The Visible Church and The Fall of Rome

For the end of the world was long ago, And all we dwell to-day Like children of some second birth, Like a strange people left on earth After a judgment day. For the end of the world was long ago, When the ends of the world waxed free, When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves, And the sun drowned in the sea. — G. K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse, Book I

But we have divine sanction and assurance that the Church will endure to the end of the world, it is said. No, we do not have assurance that it will endure in effective external form, nor in popularly recognized identity, nor by name or ritual, nor openly at all. The reassurance that the Church will endure does not apply to the furniture of the Church in this world.

This divine sanction moment is one of the most interesting passages in all of Lafferty. The goal of this post is to work through its implications for The Fall of Rome.

As of now, three well-known Lafferty novels remain undiscussed here at any length: The Fall of Rome, Annals of Klepsis, and East of Laughter. Annals of Klepsis is light, but it is also a key to some of Lafferty’s thinking about the nature of history. East of Laughter is his most searching exploration of contemporary life as vulnerable to demiurgy. The Fall of Rome, I think, is both widely misunderstood and significant for understanding Lafferty’s view of sacramental culture in history. It asks what happens when a civilization mistakes its Christian surface for Christianity’s substance, and what happens when that surface is destroyed. In other words, The Fall of Rome is not a historical novel with a religious backdrop. It is a religious novel with a historical backdrop.

After Lafferty's heart attack in the early 1970s, he no longer wrote historical works that demanded the kind of research required by Okla Hannali and The Fall of Rome. I’ve mentioned before that he drew on more than nine hundred sources for The Fall of Rome. His readers have not recognized the labor that went into it. I am probably alone in thinking it a greater work than Okla Hannali, though Okla Hannali is the more significant contribution to literature and his best hope for a wider reception.

The Fall of Rome is, of course, about the fall of Rome, yet in an important sense, it is not really about the fall of Rome. It is a book about the place of institutional religion in the civilized world, as charged as the term “civilized” is: about what happened when Roman Catholicism became the king of the hill, the king of seven hills, by becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire, and why that ended at the hands of the uncivilized, and how its end was both gain and loss.

The most interesting Lafferty is askew of his reception. The usual way of dividing his work is into short stories versus novels. If one wants to see the big picture, the more important divide concerns what I call nucleation: the moment when Lafferty realized what he was doing as an artist, which he was coming into through the second half of the sixties. After his heart attack in the early 1970s and the year in which illness left him almost unable to write (the year he called the worst year of his life), he returned a changed writer in that he seems bored and impatient with sf. He then became more committed to his vision, less willing to compromise, and in a real sense an avant-garde artist. The honest Philistine way of saying this is John Clute’s formulation in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: "For his career’s sake, it was certainly unfortunate that his response to renown seems to have been an intensification of the oddness of his product."

The interesting question is not whether one prefers the short stories to the novels. Those who prefer the short stories have often not seriously struggled with the novels, even if they have read a few, and even if the short stories are superior when taken in isolation as ambient carve-outs from the Ghost Story. There are many short stories after the heart attack that probably befuddle them. The question then is how one understands what Lafferty created in the 1960s compared with what followed 1972. After that point, his short fiction and his novels belong to an intensified artistic program: the work of a writer who knows his concerns, themes, techniques, style, targets, and aims. One of those aims, apparent even before the heart attack, was culture and Church in crisis. One of the most important straight statements about it is the passage from The Fall of Rome.

It can sound (to use the old word for it) heretical. Is Lafferty saying that the Catholic Church is an invisible church, in a way that would support the religious ideology of Reformers? How far does this claim really go?

The issue is understanding Lafferty. The Catholic Church binds communion to certain beliefs. Among them is the dogmatic claim that the Church is a visible Church in history and that the seven sacraments were instituted by Christ. Doctrine develops in complex ways. Some canonical specifics (for example, the role of a priest in marriage) are medieval developments of form, but neither the Church’s sacraments nor its visible character is optional furniture.

So the interpretive problem is: what does Lafferty mean by 'ritual? What does he mean by visible? If he were treating the sacraments or the Church’s visibility as incidental externals, he would simply be against Rome. But Lafferty is not writing as an uninformed Catholic, and I think the novel makes it clear that he is not being heterodox.

This takes us to the center of what The Fall of Rome is about: the end of Catholicism as the imperial Catholicism of Rome and the mixed blessing of that end. Read as only a political narrative, the book loses much of its artistic power. Some Protestant readers may hear ritual and assume something like adiaphora or, perhaps, empty ceremony, and may hear visible and assume merely institutional. That simplifies Protestantism and risks straw-manning Protestant theology, but I do it because making that mistake would distort the novel. Lafferty is working with the historical reality of the Catholic communion, which includes a plurality of rites. At present, 24 sui iuris churches are in communion with Rome. There are different Eucharistic external forms. In other words, by ritual, what Lafferty is talking about is rite, the forms of liturgical enactment, not sacraments as such. The importance of this cannot be overstated, because it lets one work through the passage on terms of rite rather than sacrament, and on visibility as liturgical and ecclesial practice versus political visibility.

Let’s look closely at the passage in Chapter 8. Lafferty says that Christ's promise to the Church “does not apply to the furniture of the Church in this world." He writes about the possible loss of “effective external form,” “popularly recognized identity,” and “name or ritual.” To make sense of this, I think the first thing to note is the immediate context of the passage, the Battle of Frigidus. In Vietnam, troops referred to the Jesus bolt in a helicopter. If the fall of Rome has one, it is the Battle of Frigidus. Everything in the book depends on it as a point-of-failure fastener. The stakes are what Theodosius and Stilicho are trying to save.

Read absent this context, the passage can sound weird coming from an old-fashioned Catholic. For instance, one reader takes it as a concession to the Protestant doctrine of the invisible Church—the Reformers’ claim that the true Church is merely spiritual, a communion of the elect known only to God, with institutional and visible form treated as secondary or dispensable. That is the danger of reading it out of context. Read The Fall of Rome closely, however, and the passage does something consonant with Catholic tradition. Within The Fall of Rome, this can be described as a criticism of Theodosian political theology. Lafferty introduces it in Chapter 3, at the School for Generals, and it becomes a major component of the theater of ideas that preoccupies Lafferty. It is positioned in the novel to seize readers' attention.

The Emperor tells his cadets, without qualification, that the Empire was ordained by God; that Christendom was the Empire; that it was the world itself and the highest handiwork of God; and that if the Empire were ever to fall, it would be the world itself that ended. Lafferty then makes clear:

He told them that if the Empire should ever fall, it was the world itself that would end: that their life was not their own; that they were the stewards but not the proprietors of their own bodies; that these belonged to the Empire, and through the Empire to God.

Lafferty sees that the moment as dangerous: “This was neither the established nor the universal view; nor was it the Catholic view. But it was the Catholic view as interpreted by the Emperor Theodosius, and perhaps by the Archbishop Ambrose of Milan.” Ambrose, of course, was the spiritual mentor of Augustine. Lafferty does not call the view heretical, even if it is not the Catholic view that the Church arrived at; it is one Catholic man’s interpretation. It is then vouchsafed by another Catholic man of immense authority and pressed on a generation of future rulers as if it were doctrine.

The School for Generals fosters converts to this idea, and Lafferty shows what it costs them. Two of them receive it “like fire”: the Hun Uldin and the Goth Sarus. Both give their lives to it. Both are destroyed by it. Uldin disappears into frontier service. Sarus wanders Italy, unable to locate the Empire he has sworn to serve, and he dies in a truce violation that kills the last negotiation that might have saved the ancient world.

A third figure, Stilicho, is more interesting. He internalizes Theodosian theology so completely that it paralyzes him at the moment of crisis. When the generals at Bologna implore him to name himself Emperor, Lafferty writes that “he had, which nobody understood, a mystic devotion to the person and office of the Emperor, though it was his own personal creation that he was devoted to.” Stilicho then rides alone to Ravenna to answer the manufactured treason charge. He is beheaded. The idea that the Empire is the Church’s necessary vessel kills the greatest soldier in the Roman world. This is one reason The Fall of Rome is not finally a book about Rome’s political fall, but a book about Catholicism and imperium, and the spiritual danger that arises when the two are made identical.

The Chapter 8 passage raises theological questions. It also seems to give an answer. When Lafferty writes that “the reassurance that the Church will endure does not apply to the furniture of the Church in this world,” he is calling out Theodosius for a hubristic confusion. Out of ego—and out of a Virgilian loyalty to fatherland—the Emperor takes the visible apparatus of Christendom for Catholicism itself. He is more Aeneas than Christ. He treats the imperial establishment, the public ceremonies of a state religion, and the socially recognized identity of a Christian civilization as though they were identical with Christ’s Church. Lafferty is not having it. He calls these things furniture.

The loss of furniture is a terrible thing, but it is idiotic to confuse a couch with the house that contains it. The Church does not depend on the Empire. An empire can fall and the Church will survive. The Fall of Rome is a book about how the Church is not the Roman Empire, just as the Church was not the Christendom of the world that ended before Flatland.

Where did Lafferty get this? Probably in the most obvious place. It is the argument of Augustine’s City of God. Augustine, in the novel’s dramatis personae. Lafferty introduces him in the opening pages:

ST. AMBROSE in Milan, who believed that the world was to endure. ST. AUGUSTINE in Hippo Regius who understood why the world must end, and when.

Lafferty, as someone who makes it part of his artistic project to understand why the world he was born into ended, admires Augustine as the man who “understood why the world must end, and when.” It is one of the book’s more brilliant choices that Augustine is placed against Ambrose. It is controversial and clever. Lafferty says that Ambrose “believed that the world was to endure,” but Ambrose’s world is not what this blog calls Prime. Ambrose confuses imperium and Catholicism, thinking that Rome must be bound to the fate of Prime itself. That mistake is why Lafferty takes such care to show that Theodosian theology is Ambrosian. The correction is Augustinian.

With that in mind, the passage in Chapter 8 becomes a little clearer. Lafferty writes ritual. He does not write sacrament. The entire drama of The Fall of Rome turns on it, and this is one reason the novel is so often misunderstood. A rite is a ceremonial form. It is a publicly recognizable enactment of worship, the external face of religion, or a form of enculturation that can pass at any moment. It is what a civilization sees when it looks at its own complexion of Christianity and takes that for the Church itself. A sacrament is different. A sacrament is an efficacious sign instituted by Christ. It accomplishes what it signifies. Liturgical forms vary.

Lafferty makes a point of showing this distinction in his depiction of the Goths:

To them every meal must be a form of the Eucharist, though they had the Eucharist itself and were not confused between the reality and the symbol.

The point here is obvious. The Eucharist does not represent the Body of Christ; the Eucharist is the Body of Christ. That is why billions of Catholics practice Eucharistic adoration. In the same way, baptism does not symbolize regeneration; it effects regeneration. The sacramental reality, what the Thomistic tradition calls the res et sacramentum, does not depend on public ceremony or social recognition. Lafferty is interested in the sacramental realities in The Fall of Rome—realities that run through and behind history, what he several times calls “the back of the tapestry.” Readers who approach the novel as flamboyant historical fiction will miss this dimension entirely.

Consider a scenario, a priest celebrating Mass in a catacomb, in a prison, or in a room above a shop in a hostile city. He offers the same Eucharist as a bishop in a basilica. The ritual dimension (public, ceremonial, socially visible performance, all recognized and acknowledged) may be reduced to almost nothing. What Lafferty’s passage strips away is public form and historical contingency, the rites Roman Catholics know and love. It is a point about counterfactuals. What it does not deny is sacramental necessity. The reality of the seven sacraments and of apostolic succession in communion with Rome is what divides Catholics from other confessions, as it always has. It is separate from issues of the external form of rite.

One reason the Chapter 8 passage can sound so odd is that it can be read without the novel’s larger architecture in mind. The Fall of Rome, unsurprisingly, confirms that Lafferty thinks about Christianity both sacramentally and ceremonially, as he does elsewhere, for instance, in Past Master in its heterotopian sacramental rites, and in many short stories where he makes the same artistic choice. One example of this. Before Frigidus, Lafferty describes the viaticum as “the Holy Eucharist for those at the hour of their death,” administered to “all his men, Catholic and Arian.”

What Lafferty imagines in the Chapter 8 passage, then, is not a Church reduced to a purely spiritual communion of invisible believers. It is a Church, perhaps driven underground, as it had been before, but still a Church in possession of the sacraments that make it the Church. This is not the invisible church of the Reformers. It is the Church of the catacombs: still hierarchical because of apostolic succession, still sacramental, though hidden from the eyes of the state and the wider world. The Protestant invisible church is invisible by nature, because the true Church is said to transcend all institutional form. Lafferty’s Church would be invisible only by circumstance, because a pagan victory at Frigidus has stripped away the furniture while leaving the substance intact.

Now consider the ending of The Fall of Rome. What happens when the furniture gets taken away? After the Goths enter Rome through the Salarian Gate on August 24, 410, Lafferty writes that “the world came to its end,” and then, in the epilogue, he distinguishes between the physical globe and the civil order:

The sub-title of this study “The Day the World Ended” is not meant to be extravagant. It was not the orbis terrarum, the globe, that ended; but the mundus, the ordered world. Mundus, as an adjective, means clean, neat, or elegant. As a noun it may mean the ornamentation, the vesture; but it also means the world.

The mundus is the Roman thing: the political and civilizational order. Elsewhere, I have laid out how I read Lafferty’s shifting uses of such terms; here, the consequence matters. Lafferty is not saying that the Church becomes invisible. The Goths who open Pandora’s box destroy the ordered world, but they do not (and cannot) destroy sacramental Prime, because it was never a property of the imperium mundi in the first place. In my terms, the novel is about how Theodosian political theology confuses World 2 with World 1 and the consequences of that confusion. Lafferty himself had to avoid this mistake as he learned to live the day after the world ended.