the great god Pan

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 24 Jan 2003, 17:09 · from urth-v0301.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: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (urth) the great god Pan
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 10:09:56 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0301-2809 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0301/2809.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Russell then Nutria wrote:

>> I think we are to view them as actual gods, not just
>> Latro's hallucinations,

I think rather "actual 'supernatural' beings," though not
necessarily gods. -- I put the word "supernatural" in quotes
because I believe, and I believe that Wolfe either believes
or, at least, takes as a given for his fictions, that the
word "supernatural" implies a false (possibly a Manicheistic)
division. The only "supernatural" being, by this understanding,
is God; the rest are all creatures, and, as such, bounded,=3D20
delimited as it were, by the rules of their making. These rules=3D20
may not be exactly the same from one type of being to another,=3D20
of course, but all creatures exist within some such bounds.
The point here: beings like the "gods" of the _Soldier_ books,
or of the Short/Long Sun books, are much (infinitely) more like
us than they are like the one supernatural Being.=3D20

>> but Wolfe says in one interview that they were "not worthy=3D20
>> of being worshipped." Would that make them demons?
>=3D20
>          Probably. Fallen angels.

Not necessarily ... demons are not the only creatures "not
worthy of being worshipped." There are, for example, you
and me and the rest of the human race. Non-fallen angels,=3D20
also, are not worthy of being worshipped. In point of fact,
from the Catholic, or merely Christian, point of view, all
creatures have this in common ...

... but creatures mistakenly worshipped are not necessarily
fallen angels. Wandering back to that C**F** discussion, I
hurry to point out that both Tolkien and Lewis give examples
in their fictions of how beings may be taken for gods and=3D20
still be under the Obedience -- indeed, that being taken for
gods may be an aspect of their obedience. (The clearest=3D20
example is the wizard on the island of the Dufflepuds, in=3D20
THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER.)=3D20

And, too, there is Wolfe's interesting dictum that what
pretends to be a god tends to become the god ... to which=3D20
end I point to Lewis again; his last, and possibly best,
novel, TILL WE HAVE FACES, makes use of the Greek Psyche
-- himself disguised as a local god -- as a disguise or
mask for the one God. (Well, sort of ... that's at least=3D20
one well-worn interpretation ...)

>>  What is the orthodox Catholic position these days
>> on rival religions and their supernatural beings?

...deleting James' response...

As far as I've been able to tell (and this means, among
other things, having searched the Catechism of the Catholic
Church [CCC], a more-or-less complete document of What=3D20
Catholics Are Expected To Believe), there is no officially=3D20
orthodox position on this matter ... which would mean that=3D20
a Catholic is at liberty to believe what s/he chooses,=3D20
_provided_ it doesn't contradict any of the things a=3D20
Catholic _is_ expected to believe.=3D20

A great deal of Catholic ink has been spilled over the years
concerning the idea that pagan religions are best understood
as a "preparation" for the Gospel (as, indeed, is the Jewish
Law); for example, this is referred to in CCC at #843. The
exact mechanism by which this "preparation" is performed,
however, is left open -- and can mean anything from a natural
tendency of the human mind towards God (CCC #781) to purely
speculative and para-orthodox ideas about God using angels,
or even demons, to plant religious ideas and thus to prepare=3D20
peoples for the Gospel.

--Blattid

--=20

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