As the Guild grew, so did the Curia’s concern at its influence. Seeing a rival church in the Guild, and in Natural Philosophy a rival faith, the Cardinals reviewed the Discourse for evidence of Heresy, composing their treacherous arguments even as the Guild’s foremost minds developed the Wave at their behest. The Wave’s remarkable success confirmed that the time had come to act. In the cold autumn of Forty-Six, Bernoulli was called before the Holy Inquisition and charged with Deifying Reason. They accused him with his own words: his impious presumption that nothing was unknowable.21
The fashionable consensus that the Curia was the tool of an aristocracy who saw the Guild as a rival elite is not only cynical but simplistic. This philosophical clash was genuine. Before Bernoulli, most of what the Curia was pleased to call Natural Philosophy was superstition buttressed with feeble mathematics. Though Bernoulli cast much aside, there was much that he kept. For example, he found Johannes of Palermo’s Laws of Attraction correct up to a point. Difficult as it is to see from our luminous present, it was this idea of conditional truth that was truly iconoclastic, truly insidious.
When Bernoulli’s devoted Apprentices urged him to flee, he refused, believing it was his duty as a Natural Philosopher as much as a Citizen to speak what he knew to be true. Clergy and Nobility packed the Senate, eager to see this upstart Engineer brought low. Bernoulli was harangued by a parade of Cardinals who charged that Philosophical Relativism led inexorably to Blasphemy. If Truth is not a constant, what then is Good? What is Evil? Variables too?22 Finally Bernoulli was asked to affirm Divine Authority and replied:
The Lord is omnipotent and infinite and the Destiny He has writ is immutable. Up to a point.
It was a trap, of course, for the Inquisition. Bernoulli knew that his trial would gather all his enemies. The coup began in an orgy of explicable but perhaps immoderate violence. While belated Noble resistance was crushed in the city, praetorians stormed the Senate.
Senators, Necessity may be the Mother of Invention but she is also the Mother of War. I listen to her voice most intently.
So began the last, somewhat rambling, address the Senate heard, punctuated by screams and cheers from the streets. The climax revealed a hitherto private mysticism:
Hear me, Senators, and know History’s certainty. History has no allies. History requires no preparation, no tact, no caution. It needs none. Its will is Law, that you think it Right or Wrong matters not. None of you know what is necessary. I know it. I do it. Stand against me, you stand against a flood. Necessity and I, together we’ll drown all. I tell you I am Time’s Executor. I am History’s end. Yield to me!
Shaking and sweating, pale and overwrought, the Senate’s new Master collapsed into fever. The Revolution was complete, the Re-Formation just beginning.23