Silk corrupted?

John Watkins · 22 Jan 2009, 22:01 · from 2009-January.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:01:44 -0500
Subject: (urth) Silk corrupted?
In-Reply-To: <4978E668.90307 at verizon.net>
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On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 4:34 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>wrote:

> Oh, come on. Christ has had a dual nature only since the Nicene Creed of
> 325!
>
> Seriously, you could just as well be describing the Monophysite or Arian
> Christs as Severian and Silk. Let's recall that you aren't comparing a real
> thing to a fictional thing. You are comparing fictional things to one
> another. As far as I can see, THEY ARE ALL CHRISTS. Wolfe's religion is
> secondary, because he could be holding up heretical Christs to compare them
> to the Chalcedonic Christ. We know his personal preference. So what?
>
> THEY ARE ALL CHRISTS. Even if he is deliberately showing us only how
> partial they are---which I do not believe.
>
> And this is true regardless of your religious beliefs, aside from Bible
> fundamentalist Bible literalism.
>
> Just saying.

I don't see your argument here, other than the use of the slippery term
"Christs."  If Wolfe is deliberately contrasting what he believes to be the
imperfection of a uni-nature messiah with that he believes to be the
perfection of a dual-nature messiah, then of course his religion is
relevant--primary, even--to understanding his project.

I tend to think that the Eastern concept of *theosis *is at work in Severian
and Silk, but lots of ink and no small amount of blood have been spilled
distinguishing the idea of *becoming a more perfect image of God *from the
idea of *becoming God*.

That distinction is precisely what's lost by using the term "Christ."
"Christ" just means "annointed one" and in that sense of course Severian and
Silk (and Able and Neo and Frodo and Harry Potter and Starbuck and King
David and Barack Obama and Sidney Crosby) are "Christs"--they are annointed
ones, chosen among others for an extraordinary task.  None of them, however,
is meant to be understood as the Godhead incarnate, which is the
natural-language translation of the term "Christ" due to its overwhelming
use as an honorific for the historical/religious/mythological/whatwillyou
figure of Jesus of Nazareth.

Your point is very insightful as to Arian--while Arians, like Catholics,
orthodox, and most Protestant Christians accepted that Jesus was *the
Christ, *i.e., the Chosen One of God, they denied his *divine essence, *unlike
those other groups.  Wolfe, as a Roman Catholic, does not deny the *divine
essence *of Christ and has not, as far as I can tell, created a character
meant to embody the divine essence.  He has, however, created a number of
characters with messianic (or counter-messianic, i.e., Number Five)
functions.

To the extent that these characters' lives follow the type of Jesus's life,
in Wolfe, at least, they are meant as *imitatio dei.  *Wolfe has said
himself that Severian's journey is the Christian journey--by his apeing of
Jesus, Severian becomes more Christ-like (Jesus-like is too ugly a
neologism), while still falling short of divine moral perfection.  Silk
likewise, although Silk is a far better man than Severian (or perhaps merely
a man with far more advantages--a seed sown on good earth, not in thorns).

I think it is a very great error to read Wolfe's "Christ figures" as
representations of the divinity except in a very limited and incomplete
sense.  This isn't because I'm concerned about ideological purity--it's
because I think that a great error in foundational thinking about these
complex texts inevitably leads to other errors.

As for that "limited and incomplete sense", I suppose tremendous things
could be written on the idea of the Divine peeking from behind the curtain
in Wolfe:  the suggestion that gods in the Whorl, when the possess someone,
leave something of themselves behind, for example, or the possibility that
eating the flesh of a higher being raises oneself up a level in the Wizard
Knight.  That stuff, to me, is much more interesting than the idea that a
practising Catholic wrote a story about an Incarnation of the Most High who
rapes, tortures, kills, commits adultery at the first opportunity, lies
regularly and ultimately leads to the near-genocide of the human race.

>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:20:32 -0500 (EST)
> From: brunians at brunians.org
> Subject: Re: (urth) Silk corrupted?
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Message-ID: <3026.67.142.130.20.1232655632.squirrel at brunians.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
>
> Severian (and Silk) are human beings. They each have a single, human,
> nature. Christ is unique, in Christianity in that He has a dual nature,
> being both human and God. He is the only being in the Christian World that
> has such a dual nature. He can manifest through other beings, and this is
> what is happening with Severian and Silk.
>
>
>
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