and total universes, of their own space and outside of what we call space, perfect in their merged mentality and spirit. Then there are the worlds like Earth, where men did fall from grace. On these worlds, each person contains an interior abyss and is capable both of great heights and depths. By our legend, the persons of these worlds, after their fall, were condemned to live for thirty thousand generations in the bodies of animals, and were then permitted to begin their slow and frustrating ascent back to remembered personhood. But the case of Camiroi was otherwise. We do not know whether there are further worlds of our like case. The primordial test-people of Camiroi did not fall. And they did not persevere. They hesitated. They could not make up their minds. They thought the matter over, and then they thought it over some more. Camiroi was therefore doomed to think matters over forever. So we are the equivocal people, capable of curious and continuing thought. But we have a hunger both for the depths and the heights which we have missed. To be sure, our Golden Mediocrity, our serene plateau, is higher than the heights of most worlds—higher than those of Earth, I believe. But it has not the exhilaration of height.
The last line is the reason I think Lafferty wrote Aurelia. He wanted to work out why the Camiroi lack the exhilaration of height. Recall the heights at which the novel begins, with its crescendo:
So they sang in chorus from their respective launching needles. It was praying and vaunting and inventing all at the same time.The seven youngpeople were inventing modes and guises and persons for themselves,mysterious person-fronts that they would use for only part of this one year.Ina way, they were spouting and fledging wings for themselves, for only thisdouble flight, a going-out and a return. This was the last time they would everuse even figurative wings. But they would always remember that once theyhad had wings, even if they had not been of a completely physical sort.
Years ago, I heard someone say something smart about Dante's Paradiso. Everyone in Dante’s heaven gets a grade of one hundred percent—that sounds very Camiroi—but not all one hundreds are the same size. This is why the saints appear in their respective planetary spheres, with three planets under the shadow of the sun and four beyond it, while being in the heavenly rose that lies beyond the Empyrean. Lafferty often reminded his readers that perfection always means complete, though it never means the same thing in every case. The important passage for understanding this, as it relates to Aurelia, comes when a Camiroi in “Polity” says, “We come home then to live maturely on our mature world. It’s perfect, of course, but of a perfection too small. We have everything, except the one thing that matters, for which we cannot even find a name.”
Of course, Aurelia will not make it home to Planet Aristotle. By Camiroi standards, she is a failure. But she still earns her perfect one hundred percent, whatever its size, and that, in the end, is what Lafferty is up to.
In Aurelia, Lafferty brings his mature understanding of Aquinas to bear on the earlier laughter he directed at American education and politics through Aristotle while keeping his tongue in his cheek about classical education ("the tongue so far in the cheek that it comes out the vulgar body aperture"). What he creates is stranger and more wonderful. He recapitulates a recurring pattern in Catholic history. Once again, Athens and Jerusalem are joined in marriage, this time to redeem the golden mediocrity of a Camiroi girl. When that happens, one cannot go home again, not even to Athens.
