Original Sin and pagan gods

Iorwerth Thomas · 25 Aug 2006, 19:35 · from 2006-August.txt.gz

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From: iorweththomas at hotmail.com (Iorwerth Thomas)
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2006 20:35:46 +0100
Subject: (urth) Original Sin and pagan gods
In-Reply-To: <007601c6bc37$d94c0960$d53ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
Message-ID: <BAY114-F88E0BA1D8A60C9D6D3D00B9450 at phx.gbl>

I'm a little late to the party, but the passages quoted below could be why I 
kept reading process theology into the BotNS when I first read it.  I think 
there's some evidence that Stapledon was influenced by A N Whitehead, who's 
responsble for that movement.

-- Iorwerth


>From: "Roy C. Lackey" <rclackey at stic.net>
>Reply-To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
>To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
>Subject: Re: (urth) Original Sin and pagan gods
>Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 23:45:40 -0500
>
>Dan'l quoted and wrote:
> >> Somewhere is a statement to the effect that with each cycle there is 
>some
> >> slight improvement made. Maybe, given enough repetitions, something
> >> approaching heavenly perfection will be achieved. Eternity can't get 
>any
> >> longer. <g>
> >
> >I don't recall such a statement, but I've often wondered about this. It
> >implies a structure not unlike that in Stapledon's STAR MAKER, in
> >which the Star Maker creates successively more complex and successful
> >universes (ours being somewhere in the middle) until It creates one which
> >achieves a level of universal sentience and perfection that allows that
> >universe to become, well, the Star Maker. Import that construct to the
> >Christian framework and you get a Creator whose "practice" universes
> >gradually get better and better until finally one is "good enough" for 
>the
> >Creator to be born in it as Christ.
>
>The statement is one page earlier than the other quotes I gave from chapter
>XXXIV in CITADEL.
>------------------------------------------
>     "Just as a flower blooms, throws down its seed, dies, and rises for 
>its
>seed to bloom again, so the universe we know diffuses itself to nullity in
>the infinitude of space, gathers its fragments (which because of the
>curvature of that space meet at last where they began) and from that seed
>blooms again. Each such cycle of flowering and decay marks a divine year.
>      "As the flower that comes is like the flower from which it came, so 
>the
>universe that comes repeats the one whose ruin was its origin; and this is
>as true of its finer features as of its grosser ones: the worlds that arise
>are not unlike the worlds that perished, and are peopled by similar races,
>though just as the flower evolves from summer to summer, all things advance
>by some minute step.
>      "In a certain divine year (a time truly inconceivable to us, though
>that cycle of the universes was but one in an endless succession), a race
>was born that was so like to ours that Master Malrubius did not scruple to
>call it human. It expanded among the galaxies of its universe even as we 
>are
>said to have done in the remote past, when Urth was, for a time, the 
>center,
>or at least the home and symbol, of an empire."
>-------------------------------------------
>
>-Roy
>
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