)I mentioned elsewhere that I first read the first six books in this decalogy(sp.?) when I was twelve years old. This year corresponded to my decision to become "born again," not as a Christian (not then) but just as... Well, a Covenant-ite, I guess. I really had (and have) a religious attitude towards this series. (Don't so many of us? Don't some of us act like Mormon missionaries, buying LFB for our friends and so on?) I stopped eating meat, I started watching out when I walked so that I wouldn't crush bugs accidentally, I adopted pacifism as an axiomatic principle. More or less just because of Covenant.
In short, I accepted the task of redemption from my own inner Despiser by reading TCOTC. Where it reads, "In punishing oneself, one comes to merit punishment. This is Despite," I found what was at least for me the key concept in the story.
Fast-foward fifteen years, and I find out I was right in a more than just at-least-for-me way. Proof of this may be found on TLD pages 230, 488, and 508, as well as in Covenant's absorption of the Despiser.
Traditional Christianity teaches the following theoretical atrocity: God is obligated to torture us forever for our sins unless He forgives us instead, His forgiving these sins is an act of grace (i.e. it is not obligated), apologizing to God is not enough to remit our moral debt to reality, and contra the Irish(?) monk Pelagius, there is nothing in our free will that allows us to redeem ourselves (and semi-Pelagianism or even Arminianism constantly come under attack from the more psychotic Calvinist types).
Of course, Jesus seems to have prioritized forgiveness over retribution, so I don't want to say (as I now am a Christian) that Christianity is exceedingly evil. Only its classically triumphant form seems to be so wicked.
But so what? I came to forsake sin not in Christ's name but in Thomas Covenant's. Perhaps this is why some of us respond so profoundly to SRD's work. For in them, he presents the true moral order of amendment: redemption first, then apologizing and forgiveness, and punishment last of all, if at all--and then only as a means to the other ends.
So this also, via Immanuel Kant, might give us the answer to entropy. Here I will be mirroring Zarathustra's "Entropy and Despite" arguments. The idea is that our moral power is also our power to overcome natural decay. IDK how far Z thinks this power can go--can we completely solve the problem of death in a closed universe, or only relevant to our little fragment of the universe (therefore only for a little while, in the sempiternal scheme of things)?
Well, Kant argues that if we ought to do X, and if doing X requires Y, then Y must be possible. So if we ought to redeem ourselves of our sins (axiomatic), and if we can't be redeemed if we're dead, then there must be some way out of death. Or, at least, death-as-oblivion.
In SRD's story, this way out is literally a way out of the land of Sheriff Lytton and Co. into the Land of the Ranyhyn and the Giants and the rest. It's a way from Aristotle's Earth to Plato's (since SRD says that the Land's metaphysical status is comparable to Platonic heaven). Notice how the Trinity seems in the end of TLD "as though they lived half in the realm of the Dead; as though they were in transition, passing into or leaving a dimension of refined spirit."
Since the world of the Land is, more or less, the Platonic Form of the Story of Good and Evil, that world must needs suffer an apparent destruction at the Form of Evil's hands. But since the Trinity is obligated to save that world, then they can, and they do. This is a miracle, and it possibly cannot be described (hence no description of how it takes place)--but then Kant says the noumenal realm is inexplicable to us anyway.
Christ but I do love this series. QED
No, please don't run with that. I didn't mean it!]
