Reflecting once again on the Penitent One's daring and surprisingly intelligent negotiation with the divine.
In his world, divinity is real. Divine order and justice, however incomprehensible and cruel, are real. Things are as they should be. Period.
Neither fighting the invisible strings of fate like a physical adversary nor rejecting their reality are possible. How can you possibly change anything about this world if you feel that it should be different, that it should be kinder?
You observe with careful dedication. You intergrate your very being into this divine clockwork. And you use yourself as a lever to jam it.
The Penitent One's greatest power has been narrativizing his own life. We will never know the exact thought process, or if it was an intuitive revelation, but beneath that silent mask he noticed that there is a pattern to the divine punishment and grace. A symbolic, poetic pattern. An ironic, moralizing and hopeful narrative that imbues each action with meaning and twists the world to fit the story outlined by each step. Things that seem or feel like they should, are.
Meditating in silence on the silence of the Father must have helped to notice this reciprocity between the asking sinner and the responding divinity. Being a silent ascetic in a brotherhood so heavily focused on rejecting individuality has protected this nameless man from being bound by a narrative fate of his own so far. And at this point he makes his first significant individual choice.
He takes Mea Culpa from her shrine.
I've talked before about how powerful this symbolic gesture is - a wordless rejection of the sanctity of this woman's suicide, a rejection of divinity's undisputed right to judge and sanction the impulses of the soul. This sword shows at a glance what the Penitent One stands for. But more than that, this action puts him into a unique narrative of his own.
He deliberately steps into the role of a Hero, a Chosen One, Someone Who Embarks On A Dangerous Quest To Improve The World. And because he does it through such a distinct and powerful symbolic action, the divine narrative has no choice but to bend. The is no rhyme or reason to deny him this narrative role and the bargaining power that comes with it - at least for now. But he is not ~just~ a hero - he is "the Penitent One", tying himself and his narrative purpose to the endless cycle of penance and to the endless yearning of a sinful mortal for divine forgiveness. By rejecting any subjective humanity beneath the iron mask, anything that could suggest he is bound by chains of causality and that he has a future and a past, by positioning himself as the narrative embodiment of something shared by all inhabitants of Cvstodia he becomes narratively immortal. Anyone in particular could die, but "the Penitent One" will live on and struggle on as long as the penance continues.
By taking upon himself this purpose he also becomes tied to the fleeting, naive yet resilient hopes for salvation and improvement (miraculously manifested as cherubim with golden masks) and likens himself to the bull in the painting, intending to likewise commit his suffering to the birth of something strange, new and innocent.
All this - with a single action. The Penitent One has wedged himself into the divine narrative in way that makes him and the impulse he stands for almost impossible to remove.
But to enact any real change he has to have not merely a role, a wedged spot, but narrative ~weight~ that acts on himself as a lever. He has to conform to the divine order, to live out his heroic narrative to the fullest extent lest he is ejected out of the system. Any slip up is guaranteed to devalue all his progress if he is to shift from "the Penitent One" to "the Arrogant Rebel" or something akin to that.
And thus he embarks on his journey of penitence, pushing through the goalposts of spiritual progress all the way up to the cardboard walls of reality. Thus he acts as a hero and helps people that cross his way, because improving their lives and lessening their suffering is his quest and his narrative role. It is something that the person behind the mask considered worth sacrificing himself for. Thus he cultivates in his heart nothing but sorrow for his brothers and sisters and guilt for his own human weakness, maintaining determination in his quest but never allowing himself hope in it succeeding. The narrative would immediately consider that as arrogance.
This narrative weight, should he truly go to all corners of Cvstodia and gather in himself the full extent of humanity's desperate plea for salvation and forgiveness, should he truly live up to the image of "the Penitent One", he is allowed to ascend to the turned throne - not as a man, but as an archetype, as an ideal and as an idol.
He concludes his human life with one final rejection of himself as person beneath the Ideal, he concludes the narrative of penance - not merely his own, but all penance as an ideal concept... But that's not how this story can go. The world narrative's central axiom is that humanity is powerless before the divine. And to uphold narrative coherence, the Penitent One ultimately fails. His quest was admirable, he has improved the world at least in cleansing the wicked and refreshing the cycle... But he cannot change the narrative convention from within the story.
Of course, that doesn't feel quite right either. Who determines the narrative convention then? The Fourth Face whispers a terrifying truth - it's the actors on the stage of life themselves.
There is no God writing the book of existence from outside of it - but there is a miraculous birth of divinity in the empty space humans imagine divinity to be in. They look up to the sky and see a face in the clouds, they yearn for the world to be coherent and human, and the Face in the Clouds becomes real. It sends down rain and lightning, just as humans imagine it would. The humans want to live in a fair and just world, they want to think the chaotic pattern of rain reflects some kind of moral judgment - and so the Face in the Clouds becomes judgemental, and its rain becomes moral. But it is ultimately powerless against the fact that it is derivative from human need for supernatural moralization of the world, has no will and judgement of its own. The humans want to please what they view as a powerful judge, and the Face in the Clouds becomes powerful and demanding of submission. The narrative loops onto itself. A parasite that feeds on faith is formed on the Other Side of The Dream - a being born from the fear of death, of inevitable meaningless oblivion, and that offers sense, continuity and spiritual safety. But as a product of its narrative, it cannot be infinitely kind. This gift demands a price, a price as arbitrary as it is cruel.
With the strange contradiction finally put into words, the Penitent One can confront this being. He can silently observe its hollow facade and it can do nothing but seethe as the narrative demands it does. The narrative supposes it's got to want to stay existent. It indulges the narrative by fighting for its life, despite the exposure of its nature ultimately dooming it even before the physical struggle. And the Penitent One kills it.
Along with it, he destroys the promise of continuity of the soul, the promise of spiritual safety and divine justice. The world becomes peaceful - humans stop tormenting themselves in search of forgiveness as they realize there is no one to bestow it.
But the story doesn't quite end. The inertia of the narrative remains to some extent, as people look to familiar explanations for the lack of clearer answers even as the old framework has been upended. They still want answers, the empty spaces of existence yearn to be filled with gods. The old symbols remains powerful, even if inert - the way a Christian might deny the pagan gods, but still know and recognize the imagery of Prometheus.
The Other Side of the Dream changes. It has to exist, right? Something has to continue after death? But now that we know that there is nothing, the Other Side is but a sorrowful desert of infinite loneliness.
The truth is, humans still fear death. Humans still fear losing to the tide of meaninglessness and in a moment of desperation they call out to the symbols that offer them meaning. And thus the Miracle returns, reshaped by anxieties of a new age, by a more conscious terror of its arbitrary judgement and by an increased personification of it as a subjective being.
Its return inevitably brings the Penitent One back too. As the narrative of penance before judgemental divinity is reestablished, so is he ressurected.
But it is this subjectification, this personalization of the divine that allows the Penitent One to confront it even more directly - and to show it, to persuade it that is all for naught. That there is no reason and no meaning to this suffering, and instead of making up idols to fill the void of answers we can find in this disappointment a certain relief.
The world doesn't care about us. It doesn't want to save us or hurt us. But ~we~ care about each other. We create the narrative of our lives and we can improve our world and the lives of others. And in exiting the comfortable but stagnant cyclicality of myth we might move through history into a better future that is shaped by our hands, desires and unrestrained imagination.
There may not be a supernatural actor to catch us when we die, but in being kind and caring we may leave ripples that outlive us and allow us a semblance of immortality through personal remembrance. To that eternal peaceful rest the Penitent One is ascended as thousands of spectators ~want~ such a narrative resolution for someone who've done so much good and genuinely believe in its narrative possibility. The framework of their worldview has changed since the first game. A new kind of humanism that developed out of the Penitent One's actions in the past suggests that a human is not a putrid sack of sin that should not hope but must always strive for divine forgiveness, but a person that has innate worth and inherently deserves kindness. This idea has been challenged by the resurgence of the Miracle and protected by the Penitent One.
There is little power a human has in the narrative of life, but it is still power. And giving up this narrative power en masse to invisible inhuman actors for the promise of meaning can create powerful, cruel gods - whether in the sky, in the market, in historical materialism, or in countless other conceptual spaces in-between.
The Miracle shall always be with us. The process by which supernatural constructs-arbiters of meaning are born from fear of death and hope for justice is an inevitable reality and an everpresent human temptation. But perhaps reflecting on how their power derives from our own can help us negotiate with them better, and perhaps to craft narratives for our lives that are kinder to us and to those around us.
jacobvanloon
baratheonpilled
areudirty
theartofmadeline
tangentwithtanner
