A Theology of The Book of the New Sun: God and Creation

The Doctrine of God

“When the world is horrible, then thoughts are high, full of grace and greatness.”

So says Dorcas in The Book of the New Sun, an observation which neatly captures the appeal of the novel. Its world is dark—literally, the sun is dying—but its thoughts are high, seeking beauty, hope, and truth, undaunted by the decay and despair which surrounds the characters.

One of the book’s highest thoughts is its investigation of God—or the Increate, as he is called in this world.

Metaphysics and theology perhaps are not the first things one associates with sci-fi (maybe for good reason). But Gene Wolfe is a sterling exception to this. And it’s not just that he understands these abstruse philosophical categories, he actually has something to say about them.

So, in what follows, I’m undertaking a theology of The Book of the New Sun (note, this is a theology, not the theology—I make no claims to exhaustive mastery of these books, which are famously difficult to interpret).

As Ada Palmer wrote in the preface, the intent of Severian (the protagonist) in writing his story is to “deduce the structure and intentions of the universe.” This is a bold undertaking, but there’s a certain kind of sci-fi reader for whom this is like stumbling across buried treasure. “For the sub-audience for whom the metaphysics was their favorite part,” she writes, “enter Gene Wolfe.”

But one of the simplest questions the book addresses is one of the hardest to understand.

That is—what does the word God mean?

The Increate

In using the word “Increate” to name God, Wolfe has come up with an ingenious solution to the perennial problem of confusing gods (or “the gods”) with God.

This is a difference not of degree but of kind. God is not “a being” out there, floating around in the sky. Not just another one in a long list of forgotten and obsolete deities: Marduk, Zeus, Jupiter, Odin, God. The difference between God and “a god” is the difference between necessary and contingent being, between all that exists and nothing. The ontological chasm is practically infinite.

In using the “Increate,” Wolfe hearkens back both to classical metaphysics, with the Aristotelian notion of God as necessarily existent and self-sustaining, he whose very essence is to exist. It also echoes the Biblical language of this same concept, in seeing God as the “I Am,” or as Greek icons of the Pantocrator read “Ὁ ὬΝ” (“Being”—this is also the word used in Exodus 3:14 in the Septuagint for I AM). The Increate is the one who is “un”-created, self-existent, eternal, uncaused, infinite.

The Book of the New Sun remarks on this ontological gap from time to time. In the play-within-a-story, “Eschatology and Genesis,” one character says, “What I can’t understand is how you, who suddenly seem so wise, could mistake the Autarch for the Universal Mind.” How could someone mistake a powerful but worldly figure—whether man or lesser god—for the inexhaustible source of being? Or when Severian encounters the town with their local god Oannes and is amused by him. “I did not believe in Oannes or fear him,” he says, “but I knew, I thought, whence he came—I knew that there is an all-pervasive power in the universe of which every other is the shadow.” Oannes is but a pale imitation.

As David Bentley Hart wrote in The Experience of God, such gods (say, Zeus or Oannes) “do not transcend nature but belong to it…Of such gods there may be an endless diversity, while of God there can be only one.” God is not, then, “a being” in the sense that we usually use that word. Rather:

God is not only the ultimate reality that the intellect and the will seek but is also the primordial reality with which all of us are always engaged in every moment of existence and consciousness, apart from which we have no experience of anything whatsoever.

But, Hart writes, it does seem that both believers and skeptics often have a faulty understanding of the word God. Rather than what has been described here, there is a strain of what Hart calls “monopolytheism.” That is:

a view of God not conspicuously different from the polytheistic picture of the gods as merely very powerful discrete entities who possess a variety of distinct attributes that lesser entities also possess, if in smaller measure; it differs from polytheism, as far as I can tell, solely in that it posits the existence of only one such being.

I think this might explain why, in The Book of the New Sun, the educated classes don't even use the word “God” any longer. As far as I recall, the word only appears (two different times) in a sailor’s song. As Michael Andrei-Driussi points out in the Lexicon Urthus, “the term ‘God’ is used only among slaves and the very poor.” In its stead, more theological names are used by most characters: Increate, Pancreator, Theophany, Theoanthropos (the latter being clear vestige of Christian views of the Incarnation of God in Christ).

But the “monopolytheist” conception of theism can be found many places, as much (if not more) in critics of religion as in its adherents.

Misunderstanding Theism

Take Ricky Gervais or Richard Dawkins, who are fond of the same argument. Dawkins likes to say, “All people are atheists in regard to Zeus, Wotan, and most other gods; I simply disbelieve in one god more.”

This is a conceptual error, but it’s a popular one. It seems rhetorically interesting, but the substance of the claim is actually: “Most of us disbelieve in all other existences; I simply disbelieve in one existence more.” The gap between the two is like the gap between zero and one. Infinite.

Terry Pratchett, the much-beloved writer of the comedic fantasy Discworld, was proud of his skepticism in this regard. He didn’t believe in God, but “once you have got past all the gods that we have created with big beards and many human traits, just beyond all that on the other side of physics, there just may be the ordered structure from which everything flows.”

Indeed. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas would’ve said something similar. But Pratchett took this rather pedestrian, Theology-101 level statement to be a startling insight and congratulated himself for disbelieving in a god that no religion does either.

One finds a similar approach with Jerry Coyne, the evolutionary biologist who often covers religion and science on his website.

Perturbed by Hart’s arcane definition of God, Coyne flatly asserted that it was just a fabrication of overly-educated modern theologians. “Hart claims that this is the conception of God that has prevailed throughout most of history,” wrote Coyne in The New Republic, “but I seriously doubt that. Aquinas, Luther, Augustine: none of those people saw God in such a way.”

It’s a bit surreal to hear that Aquinas did not see God in the classical theist manner outlined by Hart. It is, arguably, the thing he is most known for. Coyne’s comment is rather like asserting that Darwin did not hold to natural selection.

Read, for instance, from the “Five Ways” in the Summa Theologica:

We cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God.

Aquinas’s metaphysics is broadly similar to Aristotle’s, and here we see described the being whose essence is its existence, whose existence is necessary and not contingent (otherwise nothing would exist at all). It is the uncaused cause, a necessarily and logical terminus in causation that obviates a vicious infinite regress; in a word, the Increate.

Augustine, for his part, was struck by the similarities in philosophical theism to the I AM in Exodus, and suggested the pagans would have been better off building temples to Plato instead of Jupiter. In The City of God, he maintained that Plato believed in the one true God, in whom “to live, to understand, to be blessed, are to be. [Plato and his followers] understood, from this unchangeableness and simplicity, that all things must have been made by Him, and that He could Himself have been made by none.” Augustine even considered if Plato had read the Bible and got the I AM from there (he concluded he did not, of course, and that the similarity came from logical deduction).

This might be abstruse and unintuitive, and maybe most religious believers don’t understand it. Critics don’t seem to either. But it’s hard to say it is the reserve only of stuffy and out-of-touch modern theologians when it’s been the dominant doctrine of the church for millennia (featured in Eastern icons all over, including at my own church which is full of your average, everyday Christians). It is common enough that Wolfe included it his sci-fi tetralogy. Difficult to understand, sure, but it has always been there. One does not need to believe in it, but you cannot pretend it out of existence.

Not that these ideas aren’t difficult to understand. Severian seems to not always get the terminology right, given that he sometimes misspells terms like "thodicy" (instead of theodicy) or "theologican" (instead of theologian), which I take to be a somewhat playful bit of writing from Wolfe. Severian is interested in metaphysics, but he also is an amateur and was not actually educated in these matters. That he makes an effort, though, and can grasp much of the big picture might also be a bit of provocation on Wolfe’s part, too—see, anyone can do it!

“There are beings,” says Severian, “and artifacts—against which we batter our intelligence raw.” He meant ones in the world, but one could extrapolate this further. The Increate is unfathomable. He is outside time. “The Increate maintains all things in order surely.” And metaphysics? Well, as Cyriaca tells Severian, “the metaphysical world…is so much larger and so much slower than the physical world.”

Holiness and Creation

Though Severian is interested in metaphysics and God, he is more interested in creation.

And here, the word Increate takes on another valence—not just that God is the self-existent, uncreated being, but also that he is “in-creation.”

But this isn’t pantheism. It is closer to panentheism (not the critical en in there), a view of God’s relation to creation present in Neoplatonic metaphysics (both Christian and non). Neoplatonism’s relation to Christianity is an interesting one, and C.S. Lewis chronicles their mutual love and antagonism well in The Discarded Image. In the end, Christianity absorbed much of Neoplatonism into itself. Church Fathers like Origen and Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius drew so strongly off of Plato and his later followers like Plotinus that nowadays the Neoplatonic writers just kind of sound like Christian theologians—although, as Augustine pointed out, they always got tripped up by the Incarnation.

Wolfe, too, seemed to draw heavily on Neoplatonism for the cosmology of The Book of the New Sun. Many of the familiar ideas are there: the ineffable One (or Increate) that is the good beyond being, the celestial hierarchy that falls below the One (including lesser entities like the Demiurge), the obscure terms like hypostases (not used in the Christian sense), and the analogy of this incomprehensible good with the sun. Naturally, mention of the sun will perk the ears of any Wolfe reader, who is accustomed to seeing the story’s salvific figure as the New Sun. For Plato, in The Republic, the sun is a cautious analogy for the concept of the good; we see only because of the sun’s light, just as we only know what is true by the light of the good. Perhaps, as Severian observes of the Increate, “The theologicans say that light is his shadow.”

But it is with the “Logos” is where we find the greatest overlap, and Wolfe incorporates it into his narrative often.

For Christians, this word is most known for its usage in John 1:1, where it is usually translated as “Word,” an inadequate but understandable rendition. It’s speculated that John used this language in his Gospel due to influence from the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (Philo predates Neoplatonism but the similarities are there). And in The Book of the New Sun, Wolfe makes use of both “word” and “logos” interchangeably, as the Increate speaks the universe into existence.

In the short story “The Tale of the Boy Called Frog,” Severian reads, “Surely the Pancreator knows all mysteries. He spoke the long word that is our universe, and few things happen that are not a part of that word.” Musing on this later, Severian says, “We, then, are the syllables of that word.”

Following this, then, we even see a deeply Augustinian and Neoplatonic conception of evil (which is essentially conjoined with classical theism)—that evil does not “exist” on its own. It is the absence of good; it is darkness, a shadow, a privation. As Severian says, “The powers we call dark seem to me to be the words the Increate did not speak.” Dark powers, evil, then have a “quasi-existence.” They are real, but they are inverted and have no ontological grounding on their own. The ultimate reality is the Word that is spoken. At one point, Severian swaps “word” for “logos” and observes, upon seeing vapor in front of him, that it “writhed as I might have imagined the logos to writhe as it left the mouth of the Pancreator.”

What does this mean for creation, then? To repeat what I wrote above, and given the name Increate, God is “in creation” in The Book of the New Sun.

There is not a binary opposition of God against creation, as though the world is a distinct entity “apart” from him in some way (which doesn't seem ontologically possible if God is the ground of being and is, in a sense, existence itself). Creation is not god, there is no pantheism here, but it is somehow contained with him, animated, alive, holy, and imbued with the sparks of the divine.

Maximus the Confessor, both a Christian and heavily Neoplatonic, deployed the word logos not only in reference to Christ as the Word, but also to everything that was created.

The Orthodox theologian Elizabeth Theokritoff writes, of Maximus's panentheism, “According to [God’s] creative and sustaining ‘procession’ into the creature, the one Logos is many logoi. The very texture of the universe is God the Word in action.” Or, take this observation from Orthodox priest and theologian Andrew Louth, “the created world has value, meaning, beauty, in itself.... The beauty and meaning is found in the logoi.”

Or, from Maximus himself:

From created beings we come to know their Cause; from the differences between created beings we learn about the indwelling Wisdom of creation; and from the natural activity of created beings we discern the indwelling Life of creation, the power which gives created beings their life—the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not absent from any created being…permeating all things with His power, and vivifying their inner essences in accordance with their nature. (This quote and the above I owe to an article by Chris Durante).

This is what Severian comes to learn in his travels. Everything that exists is sacred because it participates in being, and all things of creation are good and holy; what is evil is what does not, in the end, actually exist. The logos, instead, inheres in all things and makes them supremely lovely and good. God “likes matter,” observed C.S. Lewis (a Platonist in a lot of ways), “he invented it.” All being, then, is synonymous with goodness—and the good that is beyond being is the Increate.

It is here that we find, in the midst of all the dismal violence and suffering and darkness in The Book of the New Sun, a shining ray of inexhaustible hope and beauty. The tiny miracle that is the Claw of the Conciliator—a rose thorn that Severian carries with him throughout the story—becomes a symbol of the undoubtable sacrality of all things that exist.

These thoughts come to a head in one of the greatest passages in the history of science fiction, which is worth reprinting in full:

What struck me on the beach and it struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow—was that if the Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried about my neck across so many leagues...then it might rest in anything, and in fact probably did rest in everything, in every thorn on every bush, in every drop of water in the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns are sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenbobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk on holy ground.

When the world is dark, as Dorcas says, thoughts are high. And there is no higher thought than this. Every aspect of creation is a staggering revelation of the infinite good that is God, even the smallest things in existence—perhaps even a plant. After all, Severian learns, he has manifested in a plant before; the unshod feet on holy ground testifying of Moses, the burning bush, and the I AM that spoke out from the flames.

All these thoughts are given voice in a brief comment from Thecla—a pivotal moment that serves as the foundation for The Book of the New Sun’s investigation of God and creation, a one-sentence encapsulation of the Increate and the long word of creation and the goodness of being and the unutterable sacredness of even the smallest things that exist.

"Flowers are better theology than folios, Severian."