At the very end of Gene Wolfe's "Shadow of the Torturer" (Book 1 of the New Sun/Urth series), the protagonist Severian has a dream where he speaks with his old torturers' guild master, Master Malrubius. Malrubius tests Severian, asking him, "What are the seven types of governance?" Severian struggles a bit with answering this question—though he allegedly has perfect recall—but it's not a simple categorical question. On the surface, it's a simple classroom exercise, but really what the master is doing is giving Severian a lesson in political theory and spiritual investigation. In a question disguised as "how are societies ruled?", what Malrubius is really asking is "what rules you?".
This is one of the first obvious tells in the New Sun series that Severian might actually have some relation to some greater lineage of messianic and kingly figures (spoilers ahead, obviously). Not unlike Paul Atreides in Dune, Severian is a young man (as we soon see) moving toward sovereignty. Both Severian and Paul are surrounded by prophecy, political decay, religious symbolism and fanaticism, and powerful, ancient forces manifested through both people and structures. Both eventually become figures in whom king, prophet, messiah, victim, and judge begin to merge.
The big divergence between the two protagonists, though, is in how the two authors position these characters within essentially opposing moral patterns. While Dune shows how a messianic figure inevitably becomes an idol, inspiring fanaticism and war, Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series is more concerned with showing a pseudo- (or perhaps overtly-) Christian message of a sinner undergoing spiritual transformation and redemption.
The Malrubius dream is the first key "spiritual awakening" moment in Severian's arc because it turns politics inward. Severian is functionally born into the torturers' guild—bestowed with original sin through no fault of his own, he was destined, and trained, to become an instrument of punishment, but without requiring him to ever become fully conscious of the moral meaning of punishment. The guild teaches obedience, hierarchy, ritual, memory, technique, and loyalty—it is the first system of authority that Severian is formed by. He obeys because he belongs, and he performs his role because the guild gives him an identity.
His exile from the guild begins with the first moment he experiences true, transformative love. When he gives Thecla the knife, it's merciful, it's erotic, it's rebellious and sentimental and morally confused all at once. Of course, it breaks the guild's law, but it's also the first time that Severian (whether fully knowingfully or not), rejects being a simple tool of institutional authority, driven to do so by a mysterious force greater than himself which he can't quite put into words.
Malrubius' lesson matters because the question of governance is not abstract—Severian has up to this point in the story lived under and known several types of rule—guild rule, imperial rule, the rule of eroticism (ok, maybe not quite love, but for a torturer from a medieval tower, it's something, right?), companionship, memory, habit, and fear. Severian simultaneously admires Vodalus to some degree, serves the Autarch's Commonwealth to some degree, loves Thecla, reveres his masters, and carries within himself some inkling of (yet still poorly understood) supernatural vocation. Severian is not a free spirit calmly evaluating political systems. He is a very intentionally divided person being asked to recognize the competing sovereignties inside himself. Until this point, he hasn't really shown any awareness of this nature—that's why the question in the dream sequence trips him up, and likely why Wolfe decided to use this sequence to end the first book and transition into the second.
The "seven types of governance" question functions as a ladder of authority. To paraphrase, it's basically the following: "name the seven bases on which rule can rest." Severian's answer is: 1. attachment to a monarch. 2. attachment to the dynasty or bloodline. 3. attachment to the office or state. 4. attachment to a legitimating code. 5. attachment to the law. 6. attachment to electors of law. 7. attachment to broad political abstractions. Notice that it's "attachment" (which signifies something more personal, or intimate, than "loyalty").
It begins with the obvious ladder of political arrangements: state, power, social structures. But which of these holds the most sway? Wolfe (via Malrubius) argues that the most powerful and pure conduit of rule is in the personal acknowledgement and allegiance to the master. A kingdom, Malrubius is implying, becomes a real kingdom not through armies and edicts, but through loyalty to the king. And the governed subject must consent to be governed, whether through love, fear, awe, reverence, or faith, but in any case, it must be borne of personal conviction rather than state appointment, context, caste or anything else which could be considered transient.
Of course, Wolfe is himself Catholic, so the Christian overtones are overt and highly intentional. Who is your Lord? What do you obey when law, desire, fear and conscience conflict? Severian can recite categories of governance, but he only has a vague awareness of the deeper test. Will he be ruled by the guild, by appetite, by pity, by memory, or some stronger, more ancient divine purpose which is slowly beginning to foment around him?
Paul's transformation in Dune also concerns political authority and religious meaning. As a ducal heir, he is trained in aristocratic discipline, war strategy, and superhuman Bene Gesserit awareness. As he ascends to a position of a messianic figure among the Fremen, like Severian, he discovers that sovereignty is irrevocably tied to spirituality and myth. But as a foil to Wolfe's sinner-redemption arc in Severian, Herbert treats Paul's discovery with suspicion. Dune demonstrates the extent of the danger in (partly) manufactured messiah-hood. Yes, the Fremen come to worship him as a legitimate prophet and savior. But the script is doctored. The path was laid for him by hundreds of generations of Bene Gesserit breeding programs and myths intentionally seeded in a vulnerable population. The prophetic structure is inevitable; Paul both fulfills, and exploits, a myth, while both legitimizing and bastardizing the "truth" that loyalty to a sovereign ruler is the most powerful kind of rule.
Paul's arc shows how religion can become governance through mass belief. A charismatic figure that can capture mindshare and sacred imagination will always have more gravitas than a figure with mere hereditary claim or superior war or political tactics. He is literally the promised one, and Herbert's warning is that this spiritual-liberator belief, once infused with military and imperial power, can become catastrophic. But Severian's path to power is far different than Paul's, and Wolfe's message is far more subtle. Severian is morally compromised from the beginning. He's a torturer, a liar, probably a rapist, and often has a poor interpretation and understanding of the events of his own life. This is what makes Severian the (im)perfect candidate for a redemptive and sacramental arc. It is, as Wolfe himself says, a story that is not so much a Christ story but rather squarely a Christian story.
Paul sees too much and is trapped by vision, while Severian sees too little and is led by hidden grace. Paul can see his own catastrophic future and his attempts to avoid it only deepen his entanglement, while Severian moves through a world thick with signs he doesn't understand, performing actions whose meanings only become clear later, sometimes much, much later.
Both stories ask what happens when a human being becomes the focus of sacred history. In Dune, the transformation teaches Paul that political power is most potent and can be wielded most effectively when clothed in religious myth. In BOTS, Malrubius teaches Severian that the deepest government is the government of the soul, by the authority it recognizes as ultimate. Wolfe, like Herbert, is deeply suspicious of institutions. But his religious imagination leaves room for providence—the sacred is hidden, but clearly not absent. So Paul and Severian represent two different solutions to the same "The man, the myth, the legend" trope with a "political collapse/religious expectation/historical crisis" backdrop. Herbert solves it tragically, while Wolfe solves it sacramentally. Both Paul and Severian blur the line between king and messiah, but in opposite directions.
A ruler is never only a ruler. When a person becomes answerable to ultimate authority, religion becomes governance. Severian discovers, slowly and painfully, that the soul must be ruled before it can rightly rule.
This may be why sci-fi and fantasy are almost always strewn, sometimes literally, sometimes less so, with biblical (and other sacred texts') tropes and stories. Even far-future stories of empires and time travel and space travel and dying suns and interplanetary war will always need the old questions: Who is king? Who is prophet? Who is victim? Who is judge? And when someone comes promising renewal, should we follow, kneel, resist or repent?