Shadow, Chapter X

Son of Witz · 19 Nov 2008, 20:10 · from 2008-November.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org (Son of Witz)
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:10:14 +0000
Subject: (urth) Shadow, Chapter X
Message-ID: <W2452113335238931227125414@webmail32>

>> "Hypostasis" is the wrong term for what I think you're
>> trying to convey.  In Christianity the term is used  of
>> Christ to refer to how He can be simultaneously  God
>> and Man.  Other humans are not God in a really  real
>> sense, but they are images of God.  They share  the
>> divine nature in the way that the painting of a  mountain
>> shares the nature of a mountain--you can learn
>> something about the mountain by looking at it,
>> but not everything.

I'm using the word in the sense of an Instance in the physical world.
IF the Logos manifests as a man, that is an instance of that energy, a hypostasis of that energy into flesh.  So, yes, Jesus is a Hypostasis of the Logos.

>>
>> Christ, Christians believe, shared the nature of God in
>> a really real sense--they are consubstantial, identical
>> in essence.

Yes, I'm not arguing against that.

>In this connection, it might be helpful to remember what Wolfe agrees to in  
>his interview with James Jordan, namely, that Severian is NOT a Christ figure, 
> but is a "Christian figure."  He is not the God-man, the incarnation of the  
>Son, but he is someone whose life (which, of course, begins in BoTNS, with  
>baptism in the chapter "Death and Resurrection") is being conformed to the  
>pattern of Christ's.
> 

I'm convinced that Wolfe is being sort of disingenuous here.
A) He's inspired by Borges, and in Tlon, Orbis and Uqbar, as Mantis wisely points us to as a template of sorts to BoTNS, we find him saying (paraphrasing) that they were devising ways to make a first person narrator who lies and omits such that VERY FEW will understand the amazing or mundane truth within.  Well, what could be more mundane or amazing that the character is an analogue of Christ.  To a huge chunk of the potential audience, this would be a MAJOR turn off. "christian metaphor, NEXT"  and to some, who suss it out and are sensitive to the Christian message, Amazing.

B) many Christians would also find the notion of an Exucutioner Christ to be beyond the pale of heresy and think this book was some sort of evil perversion.

C)I think the ONLY REAL mystery of BoTNS, having just finished the 4 books a second time, is "Is Severian the Conciliator/NewSun"  All the other labyrinthian mysteries are just decoration.  And, URTH of the New Sun answers this mystery. Yes he is.

But understand, when I say Christ or the Logos, I'm not necessarily talking about Jesus.  I don't even believe in Jesus, yet I'm convinced that the LOGOS is very real. The pope recently reminded the world that Christ IS the Logos.  
It seems people have a hard time separating the worldly instance (Jesus) from the Eternal Essence (LOGOS)

And if he's not an analogue Christ, Why is he carrying a cross around for 3 1/2 books?  No one has addressed the ideas about this that I posted in October.  
http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/2008-October/010121.html

~sonofwitz

>
>**************One site has it all. Your email accounts, your social networks, 
>and the things you love. Try the new AOL.com 
>today!(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1212962939x1200825291/aol?redir=http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp
>%26icid=aolcom40vanity%26ncid=emlcntaolcom00000001)
>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net