_Past Master_, by R.A. Lafferty, 1968

In a recent essay (_Chronicles_, December 1996), Thomas Molnar writes
about the culture wars and points out that the old sacred is always
challenged by a new profane, until at last the profane triumphs and
becomes a sacred tradition in its own right. Today:

    We are in a state of astonishment, as the last Greco-Roman pagans
    must have been when their temples were closed in favor of Christian
    churches, and the administration of provinces slipped out of the
    hands of imperial officials into the hands of a new authority--the
    bishops.

Taking the long view, we can view the succession of cultures and
civilizations with equanimity, knowing that the future will in certain
essential ways be like the past, and the old patterns will continue.

Yet, there is always a fear (or a hope, to some) that someday this will
not be so, that some New Thing will cause a breach with all previous
history, transforming human nature incomprehensibly. Some technological
marvel, we presume today, although who knows what it might be? Molnar
sees this also, pointing out that there may come a time when there is no
sacred at all, but only the profane:

    As long as human beings and institutions were initiators of
    historical and social change, it was legitimate to expect
    transformations, for good or evil, in laws, manners, values,
    collective aspirations. Each was escorted to the stage of history
    by an ensemble of ritual legitimization that raised the mere acts
    of change to the level of spiritual, moral significance. The new
    factor in our modern times seems to be the mechanical character of
    change, its independence of human initiative, of human interest, of
    human comprehension. [...] It is just possible--hence our "age of 
    anxiety"--that this civilization closes the door on anything beyond 
    itself and proclaims its functional self-sufficiency. _That_ would
    be the true Dark Age.

    [...] In a technological world-society, the limitless framework and
    the cosmopolitan perspective discard the transcendental objects and
    the code they impose. They turn into immanent objects because
    technology adores only its own drive, its own accomplishments; it
    worships action with its visible products and suppresses the space
    and time for ritual. The profane alone remains.

I was provoked by these reflections to dig out an old science-fiction
novel: _Past Master_, by R.A. Lafferty, 1968. The prolific Raphael
Aloysius is not well-known outside the genre, but I hope that someday he
will be more widely read. His strength is his short stories; they are
dizzying little tales by someone I have always imagined to be part
lunatic. I read one collection on an exhausting plane trip once and
swear that it gave me a sort of brain-fever. Lafferty lives (lived?) in
Oklahoma, describes himself as a "correspondence-school electrical
engineer", and is probably a wily old coot.

His novels have always seemed to charge around a bit too long for me,
but this one works well. It reminds me of the fables of G.K. Chesterton
and C.S. Lewis, as well as of what little I have been able to glean from
the very dense philosophy of Eric Voegelin.

In the year 2535 (exactly 1000 years after a certain execution), a
utopian civilization has achieved the earthly paradise, immanentized the
eschaton, and is now in inexplicable crisis, facing extinction. Saint
Thomas More is fetched out of the past to solve their problems and be
martyred again. He has been selected because of his ability to
distinguish and choose correctly between alternatives when the labels
have become confused, as, for example, between "Heaven" and "Hell", or
between "Everything" and "Nothing".

He takes it all pretty calmly. It seems that time travelers often stop
and chat with him. On Astrobe, the world of the future, he finds allies
and enemies, Adam and Eve, the last Pope, a friendly alien called an
"ansel" [angel?] and a race of artificial beings (the "Programmed
Persons" with their "Programmed Killers") who have no souls or even real
consciousness, but who are supplanting human beings. These synthetic
beings worship Ouden, the "Great Nothingness". They are More's real
enemies, and plan to exterminate humanity and then themselves. We could
say they are the problem, if it did not seem more likely that they are
manifestations of the corrupted souls of real humans. At one point they
admit to More that they are old-fashioned Demons.

(There is a Christian tradition of calling evil the "void" or
"nothingness". When soulless machines start ordering one about, there is
a natural suspicion of those satanic mills, and Luddism sometimes has
its attractions).

This is all very fast-moving, violent, witty, and more than a little
metaphysically creepy. Lafferty claims that More's _Utopia_ was a
satire.

Bill McClain (wmcclain@watershade.net), 
http://watershade.net/wmcclain/