→Seol 28: The religious man's mistake

[seol_plumfall]

What, then, is there left for the Light to be?


There are certain skeptics who argue that we should think of the Holy power that emanates from the Light as a mere school of magic, no different from Frost or Fire. Although such a comparison is immediately offensive to a religious man, it is perhaps not as wrongheaded as it first seems.

This man may immediately wish to object on the grounds that the Light does not feel like other schools of magic. Even if he concedes that the Light behaves more like a force of nature than a benevolent intelligence, even if he admits its love is often unloving, and even if he confesses that its actions may not even cohere with what he intuits to be ethically good, he may still assert that the Light is not something to be casually compared to other magical phenomena.

Despite all his intellectual concessions, he claims there is still something special about the Light. When filled with the power of the Light, he feels intensely moved; there is a deep

he feels

...

There is something deeply moving about the Holy magic of the Light that differs from other types of magic. No ordinary school can produce such tears pleasure an effortless immediate intensity of feeling. It feels like


hope, manifest. The embrace of a healing spell feels like an embrace of utter, unconditional love; with the powerful wave of the Light at one's back, one feels as if he is being carried towards virtue. The Light feels like his natural ally, gentle, kind, safe, restoring and protecting him. He wonders: how can a mere school of magic, a mere force of nature, produce such feelings in me?


Yet, while the Light does have a distinctive feeling, is true that Frost and Fire do not? One feels cold -- not merely cold to the touch, but in the mind of the skilled Frost mage, truly embodying that which is cold, the totality of the intellectual concept, the archetypal movement of freezing, the essential qualia of coldness. Fire, likewise, embodies heat and combustion.

Frost and Fire are, however, easily compared to mundane phenomena in the world, freezing and combustion. The Light is more abstract, and its subjective qualities somehow "loftier," more emotional, more sublime. To what can it be compared?

Perhaps, another school of magic: Nature.









Astrolabe,

You're out late.

Seol 27 ← Seol 28 → Astrolabe 18