Professor Aldric Sane

#On His Station

Professor Aldric Sane teaches theology at the Academy of Strasbourg, in the University district of the Holy City. His subject is the nature of the Sin-Generals. That is the whole of what the Ledger certifies about him. I have turned the entry over several times, the way one turns a reliquary that rattles when it should not.

The Academy exists because the Synod cannot govern with illiterates. Someone must draft the canons, plead the appeals, copy the registers, and explain to a provincial bishop why his assessment has tripled since Lent. So the Academy trains theologians and lawyers and, at intervals no Bureau has learned to predict, a scholar. The Bureaus burn through the first two kinds the way a foundry burns coal. They watch the third kind the way a foundry would watch a lump of coal that had started asking about the furnace.

Every account available to me calls Sane a theologian. His file turns on whether he is also a scholar.

The city around him is ancient, and the Synod's tenure in it is not. Somewhere in my own survey of Strasbourg I let rhetoric run ahead of the register.

#On His Belief

The survey records that Sane actually believes in the Creator, and adds that this is a rarity among professional religionists.

I wrote that line, and I stand by it, though I ask that the record show I stand by it at a slight angle.

Since the Bureau of Purity will read this closely, I will be exact. I make no accusation that the clergy of Strasbourg are secret unbelievers. My complaint is narrower and more damning: belief is not what they are paid for. A Hieromnemon is paid for precedent, a Confessor for attendance, an Archon for the seals that move grain to the Line and men into the ground. The Creator is invoked at the head of every form, in the same place as the date and with about the same warmth.

Sane, by report, means it.

I find this mildly embarrassing, as one is embarrassed by a colleague who weeps at the anthem. I have served the Faith with distinction, at length, and in triplicate, and nobody has ever had cause to suspect me of sincerity. My devotion is entirely in order. It is filed, countersigned and kept somewhere cool and dry.

A sincere believer is inconvenient for a reason the cynics never reckon with. The man who recites doctrine treats it as a liturgy, words with a fixed order that you speak and then put away. The man who believes it treats it as true, and you can examine a true thing. If the Creator is real to him, then the Creator's enemies are real to him as well, and anything real has a nature, and a nature can be studied, lectured on, and questioned by second-year students before the bell.

I should be just as exact about what he is not. I find no treatise under his name in any register I am permitted to see. No source makes him a reformer, a mystic or the founder of a school. As far as the documents go, he is a believer who teaches. Strasbourg has to decide whether that combination is ordinary.

#On the Nature of His Subject

There are seven. Kargath of Gluttony, Velmora of Greed, Velkara of Lust, Maldrake of Wrath, Syrion of Sloth, Atheron of Pride, Morwen of Envy. These names are not abstractions. The garrisons on the Sagittal Line learn them in the same week they learn their rations.

What the Sin-Generals are, the Bureau of Doctrine defines, and I sign beneath Doctrine. The canonical distinctions are fine enough to cut yourself on. Kargath's sin is consumption that devours the one consuming. Syrion takes a soul's agency and leaves its pulse. Morwen wears away the self until a man covets his way out of his own name. These are the Church's formulations, set down in the Church's books. They are not Sane's. I have no syllabus of his lectures. Nobody has sent me one, and I have entered that as a grievance.

The dangerous word in his subject is nature. The Bureau of War wants countermeasures: the ward, the drill, the rotation, the pyre. Doctrine wants definitions it can seal and close. A lecture on the nature of a Sin-General stands between those two needs, in the space where a student is allowed to ask what a thing is before being told what to do about it. Whether the Generals are demons in the full Doctrinal sense or something the Church has not yet finished naming is a question I have publicly admitted I cannot settle. I get away with that admission because I hold no lectern.

The survey does not say which proposition troubles Purity, and I will not supply one. A Hieromnemon who guesses at another man's heresy has drafted it for him, and in my hand it would be admissible.

#On the Academy's Difficulty

The Synod's war with knowledge has a simple shape. It needs educated administrators. Education breeds questions, and questions, if left unsupervised, breed heresy. The Academy's answer is a curriculum demanding enough that its students have nothing left over for independent thought. Most years it works. Most students graduate tired, competent and quiet, and go off to fill the Bureaus like ink filling a well.

Every Bureau views the Academy's genuine scholars with suspicion except the Bureau of Records, which needs people who can read. Records' interest is purely practical. It wants clean hands, legible hands, and hands that do not shake when copying a death warrant for the fourth time.

The institution stands among its instruments. The Library of Saint Origen holds two hundred thousand volumes. In the Debating Halls, students argue theology for grades, which teaches them that orthodoxy is something you can score. Beneath the Library are the Secret Stacks, holding books that do not officially exist in a room that does not officially exist. No register gives Professor Sane a key to them. I record that only because someone will ask.

The division of labour is plain. Doctrine sets the boundaries of authorized truth. Purity patrols those boundaries and keeps the Index Damnatus, which lists what may not be read, printed or argued. Between them sit the lecture halls, where young men are taught to approach the boundary and then turn back at exactly the right moment.

A heretic is easy to process. Purity has forms for heretics, cells for heretics, and an entire grammar of confession worked out over generations of practice. A believer who asks, in good faith and in orthodox language, what a Sin-General actually is fits none of those forms. His questions come dressed in the right vestments. They kneel in the right places. They cannot be refused without refusing the Faith they come from, and they cannot be answered without admitting that the answer is still being drafted.

This is Strasbourg's difficulty, and the Academy only houses it. Sane is just its most visible tenant.

#On His Present Condition

As of the survey of A.S. 201: Professor Aldric Sane teaches. His lectures on the Sin-Generals are popular with students. The Bureau of Purity finds them worrying. He has not been arrested.

A.S. 201 is the year of the survey that records these facts. It is not his birth, his appointment, the date of any particular lecture, or the opening of any proceeding. The Ledger knows none of those dates, and I will not make them up to tidy the margin. His age, his birthplace and his road to the lectern are absent from every file I may consult. A dossier with gaps tells the truth. A dossier without gaps has been written by a novelist or by Purity.

In the city survey I called his liberty an oversight. That was a joke. I set it down here for the benefit of those readers in the Bureau of Purity who treat my margins as a docket, which is all of them. No warrant is recorded. No observer is named. No outcome is foretold. He goes on lecturing, and the students go on attending, and somewhere in the Sanctum Mile a clerk has been told to keep a file that is so far only one page long.