Wolfe Heretic?

John Watkins · 16 Jul 2008, 18:06 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:06:53 -0400
Subject: (urth) Wolfe Heretic?
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Oh, no, I don't think he's in the Mel Gibson camp.  Some of his
non-mainstream views seem to be, if anything, on the other side--he
apparently gives great salvific power to faith in non-Christian religions,
and even to faith in religions with explicitly false or evil gods, and he
believes (or says he believes, of course) that pagan gods were real beings
but not demons.  So I'd say he's on the broad-minded side of orthodox
Catholicism.

I think it's true that Wolfe draws from that Neo-Platonic mess that
influenced Gnosticism, the Kabbalah and most of the Western mystical
tradition, but I'm not sure how much of that is setting and how much is
belief.


On 7/16/08, Adam Thornton <adam at io.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 16, 2008, at 12:48 PM, John Watkins wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> So--and I mean this less snarkily than it sounds--he's sort of in the Mel
> Gibson camp then?
>
> Come to think of it, most of the dualisms I can think of are probably
> anti-Manichean, as they demonstrate that the demiurgic creation is a fatally
> flawed creation which ends up evilly even with good initial intent.
>  (_Memorare_, here, or indeed the _WK_ cosmology)
>
> Adam
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