Savior of the Damned (the Connor series) by Dirk B. (Page 60 of 60)

Wow. Pick an easy topic! Audience is crucial so be careful about describing ML as uptight. However, it gets real tricky because I (a Protestant) personally believe that ML should NOT have split off. However, the Catholic Church had issues back then and I believe that ML fled for his life. I hang with Catholics spiritually and not just socially and they accept me just fine and I accept them. Perhaps, you can treat the Reformation as Satan working through both Catholics and Protestants. The same might be said of the Catholic/Orthodox split.

Vatican 2 accepts Protestants as not having the same level of truth as the Catholics. But this can get tricky when Catholics have mortal sins and Protestants do not. Do I need a priest to absolve me of something considered a mortal sin?
And this is from AI:
[The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) marked a significant shift in the Catholic Church's approach to non-Catholic Christians, including Protestants. The Council did not condemn those outside the Roman Catholic Church but instead sought to engage in dialogue and foster understanding. It recognized the validity of the faith of Protestants, referring to them as "separated brethren"]

Your last paragraph is interesting, but unity is not achieved through division. And Jesus prayed for unity. Both sides sharing the responsibility for the splits might be the best way to go. But do not slam either side. Can you describe it as Satan simply played to their weaknesses?

Hope this helps.
George FLC

It was Satan who described ML as uptight. Yes, I wrote it, but I intended it as Satan's opinion, not my own. I would imagine most Protestants see the result of the PR as a good thing for Christianity, otherwise why not become Catholic? At the time of the split, though, Catholics, especially the clergy, would have seen it as a disaster, and would surely have blamed Satan.

To view the PR as a good thing, the obvious conclusion is that 45,000 different denominations is also a good thing, hence my logic for the book that Satan can't conquer a denomination with no central figure to overthrow. Though Jesus prayed for unity, he also would have known what would eventually happen, and he didn't say Christians should remain forever unified under Peter and his successors.

His prayers are, of course, more than just a biography of important events in his life. Since he knew what would happen, his documented prayers are also his ongoing encouragement to readers of the Bible to remain unified. If Christians remain unified in their beliefs but not in who governs the Christian Church on Earth, does that mean Christ's prayers went unanswered?

I think the Christian faith is unified in the ways that matter most. You worship the same God, believe in the Trinity, the Resurrection, and the Virgin Birth, among other core beliefs, and you follow the teachings of the same Bible, more or less. And your faith can't be overthrown or corrupted as easily as a single Church hierarchy can.

Put all that together and the PR was a disaster one could blame on Satan. The fact that Christianity as a whole remains unified over core elements of the faith, suggests to me the outcome is actually a good thing. It seems like a great example of God using evil to do good.

Ultimately, it will be Satan who claims to be the cause of the PR, but the Catholic cardinal he converses with can point out that he's the Father of Lies and not necessarily to be believed, and the cardinal can make the counterarguments that I do above. Words to the effect: Satan, you may have caused the split, but God used it against you to create something even more indestructible.

The alternative would be to say that Satan wanted what has happened, including the 45000 different Protestant denominations, but that they will all come back together eventually. In fact, that's what Satan and Connor intend to do: conquer the biggest denomination, and then convert the rest back to Catholicism.

As one who has not been following, I say that this will be really difficult to pull off in a way that readers will follow properly.  A lot will depend on how long you keep the reader immersed in the otherguy's memories.

Sarah Hoyt does not-quite-this in volume three of No Man's Land when a lifesaving "magic" goes wrong and leaves two people with each other's memories.  The non-magician can remember how to call up magic.  It saves their bacon,  though leaving a mess around the metaphorical frying pan--the whole kitchen, in fact.  And yeah, she pulls it off like a magician turning a rabbit into a hat.

Not answering your question directly (but will in another post) but here, taking a slight side-step: A Satan POV would be hard to write. We're having an interesting discussion on another forum about what goes on in the heads of immortals.

For example, a 500yrold vampire who participated in the US civil war, chatted personally with Descartes, and was signatory to the signing of the constitution... what attracts him to a highschool-range girl who's not yet travelled or experienced or even widely read. The discussion amounted to how can the author reasonably convey what's going on in this dude's head. Surely, even a lady vampire in her mid 100's is just as pretty but more on his tier, having survived two world wars and a Great Depression.

A POV from the girl's perspective is relatable to the human condition. A POV from his perspective requires the character to be humanized.

Granted we each see Satan differently, I see a diabolical genius. No way he's risking himself by doing things personally; he'd have a puppet acting in the role you described. Let the puppet have to deal with human memories and mental contamination. Were I he, I'd have spent the years since the flood grooming my puppets to utter loyalty with promises of (insert whatever fetish they have).

If I remember correctly, Tolkien doesn't give a Sauron POV until the end of Book 3, and even then only a brief "He realized his great mistake". If there is a Sauron POV before this, it would be worth looking into

tl;dr: You've set yourself a high-level challenge to try to convince the reader that this dude is someone who can deceive an entire planet when in his head/mindset

The following is long because I'm filling in a lot of blanks based on what I've decided for the story, some of which you may not know or remember. I think it holds together pretty well. Skim as needed.

In the series, demons are no longer able to take physical form (part of what they lost after the War in Heaven), unlike their angelic counterparts. As a result, Satan came up with the idea of corporeals - demons taking control of recently dead bodies and making them appear alive. Ordinary demons can only keep that up for a few months before the tendency of a corpse to rot exceeds their ability to heal the decay. More powerful demons can keep it up longer, although I don't go into details other than the fact that Satan, who also wants/needs to take physical form at times to carry out his plans, has the ability to maintain a corpse indefinitely. That's why Angelo De Rosa is able to keep his physical body from falling apart. In fact, at some point in our recent past (e.g., a century or two before Connor is born), Satan became trapped in the De Rosa body when Michael the Archangel slipped a Christian necklace (a chain in the Apocalypse of John/Book of Revelation) around De Rosa's neck.

One advantage of corporeal form is that it protects demons from the pain of stepping onto holy ground, which is why De Rosa can set foot in churches as part of his job as commander of the Order of the Black Cassocks, a special forces team within the Swiss Guard. The order was created centuries ago as a team of priests to hunt and expose corporeals and is led in the present by none other than the ultimate corporeal. The reason Satan is willing to get his hands dirty is that this is his carefully crafted plan to have Connor eventually become the head of the Catholic Church (then convert the rest of Christianity and eventually people of all faiths). Needless to say, Satan has a vested interest in winning the Last Challenge.

Satan misinterpreted a hint given him by God for how to win the Last Challenge. God told him to become the shepherd who saves the drowning lamb, a reference to Connor. Satan assumed that meant he had to make Connor as powerful as possible so that Connor would side with Satan in deciding the Last Challenge, which God and Satan agreed would be decided by Satan's spawn, the Antichrist. There are actually two challenges: a fake one to divert the Church, and the real one. The fake challenge is that Satan supposedly bet God that not a single living priest will be found worthy of Heaven during the End Times. Satan uses that to steer the meeting into recommending that the Emissary of the Lord, when he comes, eventually be made pope. Satan suggests that in the meeting to ensure God "wins" the challenge (since the Emissary is sure to be worthy of Heaven).

Given the above, I think it makes sense for Satan to personally oversee key parts of the plan, in this case as Archpriest Philip of Rome. The real Philip is killed by Satan after Satan brings the Augustine documents to the Lateran Palace, where "Philip" received them and will steer the attempt to reconcile Augustine's holy vision with the Apocalypse of John, just as Augustine "suggested" in the letter he sent along with the detailed scroll documenting his vision. Only the letter actually appears in the book (as part of chapter one), though the scroll is referred to a number of times in the story. I may yet use quotes from the scroll as chapter epigraphs. Satan also killed Augustine and briefly took over Augustine's corpse to write the documents and set the above events in motion. Having taken over Augustine's corpse and done it in the year 430 (when the real Augustine died), Satan acquires the ability to perfectly forge Augustine's handwriting, and when the documents are retested in the distant future, not only does the writing match, but all testing will confirm that the paper and the ink are from 430.

Naturally, all of the above is done under deep cover, so there will be few hints that Satan is in the story in different bodies over the centuries to minimize suspicion among humans about any one corporeal hanging around "too long" for an ordinary human. When Satan gets trapped by Michael, that becomes his "permanent" corporeal form for the duration of the trilogy.

It is indeed tricky (and perhaps unfair) to be in Satan's and Connor's points of views since neither can think of themselves as Satan and the AC. I only use their points of view once each early on (Satan at the meeting and Connor at the youth seminary). I could have written those chapters to avoid their points of view, but I thought it would be a nice touch for the story and sets up Connor as the likely Emissary of the Lord. In his case, I drop quite a few hints in his first chapter (chapter three if you don't count the prologue in the Holy Land) that he is in fact the Antichrist, although I doubt anyone will pick up on it on first read. It reads like the POV of a teenager who is probably the Emissary but doesn't realize it yet. Augustine prophesies that the Emissary will eventually engage in a battle to the death against the Antichrist; although Augustine supposedly doesn't know who wins that battle, he does foresee that the AC is far more powerful than the Emissary, and Augustine doesn't see how the Emissary can survive that battle. I wonder who wins that battle. :-)

If you haven't already read it, please have a look at Connor's chapter (three) in the Emissary - Strongest Start book. Let me know if I'm being "fair" to the reader. I'm still rewriting chapters one & two, so skip those for now. They probably haven't changed much since you first read them.

Thanks
Dirk

It's an aspect of world-building. Corporeals inherit memories. And can become distracted by them. In this case, it was a way to narrate the opening of the book (excluding the prologue) from the viewpoint of someone greatly affected by the sieges two decades earlier and the renewed rationing of food now that the Vandals have made it into northern Africa. It allows me to set a much darker mood while still keeping the presence of Satan under wraps. If it was truly Satan's own POV, his reaction to everything would be vastly different than that of the priest he recently killed.

The angels and demons in the series are ethereal beings with (ethereal) wings, and angels can take physical form to make themselves look human, but with wings. Both angels and demons can fly in their ethereal state, and angels can fly in their physical form as well.

Demons lost both their ability to assume physical form and their physical/angelic beauty when they lost the War in Heaven, which many (most?) Catholics believe happened at the dawn of Creation. Augustine believed the separation occurred when God separated the day from the night in Genesis, a metaphor for good and evil.

Demons in physical form are the corporeals, which are dead human bodies, so whatever a living human can do in the story, a corporeal can do too, which excludes walking on water, which is a trick only Connor can do. Corporeals are generally much stronger than humans and perhaps faster (I haven't decided their speed yet). The only time demons in a physical form can fly is if they possess a (non-human) animal that can fly (e.g., the demonic locusts Connor fights at the Sea of Galilee during the prologue, and the demonic birds that attack their vehicle on the road in Israel).

My demons don't heal the sick. But they can heal signs of decay in the dead carcasses they wear as bodies. Also, for corporeals to work in the story, they can access/inherit the memories of the dead hosts if they get to the bodies quickly enough (before the brain cells die).

To ensure consistency across the trilogy, I had to make it that demons can modify the bodies they inhabit. In the case of human bodies, they modify the bodies to "heal" limited signs of rot in corpses; in the locusts, they are able to create scorpion-like stingers at the back of locust bodies. I suspect the author of Revelation didn't intend for demonic locusts to be demon-possessed living locusts with modified tails, but it avoided a big inconsistency of having demons be able to assume the physical forms of lower animals but not the physical form of humans, hence they can "modify" whatever creature they inhabit, rather than changing themselves from ethereal into physical form directly.

Given how severe the corporeal bishop's reaction to swallowing holy water was, it should cause something far more severe than itching, even in De Rosa. However, I don't yet take advantage of the fact that even Satan is at least somewhat susceptible to holy water. In early version of the book's first draft, I had something similar to itching for De Rosa's reaction to that Christian chain locked around his neck, but readers knew almost immediately that he was a likely bad guy. So, I modified the effect of the chain to cause him stigmata pain/wounds whenever he murders one of the cardinals.

For what it's worth, demons cannot kill the pope, not even Satan. It would be too painful to try since he is the Vicar of Christ (he's protected from demons by God). That's where Connor comes in. Satan uses Connor to try to kill the pope, although the little demon-spawn couldn't go through with it when the time came.

While the chain in Revelation does seem big from a literal reading, Catholics view much of Revelation as figurative anyway. It therefore seemed reasonable (and convenient!) for me to define that chain to be a simple necklace with a Christian cross on it that Satan cannot remove and that causes him painful wounds to reflect the murders he commits in the book. A supernatural necklace with a cross is, in my mind, more powerful than any physical chain. In the final scenes involving Satan and his demons in the trilogy, they're all teleported to an asteroid, and all have Christian crosses secured around their corporeal necks, preventing the demons from escaping their dead host bodies and the asteroid as it spirals into the black hole.

Many Catholics interpret Revelation to be a spiritual story more so than a simple physical one, including the idea that there is no physical massing for a battle against Christ on Armageddon either. It's the reason, my final battle of the trilogy will be Satan's forces against Connor's forces, ultimately interrupted by Christ's return, not Satan and Connor against Christ. God the Father gives the angels the option to fight for Connor, which some of them do, led by Michael the Archangel.

Are you planning on letting people know that Revelations can be taken literally or figuratively? You might need to somehow. It might appease parts of the Protestant crowd.