(urth) Severian as reverse Christ (or something)

[Chris]

I don't have any textual basis for this, but I thought of the Torturers as tracing their lineage back to Typhon. This is sort of the reverse of your impression; the institution would have started out as secular, and then acquired its mystical aspects in order to maintain its cohesion over time.

-- 
"When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set." -- Lin Yutang



> From: sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org
> To: urth at lists.urth.net
> Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 11:44:16 -0800
> Subject: Re: (urth) Severian as reverse Christ (or something)
> 
> 
> On Nov 22, 2008, at 10:19 AM, Dave Tallman wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> 
> On that note, I've taken the Torturer's Guild as a sort of Inquisition  
> that's become a more or less secular institution of the State. As if  
> the State absorbed them and gradually became more and more ashamed of  
> the Guild, yet kept it around in diminished form for their dirty work.  
> but it's lost it's original purpose.   Of course that's all  
> speculation, but it works for me.
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