Author: Nathaniel Slattery
Posted: Month of the Immaculate Conception, 26th Day, Year of Our Lord 2022
This is the foreword written by a dear friend of mine for a novel which is now available at TaurusNecrus.com. This novel is appropriate for women and men. It is a Catholic novel which I wrote as an alternative to the popular Dune which is an immoral book to read. This book, on the other hand, has only moral themes and topics. It is a mystical novel that follows a young man’s discernment of entering the married state, but it is an adventure novel. Splendor
Foreword:
Apocalypse of Splendor
A little over 2,000 years ago, God’s People invented a literary form designed to unveil hidden spiritual realities that indicate the end of this age. Named “apocalyptic” from the Greek verb ?ποκαλυπτειν, “to reveal,”[1] the first two apocalypses, Daniel (586-536 B.C.) and the Apocalypse of John (60-90 [?] A.D.), were written during times of acute distress and persecution of faithful Jews and Christians, respectively. Inspired by the Holy Ghost, Daniel and St. John were graced to receive visions of the supernatural warfare behind the historical realities God’s saints endured on earth. Most significantly, they were allowed to see the splendor of the victory of the “one like the Son of Man” (Daniel 7:13), “the Little Lamb” (Apoc. 5:12[2]), and the “Woman clothed with the sun” (Apoc. 12:1-6; 17) over the dragon, the “false prophet,” and the beast. This revelation is the grace of divine apocalyptic literature.
Later Christian apocalypses, polymorphic in form, sometimes used history (St. Augustine’s Civitatis Dei), sometimes poetry (Dante’s Commedia) to reveal the latent demonic culture still present within Christendom. In Splendor, Nathaniel Slattery uses science-fiction to ever so subtly uncover the “Endarkenment” in post-Christian, post-Modern 21st century America. Set in a not too distant future where the “empire without an emperor” that was the United States has fractured into semi-autonomous regions of varying degrees of anarchy, Splendor follows the adventures of three disparate protagonists—a Catholic knight, an American President, and a simple widower-farmer from a small village. In their Providential meeting and trek from Arizona to Raleigh, North Carolina, Slattery reveals a number of important spiritual realities concealed by the veil of contemporary American culture. I highlight only four of the many that affected me.
All apocalyptic literature of Christian Tradition compels readers to question apparent objective reality and their own subjective reality in light of the revelations they are reading. In Splendor, readers may, like me, find themselves asking “What is freedom? What is slavery?” What if everything American culture has said about these two conditions since 1776 has been wrong—even damning? “What is science, and from whence does its magisterium derive?” Should Christians, or anyone else, trust this “mortal god,”[3] the animating spirit of the “fourth industrial revolution”? Might transhumanism via IoT (“the internet of things”), AI (artificial “intelligence”), and genetic engineering turn out in actuality to be merely the revenge of bugs?[4] “What if Eden—Paradise—Pleasure isn’t the real center of the world[5] as our infrastructure of legions of malls, serpentine interstates, and neon edens suggest?” What if the automatic doors to our “supermarkets”—(Nietzschean agri-business?!)—aren’t gateways to our daily bread, but rather the maw to a thousand Gomorrah’s? And what if the path to being a “Terror daemonum” doesn’t begin in taking up swords, flintlocks, or AR-15s, but rather with becoming little, silent, unknown? Such apocalypses I have found in Splendor.
I should mention too that Splendor is a tale filled with action and suspense, and informed by a keen wit and wry sense of humor.
Ralph E. Lentz II
Lector, St. Elizabeth of the Hill Country
Boone, NC
22 December Anno Domini 2022
St. Ischyrion, ora pro nobis.
St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, ora pro nobis.
[1] See Apoc. 1:1: ?ποκ?λυψις ?ησο? Χριστο?, ?ν ?δωκεν α?τ? ? θε?ς δε?ξαι το?ς δο?λοις α?το?, . . .κα? . . . . ?ποστε?λας δι? το? ?γγ?λου α?το? τ? δο?λ? α?το? ?ω?νν?–“The revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave to Him to make known to His slaves. . . and sending by his angel to his slave John. . .” (author’s trans.)
[2] The Greek noun for “lamb,” ?ρην, is in the Apocalypse always in the diminutive, ?ρνιον. This usage of the diminutive in the New Testament is unique to the Apocalypse and John 21:15.
[3] Cf. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.
[4] See Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s “Desideratus Cunctus Gentibus: The Incarnation of the Word of God inaugurates the Lordship of Christ over the Church and the Nations, at https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/6289-non-serviam-a-history-of-revolutions-from-herod-to-davos.
[5] See Fr. James Mawdsley, Adam’s Deep Sleep: The Passion of Jesus Christ Prefigured in the Old Testament (New Old, 2022), 11.