Robert_A_Woodward wrote:Aside from the question on whether the last chapter of _TFT_ was Schueler (in what ever form) or Operation Androcles, what is the purpose of the Testimony? A statement that Shan-Wei did not fall, but Chihiro lied appears to be part of an all out attack on the entire legitimacy of the Church of God Awaiting. That appears to be a bit audacious, at least without a lot of prep. To begin with, I am certain that any War of the Fallen (or earlier) records that the Temple has had been edited to match the Book of Chihiro. Thus the Testimony is vulnerable to be dismissed as a demonic lie.
In fact, we know that Shan-Wei and Langhorne were in significant disagreement immediately before the destruction of the Alexandria Enclave and she was given an ultimatum to obey Langhorne's decree.
It's just a theory, at this point.... and I'm not even certain that I LIKE this theory....
But the best I can come up with is that the original Schueler was riding the fence the as a neutral third party.
I think he was willing to trade certain limited favors or concessions with Shan Wei and Kau-Yung, for a variety of reasons. And I think he was just fine with Langhorne's plan to invent a religion and permanently suppress technology.
I think... and I'm guessing here... That Schueler's ONLY PRIORITY is the peaceful, long-term, generic religious existence of Safehold. Sort of like a cross between Unitarian Universalism and pathological Utilitarianism. Schueler's just fine with lying to people, creating an artificial religion from scratch, naming the archangels after certain people if that doesn't obviously harm anyone, making a good-faith effort to keep technology suppressed for as long as possible, enforcing a strict top-down hierarchy led by the church, all those things...
But the one thing he WON'T accept is massive atrocities, ongoing civil wars, widespread nihilism, fatalism, or a lack of personal connections to God, even if those connections are otherwise based on a fictional or artificial religion.
Which means that his only real objections to Langhorne's plan are that it eventually resulted in a civil war with the fallen, that Chiriro added some really sadistic atrocity mandates to the last part of the writ, and that the church senior church hierarchy eventually became openly abusive towards the general populace.
In this scenario, Langhorne's priority was to stop technology by any means. Bedard's priority was to play god with mind control. Chiriro's priority was to hold sadistic personal power and win at all costs. And I think Schueler's priority.... may actually have been to make an 'honest' and 'moral' artificial religion actually work.
If that theory is right... Schueler may have left this message in order to trigger a NON-TECHNOLOGICAL, NON-HERETICAL, actual internally legitimate doctrinal revolution. He may not CARE whether or not technology or critical thought ever actually develops.... He just want's to "fix" the more unpleasant aspects of the Writ. If he leaves behind a message saying that Shan-wei was a minor schismatic heretic who probably could have been brought back into the fold with enough love and kindness, and that Chiriro lied, called down a bombardment, and altered the writ, just so Chiriro could play ruthless god-king for a few hundred years.
I don't... LIKE that theory, but it does seem like a valid third option for explaining what's going on here.
Schueler leaves a purely religious reformation textbook behind. Shan-wei is half-rehabilitated, as "the irritating opposition we should have learned to live with, and maybe could have gently brought back to righteousness, just like you should with your schismatics". Chihiro is cast as the bad guy, the sort of evil manipulative dictator that everyone has to learn to watch out for. The punishment of Schueler is rejected, and some of the other more punitive investigations by the Inquisition are rejected....
But the rest of the document is mostly just as re-iteration of "Love god using whatever logical system makes sense, be polite to your disagreeable neighbors, do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, gentle lies and manipulations are still ok, beware of sadists."
That's one of my theories. I have a few others I'm still working on.