Newsletter for the Week of 12/1/23

News: Charging through Vol. 3 of Slumrat. Had a look at getting To The Far Shore (my first novel, available on Royal Road) into a trad. publisher, but after looking at the numbers and time cost, that dog won’t hunt. I split it into a Vol. 1 and 2, Vol. 1 is already edited and typeset, so I just need to slap a cover on that bad boy and figure out how marketing works. I may yet try to sell it to a small indy pub, but a long novel that’s not part of an ongoing series? Might be a tough lift. Any which way about it, I want to get it up on Kindle by the end of spring. It’s been too damn long.

As for Sinews of War… oof. That’s on a distant back burner. I really like it, but I just don’t think the market is there for it. At least not on RR, and that’s my main way to get word out about my books. So. Tough one. Someday I will finish it and put it into print. Someday.

Project Innsmouth… remains a secret. Top secret. Highly experimental. Expected release date of late spring, early summer 2024. BUT IT IS TOP SECRET! TELL NO ONE!

Behind the Scenes/Weird Rant About Philosophy: Theology/Philosophy In Context

The statements below are almost entirely from my multi-decade old recollection. It certainly contains errors. If you are okay with that, read on. It’s a pretty weird little corner of history, and it indirectly turns up in a lot of my writing.

As a graduation requirement for my Bachelors in History, I wrote a dissertation on the following question- “Could De Tribus Impostoribus (In English: The Three Impostors,) actually have been written by the person accused of writing it?” I concluded the answer was “Yes,” based entirely on the context in which the allegation arose.

De Tribus Impostoribus is a book which is alleged to allege that the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) were founded by impostors. A particularly spicy allegation in any era. More so when you consider that the allegation was made in a Papal Encyclical against the excommunicated Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick II in 1239 Anno very fucking much Domini.

In the Encyclical, Pope Gregory IX (and there’s a name that should be ringing alarm bells for you medieval history fans) merely alleges that Fredrick said such a thing. He then (allegedly) ordered one of his clerks to write something supporting the position. The allegation caught fire, and for centuries after, people were talking about the dreadful heretical book De Tribus Impostoribus, long hidden and suppressed, but still lurking in the shadows.

So why do I use the word “could,” instead of “did?” It’s the Pope calling out the Holy Roman Emperor in 1239. No smoke without fire, right?  Well, you have to look at the context. It was a hot minute ago that a previous pope found a metric fucktonne of Normans (like, for example, Frederick II) on his front porch, looking over the tax records and weighing the silver.

This led to Urban II’s famous “Why don’t you take a nice penitential pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and reclaim it for Christ while you are at it,” speech. Deus Vult etc. A speech which survives in four versions, none of which are believed to be truly correct.

A previous Holy Roman Emperor coming to Rome and installing his own lackey as Pope is also a reasonably recent institutional memory. As is the ongoing battle between the crown and Rome over who has the right to appoint bishops. A “minor” question that will come up again in the Reformation. Gregory IX had, as a major part of his program, restoring the power and authority of the Papacy. Something he managed with great energy, a sharp tongue and sharper elbows.

Then you have to look at Frederick II. Born in Sicily, he was raised in a very multicultural environment with a lot of exposure to Islam and Muslim scholars. Incredible food, spices, art, technology, music, all converged in Sicily.

Those of you who both History and Philosophy probably remember that a lot of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophical texts didn’t survive in Europe. (Plato was almost entirely extinct, to the point where people thought Aristotle and Plato could be the same person.) Those texts did, however, survive in the East, as Islam slowly conquered the old Eastern Roman Empire.

When Fredrick II eventually took the Crown and visited the German and Mitteleuropean states that made up the bulk of the HRE, he was… less than impressed. The feeling was completely mutual.

Fredrick did what any medieval monarch with questions about his faith would do: he hugged the cross in the middle of one of his several coronations and promised to go on crusade. He put it off for a decade or so, and got his first excommunication. When he finally rolled his eyes and went, he cheated.

Rather than walk from Scicily to Jerusalem, never mind his armies across central Europe and everyone else that wanted to tag along, Frederick hired the Venetians to carry his army across the Mediterranean in boats. He cut a treaty (after almost no fighting) with the Sultan of Egypt where he would be King of Jerusalem for ten years, then sovereignty would revert back to the Sultan. Kind of a ten year tax farming deal in essence, but the city was, at least in name, “Conquered by Fredrick II.” Crusade done.

Gregory IX was not amused, to put it very mildly. Medieval Catholicism tossed out penances like beads at Mardi Gras, some of which lasted an entire lifetime. We are not talking ten Hail Mary’s here, but hours of fasting and prayer, weekly. Or daily.

A penitential pilgrimage could potentially wipe out all your outstanding penances. Hence the great appeal of the crusades. They weren’t just about grabbing new lands or doing in the expansionist Muslim kingdoms, they were about getting right with God via penance. A crusade was, quite literally, about the journey, not the destination.

And Fredrick just… speed ran the whole thing. Also he was as close to a real-life Doctor Doom as may ever have existed. I don’t want to get sidetracked more than I already have, just… he was. Google him, some of the things he did read like a Sacha Baron Cohen bit.

You can understand why Gregory IX excommunicated him a second time. And sent around Encyclicals accusing him of calling Jesus et al frauds. It would be the kind of thing an over-educated heretic with worrying ties to the conquering hordes of Islam would say, right?

“Alright,” I hear you cry, “That’s all interesting, but we are almost a thousand words into this newsletter, and I don’t really see the connection Slumrat Rising. What gives?”

This is because, as one of my patrons, you are so much smarter and sexier than other, lesser, readers. You have kept your eye on the ball. Let’s get back to my dissertation- Could Fredrick II have written De Tribus Impostoribus? And why did I (and my approving advisor) think so?

Well, here’s the thing. De Tribus Impostoribus, the book itself, probably never existed.

Which is pretty interesting, given that there are at least two forgeries of it.

There never was a De Tribus Impostoribus, but there ARE forgeries of it. Just… sit with that thought a minute.

One forgery was written in an underground library in Paris, the other written by a German theology student. Written decades apart, there is no chance of either author having read the other’s work. Stylistically they are totally different, the length is different, but the argumentation is remarkably similar.

The books are similar in argumentation because they were inspired by centuries of Catholic anti-heretical theological training. Just because the book couldn’t be found didn’t mean priests and missionaries shouldn’t be trained in how to combat its heretical arguments and poisonous philosophy. Centuries of study went into preparing to counter its likely arguments. Because everyone believed the book was real, and heretics were using it to corrupt the faithful.

I’m not kidding. That training existed. Imagine busting your ass to learn how to defeat the arguments in a book that never existed. Imagine that going on for half a millennium.

I concluded that the arguments put forward in the forgeries could have been developed by Fredrick II (or his clerk) because the arguments essentially repeat elements of Cicero’s On The Nature of the Gods, and Fredrick could have been familiar with them.

De Tribus Impostoribus was a meme. It haunted Europe for more than half a millennium. Voltaire wrote a response to it in 1770. The Seven Years war, arguably the first World War, ended a few years ago, and one of the leading philosophers of Europe is dunking on a meme generated by a 1239 CE shitpost by the Pope flaming Doctor Doom.

Philosophy, like theology, exists in its given context. The people who wrote the forgeries were working within their context to make the arguments they believed someone else might have made in their context.

The very first extended “Philosopher Dream” that Truth experiences is him riding through a burnt out village with one Thomas Hobbes, best known for his book Leviathan.

Leviathan is famously long, but what is less well known is that the whole book proceeds by a sort of formal logic. Hobbes starts from how light works, the nature of the physical world, all that, then proceeds by logical extension all the way up to God. It’s a staggering work, and frankly brilliant. It might be completely wrong, but it’s still brilliant.

Leviathan is also a response to the English Civil war, which was really a series of wars that were part of a broader series of wars that lasted for decades. It was sectarian too- the Puritan Parliament against the (very) Catholic King Charles I.

I cannot overstate how brutal these wars were. Almost a fifth of the British population died, about the same proportion as died in the First World War. Except the war was fought in Britain, not mainland Europe, so burned out villages and ruined churches were a common sight.

Hobbes saw the horror of his age and it terrified him. So he worked hard to imagine a world where people could live peacefully, protected by the law. Where questions of religion or political authority would not exist, because religion would be simply another arm of the all powerful state. And the state would require absolute power, to prevent the horror and bloodshed from ever returning.

The natural condition of mankind in the State of Nature, according to Hobbes, is a state of war in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” because individuals are in a “war of all against all.” Hobbes didn’t actually think the State of Nature was a real thing that ever existed. He was talking about his home. Terrified that he would be next, but brave enough to put forward his explosive, revolutionary book.

He thought he might be hung for it. He figured he could beat the rap in civil court, but they might get him in an ecclesiastical one. He wasn’t hung, but he lived in fear of it his whole life.

Philosophy and theology arise from their context- historical, political, economic, religious. Assuming those are different things, but then, that’s a philosophical question too, isn’t it? It was true when Marx wrote Capital, or when Spinoza managed to get excommunicated from a synagogue, or when Ayn Rand started passing off her fetish porn as Politically Important.

And now we come full circle back to my dissertation and Slumrat Rising. The philosophy and theology of an era is shaped by what went before it, even if it’s only our erroneous imaginings about what that was. They do not exist in a void. They are technologies used by people to understand and live in this world or the next. They exist only in context.

Next week, our topic is Samuel Pepys Is A Goddamn Menace To My Sleep. I’ll let you guess why.