"I am a very disordered and very often a very bad man, but I know that there is this clarity and order and certainty: the Procession of the Creatures, the Distinction and Adornment of the World, the Final Things are all a part of it."
Lafferty makes an exceptionally strong claim here. He doesn’t say he believes in the procession of the creatures or the distinction and adornment of the world. He asserts that he knows there is this clarity, order, and certainty. This is the strongest possible way to put the claim, since knowledge must be both true and justified. Let’s consider what this means, particularly for Lafferty’s approach to fiction, and to shift the frame slightly, from Lafferty’s sacramental worldview to his sacramental poesis.
I continue to think about how his longer prose often feels wild and chaotic, but how this effect arises from his willingness to open himself to the sources of creation—what most people would call the unconscious. For Lafferty, this term is inadequate; what he is truly engaging with is his participatory metaphysics.
At some point, I intend to write about how this helps explain his idea of our being inside the archetypes and screaming to get out. But for now, it is enough to notice that Lafferty shares the Scholastic understanding of creation as an ordered procession.
The concepts of creation, distinction, and adornment can become highly technical, but if you want to explore something we know Lafferty read, consider "Hexaemeron": https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07310a.htm
The deep roots of the idea can be found in thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine, but I want to focus on Aquinas’s Summa Theologica and how he lays out the way creation exists by participation in God's being (ST I, q. 44, a. 1).
The first thing to note is that God alone is Ipsum Esse Subsistens—Being Itself—while all created things do not possess existence in themselves but receive it as a gift from God (ST I, q. 104, a. 1).
This participatory metaphysics leads directly to his ideas about Distinction and Adornment, where God’s creation takes place in an ordered fashion: first, things are distinguished (light from darkness, sea from land, firmament from waters), and then they are adorned (heavens with luminaries, waters with fish, land with animals and man) (ST I, q. 74, a. 1). These are the days at the beginning of Genesis. Its total pattern reflects a hierarchical and meaningful order in creation, without randomness or disorder.
The Procession of Creatures is a Scholastic term describing how all things proceed from God—not as accidents, but according to their place in the hierarchical chain of being (ST I, q. 45, a. 1).
Lafferty goes out of his way to contrast this with Darwinian evolution, which he calls a religion and sees as a secular counterfeit of this doctrine. It is a false coin that reduces creation to mechanistic survival rather than ontological participation.
For Lafferty, the world is not merely a vast collection of things but a teleological actualization of meaning, proceeding according to an intelligible order—hence his insistence on truth and clarity.
This corresponds exactly with Aquinas’s view that creation is not a static event but an ongoing act of divine providence, in which things not only receive being but are continually moved toward their proper perfection (ST I, q. 103, a. 1).
This is also why Lafferty immediately brings in the Four Final Things. They are the ends of creation: death, judgment, hell, and heaven. Lafferty is obsessed with eschatology, and for him, eschatology means these four things in their widest application.
If you wonder why so many of his novels center on the idea of leaps forward—Fourth Mansions, Arrive at Easterwine, The Elliptical Grave, Serpent’s Egg—here is the answer, I think: for Lafferty, creation has directionality, and he wants to participate in it fully.
But he also has epistemic humility and believes that God writes the final chapter.
If this Scholastic vision of reality is taken seriously, then the ontology of storytelling changes. A writer of fiction who understands participation can no longer treat storytelling as mere fabrication or self-expression because storytelling is not just an act of imagination but a participation in the deeper order of reality.
So what does this mean for character construction, world-building, narrative organization, and even the nature of creativity itself?
Characters will have ontological weight rather than being psychological constructs. This explains why Lafferty loves seeing characters act in the world but has relatively little interest in exploring them psychologically.
If creatures in reality participate in different degrees of being, then fictional characters—if they are to mirror reality—must also reflect these distinctions. In a participatory world, a saint, a hero, a villain, an angel, a Programmed Person are not simply different “types” of people but different levels of participation in being.
This fits with Aquinas’s account of goodness as convertible with being (ST I, q. 5, a. 1), meaning that to the extent a character is good, it will participate more fully in reality, while evil characters are not equal and opposite forces but diminished, privative beings (ST I-II, q. 18, a. 1). The greatest fictional villains in Lafferty will be ontologically deficient. They do not create; they pervert. Their power is real, but it is always derived, not self-sufficient.
The principle of Distinction and Adornment is a way into Lafferty’s storytelling because it is intrinsic to how he is ordered as a human being. If God orders creation first by separation and then by fulfillment, then stories that reflect reality will necessarily conform to this pattern of chaos-to-order. Even if a story concludes in apparent disorder, it will remain the case that order is ontologically prior to and superior to chaos, and the world being depicted will not be one in which chaos ultimately prevails. Creativity itself must be understood as participation rather than invention.
Aquinas argues that God’s knowledge is causative—He knows things into being rather than merely perceiving them (ST I, q. 14, a. 8). By analogy, a writer does not simply impose meaning onto a blank slate but draws meaning forth from the deep order of things. This is a constant theme in Lafferty. As much as Lafferty took Tolkien to task for The Lord of the Rings, I think he would agree with Tolkien’s ideas about sub-creation—the writer is not a god creating ex nihilo but a craftsman participating in divine creativity.
Time and history take on a different role. If reality is ordered toward a final fulfillment, then stories should reflect the movement of history as meaningful rather than arbitrary. This is why, when a world ends in Lafferty, it isn’t a complete reset. The ontological frame remains in place.
A final point. Like any Catholic, Aquinas argues that all creation moves toward an end in accordance with divine providence (ST I, q. 22, a. 1), and a writer who shares this view must treat time as intrinsically meaningful. This is a large part of why Lafferty so relentlessly explores the nature of time in his work, not as mere sequence but as a movement toward fulfillment. It also helps explain moments that might otherwise seem only partially accounted for.
For example, I think this is why, in Past Master, Kingmaker observes that the world-ending events are happening faster and faster. He recognizes the acceleration, though without understanding its cause within the teleological arc.
When we consider Lafferty’s wilder acts of invention in his novels, we might begin to see why even the most whimsical elements may, in fact, be governed by his deeper metaphysical logic of distinction and adornment.
Create. Distinguish. Adorn. Move toward the promise of fulfillment. Let God write the final chapter.
This is the normative pattern of every Lafferty novel, even when he uses it to excoriate its incompletion, as he does in Not to Mention Camels.
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