Ziggurat confusion

Alex David Groce · 24 Jan 2000, 18:39 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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From: Alex David Groce <Alex_Groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) Ziggurat confusion
Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 18:39:19
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In fact, thinking about this--doesn't Severian?  Horn?  Silk? someone somew=
here
say "we all destroy what we love best."  THIS is the sense in which Emory
kills the coyote and his son--a strong analogy, in my mind, to the ways
Severian and Dorcas truly torture each other--with, I think, love as the ro=
ot
of the pain. =20

BLUE seems to deal with this in a central way, as well.  I think I've said
before that Wolfe seems to have a strong similarity with Dante's exploration
in The Divine Comedy (adopted from St. Thomas, of course)--that only where=20
there is love can there be real moral pain or evil--at the root of the worst
things lies a perversion or erroneous hierarchy of loves--for Dante, and, I
suspect Wolfe, a hierarchy that mistakes some lesser object for God and inv=
erts
the ladder of love into a parodic downward spiral.  Thus the insistence that
although Abaia/Erebus etc. can thwart the Increate to the extent that they
violate, presumably, the inherent good of their own natures, they cannot fa=
il
to serve also as unwilling and angry agents of Providence--another theme in=
 the
philosophies I'm guessing Wolfe is most comfortable with (anyway, the ones
Chesterton's POV is based upon*).

* for a (very Christian-biased, of course) treatment of the parts of Aquina=
s/
Augustine/Anselm/Aristotle and other "A"-list philosophers who seem to have=
 an
influence on Wolfe, I suggest Etienne Gilson's _The Spirit of Medieval=20
Philosophy_, especially as Wolfe doesn't claim to have read them all in the
original Latin/Greek or anything.

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)
Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department
8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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