Agia's Weapons

David Stockhoff · 20 Dec 2011, 14:37 · from 2011-December.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:37:04 -0500
Subject: (urth) Agia's Weapons
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On 12/20/2011 5:09 AM, Daniel Petersen wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 3:23 AM, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com 
> <mailto:severiansola at hotmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     >Daniel Petersen:
>     >"What I was going to tell you was that the existence of that
>     relic seems to
>     >have given some people the idea that the Conciliator used claws
>     as weapons.
>     >I have sometimes doubted that he existed; but if such a person
>     ever lived,
>     >I'm sure that he used his weapons largely against himself.
>
>
>     Great passage quote! I interpret this to coincide with the fact of
>     Severian becoming highly
>
>     drained and exhausted each time he uses The Claw. Also the
>     recipients of Severian's power
>
>     find the blue light to be warm (as they absorb the positive energy
>     I guess) while
>
>     Severian himself feels it to be cold.
>
>
>     It may also allude to the pains and tribulations of Jesus,
>     Hercules, Oedipus and any other
>
>     hero Wolfe may have drawn from in creating Severian. Like
>     Severian, these guys had the
>
>     weight of the world on their shoulders and suffered much personal
>     injury in response.
>
>
> On this note, I want to weigh in on something I've wanted to comment 
> on for a while.  Surely Wolfe sees all other heroes and legends and 
> divinities and rites and so on finding their fulfilment in Christ as 
> understood by the Catholic Church.  He certainly allusively invites us 
> to feel resonances with Hercules or Dionysus or whoever... but surely 
> these summed up, centred, and superseded in Christ?  (For Wolfe.  And 
> his fiction.)
>
> (Leslie Newbiggin, a 20th century British theologian and missionary in 
> India for thirty years, would be a prominent exponent of this kind of 
> missiology and soteriology - i.e. rather than Christ simply destroying 
> and replacing all other 'pagan rivals', he fulfills what is best in 
> them.  This idea seems intimately woven right through Wolfe's works to 
> me.)


Absolutely.

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