In Glory Like Their Star

Nathan Spears · 19 Apr 2007, 02:54 · from 2007-April.txt.gz

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From: spearofsolomon at yahoo.com (Nathan Spears)
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:54:00 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) (Urth) In Glory Like Their Star
Message-ID: <136978.23481.qm at web54409.mail.yahoo.com>

At 05:10 PM 4/18/2007, you wrote:

However:

"It is the interior change that suffices, the transformation that
rewards"

This statement is Christian doctrine reworded, so I doubt that Wolfe
intended it to bathe the narrator in a negative light.  Unless the
story is also a commentary on how missionaries to impoverished nations
should spend more time distributing medicine and less time evangelizing.

>          I have not
reread the story before writing this post, so this may be off the mark;
but a comment: This is not Christian but Gnostic doctrine. Wolfe is a
good sacramentalist, and for him the Kingdom is surely more than mere
interior change.

I didn't mean to imply that it was the entirety of Christian doctrine.  I think Matthew 5 and Mark 7 show that Jesus was as interested in the state of men's hearts as with their behavior.  I also didn't intend to start a lengthy religious debate, esp. over terminology, so please eschew that path if at all possible.  But my feelings about the aliens in the story were initially that they were trying to "enlighten" man by helping him learn what it had taken their race millennia to learn - and that this teaching, while aphoristic, was meaningful.

Mr. Ellis expressed the idea that Wolfe might have been feeling indignation at the idea that "primitive" man would have been unable to distinguish between alien and god.  I think that if that is our starting position, we ought also to feel indignation at the prospect of aliens "teaching" us anything - philosophical or practical.  "We were alive before you got here, so we were doing something right," as it were.  How would we (the primitive humans) be any more able to distinguish between "good technology" and "bad technology" than we would good/bad philosophy?  For instance, aliens that gave us nuclear technology, or something superior, might be calculating that, as an immature, fractured species, we would manufacture superbombs galore from our own materials and blow ourselves off the planet, saving the aliens a lot of expense.  That's not a bad idea for a story, actually.

My point is that I don't think Wolfe was trying to draw that distinction (that the alien "teaching" was bogus or useless) - he would have focused on it more.  I think the distinction is between the alien's teaching and what the alien actually does to the human - he betrays his own doctrines and murders this (quasi) innocent guy.

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