(urth) resurrecting a 2002 thread that posits an alternative lineage for Sev

Matthew Weber palaeologos at gmail.com
Thu Oct 2 07:39:23 PDT 2014


Through faith in what, Himself?

Christ is a hypostasis of divinity and humanity.  It's correct to say that
his power is not magical (i.e. granted him by some other, more powerful
agency).  It is no more magical than my power to use my arm to lift a cup
of coffee to my mouth so I can drink it.  My power to do so is inherent, as
is Christ's to perform signs.

Insofar as Wolfe is an orthodox RC, it can be assumed that this is what he
believes as well.



On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 7:14 AM, António Marques <entonio at gmail.com> wrote:

> And Christ performed miracles through faith, not by the use of some
> magical power belonging to himself.
>
> On 2 October 2014 15:04, Brad Henry <bradhenry101 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> And part of catholic teaching is that saints are not simply 'controlled
>> by christ' in their working of miracles (many saints have performed
>> miracles like severian') but they are in the process of 'theosis' (or,
>> sometimes called 'divination'), being made into gods, that culminates in
>> their resurrection to immortality. It is a christian quip: "God became man,
>> so that man might become (a) god." The traditional biblical cite for this
>> is 2 Peter 1.3-4.
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 9:47 AM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> This is obvious, but for me the miracles make him pretty explicitly a
>>> Judeo-Christian wonderworker/savior with a little sin and torture thrown in
>>> for good measure (bleeding from the forehead when he sees the many
>>> eye-winged butterfly, turning water to wine, resurrecting the dead,
>>> healing, carrying a huge cross shaped torture device which is occasionally
>>> planted in the ground, being tempted by Satan almost verbatim (but never,
>>> say, transforming into an animal like a Pagan god)) - my earliest
>>> impression when I was a young boy was not that he was a normal person but a
>>> Christ.  The pagan gods are the unnatural creatures in New Sun whose
>>> mythologies are incorporated and transformed into Christian stories [such
>>> as the flood and the story of Genesis]. (At least throughout The Book of
>>> the New Sun).
>>>
>>> I never fancied Sev ordinary. While clearly Wolfe loves playing with
>>> mythical creatures, the importance of his Catholicism to his works
>>> shouldn't be understated.
>>>
>>> On Thursday, October 2, 2014, Lee <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> >On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 7:35 AM, David Stockhoff <
>>>> dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Severian is a (pagan) god. He has a presentiment of it at the beginning
>>>> of his story but by the end
>>>>
>>>> of Citadel, we are meant to understand that he was The Conciliator and
>>>> he will be The New Sun.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> By the end of Urth of the New Sun we also understand that in addition
>>>> to his superhuman healing
>>>>
>>>> powers, he was also worshipped as Apu Punchau, he can breathe
>>>> underwater, he can travel through time
>>>>
>>>>  he is immortal (though not invulnerable), and at the very end he once
>>>> again finds himself worshipped as
>>>>
>>>> a god.
>>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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-- 
Matt +

For all that nature by her mother wit
Could frame in earth.
    Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), *The Faerie Queene [1590], bk. IV [1596],
canto 10, st. 21*
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