God/Increate in the New Sun

Andrew Mason · 03 Dec 2010, 19:44 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

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From: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2010 19:44:05 +0000
Subject: (urth) God/Increate in the New Sun
Message-ID: <AANLkTimvZrprp7MMzN5vJLDiW7e41JJSo+=2wz997n4t at mail.gmail.com>

Lee Berman wrote:
>
> I could be. But I just can't be sure. I have doubts. A similar discussion cropped
> up recently and I think it was Andrew Mason who pointed to a Christ-figure from a
> story in Long Sun. He was only a little bit perturbed that in the story, the
> Christ-figure was a man who was possessed by The Outsider while he was doing his
> thing in the Temple.

Actually, I was not perturbed at all, because I don't think the error
is Wolfe's. As I read it, Silk is remembering a story from the
Chrasmologic Writings. The authors of the Writings were not Christians
(or Muslims, or Stoics, or members of any of the other movements they
used as sources), so they would naturally tell the story in  terms
they thought their readers would find plausible.

> I'll again mention the final denouement of BotNS which takes place in the future of
> the Long and Short Sun stories. After all Severian's efforts and after so many people
> killed, I would at least hope for Ushas to show signs of being a Christian planet.
> Instead we have a rather gnostic group of four opposite gods, dark and light, male
> and female. And a demon swimming around in the ocean.
>
> Maybe Severian, as Sleeper, will somehow change this to monotheism and get them to
> believe in a Savior.

Severian says there is a single God, the Increate, and the priest
agrees with him in principle, saying that this is true for the gods,
but for ordinary people there are other gods who are very great and
deserve to be honoured. This seems to link up with the description of
the Outsider (in the list of names in _Exodus_) as 'the God of gods'.

Wolfe is said to believe that pagan gods exist. This does not stop him
being a monotheist in the sense of believing in only one God, in the
sense that the traditional monotheistic faiths conceive of God. (And a
lot of ancient pagans _did_ believe in a single creator God, with the
other gods being either aspects of him or subordinate beings.)  The
position that Severian's community have reached at the end of _Urth_
may not seem inappropriate to him - though I think he does probably
expect it to develop further.

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