(urth) Severian as reverse Christ (or something)
Dave Tallman
davetallman at msn.com
Sat Nov 22 10:19:09 PST 2008
David Stockhoff wrote:
> In similar vein, discussing "what offices a Christian man may hold", he
> refers to a recent case wherein a Church member had the opportunity to
> receive high public office as a magistrate. Tertullian argues that it
> would be morally impossible for this man to satisfy both the Gospel's
> demands and those of Roman law, for that would require him to abstain
> not only from all public pagan sacrifices, oaths, etc., but also from
> "sitting in judgment on anyone's life or character, . . . neither
> condemning nor fore-condemning; binding no one, imprisoning /or
> torturing no one/".^*2 <http://www.rtforum.org/lt/lt119.html#FN_2>*
> These are the earliest known explicit Christian statements on the
> morality of torture.
>
Wolfe may have drawn some ideas from Tertullian, but he surely wouldn't
consider him to be the last word on Christian morality. A couple of
centuries later St. Augustine wrote on the idea of a "just war," which
could be fought by righteous Christian soldiers. Tertullian ended up
being declared a heretic (not about pacificism, but about whether a new
prophecy could have the same force as scripture).
Tertullian had the luxury in the third century of belonging to a
persucuted group that could stand outside and condemn the system. But
later the Church became the accepted state religion, and took over a
great deal of power in the Middle Ages. At that point, soldiers,
magistrates, and even torturers were at least nominally Christians. It's
a difficult moral dilemma and one that Wolfe doesn't shrink from
presenting in all its horror.
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