(urth) Silk corrupted?

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

Bravo.

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:01 PM, John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 4:34 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
> wrote:
>>
>> Oh, come on. Christ has had a dual nature only since the Nicene Creed of
>> 325!
>>
>> Seriously, you could just as well be describing the Monophysite or Arian
>> Christs as Severian and Silk. Let's recall that you aren't comparing a real
>> thing to a fictional thing. You are comparing fictional things to one
>> another. As far as I can see, THEY ARE ALL CHRISTS. Wolfe's religion is
>> secondary, because he could be holding up heretical Christs to compare them
>> to the Chalcedonic Christ. We know his personal preference. So what?
>>
>> THEY ARE ALL CHRISTS. Even if he is deliberately showing us only how
>> partial they are---which I do not believe.
>>
>> And this is true regardless of your religious beliefs, aside from Bible
>> fundamentalist Bible literalism.
>>
>> Just saying.
>
>
>
> I don't see your argument here, other than the use of the slippery term
> "Christs."  If Wolfe is deliberately contrasting what he believes to be the
> imperfection of a uni-nature messiah with that he believes to be the
> perfection of a dual-nature messiah, then of course his religion is
> relevant--primary, even--to understanding his project.
>
> I tend to think that the Eastern concept of theosis is at work in Severian
> and Silk, but lots of ink and no small amount of blood have been spilled
> distinguishing the idea of becoming a more perfect image of God from the
> idea of becoming God.
>
> That distinction is precisely what's lost by using the term "Christ."
> "Christ" just means "annointed one" and in that sense of course Severian and
> Silk (and Able and Neo and Frodo and Harry Potter and Starbuck and King
> David and Barack Obama and Sidney Crosby) are "Christs"--they are annointed
> ones, chosen among others for an extraordinary task.  None of them, however,
> is meant to be understood as the Godhead incarnate, which is the
> natural-language translation of the term "Christ" due to its overwhelming
> use as an honorific for the historical/religious/mythological/whatwillyou
> figure of Jesus of Nazareth.
>
> Your point is very insightful as to Arian--while Arians, like Catholics,
> orthodox, and most Protestant Christians accepted that Jesus was the Christ,
> i.e., the Chosen One of God, they denied his divine essence, unlike those
> other groups.  Wolfe, as a Roman Catholic, does not deny the divine essence
> of Christ and has not, as far as I can tell, created a character meant to
> embody the divine essence.  He has, however, created a number of characters
> with messianic (or counter-messianic, i.e., Number Five) functions.
>
> To the extent that these characters' lives follow the type of Jesus's life,
> in Wolfe, at least, they are meant as imitatio dei.  Wolfe has said himself
> that Severian's journey is the Christian journey--by his apeing of Jesus,
> Severian becomes more Christ-like (Jesus-like is too ugly a neologism),
> while still falling short of divine moral perfection.  Silk likewise,
> although Silk is a far better man than Severian (or perhaps merely a man
> with far more advantages--a seed sown on good earth, not in thorns).
>
> I think it is a very great error to read Wolfe's "Christ figures" as
> representations of the divinity except in a very limited and incomplete
> sense.  This isn't because I'm concerned about ideological purity--it's
> because I think that a great error in foundational thinking about these
> complex texts inevitably leads to other errors.
>
> As for that "limited and incomplete sense", I suppose tremendous things
> could be written on the idea of the Divine peeking from behind the curtain
> in Wolfe:  the suggestion that gods in the Whorl, when the possess someone,
> leave something of themselves behind, for example, or the possibility that
> eating the flesh of a higher being raises oneself up a level in the Wizard
> Knight.  That stuff, to me, is much more interesting than the idea that a
> practising Catholic wrote a story about an Incarnation of the Most High who
> rapes, tortures, kills, commits adultery at the first opportunity, lies
> regularly and ultimately leads to the near-genocide of the human race.
>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 3
>> Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:20:32 -0500 (EST)
>> From: brunians at brunians.org
>> Subject: Re: (urth) Silk corrupted?
>> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
>> Message-ID: <3026.67.142.130.20.1232655632.squirrel at brunians.org>
>> Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
>>
>> Severian (and Silk) are human beings. They each have a single, human,
>> nature. Christ is unique, in Christianity in that He has a dual nature,
>> being both human and God. He is the only being in the Christian World that
>> has such a dual nature. He can manifest through other beings, and this is
>> what is happening with Severian and Silk.
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
-----
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