lost paws:

John Farrell on Gene Wolfe in First Things:

Excerpt: [Gene Wolfe’s] The Book of the New Sun started out as a long novella and rapidly grew to a four-volume science-fiction tour de force. The hero, Severian, is a lictor—a professional torturer—whose entire life has been dedicated to the infliction of agony. “It has been remarked thousands of times,” Wolfe once said, “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 seem even 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.”

It is a familiar charge of modern atheism that the existence of pain argues against the existence of God. “For some time it has seemed to me,” Wolfe insists, “that it would be even easier to maintain the position that pain proves or tends to prove God’s reality.” The tale of Severian, apprentice to the Order of Saint Katharine of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, is the tale of a man reared in the state-sponsored infliction of physical agony who comes to discover over his life’s adventures that the power of pain ultimately points to something deeper. Expelled from his own guild when he shows mercy to one of their “clients,” he is sent into exile as a disgrace to his guild. His adventures lead him to the estate of an order of religious women from whom he unwittingly comes into possession of an ancient relic, called the Claw of the Conciliator.