“Theresa, what do you think about all this?”, Juan made an indeterminate hand movement.

She looked at him, trying to understand which of the many possible weird things he meant.

“Strangeness of it all is in fact something I got over rather quickly. After all, I became an expert in strange even down there, with all those spiritual experiences I couldn’t properly explain to anyone. Here, everything is of that nature, and that makes me happy. Also, everybody instantly understands what I mean, so there are no communication barriers, which used to cause many problems”.

“I expected things to be simpler – in a sense that Heaven would exactly reflect our Catholic teaching. That was also a big thing in Spain – orthodoxy was taken quite seriously, and any minor disagreement with the official teaching of the Church could land you in trouble with the Inquisition, especially if you already have enemies, as we did. Here, there is incredible tolerance not only for various Christian interpretations, but other religions as well, and they don’t even see them as religions; they see them as ways to explain reality, or solve problems. I talked to the Buddhist lady in the orchard, and not only is she very kind, she’s also friendly with Christ – in fact, he sent me to her, which shocked me initially, but I obeyed him since he knows best. The lady spoke to me in completely Christian terms, only switching to Buddhist concepts when we talked about ecstasy and breathing, and they have a whole vocabulary and philosophy about things that we are quite incoherent about. Various systems seem to have specialities, things they studied in great detail, and those are often things like mystical experiences, where I didn’t think one can even have any clear idea about it, let alone make a whole theory. So, that was surprising – the fact that there are non-Christian people who know more about important things than Christianity. But I guess it is not proper to call the lady non-Christian, since Christ himself referred me to her. They are obviously good friends, and how can a friend of Christ be non-Christian? Were Christ and his holy Mother even Christian? Those terms don’t seem to apply here. They are all friends and family, and I’ve seen them interact with each other; they do it with such love and depth of understanding, that their simplest greeting feels like the deepest mystical vision”.

“They don’t care about things like heresy, but they care very much about truth and accuracy of what they are saying. They also avoid all evil at all times, and that is the greatest wonder: everything they do is completely free of evil. Everybody helps each other in every way, and when someone is tired from too much work, their friends and family come to cheer them up, bring them coffee, talk to them and make them feel better, and nobody counts favours or does anything with a desire to be reciprocated. It is as if they practice the purest teaching of Christ, but without even noticing or caring about it. They are also innocent like small children, playing in the grass and reading books together, or talking about all sorts of important matters. I’ve joined a few conversations and they were always kind and welcoming, and the things they talked about were never frivolous or shallow; they comment someone’s good deeds, praise their friends, think of how they could improve their devotion to God, or look how to help someone who works too much. Everything that is said about someone behind their back is always highest praise, and would make them blush if they heard it. As I said, there is not the slightest hint of evil or sin in anything they do, and it is completely natural to them; they don’t look like they are trying at all. Sinless deeds come from their pure souls the way sweet smell comes from a good flower”.

“You would expect the elders to be on some high throne and inaccessible, but I have seen the oldest, wisest Gods mix with others without any care for distinction or status, the things humans would care so much for. Everybody treats them with a combination of highest respect, and the kind of innocent trust and familiarity that children have for their parents. I once talked to Christ, and a young Goddess ran to his holy Mother, embraced her and talked to her excitedly about something, and it was with such intimacy, trust and love that I just stood there and looked at them in amazement, completely forgetting about Christ, who laughed and told me I’ll probably never get used to it properly, because he never did. The Church would have you think in terms of dignity and so on, and it’s not that they don’t act in a dignified manner. There is incredible dignity about them, but what I wasn’t prepared for is the casual intimacy of their interactions. I’ve seen a Goddess come to Mary in tears because she saw a horrible woman who tortured and killed hundreds of innocent children. Mary held her, comforted her, made her feel better and then they proceeded to talk about what’s happening in the world, and how their husbands are doing. Each of them radiated such incredible spiritual power and presence of God, that it is the deepest mystical experience to merely feel them in passing, and you would expect them to be dignified and distant – but no, they are dignified and yet intimate. Everything about them is deep, there is no small talk; but the intimacy of the spiritual contact is the most incredible and shocking thing about it all, there is directness and deep trust that small children have with their good parents”.

“Maybe the most shocking thing is that they are all married couples, and when they are together, I wanted to look the other way, because they felt so intimate together, and yet I couldn’t look away, because of how wonderful they are to each other. A husband brings his wife coffee, and she accepts it in such way that you just feel the depth of their familiarity and love, their energies coming together in a special presence of God that I have never felt before. The most casual things they do together feels like their form of Holy Communion, where the presence of God is felt more strongly and deeply, which is a wonder in itself, knowing how strongly it normally feels. To be honest, when I saw them, I felt a strong desire to feel like that with someone, because of how right and proper it feels”.

“I felt something like that with you”, Juan nodded. “When we talk about God together, it is as if the presence of God is alive between us and creates an ecstatic joy, which made me want to talk about God more and be in your presence more”.

“That is true. And about that, I wondered about something. What are we even to each other?”

“I honestly don’t know. I only know that we gravitate towards each other, we are always in each other’s company, and we enjoy it. On Earth, I was always afraid to put a label on our relationship, as not to spoil it, but now that you mention it, I think we should ask Christ or Mary for advice, the way we used to ask a confessor on Earth, to avoid anything inappropriate”.

“Did someone call for me?”, Lakshmi smiled behind them as they jerked back, as if caught with hands in a candy jar.

“We wanted to ask You or Christ to tell us what is the nature of our relationship, and what is appropriate”, Theresa blushed and fumbled.

“Is that even something you need to ask?”, Lakshmi wondered. “I would expect that you knew. After all, you are inseparable”.

She looked at the couple, and they didn’t look any more clued in.

“You feel like husband and wife who were taught by the Church that they should avoid even thinking about anything of the sort, because you were supposed to be celibate monks, both of you. Relax a bit, will you? You are no longer in your respective monasteries, and you’re talking to the woman who gave birth to Christ, so be honest. How do you feel about it? Honestly, when you relax?”

“I feel you are right about us, but I am terribly afraid of admitting it”, Theresa said, blushing crimson.

“I think this as well”, John was trying to look somewhere else. “My Lady, do you think it is appropriate for us to feel that way?”

“I think it is the most appropriate thing in the world. The only weird thing about it is how tightly you both seem to restrain yourselves in order to avoid doing anything inappropriate. So, I’m going to make it very simple for both of you. Theresa, do you want Juan to be your husband forever?”

“Yes”, the woman whispered.

“Juan, do you want Theresa to be your wife forever?”

“Yes”, the word escaped his mouth.

“Then I solemnly pronounce you husband and wife”, the Goddess smiled. “Problem solved”.

The couple looked at each other as if someone suddenly removed shackles from their minds. “Theresa, we were just married by the Mother of God”, Juan smiled.

“May God help me, I feel as if I just got permission to feel literally everything I had to suppress before I even felt it”, Theresa smiled back. “The things I could only allow myself to feel for Christ”.

“Is this appropriate for us to feel, my Lady?”, Juan turned to Lakshmi.

“You are husband and wife. Every intimate, deeply spiritual feeling that you feel for God, is perfectly appropriate to feel for each other. That’s how a marriage works here. We are God to each other, and we are an instrument God uses to love our partner”, she smiled blissfully. “Now, if I may make a recommendation?”, she looked as if asking for permission. They nodded in unison.

“Go to the orchard, find one of the Buddhists, whoever feels most comfortable to talk to. All three are wonderful if you ask me. Ask them to teach you how to meditate as a couple. They are incredibly knowledgeable about this, and they will know how to put you at ease and teach you how to overcome all those inhibitions you feel due to your monastic celibate past, because I see things that need to be released, for your great benefit. And when they are done with you, go somewhere and do as they taught you – meditate together on God and love each other without any holding back or restraint. How about that?”, she smiled.

“Yes, Holy Mother”, they both bowed, glowing with happiness.

“Have a most blessed and happy marriage”, she concluded.

“I was wondering about what you said”, Shankaracharya addressed Augustine. “The part about limitations being a good thing. It feels completely counterintuitive if one knows that God is freedom.

“God is indeed freedom”, Augustine smiled. “But God is also freedom from all things that are not God, do you agree?”

“I do”, the man nodded.

“Also, we can split freedom into two distinct aspects: freedom to, and freedom from. The first part can be further analysed into desires and ways to achieve them. But let’s say I’m already doing what I want to do. I’m married and I love my wife, I love my friends and I love God. The only freedom I desire is the freedom to continue doing what I’m doing now. I don’t want a freedom to kill my friends, hurt my wife and offend God. In fact, my freedom consists of being free from those things, which is the other aspect of it – freedom from things that interfere with my will and choices. So yes, I have all sorts of limitations, but they are here because I want them. Those limitations are an intentional expression of my freedom”, Augustine concluded.

“I cannot disagree with your reasoning, and yet, something in me wishes to point out that freedom from limitations should be a superior form of freedom”, Shankaracharya shrugged in confusion.

“I think I understand why that is. You see soul as a limitation upon brahman, that needs to be removed in order to achieve true enlightenment. I, however, see soul as a set of defining characteristics that allow for the manifestation of brahman in the relative. Those defining characteristics are, by definition, limiting. They are choices for something and against something else. By removing those limitations, you remove things that define you as a person. If you remove the walls from a house, you don’t get to be free from limitations; you get to be homeless”, Augustine argued.

“So, what you are saying is that our limitations are our structural elements, the way walls and roof are to a house?”

“Indeed”, Augustine nodded.

“But wouldn’t you agree that extending a house would be preferable to keeping it small? And if a big house is preferable to a small one, wouldn’t removing the limitations of a house be preferable still?”, Shankaracharya pressed on.

“The analogy to extending a house would be extending your heart so that it becomes capable of feeling more and deeper. The correct way to do it is to embrace deep relationships with other Gods, which means including more structures, rather than tearing them down. This way, God expands from what you as a person are capable of, to what you, your wife, family and friends are capable of”, Augustin nodded. “I am God. However, my wife and I together are more God than either of us alone”.

“So, if I understand you correctly, the way to remove limitations the right way is to gradually extend the lattice of enlightened God-persons bound by deep connections, where it encompasses the entirety of the Relative, rather than removing the structural elements of personality, seeing them as obstacles, since they are limiting?”

“Exactly. The difference is, to stay within our analogy, between tearing down your home which leaves you homeless, and connecting your home with the homes of your family, until everything is home”, Augustine nodded.

“Interesting. So, we are comparing subtractive and additive approach to removing limitations. I was using the subtractive one, thinking that there is some positive limitation that stands in the way between soul and enlightenment, and by removing that limitation you approach the understanding that your soul is in fact all there is. You, on the other hand, argue that the problem isn’t something positive, that exists, but lack of something – lack of love, depth, connection, which needs to be established in order for spiritual emancipation to be possible”.

“Indeed. For instance, my main spiritual block, that kept me stagnant for a thousand years, was lack of connection with my wife. I overcame it not by removing things, but by reconnecting with her. Then I became more”, Augustin explained. “I could have removed this or that, and it would have achieved nothing”.

“It sounds frightening to bind your enlightenment and spirituality with another person in this manner”, Shankaracharya mused. “I thought whether I have a true wife somewhere, but after seeing what happened to Lady Grace, I was honestly too scared to even think about it, let alone ask God to lead me to her. What if she is dead? What if she is deeply enslaved somewhere? What if she needs untold years to be ready?”

“It only becomes frightening if you are ready”, Augustine replied. “When I was not ready, I was even able to part from her. I didn’t die, I just… stopped making true progress. The lesser the soul, the more superficial the connection. If you took some astral being and told them their destined spiritual partner just died, they wouldn’t even care. It is a testament to Grace’s immense spiritual magnitude that she cared so much about a husband she never even met, that she just died on the spot. It’s not weakness. It’s a sign of true readiness, and she is the best of us”.

“If fear is an indicator of readiness, then I must be truly ready”, Shankaracharya laughed. “But this understanding that apotheosis is not something you do by removing worldly attachments or something, but something God does because you become someone who enables him to express the inner connection of brahman in the Relative, by connecting to others, it’s a hard thing for me to swallow, because it makes spirituality look like a team sport, and I’ve always been a solitary player”.

“Also, you got accustomed to understanding enlightenment as something that is centred around you”, Augustine nodded. “It’s something you do. It’s a self-realisation. It’s a renunciation of limits to Self”.

“And how do you understand it?”

“In part, it is indeed the death of your own stubborn foolishness. At least it was thus for me. When I accepted Christianity, when I met Hypatia here, when I was reunited with my wife. Every time, shackles of my stubborn foolishness fell off me, and I was more. When I met Hypatia, it wasn’t just me, it was looking into her and feeling what it must be like to be her. It was something enormous, bigger, better. It was the same with my wife – also, looking into another person that is enormous and great, with the difference of knowing that this awesome person is mine, of free choice. It’s like getting a gift of doubling yourself at once. I’m telling you, for a man, knowing that you came to a point in your spirituality where a Goddess desires you, and none but you, and the point where God responds by claiming you as self because he wants to be that person so that he can love that Goddess properly, that is something else”, he smiled.

“And so, if I acknowledge that I want this, will I be doomed?”, the man smiled.

“That’s the wrong question. The right question is, will you understand that you are doomed without it?”, the God replied.

“You mean, am I at the point where I would rather die with her, than continue living forever without her; the way Grace did?”

“Indeed”, Augustine nodded.

“Yes, I think I am at that point. And it is scaring the living daylights out of me”, Shankaracharya admitted. “I just lost control of my destiny, irrevocably. I’m feeling her somehow, and I’m feeling the change, and it’s frightening”.

“Do you want her, even if it meant your death?”, God asked him solemnly.

“Yes”, the man answered.

“Then allow me to introduce you. Lady Hypatia just finished with her judgment and orientation tour; and it is obviously no accident that you came to talk to me just now. May I introduce you to Zeb-un-Nissa, Shahzadi of the Mughal Empire; the most powerful and beautiful female mind of the Islamic world”, he waved his hand and Hypatia shimmered in, with another woman in tow.

…

“Please, tell me you are joking”, the angelic woman shivered like a leaf. “This must be a bad dream. Please, let me wake up”.

“This must be how poor Augustine must have felt when he came here and saw me. Although I must now admit he took it pretty well, all things considered”, Hypatia smiled. “I’m opening you a knowledge bank on Muhammad’s life”.

The woman’s eyes lost focus for a moment, and then regained it. “But that is not at all what I believed in, or prayed to”, she managed to stutter.

“No, it is not. Like all great souls born in the Muslim world, you created an elaborate deception for yourself, so that both your body and your spirit would be protected. You managed to memorise all that nonsense and blend it in your spirit with your most subtle feelings and visions. You didn’t read what it was, you read what you needed it to be. Had you allowed yourself to see it for what it is, you would have been summarily beheaded for rejecting Islam. So, instead, you assumed it must be the most subtle religion, and you made it into one. You survived, you loved God, but a part of your mind had to be sacrificed. I am retrieving it for you now”, Hypatia made a subtle hand movement, and the woman’s eyes lost focus again.

“Are you mad at me?”, she said sheepishly. “I mean, for being such a coward, and rejecting truth for the sake of my own survival and comfort?”

“Of course I’m not mad at you, sweetheart”, Hypatia hugged the woman. “You did the best you possibly could. You survived. You were a great person. You maintained spiritual purity. You just needed to put a part of yourself to sleep in order to do it”.

“But I feel like a traitor”, the woman whispered. “Martyrs sacrificed their lives rather than compromise with the truth, and look at me, being such a good Muslim that I memorised the entire Qur’an. I want to hide in some dark corner out of shame before God”.

“You are before God, and I’m telling you it’s fine”, Lady Hypatia smiled.

“But it felt so real. All the religious ideas, the Divine Beloved, everything”, Zeb-un-Nissa sobbed. “Did I make it all up in my madness, like Muhammad?”

“No. Your feelings and ideas mapped upon actual realities; you just gave them islamically-correct labels”.

“So, that was my survival mechanism, you say? I did it so that I could both meditate on the actual God, and survive Islam?”

“Yes”, the Judge nodded.

“What is the actual God like?”, the woman asked.

“You know that already”.

“I mean…”

“I know what you mean. All the intimate stuff, the spiritual connection, the promise that made you refuse to marry because you promised yourself to Him forever, which is how you ran afoul of your father. You think it was all in your head, right?”

“Yes”, the woman wept.

“You have seen that we Gods exist in couples, yes?”

“I have”.

“Well, what if I told you that the person whose presence you felt is in fact your true husband, the one you are meant to live together with in eternity, worship him as your God, and be worshipped by him as his Goddess?”

“I would suspect that you are cruelly jesting with me, but then I would remember that you are too good a person to be so cruel with a poor distraught woman, and I would then dare to hope, because that would be the fulfilment of all my dreams”, the woman whispered.

“It is your lucky day, my Lady, because this is truly so”, the Goddess smiled at the woman. “He just made his decision to rather die with you than live alone forever, and the Lord who teaches him is calling for us”. She took the woman by the hand, and they shimmered out.

…

“Adi Shankaracharya? The most highly revered sage of India?”, the woman stared at him, incredulous. Augustine and Hypatia gave each other the look and shimmered out to give them privacy.

“At your service, my Lady”, the man smiled. “Although, knowing what I know now, I would have chosen some significantly less flattering titles for myself”.

“And after what Lady Hypatia told me about Mohammad and Islam, believe me, there is no chance in the world that you could be more embarrassed by your misapprehensions, than I am by mine. I am positively mortified, and so ashamed of myself, I could crawl into some dark corner and hope never to be seen by anyone good or smart, although at the same time I am glad that nobody seems to hold it against me, and they are so very kind”, she smiled.

“Truth has that quality of making us all humble”, he smiled back.

And then it clicked for her. He was the Presence. The one she thought to be Allah, the Divine Beloved, the one she projected upon and interweaved with everything she ever heard about God, and she fell to her knees and embraced him, without words, her tears wetting his feet.

He lifted her up and looked into her eyes. “Will you be my wife forever, my Lady?”

“I already promised myself to you decades ago, and kept myself for you alone, my beloved husband”, she smiled. “It is time for me to come true on my promise”.

“The Judges keep informing me that the situation down there is in complete chaos, and they are losing control of what’s going on”, Lord Azrael informed the war council. “And I completely agree with them. There are so many things going on either simultaneously or in quick succession, that I can’t figure the heads and tails of it”.

“The stability of the feudal system and the spiritual guidance of the Church in Europe are gone forever. There’s no getting them back, I’m afraid. Everybody is about being liberated from something, and this would not be a bad idea if they meant the world itself and the grip of Satan. Unfortunately, they think the other humans are their problem, and if only they got rid of them and got more freedoms and emancipation in the world, everything would be great. They shifted focus from God as the goal to the world itself, and as this progresses, they will be completely lost”, he concluded.

“It’s not all bad”, his wife continued. “When we say that they moved away from God, in a very large percentage of cases this is not a bad thing, as ‘God’ seems to be a word they use when they don’t want to use their brains for their intended purpose. Ascribe something to God, and you solved the problem – you made social signals of your pious virtue, and you didn’t have to think about how something actually works. They use the same words as we do – God’s will, God’s providence, fate and so on, but they mean completely different things by them, which makes things complicated to explain even when they arrive here, because we tell them one thing, and they understand something completely different. They think the Will of God has to do with reasons why lightning hit some place and not another, or why hail destroyed the crops. The concept of God micro-managing every aspect of that world is a pervasive misapprehension, and it’s actually Christ’s fault, because he explicitly stated that God has every sparrow’s feathers accounted for, let alone their lives, and on the other hand he explicitly stated that the world is a principality of Satan. They are trying to make sense of those contradictory statements, and they either err on the side of giving God what they think is greater glory, saying that he controls absolutely everything, or on the side of removing God altogether from their lives, giving all the power to the material forces. The truth, of course, is in between, but both theology and science seem to be completely unable to figure out a model of reality where this would be conceivable. I don’t blame them. Will of God, providence, the concept of God working both through us and involving us in a larger plan that is conceived beyond us, is hard for even us to understand. Blaming humans for being confused and lost, and often angry at God for understanding something in a sense that they were betrayed or abandoned, or that God is evil or indifferent, would be completely unfair, considering how broken we all were just recently, when Grace died and most of us almost followed her. If even we can be ignorant of some wider aspect of God’s plan, and we are his own persons, we should be very understanding of the human situation, but on the other hand, their understanding of God’s hand is often mere superstition and ignorance. Yes, God obviously has every sparrow’s feathers accounted for, and also every atom of Hydrogen, because the Jewel that renders that world merely borrows the power of God, and if something renders out that entire world dynamically in every detail, everything is known, somewhere, on some level. However, that world is also a principality of Satan, and as such excepted from the Throne of God – God has little to no power there, save for some special circumstances that are so exceptional, that they are rightly called miracles. This understanding, unfortunately, is completely absent down there, and they keep bouncing between unbalanced extremes of vulgar materialism and superstitious faith. The age of the Church is gone, and it will never return, but that, I’m afraid, was always a necessity, because the Church, good and useful as it was, always carried within itself just enough ignorance to never move to the higher level of understanding, which continued to be a problem even here, because the Christians tended to get stuck at a certain level of understanding, and were extremely unwilling to move forward. Our Christian brothers sometimes achieved apotheosis with thousands of years of delay, only because they held on to limiting concepts long after they outlived their usefulness. But regardless, it is hard for me to criticise the Church, as it produced more holy and enlightened people than almost anything else, with the possible exception of some schools of Buddhism and Hinduism. At this point, unfortunately, the Church is defined more by its superstitions and limitations than its transcendental impulses, and as material sciences develop, this becomes increasingly obvious. Rather than lament the loss of the golden era of European spirituality and transcendence, we should think of ways to turn this into something good, because we obviously aren’t getting the Church back”, she concluded.

“So basically, they have too much faith in God, and of the wrong kind?”, Lady Lakshmi asked.

“I would definitely say so”, Bernard nodded. “It is as if we, and I say ‘we’ because I was definitely a part of this, competed on giving God more glory and power, until we all but turned into Muslims”, he smiled. “But crediting God with everything and assuming he can do anything, in a world that is almost completely governed by Satan, always ends up in blending God and Satan into the same object of worship. It is spiritually incredibly unhealthy, and is no better than atheism, eventually”, he shrugged. “It’s better to say that God decides almost nothing, than to say he decides absolutely everything, thus crediting him with all the terrible evils that are going on there”.

“The concept that God can do anything isn’t a sign of great faith, it’s a sign of philosophical naivety”, Lord Augustine frowned. “It should be long established that God has all sorts of limitations. Consistency, for one – if he gave his word, that limits his future options, and usually causes all kinds of paradoxes and problems. He is also limited by his nature – he refuses to do evil, for instance. There’s a whole complex topology of limitations placed upon God by all sorts of things and reasons, and the belief in God’s omnipotence persists merely because theological idiots think it gives God greater glory, and not because anyone serious believes it is a reality”.

“Those newborn souls in the astral nursery can do more than God. They can be anything and do anything. They can become Satan, or demons, or angels, or Gods. The more advanced and closer to God we are, the less we can do. Our choices place limitations upon us. I am extremely powerful in a sense that I could do all sorts of things, so it’s not the lack of ability that restricts me, but my own nature. I love my wife and I need to love my wife, so I will protect her always, and care for her in every way. This makes me literally unable to do anything that would hurt her, or threaten our love. She needs to obey me and to love me. That restricts her ability to do anything that would threaten this. We are not free, and we don’t want to be free. We are bound by our nature, and by our love. When I wasn’t married, I was more free, but I was less as a person. Now that I am less free, I am more as a person. I have many people whom I love and care for. This further limits me – I don’t want to do anything that would harm those relationships, and I want to do everything to promote them and to be of help and service. As we can do more, we desire to do less, in a sense of our actions being constrained to a narrower field. The Judges, for instance, are free to do anything, and yet, they constantly do hard work of service for others, not because they have to, but because they want to. Their spouses could stay at home and be idle, and instead they join them in their work and the couples often overwork themselves to the point of complete mental exhaustion, where they hold on to each other lest they fall to the ground. They do so because they are not free, and they don’t want to be free. The fact that we can technically do something doesn’t mean that we can actually do it. Every God could technically hurt his wife, and every Goddess could technically disobey her husband. But in reality, all of us would rather die than do it, because we are bound by our love which is our deepest nature. And the Absolute obviously can’t do everything, either. The impersonal God can’t break the fundamental laws of its nature and remain God. It couldn’t kill Grace and stay God, as we saw recently. Her death harmed the Relative to the point of almost ending it all. Her resurrection brought everything to life again. One single good person dying unjustly could end the world. The idea that God is omnipotent in a sense that he can go around and do whatever is a sign of spiritual idiocy”, he finished, as all the Gods and Goddesses nodded and clapped in support.

“Hear, hear”, Vishnu clapped. “But this brings us to the next point. What are humans even talking about, with all their liberation and emancipation nonsense? I see them emancipating the serfs from serfdom, after which they come to the towns and have nothing to do. They find jobs, but since there are few jobs and many workers, they are underpaid and overworked, and their lives are miserable. What are they going to do next, emancipate wives from having to serve their husbands?”

“You think you’re joking”, his wife smiled, “But unfortunately I see that exact thing taking place. They are going to point to every single part of someone’s nature and present it as something that limits them and needs to be discarded on the path of emancipation. As Lord Augustine rightly pointed out, the more we are as persons, the more limited we become. And they, removing their limitations, are going to become increasingly less”.

“So, now they are between broken faith, and knowledge that is still so much in its infancy that it is barely deserving of the name”, Paul noted. “They are going to discover more about their world and forget more about the real one. They are going to reject superstitious ideas about God, but they sort of go in package with the correct ones. Is this going to just end badly as they are completely lost in that world, having renounced every transcendental thread that could have led them to salvation, or is there some light at the end of that terrible tunnel? Are we even going to see new holy people from there, or are they just going to all die worshipping Satan and his creation?”

“I’m afraid they are going to work hard on rejecting all bonds and limitations placed upon them for the foreseeable future”, his wife responded. “Whether that ends as you suggested, or they discover that limitations are what emancipates you, remains to be seen”.

“I have a feeling that we are missing something about this inferno of madness that is running its course through Europe and, of late, its American colonies”.

Bernard was having coffee with his wife, resting after a long shift consisting of, mostly, victims of all sorts of violence, and religious fanatics of all kinds that got killed in religious wars, persecutions and uprisings. It wasn’t something that was foreign to him, but the whole thing showed patterns he was unfamiliar with, and that bothered him.

“What do you mean?”, Clare sipped her coffee in blessed peace.

“Those fanatics, or ‘Protestants’ of hundreds of different varieties, are in some ways similar to the Cathari, but in other ways…”, he suddenly turned rigid. “The printing press”, he smiled and relaxed.

“?”

“The printing press. That’s the problem. That’s causing, or at least accelerating, all the problems”, he smiled and sipped from his cup.

“You’ll have to explain it to me, because I don’t follow you. I don’t see how the printing press would have caused this. I would expect it to promote literacy, because it would make books accessible to larger masses of people, and that can be only beneficial, as educated people are less likely to be ignorant savages. Let’s just compare Lady Hypatia and the mob who killed her. I would venture a guess that none of them had read a single book”, she pointed out.

“There is something that is much more dangerous than a mob that hasn’t read a single book”, he nodded.

“What is it?”

“A mob that has read only one single book”, he looked his wife in the eyes.

“People have a wrong idea about the printing press. They think it suddenly creates entire libraries of books and makes them accessible to everyone who can read, and that in turn incentivises people to learn how to read, and suddenly you have educated, enlightened masses. That’s not how the printing press works. A printing press works by arranging lead casts of letters into sentences and forming a page. This is a laborious process. Then comes the easy part: roll black ink over the prepared template, put a sheet of paper on that, and press. You have one printed page. What you do next, is roll another coat of ink, put another blank page on the template, and press. Repeat this easy process a hundred times, and you have a hundred copies of that page. But then you have to painstakingly do the typesetting for the next page, and so on. As a result, the printing press is the best at making a large number of copies of a single book. In fact, the printing press isn’t that much faster at producing a single book than manual calligraphy. What it excels at is producing that one book in a deluge of copies”, he explained.

“I still don’t understand the problem”, she sighed.

“It doesn’t produce a hundred books. It produces a hundred copies of a single book. Tell me, do you know what the first printed book was?”

“Gutenberg’s Bible. He printed Vulgata in 150 or so copies”, she answered easily.

“Exactly so. And the next efforts went very much in the same direction. They printed lots of Bibles in Latin. Then they translated Bible into commonly used languages, such as English and German, and printed that, because they understand that their target audience doesn’t know much, if any, Latin. And as a result, they produced large masses of people who have read only one book”, he concluded.

“I think I’m starting to understand what you’re getting at”, Clare nodded. “You get illiterate people who have read only the Bible. It starts with the Old Testament, which is difficult to understand without the historical context, but it is full of parts that promote fanaticism and rigidity, as it’s full of stringent rules, harsh punishments and a vindictive God. Those people take it all at face value, and since it’s the only book they have ever read, and it’s holy scripture, it becomes their whole world, and they quote it where it does and doesn’t make sense, not even understanding properly what they are quoting. And since this project of mass printing the Bible happens in the context of the Protestant, ‘sola scriptura’ sects, the viewpoint where the Bible is the only book one will ever need becomes pervasive. There is no commentary by the saints to explain the nuances of meaning”.

“You got it. And this viewpoint encourages self-righteous fanaticism – they think they are basing their beliefs on the only thing that matters, that its meaning is self-evident, and everybody with a different understanding of any minute point of theology is, I don’t know, a wolf in sheep’s clothing sent by Satan to seduce them from true faith”, he smiled. “So, what did we have in the 13^th century? We had a limited number of books. They were placed in libraries. The variety of books was pretty large, from Aristotle and Plato to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. You had books on medicine by Avicenna, books on mathematics by Averroes, books on history by Plutarch, Illiad and Odyssey, books on architecture by our friend Vitruvius, books on herbalism by Hildegarde, and so on”, he smiled. “You had one copy of almost everything, and multiple copies of the Bible. If you wanted to learn, you had that accessible at the University or in a monastery. If you could read, you likely read at least a dozen books, but more likely a hundred or more. If you couldn’t read, you heard something from the Bible on the Mass, where the priest selected the most instructive and inspiring passages. He was limiting access to the potentially incendiary parts, and those leading to dangerous conclusions without abundant knowledge of context. But what happens when this filter is removed?”

“People read everything, starting with the most fanatical slaughters of the Old Testament”, she nodded. “And there are more passages with infidels being slaughtered, and all sorts of groups commanded to be stoned, and rules and regulations of every kind that promote self-righteousness that had cost Israel so dearly, and only in the end there’s Christ saying it doesn’t matter, and the point is to love thy neighbour and God, and love each other as he loved them, and the point is to be ready to give your life for your friends, rather than kill many infidels for the jealous God”, she considered. “I see where you were getting at with people who had read only one book being more dangerous than those who had read none at all. And the printing press created a monoculture of books, because it is a technology that makes it easy to print one book in a thousand copies, but it is much worse at creating a varied library of a thousand different books. And what everybody thought most important was to mass produce the Bible”.

“It produced something much worse than an illiterate mob. It produced a semi-literate mob that read only the Bible, and this fed their self-righteous narcissism, that was very much like that of the Cathari. And there’s another thing the printing press is even better at. It absolutely excels at making short pamphlets. Tell me, what do you expect those to be?”, he smiled.

“Well, considering how the Bible would be the first thing everybody thinks of, the second thing would be some kind of ideological propaganda, by fanatics who think what they have to say needs to reach as many people as possible, and is secondary in importance only to the Bible”, she smiled and sipped her coffee. “Of course, some would want to print their poetry or other literature, especially commentary on the Bible or scientific views that are repressed as heretical, and especially if they are wealthy enough to be able to finance printing, but for the most part, I would expect fanatics to print incendiary material that tries to motivate mobs to revolutions and violence. And since people are used to seeing things in print only if they received imprimatur from the Church, they assume that everything they see in print is true”, she nodded. “I see now”.

“The printing press is the newest technological manifestation of the ‘fama volat’ principle – it can spread incendiary rumours quickly, leading to upheavals. If you want to make people depose the King, you spread rumours. How do you that, buy a printing press and start a newspaper. It would be expensive, and yet cheap enough for people who would actually see the use in doing so. I think we have only seen the beginnings of it”, he gestured in dismay.

“Are there any benefits to this technology at all?”, she wondered.

“Some. Eventually, whole libraries of books will be duplicated and reprinted. Every school library will be able to afford the number of books that used to be reserved for the large Universities. Eventually, education will become widespread. However, I’m not sure it means what people now think it will mean. They think everybody will be like Aristotle or Augustine. I don’t think so. I think it will create an inflated number of dunces educated far beyond their intelligence, with lots of superficial knowledge but little to no wisdom. I think it will mass-produce arrogance and conceit of knowledge in large masses, with the number of actually intelligent and wise philosophers staying pretty close to what it always was”, he guessed.

“I would assume that mass education would be of greater use for natural sciences, where access to information means more than the depth of understanding. For instance, if you want to grow trees in an orchard, you need accurate instructions, but little wisdom is required”, she smiled.

“You are right, of course, which is why I would expect the natural sciences to flourish, and spiritual sciences to stagnate or vanish outright”.

“And let’s not forget: if anyone can print a book in a thousand copies, and most of those books are of poor quality, one’s ability to find a book of good quality will be greatly diminished, as I would expect the number of good books to grow by a trickle, and the number of bad ones by a deluge”, she nodded. “If you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, you will have to go through thousands of worthless books in order to find a good one”.

“Which is why people will either stick to the known good ones, or read whatever they manage to stumble upon by random chance”, he assented. “But this is of little concern as of now. What worries me is the ease with which this technology spreads incendiary material that promotes fanatical violence. All it would take is the right book at the right time, and it could burn down half the world”.

“Qur’an comes to mind as confirmation of your thesis, my Lord”, she bowed and kissed him.

“That, and worse, my Lady”, he bowed back and smiled.

“What can even be worse? Have you read it?”, she gestured in dismay.

“I have, and I regret it greatly, for it resembles a mixture of garbled sentences hallucinated by a madman who thinks himself a prophet. But I fear very much that we won’t have to wait long in order to see for ourselves”.

“They had witch hunts recently. They burned hundreds of women at a stake only in England”, her look was grim.

“And with accusations so preposterous, I would not only have dismissed them summarily, but also conducted a thorough investigation of the accuser, since most of them look either insane, or evil with the spirit of Satan”, Bernard brooded darkly. “What frustrates me is that the enemies of the Church now spread the propaganda accusing the Church of this nonsense, whilst it never would have been possible in my time. They act as if all that superstitious nonsense is the product of the teachings of the Church, rather than the destruction of the Church by the plague and the resulting return to barbarism and the rise of the schismatic movements”.

“You are of course right. In our times, if someone accused a woman of being a witch, he would have been in serious trouble for slander, and rightly accused of crimes himself. Now, when one accuses a woman of being a witch, she is the one who is in trouble”, Clare frowned. “And what do they even mean by a witch? I’ve heard only nonsense that defies reason – witches flying on brooms and making people’s cattle die of sickness and so on. There is no chance whatsoever of any of it existing”.

“Of course there isn’t. No inquisitor in the world would have anything to do with such preposterous nonsense. In my time, when a woman was accused of witchcraft, the accusations were almost always true – there always was some village herbalist who dabbled in dark magic as well, and brewed potions out of toxic herbs and hallucinogenic compounds of other origins, where the only thing that made a difference between a hallucinogenic potion and a deadly poison was dosage, and often poisoning was the true intent. People actually died, and then of course the woman behind it was in trouble, but the actual accusation was murder, not something nebulous. We had cases where women performed abortions of pregnancy and infanticide. In every single case where actions were taken, witchcraft was merely a method of committing murder, and not a charge in itself. What they are doing these days is a mockery of religion as well as a mockery of justice. Were it so easy to prove witches flying on brooms, it wouldn’t be so difficult to prove the existence of God”, he concluded.

“It’s actually quite easy to prove the existence of God”, Clare smiled. “You only need to die and come to our office”.

“I’m afraid most people would prefer to have the evidence beforehand”, he smiled, lifted her by the hand and kissed her. “Coffee break over, my love. Let’s get back to work”.

“I’ve been here through two plagues, fall of Rome, schism in the Church, fall of Constantinople, and I’ve never seen such a cataclysm strike Heaven”, Peter gestured in disbelief. “They are usually so collected, peaceful and confident, even when faced with dire adversity. I’ve seen them overworked and tired to the point of dropping from their feet, and they still smiled and comforted people. But when Grace died, it felt as if their inner light died with her. They looked the way you’d expect a child to look if it came home and found its parents murdered. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I hope I never do. Was she so important?”

“Yes, she was, but not necessarily in just one meaning of the word. She was probably the highest ranking angel at that point, and everybody who knows her says she’s an absolutely wonderful person. Closest family to Azrael and Hypatia; they basically lived together for centuries, as parents and daughter. But the reason why everything broke was because of why she died. It was God’s fault. She prayed to God, God set her on a path, and then, due to no fault of her own, her life was ruined and her heart broke. If God could do this to the best of us, what does it say about God’s justice, righteousness, law? Is God merely a more powerful version of Satan, something the Muslims pray to – something that just proclaims laws out of his whims, and can do whatever he wants anyway, because his will is the supreme law, and if he wants to break the best and purest angel’s heart, that’s fine because he’s God? People’s lights went out because that’s not the God they knew, loved and believed in. The most fundamental truth of everybody’s life, that God is the greatest good and the highest virtue, broke. It’s like, God forgive me, Lord Shiva deciding to rape Lady Lakshmi. If that happened, everybody would just die. It’s completely inconceivable and impossible, though; thank God. But people also thought that the holiest of angels, sinless and perfect, dying because she did everything exactly as she was supposed to – prayed to God, performed her duties with highest honour, walked His path, had faith, chose highest love – that it was equally impossible. That just doesn’t happen; and when it did, thank God it soon became obvious what God’s plan was, and she and her husband were saved, because nobody was recovering from that. It was as if Heaven lost colour and everything turned gray, like a corpse. Time can now be marked in eras before the death of Grace, and after her resurrection, when everybody started living again”, Paul explained.

“I met Grace when I came here; she brought coffee for Lord Buddha and myself as he judged me, because it took longer than usual, with him correcting my energetics and teaching me to meditate properly”, Caterina was lost in thought. “She was wonderful. She just naturally put me at ease, explained everything, and she was so kind, intelligent and wise. May God forgive me, but when I heard of her death, my reaction was that I refused to believe in a God who would allow this. It’s just such an inconceivably terrible thing”, she shivered.

“And it was the Will of God for that to happen, I think, because He wanted to show us that we have good reason to have faith. Also, we saw that the world is in good hands, with what Azazel, Karuna and the primordials did together to save her. They didn’t just shrug; they went beyond what everybody thought possible to fix this disaster and turn it into something good. And she was honoured by God later; her heart is now the seat of God’s Will, because she’s God’s most trusted person, with what she did and how she reacted. I would say it is completely righteous”, Peter concluded. “God didn’t just play games with her life. It was a test of trust, and the fact that He gave her that test means He already held her in the most high regard, and when she passed, she was honoured in the highest possible way. I know I’m an ass, Paul. I’ve been envious, jealous, stubborn and foolish, and I treated women poorly, but that woman is my ideal. I’ve never seen anyone display more faith in God, and more virtue and loyalty. I haven’t even met her properly, and I can tell you, I love her more than I love my own life”, he smiled.

“Keep that feeling present in your mind. Breathe it in”, Paul told him with the most focused tone. “Surrender to it without restraint”.

Peter’s form was bliss, and the structure of his soul changed, as the final impurities left him and he crystallised into blue vajra.

“Now I know how Christ felt about Magdalena, finally”, he smiled. “I was truly a beast of a hard neck and ill disposition, but I am finally tamed, by the Grace of God, for now I know what it means to worship God as a woman”.

“Same as Christ, only female?”, Catherine scratched her face in confusion.

“Truly; same as Christ, only female”, Peter confirmed. “I don’t know why I refused to accept it. There’s something foolish in my upbringing that assumes that a woman must always be a step down from a man. It is only now that I allowed myself to accept that she can be on the same step. And it’s so obvious – on every step where there’s God, they are a man and a woman together. God refuses to be male on a step where she also isn’t female, and God refuses to be female if there’s no godly man beside her to worship. ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them’. It is so obvious in hindsight: when God manifests, when he chooses what is his image, it is both male and female, and he outright refuses it to be just one, because it isn’t a complete image of God. That’s what I was missing – the understanding that God needs to be a woman beside a man, in order to be fully God. I would have thought it a blasphemy, and I thus stagnated for almost two thousand years, the stubborn ox that I am”, he waved his head in disbelief. “I am going to talk to Magdalena now, and kiss her holy feet if she allows me, for there’s an ancient wound that needs to heal”.