The Sporkings of Das Mervin and Company

This post may also be found on my journal here.



MG: Well, everyone, it is time to at last wrap up our journey through the short (and yet too long…), meandering, incoherent, anticlimactic and often disturbing world of Summa Elvetica (for the moment, at least, because unfortunately we’re far from done with Beale yet). Though we completed the tale itself last time, we still have some final matters to attend to in the form of some supplementary material Beale has provided us with to round out the story – namely, the Sanctiff’s bull officially declaring the elves ensouled, Marcus’s treatise (the in-universe “Summa Elvetica”) where he also comes to that conclusion, and then a final note from Beale himself explaining just what the point of this thing was (badly). After that, I’ll give my own final thoughts on this sporking (which shouldn’t be too long, because the book itself is pretty short compared to my usual fare). First off, we have the Sanctiff’s bull. Onward!

IMMACULATUS DEI

1 Novembre 1043

His Sanctified Holiness Charity IV

THE IMMACULATE GOD so loved man that He created him in such wise that he might participate, not only in the good that other creatures enjoy, but endowed him with capacity to attain to the inaccessible and invisible Supreme Good and behold it face to face; and since man, according to the testimony of the sacred Scriptures, has been created to enjoy eternal life and happiness, which none may obtain save through faith in our sublime Lord Immanuel, it is necessary that he should possess the nature and faculties enabling him to receive that faith; and that whoever is thus endowed should be capable of receiving that same faith. Nor is it credible that any one should possess so little understanding as to desire the faith and yet be destitute of the most necessary faculty to enable him to receive it.

MG: So, if I’m reading this correctly, by this logic any reasoning being should have the capacity to seek knowledge of God and potentially join the Amorran Church, and should therefore by that logic also by definition have a soul. Good work, everyone, pack it up, we’re done here! *beat* Except clearly we’re not, because the Sanctiff is going to keep going.

Hence Christ, who is the Truth itself, that has never failed and can never fail, said to the preachers of the faith whom He chose for that office, ‘Go ye and teach all nations.’ He said all, without exception, for all are capable of receiving the doctrines of the faith.

MG: See above comment re: then logically that implies elves have souls, assuming they are part of “the nations” (and in a standard fantasy setting populated by multiple nonhuman species like Selenoth, why wouldn’t they be?). But also see the other point re the Sanctiff not shutting up yet!

The enemy of the human race, who opposes all good deeds in order to bring men to destruction, beholding and envying this, invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God’s word of salvation to the people: he inspired his satellites who, to please him, have not hesitated to assert that the elves of the west, the orcs, goblins and trolls of the east,

MG: Okay, I’ve kind of got to chuckle at this one because according to the map of Selenoth in the main series books, the elven kingdoms are to the east of Amorr and the goblins are to the west. *beat* Maybe someone should tell the Sanctiff he’s looking at his map upside down…

the dwarves, jotun and ulfin of the north and the diverse creatures of south that bear the shapes of both man and beast, and other people of whom should be treated as dumb brutes whose creation was inspired by that enemy and are therefore incapable, by virtue of their intrinsic nature, of receiving the true and immaculate faith.

MG: That the Amorrans are quite willing to embrace these ideas and have in fact committed genocide on at least one other species (half-elves) and even to the present day treat the matter as something to make light jokes about will, of course, go entirely unmentioned.

We have certain knowledge that in some cases, these various races have entered into this world through the wickedness of man and other beings. We acknowledge that the existence of these demonic races, spawned from the lusts of spirits and the evil will of fallen men, a willful and malevolent perversion of God’s creation, and we deny and rebuke the unseemly notion that these beings are a form of man or can be deemed to possess an immortal soul.

MG: Oooof. So we’re just going to go ahead and condemn entire races of thinking beings (the Ulfin, created by the Witchkings, seem to be the obvious ones he’s getting at here) because of the crimes their creators committed in bringing them into existence, are we? Well, the implications of that are horrifying. Also, I’m glad Errezha’s not here anymore because I’m pretty sure she’d go ballistic because this hits a little too close to home. For context, Errezha was born as the result of her mother, a Chelish diabolist (Cheliax being one of Pathfinder’s big Evil Empires™ if Errezha’s comments about her homeland haven’t made that clear) sleeping with a devil in an attempt to produce an incredibly magically gifted child… and then she mostly rejected said child when she came out very, very obviously a tiefling (because that’s the logical result of having sex with devils…), and Chelish culture in general is also very racist against tieflings despite the fact that the Chelish aristocracy relies on pacts with the Hells to stay in power (partially because they’re human supremacists, partially because they view the existence of tieflings as a threat). So, yeah, the idea that entire races of people can and should be condemned because they came into existence through evil and are tied to dark powers through no fault of their own is the sort of thing that’s going to make her a little bit testy (read “testy” as “I’m surprised we can’t hear her calling for the Sanctiff’s head from here”).

Also, on a more personal note, the protagonists from my current ongoing WIP (which I’ve been posting sporadic updates about over on my journal) who are somewhat inspired by both D&D/Pathfinder tieflings as well as the Nephilim of real-world legend, among others, belong to a species who are outcast from society and generally treated like crap by the powers that be because of their supposed unholy origins, so… yeah. Just felt worth bringing up (and doesn’t dispose me very kindly towards the Sanctiff here, either).

We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of the Purified and seek with all our might to bring those sheep of His flock who are outside into the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the elves are a people truly possessed of souls which are naturally united to them through the act of creation by the Most High God and that they are not only capable of understanding the true and holy faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it.

MG: “Exceedingly desire” here having the meaning of “exactly one elf converted for personal reasons and most of the rest of them couldn’t care less,” I take it? I guess the Sanctiff decided to leave out the part where he came to this conclusion because an elf blushed after she kissed one of his priests, huh?

Desiring to provide ample remedy for these evils, we define and declare by these our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said elves and all other people who may later be determined to be similarly ensouled by us,

MG: Until then they’re out of luck, I guess. Which I guess further underscores both that the Amorran Church considers themselves to be both the ultimate arbiters of who does and doesn’t have souls, but that they have mostly been of the opinion until recently that most nonhuman beings probably don’t. Fun!

are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of the Most Holy Lord Immanuel; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

MG: So… ensouled beings shouldn’t be enslaved according to the Sanctiff, I guess? Say, care to explain all the countless human slaves you have in Amorr then, buddy? Go on, I’m waiting!

By virtue of our apostolic authority we define and declare by these present letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, which shall thus command the same obedience as the originals, that the said elves should be converted to the faith of Our Lord Immanuel by preaching the Immaculate Word of God and by the example of good, holy, and peaceable living.

MG: “Good, holy and peaceable living” being something that’s not in much supply in Amorr, from all we’ve seen…

Anyway, that was pompous and mostly served to restate the conclusions the Sanctiff already arrived at last time, with more words and more hinting at further unpleasant and hypocritical aspects of Amorran society and theology (it’s based on a real Papal bull, as Beale will eventually admit, but large chunks of it have obviously be reworked or outright inserted to fit with the plot of Summa Elvetica). Fun! Next up is Marcus’s treatise; we’re going to look at it in one unit, so I’m saving my commentary for the very end.






SUMMA ELVETICA

By Marcus Valerius

Article 1, Question VII. Whether the elves have souls naturally united to them.

Objection 1. It would seem that elves do not have souls naturally united to them. For it is written: “God formed man of the slime of the earth and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man was made a living soul.” But he who breathes sends forth something of himself. Therefore the soul is of the divine substance. Elves, created subsistent and distinct from man, did not receive the divine substance from God. Therefore the elves do not have souls naturally united to them.

Objection 2. Further, man is created in the image of God, after the likeness of God. The elves are not created in the image and likeness of God. Therefore the elves do not have souls naturally united to them.

Objection 3. Further, the psalmist asks of God: “What is man that you are mindful of him?” In answer to which question he writes: “You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet”: whereby we discern that man is foremost among all creation that is materially subsistent. Therefore the elves do not have souls naturally united to them.

Objection 4. Further, man was created on the sixth day. The more perfect has precedence in the order of nature as given in the account of Creation, therefore man is more perfect than the elves. Now the most perfect state of the soul is to be separated from the body, since in that state it is more similar to God and the angels, and is more pure, as being separated from any extraneous nature. Inasmuch as they are less perfect than man, the elves are still further removed from the most perfect state of the soul. Therefore the elves do not have souls naturally united to them.

On the contrary, Oxonus said: “In rational animals the sensitive appetite obeys reason.” Therefore, in so far as they are led by a kind of estimative power, which is subject to a higher reason, that is to say the Divine, there is a certain likeness of moral good in them, in regard to the soul.

I answer that: On this question there have been various opinions. First, if the soul by its nature were a complete species, so that it might be created as to itself, this would prove that the soul was neither man nor elf. But as the soul is naturally a partaker of the form of the body, it was necessarily created, not separately, but in the body. For if the soul had a species of itself it would have something still more in common with the angels. But, as the form of the body, the question of the soul belongs to the animal genus, as a formal principle, and therefore it may not be settled on that basis but must be answered with regards to the particular nature of the elven species.

Second, the condition of man in the state of innocence was not more exalted than the condition of the angels. But among the angels some rule over others; and so one order is called that of “Dominations.” Therefore it was not beneath the dignity of the state of innocence that one man should be subject to another. Forasmuch as one man can be subject to another without imputing significance to his soul, the elves can be subject to the mastership of man without significance to theirs.

Third, while in all creatures there is some kind of likeness to God, in the rational creature alone we find a likeness of “image”; whereas in other creatures we find a likeness by way of a “trace.” Now the intellect or mind is that whereby the rational creature excels other creatures; wherefore this image of God is not found even in the rational creature except in the mind. Gregory (Hom. x in Ev.) calls an elf a rational animal, therefore the elves are more properly likened to men and angels instead of the irrational creatures.

Reply to objection 1. The body is not of the essence of the soul; but the soul by the nature of its essence can be united to the body, so that, properly speaking, not the soul alone, but the “composite,” is the species. To say that the soul is of the divine substance involves a manifest improbability. For the human soul is sometimes in a state of potentiality to the act of intelligence—acquires its knowledge somehow from things—and thus has various powers; all of which are incompatible with the Divine Nature, wherefore it is evidently false that the soul is of the substance of God. Therefore the elves have souls which are naturally united to them.

Reply to objection 2. Although creatures do not attain to a natural likeness to God according to similitude of species, as a man begotten is like to the man begetting, still they do attain to likeness to Him, forasmuch as they represent the divine idea, as a material house is like to the house in the architect’s mind. Likeness of creatures to God is not affirmed on account of agreement in form according to the formality of the same genus or species, but solely according to analogy, inasmuch as God is essential being, whereas other things are beings by participation. Therefore the elves have souls which are naturally united to them.

Reply to objection 3. Certain elves in this state of life are greater than certain men, not actually, but virtually; forasmuch as they have such great charity that they can merit a higher degree of beatitude than that possessed by certain men. In the same way we might say that the seed of a great tree is virtually greater than a small tree, though actually it is much smaller. Therefore the elves have souls naturally united to them.

Reply to objection 4. To give life effectively is a perfection simply speaking; hence it belongs to God, as is said (1 Samuel 2:6): “The Lord killeth, and maketh alive.” The order in which the production of the animals is given has reference to the order of those bodies which they are set to adorn, rather than to the superiority of the animals themselves. Further, it is said that life is more perfect in the elves than in man inasmuch as it is the soul that gives life to the body. Whereas the span of man is but threescore and seven, the span of the elves is in excess of five centuries. Therefore the elves have souls naturally united to them.

MG: Anyway, the first thing the astute reader will probably note is that this is what we’ve been seeing in the Latin epigraphs all throughout this story, finally rendered four our edification in English. Going back over the sporking, I’d like to thank several of our commentors, and in particular Mancalledtrue, for offering us translations of this text as we go along. I’d also like to thank Chessybell for offering a deconstruction of it from a Catholic perspective and explaining why so much of this is theological and philosophical nonsense from the perspective of the church Beale is supposedly basing all of this on. Thanks again, everyone!

Anyway, my analysis will focus on the role of this treatise from a narrative perspective. And from that perspective, it sucks. First off, as we’ve already discussed last time, we’ve had basically no indication of when Marcus was actually writing the damned thing, save that he apparently had it ready when he met with the Sanctiff again in the last chapter. Considering we’d been spending a lot of time in Marcus’s head up to that point, I can only conclude he composed it in the timeskip between leaving the elven lands and returning to Amorr. In other words, the entire writing of the document after which the book was named and which, thematically, it supposedly revolved around… took place off-page and ended up being basically irrelevant to the conclusion of the actual story. *applauds sarcastically* Good job, Beale!

Beyond that, though… when did Marcus actually come to any of these conclusions? We see several points where he wrestles with the idea of whether elves have souls or not, but none of them seem to have anything to do with what he writes in this document. Initially he listens to Aestus and Claudo briefly discuss the issue and weighs various approaches he might take in his treatise in Chapter Eight, but doesn’t come to any sort of conclusion. In Chapter Nine, he ends up appalled by what he perceives as the evils of King Mael’s court and seems like he’s on the verge of declaring the elves soulless, and then in Chapter Ten he meets Nomenlos, an elf who has converted to the Amorran Church, and wonders if that means elves do have souls… and then doesn’t really think on the matter any further until he’s ready to present his finished treatise to the Sanctiff in the end. So where did this treatise actually come from? What thought process or aspect of Marcus’s character development led to him producing it? Once again, the only major element I can point to as the turning point is Caitlys – that Marcus decided she was hot, and therefore she had to have a soul, so he dashed this treatise off in a rush to justify that. Especially considering that despite the weird and tortured logic it contains, the final argument, as far as I can tell, basically boils down to “elves have souls because they are reasoning beings and reasoning beings have souls,” which is more banal than profound and doesn’t really feel like it justifies all this nonsense.

Anyway, that’s all for Marcus; now it’s time to hear what Beale himself has to say about these matters! Strap yourselves in, folks!






AUTHOR’S NOTE

This novel did not proceed according to plan. It was originally conceived as an epic philosophical trilogy, in which the reader would be immersed in medieval scholastic thought and explore various facets of some of the great philosophical debates that took place both within and without the Catholic Church.

MG: …riveting. Seriously, I’m in the middle of wrapping up a graduate degree in Religious Studies. The medieval Catholic Church is not my area of research interest, but I’d say that I’m closer to the target audience for such a thing than about 95% percent of people, and I still think it sounds like an absolute snoozefest. Especially coming from someone who has shown that his grasp of such matters is… extremely shaky at best (as we’ve been discussing some in the comments, I’m quite confident that Beale is the sort of person who is only interested in ancient and medieval philosophy so he can cherry-pick out of context quotes to support his own reactionary ideology and fetish for Roman and Crusader imagery; and while I’d like to remind everyone to be cautious and respectful when discussing religion in the comments, it feels like a major oversight to not remind you that he’s not even Catholic, he just likes the medieval Church’s vibes). Like, I could probably see the potential of a work of epic fantasy that tried to do a really deep dive based on the world as medieval philosophers and theologians understood it… but this sounds like a very poor approach to that concept, and Beale himself is absolutely the wrong writer for it.

Misunderstood by most modern intellectuals and ignored by the irreligious authors of modern fantasy fiction,

MG: Based on Beale’s comments elsewhere, I’m 99% sure this is a dig at George RR Martin specifically (and, frankly, Martin’s handling of religion is one of the weakest aspects of his worldbuilding and Westeros’s claims to be a “realistically” medieval world – the Faith of the Seven is laughably weak as both a political and cultural force compared to the real-life Catholic Church of the period – but I really don’t want to hand it to Beale on anything).

the great scholars of the church were no close-minded ideologues, but rather brilliant men who conceived and refined many of the rational mechanisms that we today take for granted.

MG: Honestly, much as Beale is ridiculously self-satisfied and pretentious about it, there is definitely some truth to this. The medieval Church, and secular writers of the same period and general cultural milieu, did produce a lot of intellectual ideas we take for granted today, along with preserving (alongside their Orthodox and Islamic contemporaries) most of the learning from the classical Greek and Roman worlds we still have. Which just makes seeing Beale butcher all of that here in the name of tooting his own horn all the more galling.

It is not a coincidence that William of Ockham, author of the Summa Logicae and known for the logical principle that bears his name, was a Franciscan monk.

While the logic of churchmen such as William of Ockham, Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, and Thomas Aquinas most certainly has its flaws, the fair-minded reader must admit that their philosophical methods, however alien they may appear to modern eyes, are rather more reasonable and straightforward than the shamelessly manipulative Socratic method made famous by Plato.

MG: …what did Plato ever do to you, Beale? First you put a version of the theory of Forms in an evil elven king’s mouth, and now you take a swipe at him here? Especially considering that those medieval thinkers you champion so much were quite familiar with Plato and influenced by his works, which they thought very highly of! See that point I just made about the Church going out of its way to preserve a lot of Greek and Roman literature? The reason we have so much Plato is because people in the medieval world read his stuff and thought it important enough to make copies of!

Unfortunately, my initial goal of assigning roles for the diverse schools of philosophical thought to each of the conventional fantasy races foundered on my inability to meaningfully connect it to the story of the prospective young priest traveling to the elflands.

MG: …yeah, an inability to connect your intended themes to your actual story would seem to be a problem, yes (not that the finished Summa Elvetica does much better in that regard). But I have to say I think it’s very telling that Beale wanted to tie philosophical schools to races and not to, say, something like nations, monastic orders, religious traditions, or even magic systems. Says a lot of things about his worldview, I think; none of them good.

Fortunately, I had long been fascinated with the problem of a medieval Church-dominated society forced to come to terms with the existence of traditional fantasy concepts such as elves, orcs, dragons, and dwarves.

MG: Which is a very bad fit for the setting he’s created. This isn’t a version of the medieval Catholic Church that’s suddenly been introduced to the existence of elves et al. It’s a Church that has always existed in a world where such beings are known to be real, and whose civilizations are, in at least some cases, much older and more powerful than humanity’s. The Church really ought to have hammered all of these questions out long ago, probably shortly after its inception (if it started as a purely human religion; if it claimed adherents from other races from its beginnings, it’s probably a non-issue entirely). That it hasn’t speaks incredibly poorly of it… and also makes it all the more clear that Beale just dropped his version of a real-world church into a fantasy world without ever stopping to think about how those things might impact each other. It’s things like this that remind me of just how sloppy Beale’s worldbuilding is, I swear…

It has long been my contention that the superficial medievalism of fantasy fiction has crippled the genre, rendering its settings incoherent and its characters shallow and unconvincing even in the hands of writers much more talented than I can ever hope to be.

MG: I mean, there’s some truth to that to be sure, but I’d also argue that most modern fantasy authors aren’t medievalists and aren’t trying to present an actual look at the medieval world or an extended lesson on medieval life. And I think mister “I’ll just take every era of Roman history and put them all in a blender so they’re all happening at once and call the result Amorr instead” doesn’t really have a leg to stand on when it comes to authors not accurately representing actual historical cultures and periods. Or for haphazardly mixing the medieval Church and classical Rome together in the first place, instead of placing the Church into the sort of politically fragmented situation it actually occupied in the real Medieval period…

It is absurd, for instance, to base a plot that turns on a nominal Divine Right of Kings where there is no Divine from which the right is derived, and modern fantasy is littered with nonsensical priests without gods, who might as well be white wizards.

MG: …are either of those really a thing? While you can certainly complain about the tendency of fantasy writers to make their heroes Chosen Ones or of extraordinary birth in some way, exactly how often does Divine Right of Kings specifically come up as a major plot point in worlds without gods or religion to support or enforce the idea of such a right (and the sorts of grimdark fantasy Beale despises tend to be pretty cynical about kingship anyway and don’t usually take divine right seriously as a concept… though even Westeros has an at least nominal state religion)? And what sort of “nonsensical priests without gods” is he even on about? Some D&D settings allow for “atheist clerics,” sure, but even those sorts tend to be followers of religions or philosophical schools, just nontheistic ones (or in some cases they’re actively being courted by gods or other divine beings who could channel magic their way). Is this really a common enough trope to be worth complaining about? Is there a massive movement in fantasy I’m missing here, or is Beale just full of it?

So, the part of the original story that concerned the conflict between medieval Church and medievalesque fantasy not only survived intact, it became the central point of the plot.

MG: Which is why we ended up diverting away from that entirely to have a fairly banal political conspiracy plot instead in the last few chapters and resolve the “medieval Church” plot off-page…

Needless to say, this notion of centering a story around primarily philosophical action would have rendered the book all but unpublishable, were it not for the fortuitous emergence of Marcher Lord Press.

MG: And if only it had stayed unpublished…

I had originally planned to title the book Sublimus Dei, which is the name of the papal bull issued in 1537 by Pope Paul III that declared the primitive people of the Americas to be rational beings with souls.

MG: …which ended so well for the indigenous peoples of the Americas (and of course Beale just had to use the racist and colonially loaded term “primitive”, surprising no one). But looking up the text of that bull, it does indeed appear to have been somewhat butchered into being the Sanctiff’s bull that Beale quotes near the end.

Its text, somewhat altered, appears in the final chapter. The original translation of the Latin encyclical can be found at Papal Encyclicals Online as well as the Catholic Encylopedia at New Advent.

One day it struck me, however, that while the book could be presented as a metaphorical argument for the ensoulment of the elves, the structure of most philosophical arguments tend to be inordinately one-sided. There was, however, an exception.

MG: …not really? The elves certainly never get much of a chance to tell their side of the story beyond vaguely and anachronistically atheistic Platonism and being smug about it, while the Amorrans’ objections to the idea of elves having souls mostly seem to be rooted in knee-jerk human (and Amorran specifically) supremacism rather than any more solid philosophical argument.

Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica makes use of a particular method that provides, or at least appears to provide, the opposing side with a fair hearing.

Happily, this provided me not only with an obvious title for the book, but also a useful means of structuring the story in a manner that was at least tangentially connected to the argument.

MG: …as I think we’ve rather conclusively proven, you failed. If your story ends up so disconnected from your themes you can’t even really tell how its narrative conclusion is connected to the supposed thematic conclusion at all, you’ve probably failed at something (or quite a few somethings) along the way.

In the unlikely event one has not noticed, each chapter in this book has a Latin header. Each header is a part of the single article presented in its entirety—and in English—at the end of the story.

MG: *sighs heavily* We know.

Here I must once again express my gratitude to Meredith Dixon, whose Latin expertise filled in the gaps where I could not simply lift the relevant text from Saint Thomas himself. For the reader who happens to be curious about where various concepts were derived, note that Questions 51, 71 and 90–96 of the Prima Pars were particularly useful.

MG: While I took several semesters of Latin in undergrad, I’m sufficiently rusty I don’t feel qualified to weigh in on Beale’s use of the language, so I’ll refrain from doing so.

The argument presented is nonsensical, of course, but it is nonsensical in very much the same manner that so many of the philosophical and theological arguments presented by the great minds of the medieval ages were.

MG: I mean, when you get down to it, it basically amounts to “elves are reasoning beings and therefore have souls” with a lot of additional meandering and bells and whistles, so… which part is supposed to be nonsensical, exactly? Or is this just Beale trying to cover his ass upon realizing that he’s not actually very good at this and is mostly just ripping off thinkers much, much wiser and more knowledgeable than himself and crudely repackaging their arguments into a context they were never meant for? That seems more likely to me…

But we should not scoff; it is deeply ironic that the leading atheists of our day happen to subscribe to this same method of argument, wherein empirical facts are ignored in favor of specious rationalizations that appear to be convincing so long as the logic is never weighed against the observable evidence.

MG: So, Beale is saying that the modern atheists he despises and the medieval philosophers he idolizes… have fallen into the exact same logical and rhetorical fallacies that undermine their arguments in the same ways? The hells?

Hence the description of the book as a “casuistry”, which can mean either “oversubtle and fallacious reasoning”

MG: *snorts* Fallacious, maybe, but nothing about this book is subtle, “over” or otherwise.

or “the application of general ethical principles to particular cases of conscience.” One could reasonably argue for either definition, and I gladly leave it to the reader to decide which is the more fitting.

MG: …but we all know you really think it’s the latter, Beale, so stop patting yourself on the back.

Luckily for the elves, man is in little possession of any evidence against which to balance the reasoned argument of the Summa Elvetica made on their eternal behalf. Therefore, we have no choice but to conclude with Marcus Valerius that aelvi habent animae naturaliter unita.

MG: *flatly* I’m sure the elves are so very grateful that Marcus is here to save them (this feels like the time to remind you that the Sanctiff ended up concluding that the elves have souls entirely on his own without even reading Marcus’s treatise, making the whole thing especially pointless).

The rest of this volume consists of eight more tales from the land of Selenoth, which are considerably less ambitious than Summa Elvetica, but on the whole, rather more successful. And for those who are interested in following the progress of Marcus Valerius, his story continues in Book I of Arts of Dark and Light, A THRONE OF BONES.

MG: …honestly this just feels like an inferior version of the ending of the first version of The Hobbit that I ever owned, which included a brief note telling the reader that if they enjoyed reading about Bilbo they will learn a lot more about hobbits in general from reading The Lord of the Rings. Too bad Marcus isn’t nearly as engaging a protagonist as Bilbo. The good news is that in The Arts of Dark and Light proper, he’s only one POV character among many; the bad news is that most of the others are just as insufferable, in their own ways.

Anyway, that’s it for Beale’s ending matter, which I think conclusively proves he’s just as much of a pretentious, self-absorbed, bigoted reactionary twit as we all knew he was. So now, onward to the final thoughts!





Final Thoughts

Surprising exactly no one who’s been paying attention, this book was very bad. The characters were both boring and obnoxious, the plot was scattershot, the setting was incoherent, the writing itself unbelievably pretentious, and thematic content was hollow at best and outright disturbing at worst. Now, due to the short length of the book and the fact that it is, ultimately, only a prelude to a longer series, I don’t really feel like I have as much to say here as I have to some of my other Final Thoughts sections for other things I’ve sporked, but I would like to run down all of these categories in turn and explore a bit more about why I think they all fail.

Characters

We’ll start off with Marcus, our main protagonist and the only character whose POV we actually follow over the course of the story, not counting some of the war stories the side characters get into (more on that in a minute). Marcus himself… I find hard to talk about, because at the end of the day his character has so little actual substance to it. I can’t say I like him as a person, though most of his flaws – he’s casually racist, elitist, judgmental, seems perfectly okay with things like slavery and mindless wars of expansion so long as they don’t affect him or people he cares about personally, and thinks he’s a lot cleverer and more insightful than the events of the story indicate he actually is – are the sorts of things that I’d probably expect from someone of his background and social class. On the other hand, he also fails badly as a protagonist. At the end of the day I’m still entirely uncertain as to what he was even doing on this mission; the Sanctiff apparently needed someone to mediate between Aestus and Claudo, but I’m still uncertain as to what the nature of their argument even was, much less what made this dweeb uniquely qualified to weigh in on it. Beyond that, he barely has any emotional investment in the plot at any point. He’s going on this mission because the Sanctiff tells him to. He doesn’t really give a damn about elves one way or another. He only gets involved in stopping the war at the end of the book because the conspirators target him personally, and he only finds out about that because Caitlys and Nomelos literally grab him and railroad him into following the actual plot. His all-important treatise, his decision to leave the priesthood, and even his kiss with Caitlys all end up happening off-page. Even his decision that elves do indeed have souls, as poorly as Beale establishes it, is ultimately irrelevant because the Sanctiff came to that conclusion entirely separately, and his opinion is what matters. And despite the narration’s insistence that Marcus has grown and changed from his experience, I literally couldn’t tell you how he has, other than that he kissed and elf and did some stuff off-page that doesn’t really flow from anything he did on-page. Ultimately, he’s a character who just sort of feels irrelevant in his own story, which is needless to say both frustrating and underwhelming.

The next most important character after Marcus is probably Marcipor, who is… also hard to talk about because how much of his character relies around the fact that he’s Marcus’s slave and how uncomfortably Beale handles it. Honestly, if he’d just been a friend or relative of Marcus who was sent along with him on his journey, who could be more flamboyant and lighthearted to contrast the (supposedly) more serious and intellectual Marcus, who nearly sells him out to the bad guys from jealousy but ends up standing by him in the end… the character would’ve worked fine. The slavery issue complicates things badly, and in ways Beale isn’t really equipped to handle. I get the impression Beale wanted to go for some deliberate values dissonance here by depicting a character who is a slave in a society where that is highly normalized, but he misses the mark badly in hammering how much Marcipor is seemingly content to be a slave initially (it should go without saying that even in heavily enslaved societies, it’s the very rare enslaved person who won’t take freedom when offered, as I’ve already brought up), how the bad guys offering him his freedom is presented as some sort of evil temptation and how he’s saved (and ultimately does earn his freedom) through loyalty to Marcus… it’s just incredibly uncomfortable. From another author I might be willing to assume it was an attempt at showing the values of an alien society that was just fumbled, but knowing Beale is a reactionary nut IRL makes me far less likely to give him the benefit of the doubt here (and I’m also reminded of another Rome-themed epic fantasy, Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera, that actually does manage to both show a society where slavery is extremely normalized and make it clear that it’s still a horrifically evil institution).

Marcus’s other slave, Lodi, is… weird. On the one hand, the way Lodi makes it clear he’s only serving Marcus so loyally with the expectation that he’s going to be freed and get to go home afterwards and he likes his odds better here than he would just bolting in the middle of the wilderness feels much more honest than Marcipor’s arc (and, in Marcus’s defense, he does keep up his end of the bargain). On the other hand, personality-wise Lodi’s personality as the gruff, grizzled badass makes him, well, an extremely standardized fantasy dwarf and he never really rises above it, especially considering that ultimately, he doesn’t contribute all that much to the story. He tells big war story that takes up a whole chapter, but the whole thing – including his warning about elves being untrustworthy – proves entirely irrelevant to the main plot and it ends up feeling more like a short story Beale decided to cram into the main Summa Elvetica for some inexplicable reason. Once we get to Elebrion, he contributes to the fight against the false Michaelines (and sets part of the palace on fire in the process) but ultimately you could remove him and it wouldn’t affect the plot much other than requiring some action scenes to be rearranged. Now, Lodi is going to be a POV character in the main Arts of Dark and Light sequence, so you may assume Beale wanted to go ahead and introduce him here… but for some context, in previous sporkings of the books I’ve read, Lodi’s subplot became notorious for how little it has to do with just about anything else going on, so ymmv if that actually accomplished anything. I probably did end up liking him the most of anyone in the main cast, but that’s a low bar to clear.

Caitlys and Nomenlos are our two main elvish characters, and there’s just not a lot to either of them. Caitlys suffers from the fate of many a Strong Female Character™ written by a sexist male author, in that she’s cool on paper but in practice is mostly reduced to playing second fiddle to a less interesting guy and ultimately turning into a love interest for him. We get very little insight into her inner life, why she became Nomenlos’s student, what she sees in Marcus, or really why she’s doing any of this beyond a general desire for her homeland to not be invaded. The fact that the ultimate resolution of the plot depends on her falling for Marcus and blushes after they kiss is… deeply awkward and uncomfortable, especially considering that she’s the only major named woman in the story so of course she has to fall for the male lead, and as I noted before, everyone is weirdly cool with the fact that she nearly killed Marcus and was genuinely amazed he survived her spell. Some couple! Nomenlos himself is basically a Mister Exposition who exists to shove Marcus on course for dealing with the actual plot. His implied backstory, as a powerful and feared elven wizard turned the seeming sole elven convert to the Amorran Church, is interesting, though it’s mostly shoved off into his short story and only hinted at here. In terms of his actual appearance in the present story he’s mostly limited to being a stock “cool old guy,” though Beale at least executes the trope reasonably well in this case.

The false Michaelines, as we’ve already discussed, are deeply weird characters. They’re the main villains, impersonating Church warrior-priests in order to assassinate the king of the elves and start a war. Even before the reveal, they’re clearly bloodthirsty, amoral, cheerfully violent and pretty dang racist, Serranus in particular. But the narrative loves them anyway; we’re constantly told how brave and noble and badass they are and how much Marcus admires them and even in the end the punishment the survivors get is basically to continue doing what they’d been doing before, just under the authority of the Church for real this time. It really does feel like Beale either thought that what these characters were doing just wasn’t that bad, really, or that he ended up liking them enough in spite of that fact that he couldn’t condemn them that harshly, even though, objectively speaking, their actions are very, very bad. We can’t even write off their bad behavior as being because they’re really mercenaries and not priests, because of how we’re emphatically told they impersonated actual Michaelines exactly. Not helping is how underdeveloped they all are as characters. Only three of them get much development, and of those three, Captain Hezekius, despite being the leader, gets by far the least; he’s basically there to be a pretty generic commanding officer type, and even gets killed off off-page after his treachery is revealed, almost as an afterthought. Zephanus is probably the closest thing to an actual main villain we end up getting, since he’s more-or-less the face of the Michaelines and the one Marcus ultimately squares off against in the climax. But his relationship with Marcus, as mentioned previously, is sufficiently underdeveloped that the sense of betrayal we should be feeling just isn’t there, and his ending is very rushed. Serranus is… weird. He’s clearly meant to be, on the surface, another Cool Old Guy, but it’s undermined by how blatantly clear it is that he’s just a vicious, unrepentant old mercenary even before his treachery comes out. And then, despite being probably the most prominent Michaeline to that point, and the fact that we’re explicitly told he’s the most dangerous of them all and that even the others are scared of him, he’s… entirely uninvolved in the climax and when he shows up again it’s to be given a punishment we’re explicitly told he won’t mind at all. Just… huh? What was even the point of this, Beale?

I also still think that they were changed from being real Michaelines to frauds at the last minute, because Beale realized he liked the actual Michaelines as a concept too much to make the villains real ones. Which leads to the unfortunate question of just how these guys got assigned to the mission in the first place. Did the Sanctiff even screen these people? I’m not even going to bother to waste much time on the corrupt merchants and senators who hired the mercenaries, because their whole existence is just handwaved away and they’re entirely irrelevant to the plot, which is just a baffling bad way to handle the true main villains.

Rounding out the major characters, the Sanctiff himself is clearly meant to be yet another Cool Old Guy, but he ends up feeling more like a plot device to get Marcus onto the mission in the first place, especially when it turns out he’s resolved the question already and didn’t even need Marcus’s input. And his trolling of Marcus at the end is just cruel and could have backfired on him spectacularly, if Marcus had actually reacted to thinking Amorr declared holy war on the elves after all in any way other than feeling sorry for himself. The two bishops, Claudo and Aestus, mostly just… exist. Supposedly their philosophical debate is what’s driving the thematic core of the narrative, but we never even learn what their philosophies entail or what their disagreement actually is. Claudo, at least, has some substance in that he initially seems to be aloof, ill-tempered and judgmental but actually turns out to be an honorable man who believes in peace when the chips are down, but he’s such a thinly drawn character it’s hard to tell if that’s even intentional or not. Aestus… exists, and it’s hard to even be sad when he dies because his only real personality trait is “friendlier than Claudo.” Rounding out the major characters is High King Mael, who I’m pretty sure is mostly there to be a red herring; we’re initially supposed to assume that he’s an evil king who will be a major obstacle to our heroes and will eagerly go to war with Amorr, when the real threat is from within our heroes’ own party. Other than that, he mostly comes across as a weird mashup of Elric and a rather more murderous Thranduil, and there’s not a whole lot else to say about him.

Setting

We don’t really see a whole lot of Selenoth in this book; it’s mostly just from Amorr to the elvenlands and back. What we do see, however, feels very much to me like two entirely separate settings crudely mashed together. The first is a generic Warhammer/D&D-esque epic fantasy setting (I’m not dignifying it by calling it “Tolkienesque”). We have dwarves, orcs, goblins, mages, an ancient evil long-defeated that still casts its shadow over the present (Witchkings), and they’re all very generic in ways I’ve seen dozens of times before. Even the Ulfin aren’t that interesting.

The elves are fleshed out a bit more. The elves of Shadowald, who we meet first, are mostly generic wood elves, but the elves of Elebrion are a bit more interesting, mixing elements of Tolkienesque (I’ll use that term here, for lack of a better one) high elves with some parallels to Moorcock’s Melniboneans as an ancient pre-human civilization now in decline but clinging to the trappings of their old glory and still possessing powerful and sinister magic. And they ride giant hawks, which are neat! Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear that Beale is interested in them not for themselves but only as a foil for his precious Amorrans, and so they are Wrong (about religion, society, magic etc.) in ways that we are clearly meant to see the Amorrans as being Right, and even when we do establish that they have souls and the Amorrans won’t be going to war with them, it still feels like it’s too little, too late to overcome that. I might be interested in seeing more of these elves from a better author – I’ve mentioned in my Elminster in Myth Drannor sporking that I’m actually rather fond of well-written elves, though I think there are very few fantasy writers who do them justice – but Beale is not that author.

Amorr itself feels like it belongs to the other setting. It represents a sort of pseudo-historical fantasy featuring a blatant expy of the medieval Catholic Church in a blatant expy of the Roman Republic (but more on that in a minute). Nonhumans seem to barely exist in Amorr, and then only as gladiators and the occasional foreign visitor, and while we’re told rare Amorran magic-users exist (by the sufferance of the Sanctiff) the only ones we see are the Michaelines (if they count, being more ant-mages than anything else). Everything else is medieval flavored, including the other human nations, but Amorr is classical Rome (save for the presence of the Church, which Beale just sort of drops awkwardly into a very different cultural context than this era of the historical Catholic Church existed in and hopes no one will notice). Broadly speaking, Amorr barely feels like it takes place in the same world as everything else, to its detriment. Not only is its presence tonally jarring, but it undermines the premise of the work as well. No explanation is provided for why and how Amorr uses what seems to be the real-world Bible as its scripture, despite aforesaid text being heavily concerned with the history and practices of people and regions that don’t even exist in Selenoth, even in fantasy counterpart form. No explanation is given for why and how a church that exists in a world inhabited by countless nonhuman species has apparently never stopped to consider whether those beings have souls before now. And we even get a few references to Jesus directly by name and/or title, which are just extremely jarring and immersion breaking for me.

Even within itself, Amorr isn’t consistent. As I’ve noted at length, Beale thoughtlessly mashes every era of Roman history he can think of, from the Republic to the Papal States, together, and it seemingly hasn’t occurred to him that those aren’t actually interchangeable. The Church he depicts was a product of a deeply politically fragmented western Europe that arose after the fall of (western) Rome… but it’s crudely slotted on top of a Republic that historically existed long before that church even existed, and which practiced a wholly different set of religions. Absolutely no attempt is made to square that circle. And if you know anything at all about the Roman Republic – and I, to be clear, am merely an interested amateur, not an expert on this topic – then much about Amorr’s history, culture and politics ends up full of nonsensical holes. And you might argue that Amorr isn’t Rome and is merely a fictional nation loosely based on it, but, well, Amorr isn’t a society that is “sort of like Rome but also clearly not actually Rome” in the vein of say Gondor, or Tamriel, or Tevinter or the Malazan Empire or the like. Beale is very, clearly and explicitly setting out to create a clear counterpart of Rome in almost every way (the main series, if anything, will double down on it) – even the name is just “Roma” backwards and with an extra “r” - and so I feel it’s fair to call him out when he fails at it.

Plot

Summa Elvetica’s plot is rather more coherent than most of Ed Greenwood’s meandering nonsense, but the comparison still comes to mind because it shares a similar lack of focus. Let’s look over the plot in detail, shall we? We spend the first few chapters in Amorr itself, with Marcus preparing for and then setting out on his mission. We then spend several chapters in transit across vaguely described countryside where nothing much of interest happens save for a couple of characters telling old war stories, which are mostly irrelevant to the actual story, are supposed to vaguely tell us the elves are no good (but this never really comes up again, and the depictions of the elves here are never either really proven nor refuted) and develop the characters who tell them (which is mostly irrelevant to anything that those characters will later do in the story). When we finally get to Elebrion in the last few chapters, we then end up introducing and rushing through the “attempted assassination” plot so quickly it’s head turning, and then the major plotlines that the story has supposedly been building up towards – the question of whether elves have souls, and what Marcus intends to do with his life and if he intends to stay in the priesthood or not – get resolved mostly off-page. Whew.

My biggest takeaway here is that, despite the short length of the book, Beale didn’t really know how he wanted the story to proceed or what he intended to be important. As such it feels like he just ended up throwing whatever he felt like at the time at it and seeing how it would impact things later, leading to things like Serranus’s and Lodi’s backstory or the Ulfin that get introduced with much fanfare and then largely forgotten, or elements like the conspiracy of senators behind the fake Michaelines that get brought up briefly and then handwaved away. The whole thing has a very “first draft” feel in a way, like Beale was making things up by the seat of his pants as he went along, and then never really bothered to go back and hammer it into a more coherent shape afterwards. The problem is, the basic idea for the story – a looming religious war between humans and elves, a human embassy seeking to bridge the gap and find common ground both politically and spiritually, and subversive elements on both sides trying to provoke the war for their own gain – is a perfectly fine one, it’s just that Beale’s execution of it sucks, both because he’s a bad writer and, frankly, because he’s a bad person (ie, his partisanship towards the Amorrans and against the elves is sufficiently blatant it makes his ultimate conclusion that elves have souls and the people trying to start the war are in the wrong feel unearned and insincere).

Honestly, I suspect part of the problem is that Marcus is simply the wrong protagonist for this story; as I’ve mentioned before, he’s barely invested in it until he gets literally dragged into it and is basically forced to be the one to resolve things by happenstance and other people forcing his hand. Part of me feels that a better way to tell this story would be to have parallel human and elven protagonists, introducing both civilizations and their worldviews and politics and get the reader invested in them trying to find common ground. Caitlys is an obvious choice for the elven protagonist; you could replace Marcus with someone else, or at least rewrite him significantly so he has an actual emotional investment for being here beyond “the Sanctiff said so and the bad guys want to kill me so I guess I’d better stop them.” But I guess that would take too much attention away from Marcus and his navel-gazing, so we can’t have that.

Style and Theme

Easy part out of the way first – Beale’s writing style is pretty unbearable. He’s clearly trying way too hard to be eloquent and instead just comes across as pretentious, while he also has a fondness for “clever” asides and labored turns of phrase in a way I tend to associate with literal teenagers trying to show how smart they are. On top of all this book’s more serious sins, it makes the damned thing just a slog to get through.

Theme is… oof. Summa Elvetica isn’t didactic, exactly. I don’t get the impression Beale is trying to convince anyone of his worldview here, possibly because he assumes anyone who picks this book up would already share it. But it’s clearly suffused by his worldview – remember, in real life Beale is a notorious arch-alt-righter well known for his racism, sexism, religious fundamentalism, and generally being a complete asshole on top of it – in ways that are very hard to get away from. A lot of this shows up in his blatant favoritism of Amorr. Now, the historical ancient Rome was a fascinating place, and the world today would look very, very different if it had never existed. But it would also be very remiss to not note and be aware that this was a society that routinely did very, very terrible things. There’s a reason that I’ve considered that our cultural idea of a great civilization is very heavily Roman coded… but our idea of an evil empire is also very heavily Roman coded.

What’s disturbing to me in particular is that Beale doesn’t shy away from depicting the evilness of Amorr – this is very clearly an empire built on war, conquest, slavery, and human (and humanoid) suffering and death on a vast scale – but he also doesn’t really seem to mind very much. Amorr constantly engages in wars of expansion, keeps massive numbers of slaves, has committed genocide on at least one entire species, and yet there is never really any indication from either any of the characters or the narrative that this might be, you know, wrong. Even Marcus, our hero, only gets involved in stopping the war with the elves because he’s on the conspirators’ hit list, and then later he has a thing with an elf girl; we make sure we know he gets Marcipor and Lodi their freedom, but he certainly never stops to question slavery itself as an institution. Amorran women… get mentioned occasionally, but this is a very patriarchal society and nobody seems to care about them much. It’s pretty clear that Amorr’s attitude towards other species is that they’re soulless monsters (prior to the events of the story, of course) but even pushing back on that idea is presented more as an interesting puzzle to solve than an actual moral wrong that needs to be urgently corrected. Now, one could argue that all of this is intended as a depiction rather than endorsement of the values of an alien society (Eilistraee knows, I’ve certainly enjoyed reading about plenty of fictional cultures you couldn’t pay me to actually live in!) but knowing Beale’s real-life beliefs and the sort of shallow Roman fetishizing his ilk of alt-righter are prone to engaging in, I’m not inclined to cut him much slack.

When it comes to religion, the book is… weird in that again I don’t really feel like Beale is trying to preach at the reader. Books that are trying to convert people tend to have a particular sort of vibe that I don’t get from him. But he does take the Amorran Church’s status as being right in-universe pretty much for granted. Broadly speaking, sympathetic characters are devout Amorrans; characters who don’t, like the elves, get throwaway lines establishing them as smug straw atheists so that we know they’re not to be trusted or admired. There are a couple of exceptions, interestingly both nonhumans – Lodi is pretty indifferent to the Amorran Church but seems to get a pass largely for being badass; Caitlys seems to humor her mentor Nomenlos’s conversion but clearly has zero desire to join the Church herself but gets a pass for being hot. But broadly speaking the text is suffused with the idea that the Amorran Church is self-evidently correct and everyone else just hasn’t realized it yet. Again, writing from the POV of a deeply religious society, this wouldn’t bug me… if Beale wasn’t Beale, and clearly couldn’t resist merging his Rome fetish with his medieval Church fetish, however little sense it made.

In terms of the book’s actual stated themes… they have very little to do with the actual story. Marcus is sent to determine whether elves have souls. He thinks about it a bit on his journey before he ever has much interaction with actual elves. He overhears some snippets of out-of-context discussion on the topic, is disgusted by much of elven culture he sees… and ends up coming to his conclusion that elves do have souls entirely off-page, following a chain of logic that seems entirely unrelated to anything we’ve seen him considering. If the book really is meant to give its reader more of an appreciation for medieval Catholic philosophy and theology it fails there, too, because it barely explores the idea at all beyond periodically dropping out-of-context, misapplied and sometimes outright mangled quotes on us, and we’re never given much of a sense of what Beale is getting at or how all this is meant to hang together. And, well, the actual plot ends up mostly being a rather banal adventure story in which the philosophical stuff is mostly an irrelevant side-show. I can honestly say that the only way in which this book has piqued my interest in the topics Beale supposedly wants to discuss is making me wonder how a writer who was an actual expert in these fields might have done them better.

Conclusion

Several of the works I’ve sporked in the past – in particular all of Greenwood and all of Newcomb – feel like the products of authors who lacked ambition and were mostly just phoning it in with flat stories that never tried to be anything better (though they did reveal rather more about their creators’ thought processes than I think was intended…). Summa Elvetica has a different problem. Beale is clearly ambitious, with this short novel and his main Arts of Dark and Light series both existing to set out to produce a grand saga that is both a reconstruction of epic fantasy and a deep dive into philosophical and theological topics whose ideas he can explore in detail. Needless to say, he fails utterly, crashing and burning practically from the first chapter and only digging himself deeper as he goes. Summa Elvetica is a bad book all around, with weak, unlikeable characters, a dull and meandering plot, a sloppy, thrown together setting and some very unpleasant thematic ideas that have very little to do with the topics it’s supposed to be addressing. And to top it all off, it’s a terribly written book that’s just a slog to get through. The best that can be said is that there are glimmers of interesting ideas raised here; I do think there is merit in an epic fantasy series that sought to blend modern fantasy tropes with actual medieval intellectual thought. But Beale is the wrong writer for such a story, writing for the wrong reasons, and the whole thing falls apart, with only occasional glimmers of unrealized potential sticking out. But unless you have a morbid interest in bad fantasy (like me!), in one of the more notorious figures active in the SFF community today, or both, there’s just nothing really worth pursuing further here.

That brings us to the end of Summa Elvetica the novel… but not Summa Elvetica the collection! Now, as Beale himself indicated, we have a number of short stories set in Selenoth to get through! First up will be Nomenlos/Bessarias’s backstory, so we’ll see you next time for “Master of Cats”!