Grand Unified Theory

Lee Berman · 27 Aug 2010, 16:40 · from 2010-August.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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:40:05 -0400
Subject: (urth) Grand Unified Theory
Message-ID: <SNT123-W4361FEBFBE7ACCD3831ECCF860 at phx.gbl>

Mark Lewin-

>Gene Wolfe- One of the places where I probably split off from
>conventional Catholic thinking is that I* believe that the gods of paganism
>were real*. I don't think that they are entitled to the worship that they
>received from the pagans. I think what many of the biblical writers are
>saying is, "Yes, these are real powers, but it is wrong for you to give to
>them the honors that are due to God alone."

Yes, thanks Mark. There are other Wolfe quotes which as clearly and unequivocally
say the same thing about Gene Wolfe's personal religious philosophy. This is the
most basic tenet of my Grand Unified Theory.

For me it is a small intuitive leap to further assume that the angels and
demons of the Bible fit into a similar explanatory framework as gods and monsters
of pagan mythology for Gene Wolfe. Same story, same "beings", different names and
interpretations of their behavior.

Thus in BotNS there are some aliens who are noble and beautiful and others who are..
well, not so much.

I think it is easy to accept that, hey, Tzadkiel and Famulimus are good, Abaia and Erebus
are bad.

But what about Father Inire and The Cumaean? How are we to judge their behavior? Does their
hooded, cowled, old appearance mean anything? Are they more Yoda or Emperor Palpatine?

Hierodules wear masks to cover their youth and beauty while their height remains apparent. I
get the impression that Father Inire's and The Cumaean's shortness and oldness is not a
disguse. So, I must guess they are not analogues to angelic beings but are rather analogues to
pagan gods or fallen angels or perhaps both. Pagan gods and fallen angels might be exactly
the same thing in Gene Wolfe's philosophy.

(I think the issue is clouded by the fact that many of the fallen angels of Judeo-Christian
belief can take a form which is beautiful to humanity. But I think that form is always described
as beautiful and seductive, appealing to our base instincts rather than beautiful and noble
appealing to our higher, divine nature. This is only fair- God has to give us SOME means of
determining which is the right choice when faced with good and evil alternatives)

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