who's Christian?

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Thanks, Doug,

I have read the excerpts you forwarded with interest. Just a few remarks:

The first excerpt certainly demonstrates the complexity and depth of Pynchon's
allusions to religion and mythology. This is not a subject of contention. I am
not surprised to be told that he was obviously aware of some the more obscure
relations between antiquity and Christianity, and that there are some veiled
references to older Deities. At least in his allusions P does indeed return to
pre-Christian concepts. I have not yet come around to read Adams' book, but it
seems indispensable to do so in order to grasp the way P uses the notion of a
mythical mother-goddess being a driving force of history. As I stated before,
the "earth-womb" is a decidedly non-Christian idea. Also, it is hardly
flattering for Catholicism when the children who dissemble the sinister Bad
Priest find an image of the Crucifixion tattooed on his/her forehead.

There is a part I don't understand:

> Because Pynchon rejects the
> more obvious choice of the Virgin Mary in favor of Christ, and in particular
> the story of Christ as advanced by the Roman Catholic Church, it may at
> first be thought that the idea of V. loses consistency after its first three
> phases. [...] .

Why does Pynchon reject  the "more obvious choice of the Virgin Mary in favor of
Christ"? And what is "the idea of V."?

As for the second excerpt you provided: Chapman says that Buddhas and Angels are
depicted in GR as impassive. This is well in tune with the real life ethics of
Buddhism and with Rilke's take on angels in the "Duino Elegies". He also says
that this means "bad" in Pynchon's moral universe and that the Buddhas as well
as the angels are "malignant cosmic entities". I am not sure that I agree with
this. The angels and the Buddhas just ARE, as Fausto would perhaps put it. For
me this seems to refer the notion that the inhabitants of the metaphysical world
indifferently view humankind just as some kind of "flies" they "kill for their
sport" ("King Lear", IV, i, 37). This is hardly an argument in favour of a
religious "Weltanschauung" of the author.

As for the "Gaia philosophy" that "the earth is a conscious organism": This is a
subject treated in some depth in V. Obviously one of the attitudes characters
display towards the earth and especially rocks is that they are inanimate, which
is the opposite POV. And I do not have to re-read GR to tell that the passage in
which "Felipe, one of the Argentinian exiles, makes 'noontime devotionals to the
living presence of a certain rock' which, he believes, 'embodies . . . an
intellectual system,'" (quote from the excerpt) is  ironical. In order to come
to meaningful assumptions about whether Pynchon supports or opposes the view of
a living earth in V. or GR we still would have to separate the implied author
from Fausto and his remarks about the "intentional fallacy", i.e. the poetic
strategy of projecting human feelings onto natural phenomenons. You may remember
that he calls the notion of animated nature a lie.

As for your own comments: Fausto in Chapter 11 expresses a most heartfelt
refusal of the notion of a meaningful universe. If it is true that Pynchon
endorses the notion of the "earth-womb" or the Gaia philosophy, which seems to
be your view (although this is certainly neither presented as a "bedrock" or a
"fundamental truth" in P's fictions, as I have tried to demonstrate with regard
to the beginning of Chapter 11), we are not talking about Christian religion
anymore, but about syncretism or a return to pre-Christian belief. As I stated
before, the notion of a conscious earth is not reconcilable with at least
orthodox Christianity. It is a pagan idea and people have been burned on the
stake for implying that this might not be so bad a "Weltanschauung" after all.
The Christian concept of life after death is fundamentally different from the
view that "all nature knows is transformation" and that therefore there can be
no extinction.

Thomas