Heresy of Selectivity

#On the Portion Refused

“He believed everything we told him except the part we needed.” (remark to junior exegetes, Tower of the Quill, unrecorded by request)

The Heresy of Selectivity is the offence of the faithful subject who believes too little of what he believes. He kneels when the bell requires it. He pays the tithe, keeps his correction slips folded flat in his hat, and recites the creed at a square-stop without a stammer. Then he reaches the point where the Church has approved two accounts of one matter, picks one, and leaves the other on the table like gristle.

That choice is the crime.

Under the Doctrine of Concordant Multiplicity, contradictions between approved narratives are complementary facets of a truth too large for a single account. Selectivity is the lock on that cabinet. Without it, every facet becomes a menu, and the faithful wander the shelves like housewives squeezing pears.

Two faults are kept apart here. A man who accepts an account the Church never approved has committed ordinary error. Depending on who overheard him, it is filed as rumour, perjury, or heresy, and there are clerks enough for all three. A man who rejects part of what the Church has approved together has done something worse. He has left authority standing and edited it. A denier at least leaves the shelves intact. An editor rearranges them and calls it his conscience.

#On Halva's Retained Deaths

Saint Halva of the Warm Ladle is still the teaching case, because her packet reached Aldous Crenn in A.S. 94 with three deaths in it and no room on the shelf for a choice. The history belongs to the parent tract, and I will not chew that broth twice. Here the shape is enough. One account has her dying of hunger. One has her trampled. One is the approved domestic tableau, with the ladle, the cradle, the storehouse key, and the psalm. The hunger account serves the Mothers of Plenty and their teaching on sacrifice. The trampling gives the Mercy clerks their grim realism. The tableau goes on the feast cards, the chapel plaster, and the tin medallions sold outside Mainz at a markup I admire.

Mind the wording. The Ledger keeps three accounts of one woman's death. Anyone who asks how many times she died will be shown the door, and then the approved account of the door.

Now take the widow in the ration hall who weeps at the hunger account and calls the trampling a slander made up by Mercy clerks. Her love of Halva is spotless and her bookkeeping is heresy. Or take the apprentice who prefers the trampling because it sounds true, and sneers at the tableau as a card-seller's fancy. He has set himself up as a court of appeal over three sealed instruments. Nobody gave him a bench. He brought a stool from home.

They differ in taste and agree in sin. Each has received Halva and returned part of her.

#On the Office Entitled to Choose

Choice belongs upward. Reception belongs downward. Everything else here is commentary on those two sentences.

The four tests of Multiplicity are authority, institutional utility, audience segmentation, and sanctified vocabulary. They tell an office when it may keep conflicting accounts on the same shelf. They give the recipient nothing at all. They are keys cut for a cabinet, and nobody hands the cabinet's keys to the man who dusts it.

Each office keeps its own share of that cabinet. The Bureau of Doctrine supplies the binding definition and the approved wording from the Cloister of Concord in Strasbourg. The Bureau of Purity investigates and enforces. The Bureau of Records keeps the seals, copies, and abstracts that let divergence stay legible and stop it turning into rot. The Bureau of Relics decides whether two skulls may share a saint by giving them separate calendars and custody lines.

The clever objector raises audience segmentation at this point, because clever objectors always reach for the one tool that will cut them. If the ration hall is taught hunger and the festival is shown the tableau, the Church is selecting. Quite so. The Church is selecting. That is allocation, and allocation is an office. A Matron who teaches only the hunger account to her queue does so because hunger was allotted to her hall. If the same Matron tells that queue the tableau is a painted lie, she has crossed from allocation into preference. The ladle in her hand is identical in both cases. Her standing is altered completely.

All the faithful are required to assent to every approved account of a matter, and to hold them together in the heart at all hours.

#On Selectivity in Daily Practice

None of what follows is a case. They are forms of the offence. The names belong to Purity, and Purity does not lend.

In the ration hall, the Ladle Sister taps her measure cup three times, chalks the day's quota, and says the formula: Enough, if obedient. She teaches the hunger account because her hall was given it. A woman in the queue answers that Halva starved and "never mind what the Mercy men say." Her first clause is devotion and her second is Selectivity. The Sister may let it pass once. A Sister who lets it pass twice will find her own measure cup checked first when the auditors come.

At the square-stop, a Street-Vicar halts a cart and asks for the response line. The carter gives it perfectly, then adds a small aside of his own about which saint's death the priests "really" believe. The aside is what goes into the chalk. The vicar issues a correction slip, requiring a recitation, a chapel attendance, and a penance chore, and logs the escalation if the carter argues. Nobody questions his piety. They question his editing.

At the confessional screen, a penitent admits she kisses her ladle token every night and thinks the witness file on Halva is "clerks' rubbish." She has taken the ladle's devotional sufficiency and mocked the witness file. The confession abstract travels to Records, where a scribe reconciles it against the parish ledger and notes the discrepancy in a controlled hand. She came in to confess one sin and confessed a different one without noticing.

Then there is the subject with comic ambitions. A cooper obtains a certified copy of a Doctrine ruling and carries it to a Purity examiner to argue his own case. He is citing Doctrine against Purity without leave from either. The Seven Seals overlap like roof tiles, and every gap between them is an invitation to men like this. He believes he has found a crack in the masonry. He has found the place where the masonry keeps its spare tongs.

#On Correction and Authorization

An office may revise an account, set it apart from another, or retire it to a sealed appendix. When Doctrine withdraws a narrative, that is correction. When a citizen withdraws it privately in his own head, that is Selectivity, even when the two acts are identical and their conclusions match to the letter. Occasionally the heretic turns out to have been right ten years early, and that is the least forgivable thing about him. Being right is the Bureau's privilege. Getting there first is theft.

The same rule governs quarrels between offices. When Doctrine and Purity disagree, the question of which one the faithful should follow is settled by authorization and by whichever office currently prevails. The faithful may hold no opinion on which office prevails either. They will be told. Usually they are told by the office that prevailed.

Do not confuse any of this with licence. Multiplicity shelters approved divergence and nothing else. The tithe-collector who counted twice, the parish that claims two grants for one roof, the man who says the Church holds many truths and so his own must be one of them: these are fraud, disorder, and impudence, and they get none of the mercy that sealed contradictions get. A subject cannot defend himself against a charge of Selectivity by pleading Multiplicity. That would be choosing which doctrine to receive, and that is the original offence again, in a better coat.

The stakes are what they always are. Purity keeps no tariff for Selectivity. Its examiners keep the furnace, the tongs, and long memories, and they consult the prevailing office on which to use.

#On the Present Application

As of A.S. 201, the offence is seldom named and constantly policed. Parish catechisms give "the deaths of Saint Halva" as a plural noun, and the child's response is fixed: I receive them. A child who asks which one is told she has received them already, and the matter is closed with a sweet or a slap, according to the parish.

Relic interpretation runs on the same rails. When pilgrims from two towns arrive carrying the same saint's finger, Relics has already separated their feast days and custody lines. The pilgrim who announces that his finger is the true one has committed Selectivity in a reliquary. He is usually sent home with his finger and a correction slip.

Administrative wording has learned the lesson best of all. Records clerks write retained where an untrained scribe would write resolved. Doctrine examiners write received entire. Purity writes as little as it can, and seals the rest.

The question is closed. It was never open to you.