My recent serendipitous discovery of Catholic-focused speculative fiction resources has built a fire of excitement somewhere in my belly. As I was perusing the virtual pages of wisdom that sometimes make themselves known in the blogosphere, I stumbled upon this quote from Gene Wolfe's, Shadow of the Torturer:

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. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.

I never realized as I read Wolfe's fiction how integrally Catholic his writing is. Going back now and looking through my collection, I can clearly see the strains of Catholic theology present in his work. If I were in Graduate School, I'd long to do a paper. However, since I completed one graduate degree in English (and I'm not anxious for another), I'm happy to simply point out the sacramental theology present in this excerpt from Wolfe's novel.

It's interesting that the "speaker" utilizes the example of a military oath when talking about symbols inventing us, for that is exactly where the Church gets the word "Sacrament," from the latin, sacramentum, meaning oath. Before Roman soldiers were invested with their duty, they took upon themselves a sacramentum. This oath, sworn before their brothers, strengthened them for their responsibility--one was less likely to break and run in the heat of battle if one had sworn courage and bravery before one's brothers.

Sacramentum, therefore, made it possible for one to become a soldier and they offered strength for the journey. In an analogous--but even more real way--the sacraments make it possible for us to enter a covenantal and familial relationship with God and they offer strength--the very life of God--for the fulfillment of our Christian life and mission.

In Catholic sacramental theology, the sacraments accomplish what they signify. The waters of baptism, for example, really do wash one clean of original sin and join the individual to the Body of Christ--not in a metaphorical way, but in a real, ontological way. In this theology, there is no separation or distance between a sign and what it signifies. In the Catholic sacramental worldview, a sign warning of danger from an open flame would itself be hot!

The Church speaks of these realities as symbols--and here is where the modern mindset has trouble interpreting language. When most people use the word symbol, they mean something that stands in for something else. A rose represents love, but in the modern mindset does not partake in any way of the reality of that Love. Not so for the Church. The word symbol, in its original conception, comes from the Greek word "symbolon" which literally meant "to bring or throw together." Symbols, therefore, bridge the gap between sign and signified, making the reality present in time and space. The "symbol" of the Eucharist brings the very Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ together with His creatures, intimately binding them together each time the mass is celebrated.

Thus, in a very real sense, our symbols invent us. Through the waters of baptism we "become a new creation" (2 Cor 5:17), we are invented anew through the great gift of our God.

The theological and philosophical richness of the excerpt from Shadow of a Torturer occurs all throughout Wolfe's fiction. If you haven't already, I would encourage you to pick up his The Book of the New Sun series. There are few authors writing today that examine what it means to live in a sacramental world--and fewer still with the talent of Gene Wolfe.