Ignatius J. Reilly: Patron Saint of the Post-Traditionalist Age

Reflections on A Confederacy of Dunces and Tradition

“You learnt everything, Ignatius, except how to be a human being.” — Irene Reilly

I was not aware of John Kennedy Toole’s novel A Confederacy of Dunces until I was well into my monastic life in a monastery. A priest friend of mine adored the novel, and he would call me up while I was busy working and packing monastery incense and gifts bought on our website to ship out to customers. And there I was, securing boxes of monastery items with ample shipping tape while my priest friend laughed hysterically on the phone reading whole passages and dialogue from the novel verbatum. The main character of the novel, Ignatius J. Reilly, was hilarious because he was so real — but in an absurd sort of way. The lines, though they were written in the early 1960s, were so relatable to us — to our sentiments as “trads”, first of all, but also because we saw something of ourselves in Ignatius J. Reilly.

It wasn’t until some years later that I really sat down and read the novel. It occurred to me, then, that the novel really was a mirror held up to ourselves — as young, disaffected ‘Trads’ railing against the ‘Modern World’ — but in a way that was not too flattering and very much tragi-comic.

Tool’s protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, is more than a caricature — he is an accidental prophet of our moment: a man grasping at sacred order while drowning in his own contradictions. He dresses like a medievalist, speaks like a scholastic, lives with his mother, and dreams of restoring metaphysical dignity to a world he can barely participate in. He’s the epitome of the caricature of the fedora-tipping, basement-dwelling, hyper-online ‘trad’ of our time.

And if we’re honest — many of us, whether Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, etc. — whether pipe-smoking Twitter Trads or caliphate-yearning keyboard jihadists — have seen a bit of ourselves in him.

It’s not because we we share in his absurdity, exactly. But because we, too, are trying to make sense of what it means to live in a world that often feels spiritually dismembered.

And yet sometimes — even with all of our good intentions… we get it wrong.

“I am writing a lengthy indictment against our century…”

Ignatius writes the above line while eating cheese dip in bed.

“With the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy, and bad taste gained ascendancy.”

It is easy to smirk at this absurd image of Ignatius, but it is also difficult not to see ourselves in him. I have laughed — and cringed — at seeing my own self in Ignatius. So perhaps have many of us. The longing for order, for hierarchy, for beauty — for something older and more rooted than this restless, digitized, commodified present. We grieve the loss of sacred time. We flinch at the noise and the cacophony of our contemporary life.

But the tragedy of Ignatius is not his grief — but how he manifests it.

He doesn’t pray. He doesn’t fast. He doesn’t repent. He doesn’t work.

He writes, yes — and furiously! But it’s always an indictment, never a confession. He condemns a world that he refuses to be a functioning part of, and he clings to a version of tradition that he does not live.

The uncomfortable part, however, is that many of us — regardless of our religious tradition — often do the same.

Aesthetics Without Ascesis

It’s not that Ignatius is irreligious, exactly. He just doesn’t have a rule of life. He’s all talk, with no follow through. He loves theology, but cannot bear humility. He sees the sacred not as something to be received, but rather as something to be wielded against others.

And that’s where things get dangerous.

In my own time, I’ve been in both traditional Muslim and Catholic spheres, and I have seen a sort of religious psychology that transcends religious boundaries. There is a danger of performing tradition without being transformed by it. There’s a lot of posting, quoting, debating… There are plenty of memes. There’s grandeur in the ideas — but not always patience in the practice. I’ve met young men who know every detail of scholastic polemics, yet are unable to speak gently with their parents. I’ve met brothers who dream of reviving the Caliphate, yet they don’t pray regularly, or they are uninvolved in their community.

It’s not really malice. It’s just… a dislocation. As a generation, we are hurt. We’re searching. We’re yearning for something that we feel has been lost. We want the ‘old ways’ back, but there is more of costume than of cultivation in our attempts to ‘RETVRN’.

The Nafs in the Name of God

In Islamic terms, Ignatius J. Reilly is ruled by his nafs. In Catholic language, he’s ruled by the ‘passions’, such as pride, sloth, etc. Either way, he is an example of what both traditions warn us against: the man who speaks of virtue but who cannot bear to be corrected, who quotes scripture but doesn’t have the capacity to truly hear it.

Toole’s brilliance lies in showing this through comedy. We laugh because it’s absurd — but also because it’s true.

“Oh Fortuna, blind, heedless goddess, I am strapped to your wheel. Do not crush me beneath your spokes. Raise me on high, divinity.”

Ignatius wants elevation without purification. He wants authority without service. He wants glory without the sweat involved to struggle for it. And that desire — that impulse — is alive in many of us. (And I put myself first and foremost in this particular brand of modern malaise.)

As such, I don’t say this out of judgement — but rather, out of lament.

Real Tradition Doesn’t Perform

We are not wrong to want ‘tradition’. We are not wrong to feel the loss of something deeper and older and ordered. There’s beauty even in the longing itself. But this longing must become living.

And this brings me to what I’ve come to believe in my years in the monastery and as a priest, and now studying and praying within a madrasa.

Tradition doesn’t perform. It abides.

Real tradition is not about showing itself, or internet arguments, or taking dramatic public stands. Rather, it is about living deeply, faithfully, and consistently, whether or not anybody is watching.

I’ve long advocated for a sort of ‘village piety’, which is divorced from the sort of religiosity which consists of little more than toxic online arguing, street preaching, and polemics, and more of the searching for the ‘still, small voice’ of God in the quiet rhythms of daily prayer, family devotion, and an honest living.

There is a prayer within traditional Islam: “Oh God, give to me the faith of old women!”

This is, indeed, a worthy model. It is a quiet and steady faith. Humble, yet strong as a rock.

It does not announce itself. It does not demand applause. It does not depend on aesthetics or argument. It is not reactive. It is not ironic. It does not need a platform.

It is expressed in the ordinary things — in the rising before dawn, in the lighting of a candle, in the keeping your home and your prayer space clean and neat and tidy…

Real tradition is seasonal and slow. It is the kind of piety that does not call itself piety — the kind that lives in villages and quiet homes, passed down not in manifestos, but in gestures: the way the bread is broken, the way the elderly are spoken to, the way children learn good character by watching.

It is a tending of the inner flame — not with rhetoric, but with prayer, labor, repetition…

The world will not be saved by rage, but by mercy. And the enemy is not always “the modern world,” but often the undisciplined self.

Conclusion

In the end, A Confederacy of Dunces is not simply a comedy about a ridiculous man. It is a parable of what happens when our religious impulse for ‘tradition’ is severed from humility and not grounded in the reality of day-to-day life.

Ignatius J. Reilly grieves the loss of a sacred world, but he turns that grief into a grotesque performance. He imagines himself a defender of higher truths, but he never submits himself to the quiet disciplines that actually sustain them. He mistakes railing against the modern world for reviving the old one.

In this way, Ignatius become a sort of mirror for all the disaffected ‘trads’ of our time — not just individuals, but entire movements that mistake aesthetics for ascesis, nostalgia for practice, slogans for sanctity, and condemnation for community.

And yet we love Ignatius J. Reilly, despite it all. Toole’s genius is that through comedy, he cautions without condemning. It’s an affectionate presentation of our all-too common flaws and foibles.

If we want to revive what is best in the ‘old ways’ — whatever our particular religious path may be — we will not do it by shouting or ‘LARPing’ (to use modern parlance). We will do it by bowing our heads, by prostrations, by rolling up our sleeves, by genuine labor, by helping our neighbor, by creating real communities, by lighting the lamps of prayer and keeping them burning long into the night when nobody is watching.

Ignatius could not abide. But perhaps we still can.

Some more quotes from Ignatius J. Reilly:

“I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”

“Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today’s employer is seeking. ”

“Is my paranoia getting completely out of hand, or are you mongoloids really talking about me?”

“You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.”

“Employers sense in me a denial of their values…. They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century I loathe. This was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library.”

“I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.”

“I refuse to “look up.” Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man’s fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.”

“When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life.”

“I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.”

“Canned food is a perversion,’ Ignatius said. ‘I suspect that it is ultimately very damaging to the soul.”

“You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces.”

“A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.”

“Oh, Fortuna, you capricious sprite!”

“The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge. . . . New Orleans is, on the other hand, a comfortable metropolis which has a certain apathy and stagnation which I find inoffensive.”

“I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.”

“Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”

“I am an anachronism. People realize this and resent it.”

“They would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food. Don’t you understand? Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be brainwashed. I won’t be a robot!”

“In other words, you want to become totally bourgeois. You people have all been brainwashed. I imagine that you’d like to become a success or something equally vile.”

“Do you think that I want to live in a communal society with people like that Battaglia acquaintance of yours, sweeping streets and breaking up rocks or whatever it is people are always doing in those blighted countries? What I want is a good, strong monarchy with a tasteful and decent king who has some knowledge of theology and geometry and to cultivate a Rich Inner Life.”

“…the nation as a whole has no contact with reality. That is only one of the reasons why I have always been forced to exist on the fringes of its society, consigned to the Limbo reserved for those who do know reality when they see it.”

“The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don’t like new cars and hair sprays. That’s why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.”

“This is a floral abortion,’ Ignatius commented irritably and tapped the vase with his cutlas. ‘Dyed flowers are unnatural and perverse and, I suspect, obscene also. I can see that I am going to have my hands full with you people.”

“I would very much like to know what the Founding Fathers would say if they could see these children being debauched to further the cause of Clearasil. However, I always suspected that democracy would come to this.”

“I also told the students that, for the sake of humanity’s future, I hoped that they were all sterile.”

“I am the avenging sword of taste and decency.”

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