Kael Posavatz wrote:Bluesqueak wrote:Well, was it Langhorne?
I mean, yeah, Merlin thinks it was Langhorne, but Merlin hasn't got a clue who really wrote the Writ. So it might have been Langhorne, or it might have been someone else's idea. Someone with a long term plan for the destruction of the COGA.
Remember that the original plan was to lie low for several centuries. The Ptolomaic view of the universe might be someone's little time bomb. They persuaded Langhorne and/or Chihiro that keeping the colonists on the surface of Safehold will be ever so much easier if they're specifically told that there is nothing beyond the local system. But the real plan was always to provide a 'proof text' that the Writ is not, in fact, inerrant.
They know it will take a very, very long time for their time bomb to go off - but that's fine, because they agree absolutely that the longer Safehold stays hidden, the better. They just don't want the technical freeze to last forever...
Now that is a very interesting idea. We know, now, that there were...factions among the command crew. It's been heavily implied that there was at least one major power play, and it certainly seems like most had their own little side-plots going (not sure how else Schuyler could be passing out 'holy' lie-detectors and paperweights).
But I see three problems with it
1) It gives humanity the worst of both worlds. They would no longer be 'safe' in their ignorance, but they wouldn't know about the real threat either.
2) The Inquisition has authority/power Torquemada couldn't dream of. Galileo got off easy in comparison.
Three comes back to the inherent truthfulness of the Writ. It wasn't until the 1820s that the Catholic Church got behind the heliocentric model, and not until 1890-something that Pope LeoXIII wrote that science and the bible don't contradict each other, that scientists needed to keep in mind that the Bible hadn't been written to describe the natural world, and biblical scholars needed to also be aware that biblical authors may have used figurative language.
The Writ, however, does describe the natural world. It does so to the point that non-powered terraforming (unconsecrated lands) is on-going. Surgery is routinely survivable. Sanitation for large cities and army camps is very much a thing. For that matter, Hasting's (admittedly not self-updating) maps give an Angel's-eye view of the physical world on the day of creation.
Yup, there are problems with it. Nothing a good novelist couldn't solve, however. Possibly with a religious war, though.
1) You'd need to have a second string to the dynamite of the incorrect Writ. Dunno what. A holy paperweight, maybe? Full of unspecified data? With instructions to the Wylsynns to 'break glass if the church is in danger'?
Doesn't have to be that; by now we the readers have been carefully primed to accept that there were several alternative accounts of 'Creation' and the 'Writ', and that some of them have survived by means of extremely secret societies.
2) Yes, the Inquisition is (in my mind) the biggest evidence that the Book of Schuler wasn't written by the same guy who left the Wylsynns that message. Because the writer of the Book of Schuler must have been a frothing lunatic. And that idea fits Chihiro (extremism in the pursuit of godliness can never be a sin) much better than the sensible, stern-but-fair bloke we see in the Wylsynn's hologram letter.
However, the Inquisition instructions appear in Writ Mk. 2. The Ptolomaic universe appears in Writ Mk. 1. I don't think you can use the Inquisition as a problem for inserting a 'time-bomb' Ptolomaic view, because when that view was inserted, the Inquisition didn't exist and hadn't been thought of. Yes, it was an authoritarian church, but it hadn't yet reached the depths of the Punishment.
3) That is what you might call the 'simplified' version of the history; it misses out rather a lot of people playing around with the idea of a heliocentric universe, but basically deciding 'no way of proving it, anyway'. It also misses out the Catholic church agreeing (by way of St Augustine) that the scriptures often conflict with the natural world.
I think the relevance of this for Safehold is that the Catholic Church then, after all this consideration of 'don't take Scripture literally', took a bit of a step backwards post-Reformation, into a far more rigid literalism than would ever have been accepted by the earlier church. It's possible that once Saint Robhair dies, the COGA might well react the same way - especially since, as you say, the rest of the Writ is written in line with the original expedition's up-to-date scientific knowledge.
But the problem with a very rigid literalism is that once it breaks, it breaks. If everything in the Writ is right, what do people do when it's proved that everything isn't right?
