Sacred Ground: A Review and Analysis of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun

By Man of Nessus

Amid the withdrawal of Christianity from mainstream society, one growing up in the secular world could easily come to believe that there is no God looking after us, that we have entered a new age of recognition that religions are just relics of the past, created by a more primitive man. While this belief may have been combined by a sort of techno-optimism in the 20th century, the decay of our basic civilizational capabilities in the 21st century has shattered the secular dream of a Star Trek-esque interstellar utopia. The Book of the New Sun tells the story of a young man growing up in a similar world, but one in what appears to be the distant future, a society that has abandoned God so many times over, and has had its technological dreams shattered so many times over, that it exists in a resigned and apathetic decline. The sun is slowly flickering out, and everyone despondently and nihilistically awaits the icy grave of their civilization, culture, and spirituality. Our protagonist, Severian, has been raised in a guild of torturers, to live out his life as a callous functionary of the state. After being exiled for showing mercy, Severian embarks on a literal and metaphysical journey through this fallen world, and discovers profound truths about the nature of God along his way.

The Perennial Nature of God in Creation

The world of Urth is one of decay, depravity, and darkness. Human society is almost unrecognizable from what we know today, and immorality pollutes the lifeblood of what remains. Wolfe doesn't portray this immorality as having been recently infused into the society, in the jarring way that it appears to Christians today. So much time has passed that the immorality has become an essential part of society, taken for granted as much as the color of the sky. As Catholics, we tend to see societies built on immorality as ones that cannot stand for long, as they have set themselves up in opposition to natural law. While this may be true for cultures that retain a youthful vigor, the culture amid the dying sun is one that has resigned itself to its fate, and has accepted depravity in the way that an elderly person may learn to accept a terminal illness. Wolfe plays with the idea of moral and cultural relativism by immersing us in the mind of Severian, a torturer, who has internalized the morality of the world around him. The surreal and disorienting nature of this world is furthered by the fact that the culture is based on a series of poorly reflected collective memories; critical history exists as more of a mythologized haze than as actual truth. However, unlike the culture he lives in, Severian's memory is perfect. Perhaps because of this, he is able to cut through the haze of his time, and discover the transcendent, eternal truths that underlie our universe. The book opens with Severian saying "It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future." Given the cyclical nature of the material world that the book explores, and the well-known rhyming of history, it is theoretically possible that a perfect understanding of the past would give one a perfect understanding of the future. To have this timeless understanding would make one like God, which is likely one reason why Severian is chosen to bring the New Sun.

Throughout this book, Severian slowly realizes which things are truly undying, which will survive no matter how many thousands of years have passed, and no matter how much society has been transformed. His journey begins when he implicitly recognizes the immorality of institutional torture and performs an act of mercy to one of his clients. Severian is eventually drawn to a sort of remnant of the Catholic Church, surviving in the form of wandering nuns called the Pelerines. Severian comes to possess a relic of the Conciliator, a Christ-esque figure of the distant past. Despite the fact that the relic apparently bestows Severian with supernatural powers, he still recognizes that it belongs to these Pelerines to safeguard, in much the same way that the Church safeguards the magisterium. Early in his journey, Severian also follows a group of materialist rebels working for demonic creatures, but even they hunger for the Eucharist in the depraved, perverse form of consuming the flesh of their own comrade. With the use of the Alzabo drug, they are able to acquire the memories of that deceased comrade, a woman named Thecla who Severian had been infatuated with during his time as a torturer. For others, Thecla survives only in a temporary and vaguely hallucinogenic fashion, but due to Severian's perfect memory, Thecla becomes a permanent part of his psyche. He then learns the depths of the woman he had been entranced by, and discovers that she has many unsavory qualities. Severian's perfect memory allows him to approximate the depth and timelessness of God, and in the classic way that God brings good out of evil, this perverted Eucharist allows him to approach the breadth of God, in the way that God has a perfect, limitless understanding of human beings.

It's frequently said that "God is dead" in modern, Western society. In the world of the dying sun, most people act as if God was never alive at all. God exists in the form of a nebulous folk religion that references the "Pancreator" and has developed a cult around the belief that the Conciliator will come again and bring a New Sun. The book explores how these reflections show the existence of the real thing. Space travel is possible in this world because of a method of light refraction, where the created reflection necessitates the existence of a thing for it to reflect, bringing an entity into being. Wolfe shows how crude reflections, such as the many sun gods of primitive societies, can only exist if they are reflecting something truly present. Despite the seeming distance of God in this society, one that literally lives in darkness, Severian eventually has an epiphany where he realizes that the "Pancreator" has not abandoned the world to wallow in a gnostic wasteland, but is present throughout all of His creation, and the many reflections of God that exist in even this fallen world, provide testament to His eternal presence.

Symbolic Theology

"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life - they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic."

Even when it appears God has forsaken the world, He makes his presence known through natural symbols. St. John Cassian, and most other early Christians, believed that scripture should be interpreted in four ways; literally, allegorically, anagogically (spiritually), and tropologically (morally). “The one Jerusalem can be understood in

four different ways, in the historical sense as the city of the Jews, in allegory as the Church of Christ, in anagoge as the heavenly city of God ‘which is the mother of us all’ (Gal 4:26), in the tropological sense as the human soul.” The Book of the New Sun can also be understood in these four ways, and Wolfe implies that reality itself should be viewed through this lens as well. At one point in The Shadow of the Torturer, Severian witnesses a miracle. The tent of the Pelerines rises up and flies above the city of Nessus. In attempting to explain this to his companion, Dorcas, Severian describes these multiple meanings and how the third meaning "is the transsubstantial meaning. Since all objects have their ultimate Origin in the Pancreator, and all were set in motion by him, so all must express his will - which is the higher reality." An old woman later describes the skepticism of her grandson-in-law: "When my grandson-in-law heard about it, he was fairly struck flat for half a day. Then he pasted up a kind of hat out of paper and held it over my stove, and it went up, and then he thought it was nothing that the cathedral rose, no miracle at all. That shows what it is to be a fool—it never came to him that the reason things were made so was so the cathedral would rise just like it did. He can't see the Hand in nature." While the young man might be right that the literal reason the tent flew was because of this hot-air effect (there was a fire in the tent), he misses that God set up creation and the laws of the universe in a way that would create these sorts of events to inspire us towards Him.

Sam Harris, a prominent atheist, recently mocked religion by pointing out that we've been to space and found no heaven there. Aside from the general stupidity of this comment (not even in the Middle Ages did people think heaven was physically in the sky or nearby space), Harris gives little thought to the fact that God designed the beauty and vastness of the sky for the sake of showing us that there was something grander above our everyday existence. While the sky might literally contain little more than water vapor, in a spiritual sense it really is heaven. The prominence of the sun in almost all mythologies also shows how God wanted there to be one, great, life-giving entity to sustain us for the sake of showing us that there is one loving God. For the ancient Hebrews though, God was associated with the sky. The thundering might of the sky was an appropriate way to view the Father without the mercy of the Son. Of course, the Father and Son are the same God, but to our perception, believing in the Father without the Son is like having a thundering sky without a coming sun. The sun is dying on Urth because an advanced civilization implanted a black hole into it long ago, and while this is the literal reason for the dying sun, a much more significant meaning is conveyed regarding how this society has turned away from God and morality. To illustrate this further, the moon has been terraformed and is now forested. The moon represents the Church, as it's only illuminated through reflecting the sun, and this symbolizes the fact that in this world, the Church has been dismantled and scarred by human error in the same way the moon has.

The Holy Spirit is represented through water, and is referred to as the "Increate" on Urth. Severian describes how he can feel the presence of the Increate while standing next to a river, and his epiphany on the presence of God ultimately comes on the beach of an ocean. The endless nature of the ocean, the way that water can hold up even the greatest cargo ship despite its penetrability, the ability of water to descend into the deepest crevices, and its necessity for sustaining life all point to it as having been created to represent the Holy Spirit, and while the people of Urth may have forgotten the significance of the Holy Spirit, it can still deeply move Severian through its symbol in our world, water. Long trying to return his powerful rose-thorn relic to the Pelerines, Severian comes to realize on the beach that it has no inherent power at all. However, God created the rose to represent the Virgin Mary, and so this relic actually has immense power, and its symbolism ultimately brings Severian to God.

Theodicy and the Second Coming

Vodalus is a rebel dedicated to returning society to the high technology of the past, but when his life is actually threatened, Vodalus does not use his advanced plasma pistol, he pulls out a simple sword. Despite how hard we may try, we cannot truly transcend our own time in this world, we are stuck in the material cycle of growth and decay unless we can unite ourselves with the timelessness of God. As Severian witnesses Vodalus's act of hypocrisy, he remarks: "That we can only be what we are remains our unforgivable sin." Our inability to transcend our own natures is one of the reasons why we need a redeemer like Christ in the first place. With the Conciliator relegated to a hazy legend of the distant past, it appears that Urth is damned to an existence in sin that cannot be forgiven, with demonic creatures manipulating the Vodalus's of the world who believe they can break out themselves. However, as we discussed earlier, Severian himself comes to realize that this is not the case, and his story serves as an examination of how we can escape through the mercy of God, but also through the justice of God. Wolfe once made a comment on the intricate relationship between mercy and justice:

"It has been remarked thousands of times that Christ died under torture. Many of us have read so often that he was a "humble carpenter" that we feel a little surge of nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, and a hammer; that the man who built the cross was undoubtedly a carpenter too; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a carpenter as a soldier, as much a carpenter as a torturer. Very few even have seemed to have noticed that although Christ was a "humble carpenter," the only object we are specifically told he made was not a table or a chair, but a whip."

When Christ came the first time, He came as one who was tortured. When He comes the second time, He will come as an executioner, to sentence those who insist on wickedness to damnation. Like the existence of evil, this can be hard for people to reconcile with the merciful and loving nature of God. Wolfe examines this by having Severian take on the role of a Second Coming figure, with his position as an executioner and torturer. Severian eventually realizes the immorality of the purely punitive torture that he has been exacting, but the role of torturous suffering in bringing about a greater good is undiminished. The glory of the New Sun and the rejuvenation of humanity that comes with it would be impossible without people knowing what it's like to live without the grand light of the sun. The work itself is deeply infused with this idea, as there is a consistent contrast between the grotesque, decrepit, brutal nature of Urth, and the exquisite beauty that Wolfe highlights in the world through simple moments like Severian's starlit climb in the mountains or his unshod, transcendent walk on the beach. These moments are made all the more meaningful to a Severian who grew up desensitized to cruelty and depravity, who lived in a world where God appeared absent. Such simplicity could only inspire such profundity through its role in making someone realize the presence of God, and that moment of realization is only possible in a world that is so inundated with suffering, it appears God is no longer present at all.

At one point Severian muses that light is merely the shadow of God, despite this seeming paradoxical. After all, a shadow does indicate an actual thing, that has been projected due to its interaction with light. In this same way, light itself is a projection of God, that is interacting with the material world. Wolfe likely inserted this thought to show that a shadow should not always be seen as a bad thing. While torture and suffering appear so terrible to us, they are really just the shadow of goodness. Suffering interacts with humanity to bring about a good "shadow" that could not otherwise exist. The redemption that Severian brings to humanity is the shadow of the torturer, and it could only be brought about through the suffering of the world.

A Thousand Ages in Thy Sight

The Book of the New Sun provides us with a reminder that progress is fallacious, the nature of materiality is a cycle of life and death. This cycle applies to our cultures and civilizations as well, and in Wolfe's world it even applies to the universe itself. At one point, Severian's mentor demonstrates to him how the most primitive form of government, attachment to the person of the monarch, is actually the highest, because it reflects our attachment to the "Divine Entity." We cannot let a desire for advancement push us away from the fundamental truths that God weaved into creation. Everything has been set up to inspire us towards Him, from our inherent desires for morality and a higher power, to the very nature of the natural world that we live in. No matter how corrupted and incoherent our world becomes, the fabric of creation will always give us a window into God's presence with us. Along with that, the suffering we experience is there to give us the push towards everlasting truth that we frequently need. For those looking to rise above the baseness around them, Severian will prove to be a sympathetic guide, during this journey to bring the New Sun.