(urth) Urth - Earth links

[Andrew Mason]

Jerry Friedman wrote:

> I have a great deal of trouble believing that Wolfe wanted to imagine Incarnations in different universe

Well, C.S. Lewis did, and he was pretty conservative. That's not to
say it's actually orthodox, but it's not so blatantly heretical that
no basically orthodox believer could entertain it.

'La Befana' may be relevant here. It's based on the idea that the
Saviour has to be born on every planet. In the author's note Wolfe
makes it clear that this is a joke, a deliberate misinterpretation of
'world'; but that allows that he may actually think it true of
universes.


>or?a world Jesus had been forgotten?and the Roman Catholic Church had disappeared.?

That, I admit, is trickier. But Jesus has not been _wholly_ forgotten,
if the Conciliator is partly based on memories of him, and the passage
in the Chrasmological writings about the beating of animal-sellers
relates to him.

Something very like the Catholic church certainly exists in the past
of Wolfe's world - rituals invovling bread and wine, crosses, saints
(Wolfe in COTO makes it clear that Holy Katharine is indeed the saint
of that name, of Alexandria).  It's fair to ask how, from a Catholic
point of view, it could perish. But we don't know that it has perished
everywhere; there are plenty of places besides Urth and the Whorl
where it may be flourishing.

I'm not actually committed to Jesus existing in the past of Urth; it
may be there was a Jesus-analogue who was ony a prophet, But if he's
not literally present, he's symbolically present. After all, the
various pagan gods who are alluded to aren't literally present either.