just in case anyone was wondering

My favorite Lewis is Till We Have Faces.  After that it is That Hideous Strength.  Crush gave a good critique of the book, but I just wanted to point out that Lewis was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn for a while and denounced it but used the idea of Planetary Intelligences for his Greek God/Angel Ossyra or however you spell them. I mean it's inherently Cabbalistic.

Does anyone consider the Sun series one novel?  I mean, it's one history, but is it one novel?  I definitely agree with everyone's ideas about gnosticism, but the idea of secret knowledge is a strange contradiction in Christian mythology on the part of the Church. If there is something you don't know, of course it's secret.  If God is unknown or unknowable, of course he's secret too.  Really, what the Chruch is saying is that we have it all here, the manual for the universe with this Bible and this catachism, you're set, just believe in Christ and go to confession, never mind spiritual growth  We don't even need revelation or prophecy anymore.  And then people wonder why Evangelicism started in America, born out of Protestantism which was as mechanistic as Newton's physics.  This is also why Eastern religions are now popular in america.  People want to undergo transformed.  All the Church offers the Christian is the transformations of death and the resurrection but none for the life between now and death.  It seems with the advent of modern psychology Christian churchs at least in America have changed their tune to a certain degree, there is a 12 step self help program for everything, but for a long time Protestanism was admit your a sinner, believe in Christ, and before that, not even those simple coercions were a gurantee.  The moment you remove ritual, culture, and history is the moment you lose relevance.  

I want to throw out some questions we've been talking about but turn them on Wolfe.  I usually read books without thinking of what the author believes, but in the case of Wolfe and Tolkien, it's kind of neccesary, and also I want to know what Wolfe thinks as a reader of his own work not as an author trying to communicate a specific message.

I wonder what Wolfe actually thinks about the gnosticism in his novels?  Do you think Wolfe believes Silke's enlightenment could happen?  Do you think he believes personalities can be copied, like Hans Moravec or Kurzweil, scanned into a computer, does he equate the mind with the soul like Descrates?  And does he think the chems, Maytera Marble, Hammerstone, or Counselor Loris, Lemur, etc are people (Even if the bodies of counsel have died)?  Do the inhumi have souls or are they in the process of gaining souls?  Would that mean for Wolfe that Jonas had a soul?  The elves in the Wizard Knight don't have souls, but he implies that they will could recieve souls, but this is a convention of faerie stories, the soulless elves.  He also talks about Baby and Seawrack both becoming people.  Does language consittute personhood for Wolfe?  Do you need to be a person to have a soul?