Wolfe Heretic?

John Watkins · 16 Jul 2008, 17:48 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:48:21 -0400
Subject: (urth) Wolfe Heretic?
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Message-ID: <93d4039f0807161048x2f0f9f64wae0e77189c2aa533 at mail.gmail.com>

Catholic Christianity neither currently nor historically requires pacifism.


Wolfe is not a heretic.  He plays with extra-orthodox but not unorthodox
ideas, if that's clear--he believes or seems to believe many things that are
permissible but not required for a Catholic, but I've yet to encounter an
overt endorsement of some doctrine that Catholics are forbidden to hold in
his works.

As for Manicheanism, I don't detect much of that in his works at all.
Manicheanism is dualistic, and the cosmology of The Wizard-Knight more or
less explicitly rejects dualism, as do a number of bits and pieces
throughout the Urth cycle.


On 7/16/08, Adam Thornton <adam at io.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Jul 16, 2008, at 12:17 PM, brunians at brunians.org wrote:
>
>
>> Seriously: we're supposed to be talking about the writings of someone
>>> who is ... famously Catholic, with ... some really nonstandard theology,
>>>
>>
>> I know Wolfe considers himself to be orthodox. What bits of heresy do you
>> accuse him of? I don't see any that's explicitly in there....
>>
>
> The outright rejection of pacifism (which I believe is pretty clear in the
> interviews) seems to directly repudiate much of the Sermon on the Mount,
> which I think I am being pretty orthodox in believing to be among the very
> centralmost of Christian positions (although, yes, of course you can point
> to the moneychangers, and, yes, then you can point to Christ carrying a
> scourge...but I think that most orthodox theologians would react pretty
> violently to the suggestion of Christ-as-Torturer, which is among the
> fundamental metaphors underlying the New Sun).
>
> I keep getting whiffs of Manicheanism as well, although that is proving
> much harder to pin down.
>
> Adam
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