An Old mystery ...

John Watkins · 04 Dec 2008, 20:50 · from 2008-December.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 15:50:41 -0500
Subject: (urth) An Old mystery ...
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> I can totally understand that.  I wouldn't say the Christian God is a
> Monster at all.  In fact, I think that, for myself (admittedly a
> non-Christian, but not an Athiest or even Agnostic really) part of my
> understanding of the Absolute (for want of a better word) is an
> understanding of the 'impersonal' nature of destruction.  That while the
> Christian God, in his old testament form, destorys the world so Noah can
> survive and give rise to a better humanity, or destorys Sodom because of
> it's wickedness, or encourage the Jews to smash the infants of their enemies
> upon th rocks...these things to not indicate Evil.  The situation is bigger
> than that.  And the sorts of arguments where people try to 'disprove' or
> 'invalidate' God in these terms are juvinille and unsublte.  (And here, I'm
> not attributing these arguments to you...the opposite actually).
>

We agree here.

> So, for me, the destruction of Urth to create Ushas is not a monstrous act.
> If there is no afterlife in New Sun, if the Increate isn't real (no matter
> how conscious his servants are of his wishes), then the destruction of Ushas
> is a brutal and monstrous one.  If the Increate is real, and there is some
> sort of Life of the Soul in the books (of which textual evidence you've
> asked for I would posit all of the discussion of the survival of Severian's
> 'personality' through so many types of death, and the corridors of time
> themsevles) then this act, the destruction of Urth, the 'hitting of the
> reset button' is no longer monstrous, but another instance of the Increate
> hitting the reset button like he did with Noah, or Sodom, or countless other
> examples.

My point isn't that there's no Life of the Soul in the Urth books--I
think there pretty clearly is, at least of some sort.

But that Life of the Soul seems wholly divorced from the flooding of
Urth.  There is nothing literally redemptive about the destruction of
Urth--it's just a big eugenics project, undertaken by artificial
lifeforms who claim to be doing the will of God.  I think the
comparison with Noah is much more apt than the comparison with the
Second Coming, and maybe the reading that Severian is "the kind of
Messiah humanity can produce," or maybe even "the kind of Messiah
humanity deserves" is dead-on.

I'll just reply to Son of Witz here as well:  if the Sun was dying for
natural causes, or because of the actions of Typhon, and if there was
no feasible way to evacuate Urth to other settled planets, and the
destruction of Urth was the only way to cause this "long term
resurrection," then I would agree that it is a "good thing" in the
ultimate sense, and the casualties are unfortunately necessary.

But we know, textually, that the Hierogrammates are behind the dying
Sun, that there are other settled planets, and that evacuation was
feasible.  The difference between an airlift and the flooding, other
than the millions (billions?) of lives saved, is that it wouldn't
advance the Hierogrammates' eugenic agenda.

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