Gnostic Wolfe

Josh Geller · 11 Oct 2002, 00:46 · from urth-v0210.mbox · original

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: Josh Geller <dclxvi at dclxvi.best.vwh.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Gnostic Wolfe
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 00:46:00 +0000 (GMT)
Message-ID: <urth-v0210-1847 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0210/1847.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Thu, 10 Oct 2002 DSG20001 at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 10/10/2002 9:43:11 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
> straight at email.unc.edu writes:

> If Whorl=3DGarden and Pas=3DGod,

Pas =3D=3D Demiourgos

>                               then Outsider=3D???

Outsider =3D=3D God

> The view that religion and politics aren't subjects for polite conversati=
on
> doesn't appear to be a view Gene Wolfe fans can casually adopt. (Which may
> account for a great deal of his appeal.)

> I don't know nearly enough about the various Gnostic doctrines, but the m=
ore
> I do learn about them, the more affinities I notice between certain of th=
ose
> doctrines and the BotLS.

> I suppose readers must take Wolfe at his word when he confesses that he's=
 an
> orthodox Catholic--while keeping in mind that at least some elements of h=
is
> theology are decidedly nonorthodox. For example, his belief in the (prior=
?)
> existence of pagan gods and goddesses.

That's in the Bible.

'Prior', that's a loaded term. We're working with two entirely different
ways of looking at Time.

> I'll leave to the theologians on this remarkable list the question of whe=
ther
> Wolfe's additions lean toward the heretical or merely the eccentric.

Wolfe's orthodox.

He communicates, you know?

He's learned. He knows many of the more poorly documented features
of the religion and the picture of the World associated with it.

>                                                            But in
> appraising his works, particularly the BotLS, it might be useful to
> pursue in a little more depth what appear--at first blush, anyway--to be
> striking similarities between Wolfe and Gnostic thought.

Wolfe's gnostic only in the sense that Catholic or Orthodox Christianity
is a subset of gnosticism.

But in fact the name and concept of gnosticism was invented by the
Orthodox ("correct-believing") to seperate themselves from the heterodox
("different-believing").

Before what became the Orthodox church got into bed with the Roman state,
there were just different kinds of Christians and such arguing amongst
each other.

After the 330's, the Orthodox owned the cops, and enthusiastically
employed them suppressing everyone who 'believed different'.

> The online Gnostic Library (http://www.webcom.com/~gnosis/library.html)

www.enemies.com is my favorite.

=2E

--=20

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