(urth) Wolfe as Heretic

[Lee Berman]

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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