(urth) TWK: 7 world cosmology
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
danldo at gmail.com
Sat Dec 10 13:20:18 PST 2005
Stanisław Bocian wrote:
> Why do you expect all Wolfe's books to be Christian? When pagan gods
> do fit into Christianity?
As I've said before, Wolfe's major project since at least _tBotNS_
seems to be creating situations in which a non-Christian cosmology
is embedded into a larger, ortho-Christian context. The most blatant
example of this is _tBotLS_: the _Whorl_ is a perfect Gnostic kosmos,
embedded into a larger Universe in which there is only one true God
of Christianity (whom Silk knows as 'the Outsider'). We know this
because in Silk's "enlightenment" vision at the beginning of
_Nightside_ he is shown the Gospel, though he can only understand
the theoanthropos as "a man who has been both enlightened and
possessed by the Outsider."
> This is the best
> orthodox neoplatonism. According to it, any contact between two levels
> needs mediators.
Actually, it isn't so much Neoplatonic as Pagan (in my etc.). It is a
deliberate representation of the world-Ash of Norse myths, with its
higher worlds and its lower worlds, in the form of the later Edda
(which was influenced by both Christianity and Neoplatonism, and
had a High God above all). Similarly, the world of Latro is an
embedding of the Greek myth-world into a larger Christian
context.
--Dan'l
--
I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him.
-- St Teresa of Avila
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
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