Louis R wrote:And the test for the loss of the mandate would be the same: if you lose the civil war, you've lost the Mandate of Heaven. Until that point, there was no way to know for sure, although widespread disaster or general misrule would definitely get the peasantry looking sideways at your tax collectors.
In the Safehold context, it would actually be a very _big_ leap. There's not only no precedent - in fact, the precedent is exactly the opposite - there's no conceptual background for it.
alj_sf wrote:There is a concept from pre-Confucius ancient China that applies here.
Emperors of China did rule with "Mandate of Heaven". If they were to lose that mandate, it was time to change the dynasty, and nobody, even the humblest peasant, was required to obey anymore the old dynasty members. The same concept applied btw to gods themselves.
Here the the church of Zion rules by explicit mandate from Langhorne. But when disaffection raise and only the steely hand of inquisition is left to keep people in line, it is a very small leap to justify rebellion and so side with the heretics.
I think Dohlar is just at this tipping point, and I can see Thrisk and Alvarez being leaders people can turn to. Note that would be much more dangerous than in Desnair case because a strong ally would turn in foe, but would not imply accepting the still heretic church of Charis.
One way to look at the Mandate of Heaven is to look at it as a self-correction mechanism for Chinese governance. It has some pretty deep flaws, namely that it's an ex post facto justification for
any regime change, but it also served to protect the system by shifting any political blowback onto the deposed ruler.
Safehold doesn't have the background for that sort of concept because Langhorne and his fellows never thought it would be necessary. The Writ has been described as a straight-jacket more than once, and it's a very apt (and very literal) description. It was designed to be an authoritarian source not to be questioned. Trying to make the Writ more flexible would have undermined their own goals by implying a potential fallibility to Mother Church. And to be fair, they were working under the assumption that the foundations of their social matrix were infallible. But they clearly lacked the history and psychology knowledge that ought to have told them that was an impossibility and that they should build in a few backup plans. They knew they didn't need a self-correction mechanism and that it'd only add complexity to the social matrix they were building, so they chose to leave one out.
Personally, I think it's a given that some sort of corruption was inevitable. Even something as simple as mandating a vow of poverty would have gone a long way towards curbing the abuses. Chastity, too would have helped by preventing the rise of Church dynasties in their current, explicit form. Instead, they build a Temple that was a shining, magical beacon of hedonistic excess with all of its mystical features. Corruption in that sort of environment was inevitable, especially with the sort of power afforded to the Church and no external factors to provide a check on said power.
In any case, the fact that the Writ is so explicit on everything is actually a good thing. There's no wiggle room and no room for any sort of interpretation. It makes explicit promises about God's favor and his support of Mother Church, on divine responses to any demonic activity, and other similar guarantees in general. And they have absolute proof that everything is true. When the Church loses the war, people are going to have to square that loss with those divine promises scattered throughout the Writ. It's going to be one hell of a shock, even for those who support Charis.
For the first time in the history of Safehold, we're going to see the rise of theological interpretation similar to what we have with theology today. They've never had the need for this sort of critical analysis before, and while the end result will probably evolve towards something similar to the Mandate of Heaven, actually interpreting divine texts and squaring them with the seemingly dissonant facts on the ground is going to be one hell of a culture shock. It'll lay the ground work for a lot of Staynair's reforms even amongst Temple Loyalists.
CoGA fanaticism is largely based on doctrine. In order to survive as a coherent doctrine in light of certain facts (namely, the Church eventually losing the Jihad), that doctrine has to be re-interpreted, thereby undermining the aspects of that doctrine that pushed people to support the Jihad in the first place. Even rationalizing those facts away requires people to spin new interpretations of CoGA doctrine. No matter how you look at it, mortal minds have to creatively re-interpret aspects of the Writ. It's a pretty nasty catch-22.
Long-term, CoGA fanaticism has a time limit. Eventually, technological progress and secular explanations for every aspect of the Writ's writings on the physical world will erode support altogether given a generation or two. And having to interpret theology within a new context (one where Mother Church is no longer supreme) is the first step towards that day.
