Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2003 12:11:23 +0000 (GMT)
From: Josh Geller 
Subject: Re: (urth) RTTW Chras writings


I really do think it is from "Hamlet's Mill".

Anyone who enjoys Gene Wolfe's fiction owes it to themselves to read
Hamlet's Mill.

J.

____


On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Andrew Bollen wrote:

> Crush the sleuth writes:
>
> A quick scan of the introduction to "The Greek Myths" did not find this one.
> Nor did I find it in Graves' introduction to Bullfinch's "The Fabled Age."
> The more I think about it, the less it sounds like something Graves would
> say.
>
> I didn't find it in Frazer's "The Golden Bough," albeit I was only
> scanning - still, it is surely post-Jungian considering the "psychology"
> reference. I really really wanted to find it in C.S. Lewis' "Myth Became
> Fact" but it's not there. But Lewis talks a lot about the meaning, purpose,
> and value of myth so there is a lot of places to look there.  Hmmm, I didn't
> check Tolkien's essay introducing "Leaf by Niggle."
>
> ------------------
>
> Those were the kind of places I'd been thinking of, too & I agree - *please*
> let it not be Campbell! I think C.S. Lewis is a good bet.
>
> The second sentence starts: "It [myth] is wholly other ..."  That "wholly
> other" phrase is suggestive, being apparently a common term in in theology
> for the Godhead. It seems to be most closely associated with the writing of
> Rudolf Otto, esp. "Idea of the Holy". This is a work which influenced C.S.
> Lewis, who of course saw Christianity as being a myth of the same kind as
> the classical myths, except for being *true*. For Lewis et al, and maybe
> Wolfe, it would seem that the territory of myth is the same numinous, wholly
> other realm inhabited by the Godhead.
>
> This from a commentary site on Otto:
>
> "The Natural mystery indicates a secret or a mystery that is alien to us,
> incomprehensible, and unexplained. Like Sherlock Holmes, we may clear up
> this level of natural mystery. Religious mystery is of a higher order. It
> can never be solved, cleared up or otherwise resolved. It is in some sense
> Wholly Other, something "which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the
> intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the
> limits of the 'canny', and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with
> blank wonder and astonishment." One frequent response is the human attempt
> to rationalize or explain away the Mystery with theories. This transforms
> Mystery into a problem. Otto points out that this is invalid: "The truly
> mysterious object is beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not only
> because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we
> come upon something inherently 'wholly other', whose kind and character are
> incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in a
> wonder that strikes us chill and numb." Mystery is something we can feel,
> "without being able to give it clear conceptual expression."
>
> And this brief commentary on a work by John Crossan (of all people) kind of
> ties things together:
>
> Myth ... is rooted in extra-ordinary encounters with that which is Wholly
> Other than the world as we know it. When we read of the Paradise that is in
> Eden from which we are barred by "the cherubim and a perpetually revolving,
> flaming sword" (Gen 3:24), we know that the writer speaks of a realm that is
> Other, the Garden of God from which man has been expelled. By definition,
> this place cannot be found in our world. This does not say, however, that
> Paradise is not actual; merely that it does not exist in the world of
> objects around us the way women baking bread do
>
>
>
> --
>


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