#On the First Explanation
A mystery has no sentence. A punishment does, and a sentence has a term. That was the attraction, and the trouble with it.
The First Position held that the Great Deceiver is a punishment laid on the world for the sins of the Rationalists, and that it will be withdrawn once sufficient penance has been performed. That is all of it: an indictment in one clause and a release in the other. The Bureau of Doctrine no longer teaches it. The Bureau has not burned it either, which is more than can be said for most teachings the Church once found useful and later found embarrassing. So the Hieromnemon records it here, in the survey of A.S. 201, as a former explanation set down under present authority.
Nobody needs a theologian to explain why it appealed. A mystery gives the faithful nothing to do. A punishment gives them a sentence, and every prisoner who has scratched tallies into a cell wall knows how much comfort there is in a term. The First Position told a frightened continent that the thing in the fog was deserved, that a deserved thing can be survived, and that surviving it would one day be finished. I don't blame the faithful for loving it. I file them.
#On the Offence
Within the Church the charges against the Rationalists are not in dispute, and I won't waste vellum pretending to try them. The Age of Reason emptied the shrines. Its lecturers taught that a reliquary is a box and that a bone is only a bone. Its crowds jeered priests in the marketplaces of Amsterdam and Paris. Its magistrates put relics on public fires or sold them by weight, and its ministries pushed the rites out of the squares, then out of the parishes, and finally into cellars, where the hidden Church kept them for longer than the Rationalists believed anything could survive in a cellar.
Then, on the first of November, A.S. 45, came the Sundering, and the enemy with it.
The First Position joins those two facts with one word: therefore. The Rationalists sinned, therefore the Great Deceiver. A child can parse that sentence, and that was both its strength and its flaw. The Position assigns guilt. It describes no mechanism. It does not say that the jeering summoned anything, or by what door the punishment came in, or whose hand opened that door. It is an attribution of responsibility made with doctrinal authority, and the Hieromnemon records it as exactly that. What actually happened on the first of November is a matter on which the Bureau has issued many statements and the Ledger has closed nothing.
The relics answer. Consecrated ground holds, and holy water burns what it is supposed to burn. All of that shows that something answers. None of it shows that a sentence was ever passed.
#On Sufficient Penance
The whole Position hangs on a single adjective: sufficient.
The faithful already knew how to do penance. They had always known. A penitent kneels at the confessional screen and says the thing aloud. A family fasts on the appointed days and a little past them. Prayers go up at the bell, the tithe is paid and written down, and a pilgrim walks to a shrine on feet that will not thank him later. The Church had all of these instruments before the Sundering, kept them in cellars through the Rationalist years, and brought them back into daylight afterwards. The First Position took every one of them and added only a promise.
It never said how much. It never said whose penance counted, or for how long, or for which part of the offence. The Records hold no instrument naming the officer competent to declare the account settled, and no description of the seal that would settle it or of the sign by which the world would learn that the enemy had been recalled. A penance without a measure is a debt without a ledger. I have spent my life among ledgers, and I can tell you that a debt without one is the most profitable kind for the creditor and the most terrible for the debtor, because the debtor can never prove that he has paid.
The Records can tell you, almost to the line, what a parish tithed and how often its bell was rung. No office has ever been able to tell you what was owed. The penitents kept paying into an account whose balance nobody could read, and the only evidence that it was still open was that the Great Deceiver was still at the Line.
That was the evidence, every morning.
#On Those Who Pay
The Rationalists are dead. Their academicians are dead, their ministers are dead, and the crowds who jeered in the marketplaces have been dust since well before anyone now living was baptised. A punishment in the ordinary sense falls on the offender. Under the First Position, the people doing the penance were everyone else.
I have searched for a statute of inherited guilt and found none, and I don't believe the Position ever had one. It didn't need one. If penance is owed and the debtors are dead, the debt falls on whoever happens to be kneeling when the bell rings. That meant the widow in the rear provinces fasting for an offence committed in a city she will never see. It meant the mill-hand confessing on a Saturday to a desecration done before his great-grandfather was born, because the confessor told him that confession helps, and confession was the one thing on offer. It meant the soldier on the Sagittal Line at three in the morning, praying for the enemy to be withdrawn while he watched that enemy fail to withdraw. In the case of his own penance the soldier did get some proof that it was insufficient, because the enemy was still there to shoot at him.
Between the guilty and the penitent stood the clergy. They heard the confessions, assigned the fasts, rang the bells and wrote everything down. They administered the payment for a crime none of them had committed and kept the books on a debt none of them could total. The faithful paid it, as they pay everything.
#On the Later Positions
Three Positions on the Great Deceiver have been taught. A careless reader will run them together, and a careful one will notice that each asks something different of him.
Under the First, the enemy is a punishment, and a punishment has a term. Pay enough and the sentence lifts. The faithful were asked for endurance and contrition, and they were promised an end.
Under the Second, the enemy is a corruption brought into the Creator's design by mortal hubris, a breach in the work, and only mortal sacrifice can repair it. Time does not heal a breach. Labour and blood are what close it. The faithful were asked for sacrifice, and they were promised that the thing could be mended.
Under the Third, which is the Bureau's present Position and carries the formula of permission recorded at the Fourth Doctrinal Congress of A.S. 104, the enemy exists by divine permission and for a purpose: he is a trial worthy of mankind's faith. The faithful are asked to understand that the struggle is the point. They are promised that it means something. No release is offered. The Third Position does not say when the trial ends, and after reading it closely I am not sure it says the trial ends at all.
So punishment gave way to breach, and breach gave way to examination. Each step put more distance between the faithful and a date.
Two neighbouring doctrines should be kept apart from the Positions, because they live in the same rooms and get mistaken for relatives. The Doctrine of Divine Withdrawal, set at the Second Congress of A.S. 72, explains the Creator's silence: the desecrations broke the apparatus of belief through which divine speech reached mortal ears. The Doctrine of Perfect Faith promises that the Creator will intervene once faith becomes perfect. Both place the responsibility on mortals, as the First Position did. But perfect faith is a condition of the soul, and sufficient penance was a quantity owed. One is a state you can never be sure you have reached. The other was a sum nobody would tell you. I note the family resemblance and claim no kinship that the Records do not record.
The First Position, promulgated at the First Doctrinal Congress, was succeeded by the Second Position at the Second Congress of A.S. 72.
Corrected. The Positions and the Congresses are separate numbered series and share nothing but their digits. The Records before me assign the First Position no Congress, no author, no date of promulgation and no date of supersession, and this entry assigns it none. The Hieromnemon regrets having counted to two twice.
There is also the Suppressed Position, which the entry on the Creator acknowledges and declines to describe. A fourth Position was declared non-existent by Bureau of Doctrine Memorandum 19-H in A.S. 187. I have nothing to add, and I add it.
#On the Present Record
The First Position is a former teaching. As far as the Records before me show, nobody has classified the memory of it as an offence, and this entry does not do so. The Bureau of Purity is welcome to read these pages. It will find in them a survey, made in Strasbourg under seal, of a doctrine the Church once held and no longer teaches. I am told the old still say it at the bell in some parishes: we sinned, and we are paying. I record that as hearsay and leave it there.
One thing in the Position was never revised, because no later Position addressed it. The promise was not fulfilled and it was not withdrawn. The Bureau moved its teaching from punishment to breach to trial and left the penitents' account where it was: open, unaudited, and still being paid into every morning across the Church by people who have never heard of the First Position and will kneel anyway.
The Great Deceiver remains at the Line, and the account remains open. If the Creator keeps a ledger, He has not shown it to the Bureau. If He keeps none, the Bureau has kept one on His behalf, and it balances.