(urth) Wolfe as Heretic

[António Pedro Marques]

Church Fathers did not in general make a point of saying pagan gods didn't 
exist. I don't think any considered them divine, but instead of angelic 
nature, though either fallen or miscontrued by their worshippers.

Hi, people.

Lee Berman wrote (19-05-2010 15:00):
>
> 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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