“The All-At-Once Man” (1970)

Picking up on yesterday’s post and the theme of Gnosticism, I want to look its presence in Lafferty’s work a little further. Lafferty often extracts elements of Gnostic thought and builds spectacularly upon them, shaping strange new conceptual structures all his own. Sometimes, this is as straightforward as in his short story "Snuffles" (1960), where being acts as a demiurge; other times, it is a complex interplay of Gnostic and Kabbalistic ideas, as in Not to Mention Camels (1974). Rarely does he present a direct, unified variation of Gnostic thought. One exception is "The All-At-Once Man."

As with all of Lafferty’s writing, the story can be enjoyed without deep knowledge of the ideas he plays with. But here, he leans in heavily, crafting a brilliant parody of Valentinian Gnosticism.

Since this is a vast rabbit hole, I’ll begin by sketching the plot before unpacking key elements to show how I think the story works.

"The All-At-Once Man" belongs to Lafferty’s Men Who Knew Everything cycle. One of these men is the charismatic John Penandrew, a former student of Monica Hall. His peers include George Drakos, Harry Donovan, Cris Benedetti, and Barnaby Sheen—along with Lafferty himself, appearing as "the man who doesn’t know everything."

Penandrew’s goal is to possess his entire life at once—to exist simultaneously as a boy, youth, man, and old man—thereby evading natural death. He confidently tells his brilliant friends that he will achieve this. To do so, he gains power from the legendary Prester John. Though he attains a distorted form of everlasting life, his success is hollow. It backfires, creating a rift between him and his wife, Zoe Archikos, and spiritually warping him, making him, as Lafferty says, lopsided.

The fragmented parts of himself, now living independently, return to him as degenerate “nephews.” His wife, Zoe, leaves but later returns. Together, they inhabit what is essentially a haunted house on Harrow Street, trapped in a grotesque union.

At its core, "The All-At-Once Man"  is a send-up of Valentinianism, retelling its primary myth through the lens of an uncanny marriage. The primordial man tries to restore himself to Pleroma, the divine fullness, by merging all his Aeons—his past and future selves—into a single, simultaneous existence. As he tells his friends:

“I know pretty well what I want to do and I know pretty well what it consists of. I will become every aeon of myself simultaneously; then I will have become a complete man — and then I will not die. There is a meaning within a meaning of the old word aeon. Aeon means ages. But the pleroma or plentitude is made up of substantial powers called aeons. I maintain that these two meanings are the same. In Gnosticism, the aeon is one of the group of eternal beings that combine to form the supreme being — all of them are eternal and simultaneous, but no one of them would be eternal out of combination. I believe that there is an analogy on the human plane; and I intend to become that analogy, to be all my ages simultaneously and forever, to be every aeon of myself.”

In effect, John is a distorted reflection of the Valentinian anthrôpos, the original spiritual man—sometimes identified with Geradamas—who falls into ignorance and fragmentation. Lafferty plays with this idea when the men who know everything recall their intellectual formation. For all his brilliance, John Penandrew remains ignorant of theological nuance. Benedetti points this out when he tells him:

“You have common decency, John, but not integrity,” Cris said. “I use the word to mean unified totality and scope — that is integrity in the theological sense. I use the word as Tanquerey uses it. (They used to study Tanquerey's Dogmatic Theology in the seminaries. Now they study rubbish.)”

This is a deep cut from Lafferty, who draws on passages from Tanquerey, like this one from Manual of Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 1, which addresses praeternatural selfhood and theological risk in Augustinianism:

On this issue of dangerous systems, with its emphasis on "every sound idea and intuition." Lafferty writes:

“We had all gone to school together to the Augustinians at Monica Hall, and minds once formed by the Augustinians are Augustinian forever. We had learned to latch onto every sound idea and intuition and hold on. At least we had more scope than those who went to school to the Jesuits or the Dominicans. This information is all pertinent. Without the Augustinian formation John Penandrew would never have shattered—he'd have bent.”

In Valentinian Gnosticism, the Pleroma is the transcendent, spiritual realm of the Aeons, divine emanations of God existing in perfect harmony. Before chasing his false Pleroma, John already possesses a rightly ordered harmony within his home. But unlike in Gnosticism, it is this ‘Pleroma’ that he stands to lose. At the story’s outset, Lafferty writes:

“This is also an attempt to record some of the strange goings-on in the house on Harrow Street, and it is a halfhearted (no, a faint-hearted or downhearted) attempt to record the looser goings-on in the subsequently forever house on Harrow Street. The subject is a man who had everything, who took hold of everything beyond that, and who was broken to pieces by it. Or was not.”

John is happily married to his Greek wife, Zoe Archikos. In Valentinianism, Sophia Achamoth—a fallen Aeon—disrupts cosmic harmony by attempting to grasp the unknowable Bythos (the deep, hidden God), leading to her fragmentation and the birth of the Demiurge.

Lafferty plays with Aeonic concepts, blurring Sophia (Wisdom) and Zoe (Life). In his version, John himself becomes Sophia Achamoth, the disruptor whose overreach fractures him, bringing forth even more Archons—his three nephews—who drain away what spiritual integrity he once had.

“There were low-life doings at the big house on Harrow Street. The four Penandrew males each seemed to bring in seven cronies worse than himself. There were riotous doings there and the black maria was a frequent visitor to those doors. There was the aroma of stale evil in all this and John hadn't used to be a bad sort of man.”

Rather than achieving divine harmony, John and Zoe become a degraded syzygy. Their grotesque aionion existence turns them into clanging brass.

Lafferty ties it all together in a stunning ending, marked by the brilliant metaphor of a descent from Classical Greek to Koine.

The Penandrews are a unique couple taking their pleasures together all at once forever, and so violently as to drive the whole town stone-deaf—like those old stone-deaf statues, their only real kindred. For these two will not die in any natural course of things, not with that big loud bright brassy horn blowing in a distance, and at absolutely close range, all at once, everywhere, unclosed, lopsided. It's the ending that hasn't any end. The Stone is found, and it's an older texture than the philosophers believed. The transmutation is accomplished—into brass. Classic and koine: this is the Zoe who dies hardly forever; this is the Penandrew, the man of the wrong shape. The four men who know everything understand it now. And I do not. Five little Wise Men, sitting on the floor. One lived forever, and then there were four.”

Current notes:

All-At-Once Man Notes.docx

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