(urth) Father Inire

[Gerry Quinn]

From: Lee Berman 


> >Gerry Quinn: As interstellar arms dealers, if that is one of their (hierodule) 
> >roles on Urth

> Agreed, it is one of their roles.

 
> >also apparently do not choose sides. They seem to take the view that conflict 
> >leads to progress.

> Well, they might choose Severian over Baldanders. Isn't fully clear. 

It’s clear enough – they didn’t take sides in that fight.  Though they probably knew how it ended, as Baldanders himself guessed, I think.


> >This angle would seem to require that you identify angels.  You mean the interstellar 
> >arms dealers, right?

> Correct. When I say angels, I mean the Bibical kind not those found on Christmas cards.
> Think Angel of Death slaying Egyptian children, Cherubim with flaming sword guarding
> Eden. The four archangels leading the Hebrew army to victory on the battlefield. Uriel,
> Michael, Raphael and good old Gabriel (Dr. Talos' role) on the frontlines, 

But all those angels, who admittedly did not flinch at the sight of blood, seem to have picked one side.  Do we know of any Biblical angels who supported both sides in a conflict?

I’m not saying the Hierodules are evil, by the way, even in our terms.  I’m just saying that setting them up as “angels”, in order to make a contrast with “demons” like (you are proposing) Father Inire, doesn’t seem to work well given the actual behaviour of both sides.  Inire, it would seem to me, supports the better side on Urth.  If the Hierodules are selling arms to both Commonwealth and Ascians, in an Urth tottering towards extinction, surely we must prefer Inire, who cleaves – against his own best interests – to the Autarch who runs a seemingly more human, if backward, realm, and will in time bring about a New Sun.  

Famulimus may have a pretty face, but if we demand that she and Inire are angel and devil, or devil and angel respectively... is it not Inire, by his actions, who deserves the title of angel?  Perhaps he also has a fantastic body under those robes, but prefers to be judged by his deeds.


> >Would an angel say: "Is all the world a war of good and bad? Have you not thought 
> >it might be something more?"

> I think the answer to that is obvious.

Only if ‘angel’ has other than the usual meaning.


> >If the Hierodules are supplying weapons to both sides (of course we’re not certain of 
> >that, I think – perhaps some other group of cacogens is supplying them, in which case 
> >it might be *they* who are Inire’s cousins), they would seem to have a worse claim on 
> >our sort of morality than Inire.

> It might have some substance if you base your hyphothetical "other group" on some 
> unmentioned level of Biblical angels or something like that. Otherwise, they are just 
> a non-textual Gerry invention or extrapolation. Nothing wrong with that I guess.

It was more of a Gerry interjection.  Are we sure it is the Hierodules who supply energy weapons to both the Commonwealth and the Ascians?  I think it is them also, but I am not certain we know it from the text, so I mention the alternative.  Like Quetzal, I am a careful man.


> As far as angelic morality, you've already explained it in your argument above. Neither
> angels nor God are subject to judgement by human morality. They are higher beings and
> have their own "mysterious ways" to justify what they do. They act as a scientist acts
> injecting carcinogens into thousands of animals and dissecting them for a higher cause.
> The animals are a lower class of being and have no choice but to submit to judgement of
> their superiors when it comes to moral decisions. Same for the people of Urth, who are
> as dead as a pack of lab rats.

We cannot control their actions.  But we can choose what we call them.  If they abuse us, the word ‘angel’ seems inappropriate.
 

> >Is there any evidence that Inire has been around for 1000 years, or anything like it?

> He has been vizier to all the autarchs. How many years of them have there been?

Ah, I hadn’t realised that.  I thought it was only known that he had been around a while, and served the Old Autarch.  

Where does it say he served all the Autarchs?

 

> >And if he knows that Severian will bring the New Sun, he doesn’t apparently intend to do 
> >anything to stop it.

> He reacted in the same way that Jupiter and Dionysus reacted to the coming of Jesus. Perhaps
> they knew they were about to be swept away, perhaps they didn't. But what were they supposed
> to do about it?

He could have killed Severian in the jungle, for a start.  Okay, you can argue that wibbley-wobbley-timey-wimey stuff would have cancelled his efforts, if he had.  But why do *anything*, if that is the case?

 
> >Indeed, it appears they don’t care who lives or dies so long as human knowledge advances. 

> That might be a way to look at it. I think "spiritual advancement" is a better way of
> understanding what is really going on here. The bottom line is that pretty much every 
> human on Urth does die. We had a similar situation during a Flood here on earth.

Baldanders doesn’t seem big on spiritual advancement, and they help him.  [I also don’t agree that the flood wipes out almost all humans, though I accept it is devastating.]


> >They would willing have worked simultaneously with Josef Mengele and the Manhattan Project. 

> God allowed both those projects to continue simultaneously, didn't He? They both killed a lot
> of people.  Are you implying that one of these actions was "good" and the other "bad"? Or that 
> both are bad? Both good? I'm not quite catching your meaning on this one.      

But was God more than usually present as a special advisor to both projects?  If God is omnipresent, he was present at both, certainly.  And the leaders of both may have prayed for his aid and asserted his presence, for all I know.  But in BotNS, the room in which Baldanders dissects living women is a place in which the Hierodules especially manifest themselves.   (To be fair, they claim that the matter is nothing to do with them.)

- Gerry Quinn
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