(urth) Wolfe as Heretic

Jerry Friedman jerry_friedman at yahoo.com
Wed May 19 10:50:19 PDT 2010


Wolfe said in that same interview, "Laura is my idea of what a pagan goddess might be who survived
into the Christian world. One of the places where I probably split
off from conventional Catholic thinking is that I believe that the
gods of paganism were real. I don't think that they are entitled to
the worship that they received from the pagans. I think what many
of the biblical writers are saying is, 'Yes, these are real powers,
but it is wrong for you to give to them the honors that are due to
God alone.' And I think that that is exactly correct."

So he thinks (or thought) his view of the pagan gods was "probably" not "conventional Catholic thinking", but that's different from "heretical".

I can't answer your questions about Catholic doctrine, Josh.

Jerry



----- Original Message ----
From: "brunians at brunians.org" <brunians at brunians.org>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Wed, May 19, 2010 9:39:00 AM
Subject: Re: (urth) Wolfe as Heretic

In what way is this not compatible with Catholicism?

What is Catholic doctrine on this matter?

.

>
>
> 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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