"It was probably in 1309, in anticipation of the emperor’s coming to Italy, that Dante wrote his famous work on the monarchy, De Monarchia, in three books. Fearing lest he “should one day be convicted of the charge of the buried talent” and desirous of “keeping vigil for the good of the world,” he proceeds successively to show that a single supreme temporal monarchy—the empire—is necessary for the well-being of the world, that the Roman people acquired universal sovereign sway by divine right, and that the authority of the emperor is not dependent upon the pope but descends upon him directly from the fountain of universal authority, which is God.
Dante’s argument rests on the idea that man is ordained for two ends: the blessedness of this life—which consists in the exercise of his natural powers and is figured in the terrestrial paradise—and the blessedness of eternal life—which consists in the fruition of the divine aspect in the celestial paradise, to which man’s natural powers cannot ascend without the aid of divine light. To these two ends, man must come by diverse means:
“For to the first we attain by the teachings of philosophy, following them by acting in accordance with the moral and intellectual virtues. To the second, by spiritual teachings, which transcend human reason, as we follow them by acting according to the theological virtues.”
But although these ends and means are made plain to us by human reason and by revelation, men in their cupidity would reject them were they not restrained by bit and rein.
“Wherefore man had need of a twofold directive power according to his twofold end, to wit, the Supreme Pontiff, to lead the human race in accordance with things revealed, to eternal life; and the Emperor, to direct the human race to temporal felicity in accordance with the teachings of philosophy.”
Mr. Wicksteed (whose translation is quoted) aptly notes that in De Monarchia, “we first find in its full maturity the general conception of the nature of man, of government, and of human destiny, which was afterwards transfigured, without being transformed, into the framework of the Sacred Poem.”
—Gardner, Edmund. “Dante Alighieri.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 4. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908.
(This was originally a post on the East of Laughter Facebook group, but I’ve expanded it and moved it here. Provisional thoughts, but it’s probably too complex for that forum.)
Lafferty once told his readers that when he sat down to write about a location, he started by consulting The Catholic Encyclopedia, a set that he clearly knew backwards and forwards. When thinking about an issue in Lafferty, it's a good place to start.
What led me to it this time is Daniel Otto Petersen, who has been working through Past Master in a series of YouTube videos and who has done a smart video on Chapter 7 of the novel.
Petersen makes a comparison between Lafferty’s work and Gene Wolfe’s at timestamp 6:57 of Part 1 of his introduction to the chapter. The gist of his argument is that Lafferty’s way of teasing the reader differs from Wolfe’s: it is more comic, more structurally collaborative with the readership, and requires a different sort of readerly commitment, if I understand him correctly.
This seems right to me, though I likely see Lafferty’s novels as more tightly constructed than Peterson does. They are usually more than half-hidden—intricate, fiercely coherent—but where Wolfe often builds his narratives to invite the reader into decoding their complexities, Lafferty layers density in his longer works for his own pleasure, offering his readers what he hopes will be enough to have a great time. For Wolfe, hermeneutical pleasure is explicit; for Lafferty, implicit. For both, coherence counts.
Imagine multiple lines—each with its own destination—intersecting at various hubs. Every crossing and transfer represents a point where different layers and narrative elements overlap, creating a network rich in unexpected connections and hidden depths. This is like the elaborate structure of Lafferty’s novels, which differs from his short stories, where there isn’t time to build many “subway systems.” Instead, they’re brilliant bullet trains, so swift and surprising that we forget the speed entirely. This might be similar to what Andrew Ferguson once wrote in a blog comment. He called Lafferty's structures plateaus.
I've often wondered why Lafferty’s novels feel so different from his short stories, especially in light of a comment he made in an interview: he had put far more work into his novels than his stories, and they were harder for him to write. From a disciplinary perspective, I think the Lafferty/Wolfe difference comes down to a different orientation toward high modernism. Someone once said, “From the modernism you choose, you get the postmodernism you deserve.” Much of what Lafferty does in his novels, I think, involves refusing to play the modernist or postmodernist game. His favored techniques may make him look superficially postmodernist, even if he isn’t. (Lafferty is obviously “post-modernist” in the sense that he thinks Western Civilization has ended, but here I am stipulating the word to mean what it means in literary theory.)
What Lafferty does reminds me of something a brilliant academic, Thomas Keymer, has written on Tristram Shandy, showing how many of its seemingly postmodern features arise from Sterne’s internalization of Renaissance writing and the market constraints of serialization. Keymer calls this interplay of factors its “contingency, malleability, elasticity, improvisation.” The short story market did this for Lafferty.
My theory of how Lafferty writes novels is tied to my understanding of how he composes short-form fiction. Lafferty uses intense logical compression to arrive at unusual plot patterns, then unfolds them with his signature elements: humor, grotesquery, second orality, etymological games, regionalism, and lightly worn erudition. Lafferty outlined his novels, and I suspect that when he builds a novel, he reduplicates the pattern he uses for short fiction. The consequence is layers upon layers of complexity and interconnection.
It is how Lafferty seems to produce a novel—how he achieves narrative length. As his career progresses, this layering becomes less accessible and increasingly dense, but the best way to approach his later novels might be to reconstruct how he builds interconnected layers, starting with his “easier" /“less dense” novels, especially the three from 1968.
Writing this way makes Lafferty’s novels appear to have shades of modernism and postmodernism that they don’t possess, just as Tristram Shandy appears proto-modernist or proto-postmodernist. The complicating factor, of course, is Lafferty’s historical moment—the fact that he was writing during the heyday of postmodern experimentation. If Wolfe sat down at modernism’s poker table and played brilliantly, Lafferty flipped the table over. He has no interest in teaching anyone how to read him, the way a “proto-modernist” like Henry James or a high modernist like Joyce does.
So how does all of this relate to Past Master, Chapters 6 & 7?
By the time the reader hits these chapters, Lafferty has used Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, to show that Cosmopolis is a metastasized version of the City of Man. As Augustine writes, “Two loves have made two cities: the love of self, even to the contempt of God, made the earthly city; the love of God, even to the contempt of self, made the heavenly city.” (De Civitate Dei, XIV.28). We know that Lafferty is thinking of this because of how he capitalizes City in Chapter 4 when Thomas consults the précis machine, which tells him:
“Golden Astrobe is an urban world, a world of cities,” the précis machine played. “If a man is important, then a city is more important, and a very large city is still more important. When we have all become one perfect city in our totality, then our evolving will be completed. The individual must pass and be absorbed. The city is all that matters. A city is more than the totality of the people in it, just as a living body is more than the heaped-up quantity of the total cells in it. When the cells consider themselves as individuals, that is cancer in the body. When men look upon themselves as individuals, that is cancer in the body politic.”
The way Lafferty presents the City and then the Feral Lands shows—I think—that he is not only thinking of Augustine but also Dante’s vision of the “two suns.” In De Monarchia, Dante argues that spiritual and temporal authority must be distinct yet independent, each deriving its power directly from God. This challenges the medieval model, in which the pope (as the sun) fully dominates the emperor (as the moon), and also contradicts Pope Boniface VIII’s declaration in Unam Sanctam that both swords—the spiritual and the temporal—reside within the Church, with the latter subordinate to the former. Dante’s idea, by contrast, proposes that the emperor must show reverence to the pope, but not subservience, because the two authorities have their own light and their own purpose:
“One is the Supreme Pontiff, to lead humankind to eternal life, according to the things revealed to us; and the other is the Emperor, to guide humankind to happiness in this world, in accordance with the teaching of philosophy.” (Monarchia 3.16)
Once in the Feral Lands, we meet two unusual figures, Adam and Charles. Adam is always the same Adam. He dies and is resurrected. The Charles we meet is Charles 612. The Charleses all have short reigns because they are hunted down and killed by the Programmed Killers of Astrobe. The “empire” itself has only lasted two hundred years.
These two characters are archetypes of the split Dante describes: Adam, always resurrected, represents religious continuity, while Charles, whose numbered iterations are hunted and exterminated, represents a fragilized temporal authority. Lafferty shows us what happens when the balance between these two forces collapses under the pressure of a terminal City of Man.
In Past Master, there is no functioning dual authority. When Evita says that she cannot stay with Charles, we arrive at a situation where there will be no reunion of the two suns, no restoration of the proper order that Dante envisioned. There will be apocalypse. This moment, rather than offering a path toward balance by uniting Adam-Evita-Charles, seals the impossibility of its return. It didn’t work with all those other Charleses, Evita seems to say, so we’re not going through that again. It’s time to take out the City of Man. Put your Dante back on the shelf. We’re done with that—at least for now.
The contrast between the failed synthesis of spiritual and temporal authority in Past Master and Dante’s vision of the two suns—under the threat of Augustine’s demonic City of Man—also suggests a broader distinction between Lafferty and Wolfe as novelists.
Wolfe’s fiction and its labyrinthine complexity are often structured to be decoded, even if many of these decodings lead to points of deliberate undecidability. This looks like the result of Wolfe’s internalization of modernist storytelling technique, which he brings to genre fiction. He plays this game with exceptional skill, rewarding the careful reader with a coherence that can be reconstructed through inference and close attention.
Lafferty, by contrast, operates from a different set of assumptions and rejects modernist storytelling. His novels achieve intricacy not through puzzles but through a unique textual density, layering ideas while maintaining coherence. There is, as yet, no established framework for discussing this mode of storytelling. While his works contain puzzling elements and reward the kind of close attention Wolfe’s writing has benefited from, they do not invite resolution in the same way. They are not structured as Wolfean invitations, and readers who approach them lack the critical tools honed by a century of modernist analysis—so it is unsurprising that many simply go along for the ride.
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