(urth) Wolfe as Heretic

[John Watkins]

I am not certain that monolatrism is heretical.

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> In my fairly extensive review of Gene Wolfe interviews I've
> found him to be generally cautious and circumspect with regard
> to revealing the mysteries behind his literary work. But
> occasionally a certain interviewer will inspire him to let
> something important slip. For example, in the Larry McCaffery
> interview I mentioned in another post he is willing to resolve
> the central mystery of Fifth Head of Cerberus.
>
> In the '96 interview with James Jordan I find one of the most
> telling revelations which has helped my personal understanding
> of the thematic underpinnings of the Sun series. Ironically the
> answer is in response to a question about the Soldier series. But
> it displays a part of the stated personal belief system of Gene
> Wolfe which seems to have inspired much of his work. I think it is
> a belief which is not reconcilable with orthodox Catholicism, though
> I can't be sure.
>
> >JJ: Which is another way of saying, do we have fallen angels here
> >or some type of power that really was operative in the world before
> >the kingdom of God?
>
> >GW: That is my personal belief. I think that the gods of paganism were
> >real. But what I tried to do was to write about that pagan world as the
> >pagans themselves wrote about it. If we read modern historians we are
> >reading a very rationalistic viewpoint of this which says that all of
> >these people were absolutely wasting their time by building temples to
> >Ares or Apollo or you name it. And by offering sacrifices in worship and
> >all that it was nothing there. Nothing at all there and that whether it
> >is true or not that certainly is not the way the people who were doing it
> >felt. They were convinced that there was something there and they had all
> >sorts of legends and so forth about the appearances of the god and in fact
> >there is one place in the Acts where Paul and another one of the apostles
> >are mistaken for Zeus and Mercury. Zeus and Hermes, we are mixing the
> Latin
> >and the Greek which is what I was trying to get away from. They are
> mistaken
> >for Zeus and Hermes in human form because people in those days expected
> that
> >you could see Zeus and Hermes in human form. I am not so sure they were
> wrong.
> >I am not convinced that they were wrong. We love to think how much smarter
> we
> >are than people of ancient times or biblical times or so forth but I am
> very
> >dubious about that.
> >
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