The Finite Creed

How the Roman Regime Used Christianity to Simplify Thought and Subdue the Mind

I. Two Games, One War

Before the history, a map. Everything that follows will be misread without it.

There are two kinds of war that have been fought across the whole of recorded civilization, and they aren’t the wars that appear in the history books. The wars in the history books are the visible eruptions — armies, empires, councils, creeds — of a deeper and older contest. To understand what Rome did to the Western mind in the fourth century, and why it matters now, you need to understand the nature of that contest first.

The first war is the Great Game. It’s unconventional warfare played as a finite game — bounded, rule-exploiting, institutional, seeking to win and thereby end the contest. Finite games require clear frames of victory: a creed enforced, an academy closed, a tradition criminalized, a people sorted into the saved and the damned. The finite player must hold everything he seizes, or everything unravels. His greatest vulnerability is time, because what is taken rather than built requires perpetual expenditure to maintain. But his greatest weapon — and this is the point to hold onto throughout everything that follows — is that he can define the terms of the cognitive field. He can, if he moves correctly, make the infinite appear impossible. He can make complexity itself seem like heresy.

The second war is the Sport of Kings. It’s unconventional warfare played as an infinite game — unbounded, adaptive, seeking not victory but continuation. The infinite player doesn’t need to seize and hold. He needs only to exist fully and to outlast every frame the finite player can construct, because no finite game, however skillfully prosecuted, can contain an infinite one. The Sport of Kings isn’t a counter to the Great Game. It plays the Great Game — and the men and institutions of the Great Game — for sport. The Game is the quarry. It’s always been the quarry.

These aren’t abstractions. They’re doctrines versus guidelines, as old as civilization, practiced by specific kinds of people using specific kinds of power. The Great Game is waged primarily by what I call the Resentfuls: a disposition — envy elevated to doctrine — operating within the intellectual, financial, managerial, and merchant classes. Their motivation isn’t ideology in any pure sense. It’s the conviction that those who build and sustain across generations shouldn’t exist independently or at all, and that they, the Resentfuls, should have the status of those they resent. The Sport of Kings, conversely, is played by those who build, sustain, and transmit: the multigenerational families and their allies across every class, whose obligation is stewardship rather than seizure.

The Great Game is forever Revolution. The Sport of Kings is forever Restoration.

With that map in hand: what Rome accomplished in the fourth century wasn’t a religious conversion. It was the largest successfully executed opening move of the Great Game in Western history — a deliberate act of cognitive disarmament, aimed at eliminating the mental infrastructure on which the Sport depends. What was destroyed wasn’t belief. It was the capacity for a specific kind of thought. And as we will trace across the essays that follow, the methodology has never changed. Only the instruments have.

II. What Was Lost: The Infinite Mind of Paganism

Imagine a universe where truth is never singular, where gods multiply and merge, where every myth invites allegorical interpretation rather than literal obedience, and where the intellect is a muscle exercised daily in the gymnasiums of competing philosophical schools. That was the intellectual landscape of classical paganism. Contrast it with the stark, clean lines of early Christian doctrine as enforced by the state from the fourth century onward: a single God, a single path to salvation, a single book, and a great sorting of all humanity into the saved and the damned. The difference isn’t merely theological. It’s a difference in cognitive architecture — and that difference was the objective, not the byproduct.

Ancient polytheism had no central dogma, no authoritative scripture, and no professional clergy with a monopoly on truth — but neither was it arbitrary. Beneath its apparent diversity ran a deep structural coherence, one that modern comparative linguistics and mythology have traced to a single Proto-Indo-European root originating in the Pontic-Caspian steppe and the Caucasus — the genetic and cultural homeland of the ancestors who carried this tradition westward into Greece and Rome, northward into the Germanic and Norse worlds, and eastward into the Slavic lands. The same sky-father — Dyeus Pḥatḗr— stands behind Zeus, Jupiter, and Tyr. The same divine functions recur across every branch of this family: the sovereign pair, the warrior god, the divine twins, the goddess of dawn whose name echoes from the Greek Eos to the Norse Auðr. The myths vary in their costume; the architecture beneath them does not. This wasn’t a collection of unrelated local superstitions that happened to coexist. It was one of the longest-running and most geographically vast experiments in distributed theological cognition in human history — a tradition capable of absorbing Egyptian Thoth into Hermes Trismegistus and identifying the Syrian El with Saturn, precisely because its underlying grammar was flexible enough to recognize genuine kinship in unfamiliar form without being destabilized by it.

A citizen of the classical world could honour Mithras in the morning, consult a Stoic philosopher at noon, and participate in a Dionysiac rite by night without anyone crying contradiction — not because the tradition was intellectually lawless, but because it was sophisticated enough to hold unity and multiplicity simultaneously, to understand that many true things can be said about the same real thing, and that the map is never the territory. Myths existed in dozens of incompatible versions, all accepted as valid perspectives rather than heretical errors, because the tradition had grasped something the enforced creed would spend centuries trying to destroy: that an inexhaustible subject demands inexhaustible modes of approach. This wasn’t intellectual disorder. It was an open system with deep, traceable, ancestral roots — one that nurtured a mind comfortable with paradox, ambiguity, and the hard work of discerning meaning without a cheat sheet, because that comfort had been cultivated across thousands of years and thousands of miles of shared human experience.

This open system was also the cognitive infrastructure of the Sport of Kings. The practitioner of the infinite game requires a mind trained to hold multiple competing truths simultaneously, to navigate paradox without forcing resolution, to sustain complexity without the comfort of a creed. The pagan tradition produced precisely this mind, through its philosophical schools — Stoic, Epicurean, Platonic, Skeptic — through its traditions of dialectic, through the lifelong pursuit of virtue by reason rather than by command. The thinking citizen of the classical world was expected to engage with Stoic physics, Epicurean atomism, Platonic metaphysics, the rigorous skepticism of the Academy. Even the simplest farmer who made an offering to Ceres participated in a world-picture that accommodated infinite gradations of divine agency, from the numen in a spring to the cosmic order of the spheres.

For a regime increasingly terrified of its own populace, an infinite universe of thought was precisely the problem. What it produced — sophisticated political dissent, philosophical resistance to simple authority, the capacity to hold the actual map rather than the presented one — was the very thing the finite player can’t afford to have circulating. To close the game, you must first close the mind. And for that, paganism was exactly wrong.

III. Intelligence Is Not Sophistication

Here the argument requires a distinction that will run through every essay in this series, and which matters more than perhaps anything else we will explore.

Human beings have been growing more intelligent at the base level across the same period we’re examining — indeed, across the whole of recorded history. Cognitive capacity, in its raw form, hasn’t declined. The Flynn Effect documents sustained measurable increases in abstract reasoning across the twentieth century alone. The Common Man of today, in terms of raw processing capacity, is almost certainly more intelligent than his medieval ancestor.

But intelligence isn’t sophistication of thought. They aren’t the same instrument. Intelligence is the engine. Sophistication of thought is the road the engine is allowed to travel. And across the same period during which base intelligence has grown, the road has been systematically narrowed.

What paganism provided — and what the regime’s Christianization destroyed — wasn’t intelligence. It was the trained capacity to operate at the full range of that intelligence: to hold complexity without resolving it prematurely, to reason across multiple competing frameworks simultaneously, to live comfortably in paradox and ambiguity, to engage with the world directly as an inexhaustible field of meaning rather than a closed binary system of the approved and the forbidden. The pagan philosophical traditions were, in effect, the gymnasium in which raw intelligence was trained into sophisticated thought. Close the gymnasium. The muscle atrophies. The engine remains, but the road’s been reduced to a single lane with walls on either side, every exit and entry not approved, blocked off.

This is the Great Game’s most elegant weapon, and it’s been redeployed in every era since: you don’t need to reduce human intelligence. You only need to reduce the sophistication of the world people interact with through words and word-defined systems. Control the cognitive field — the language, the permitted questions, the structure of available discourse — and raw intelligence becomes largely harmless. The brilliant mind, trained only in binary categories, produces brilliant arguments for binary conclusions. The Game requires nothing more.

We’ll return to this in later essays. The mechanisms change — from imperial creed to inquisition to algorithmic feed to the managed vocabulary of vast bureaucratic systems — but the operation is identical. What’s being bounded isn’t the capacity to think. It’s the sophistication of the world in which thought is permitted to move.

IV. The Common Man as Infinite Player

One clarification the map requires, because it’s easily missed: the Sport of Kings isn’t the exclusive province of the multigenerational elite. It never was.

The Common Man is also a player in the infinite game — when allowed sophistication of thought, and even when not. This matters enormously. When the pagan tradition provided the common citizen with a cognitive world of genuine complexity — competing cults, philosophical schools, a universe of many gods and many truths — ordinary men and women were participants in the Sport whether they knew it by that name or not. The farmer who understood that Ceres and Demeter were the same goddess wearing different faces, and that both were also something the philosophers called the World Soul, was operating in an infinite cognitive space. He couldn’t be easily boundaried, because his universe wasn’t bounded.

But even when the common man is denied the sophisticated cognitive world — even when the gymnasium is closed, the creed enforced, the permitted questions narrowed — he retains a form of infinite-game advantage that no institutional framework can fully extinguish. He lives closer to base reality. He works with soil, weather, bodies, hunger, birth, death — with the irreducible, uncontrollable, unboundable fabric of existence that no creed can fully capture and no bureaucracy can fully manage. Hence the drive to end the small farmer, the man who lives close to and in daily communion with life and the earth, the old gods. The universe isn’t boundable. The Game can bound the words used to describe it. It can’t bound the thing itself. And the man who lives close enough to the thing itself carries a knowledge the Game can’t reach: the knowledge that the presented map is wrong, because the territory in front of him refuses to conform to it.

This is why the war against the Common Man’s sophistication of thought and the war against his connection to base reality are conducted simultaneously. Urbanization, managed food systems, the mediation of experience through screens and bureaucratic systems — these aren’t mere economic developments. They’re the progressive removal of the common man from the unteachable cognitive reality of direct encounter with an unbounded world. The Sport of Kings has always drawn its most reliable allies from those who retain that contact. The Common Man. The Gentleman Farmer. The agricultural estate owning Lord. The Game ‘s always known this. Which is why it’s always worked to sever it.

V. The Christianity That Was Lost Before It Was Weaponized

Justice requires a distinction that the history of this period almost universally obscures, and which the argument of this essay mustn’t.

The Christianity that Rome weaponized in the fourth century wasn’t the Christianity of the first three centuries. The religion of the Apostles and the early Church was something strikingly different: rich, disputatious, philosophically sophisticated, and deeply engaged with the intellectual world it inhabited. The early Christians absorbed Hellenistic philosophy with genuine appetite — Clement of Alexandria and Origen brought Platonic metaphysics directly into Christian theology. They engaged Buddhist ideas through the trading routes of the ancient world and the Greco-Buddhism rich within the world Alexander the Great left behind. They incorporated Stoic ethics, Neoplatonic cosmology, and Jewish mysticism. Early Gnostic Christianity was, in its own way, as complex and allegorically demanding as anything the pagan tradition produced. The Apophatic tradition held that God was fundamentally beyond all categories — not binary, not finite, not containable in any creed.

This wasn’t the Christianity Constantine needed. The early Church’s intellectual diversity — its dozens of competing schools, its tolerance for paradox and mystery, its willingness to hold multiple cosmologies in tension — was precisely what made it resistant to the kind of imperial standardization the regime required. The Council of Nicaea in 325 CE wasn’t a theological summit. It was a hostile acquisition. Constantine didn’t patiently seek theological truth. He commanded hundreds of bishops to produce a single, rigid creed, and then he enforced it with the power of the state. His goal wasn’t the salvation of souls. It was the order of the empire: one God, one Emperor, one realm.

What was destroyed at Nicaea — and in the decades of enforcement that followed — was not paganism alone. It was the Christianity of the first three centuries: the rich, philosophically open, sophisticated and intellectually demanding tradition that had spent three hundred years thinking carefully and complexly about the nature of reality. The regime didn’t adopt Christianity. It replaced it with a simplified version designed for governance. A version of binaries to be controlled. The distinction matters, because the war being described in these essays isn’t a war against Christianity. It’s a war against the same target Christianity itself was used to eliminate: the open epistemic system, the infinite cognitive space, the trained capacity for sophisticated thought.

VI. The Instrument of Capture: The Binary Code

Christianity, as standardized and enforced by the imperial state, offered the cognitive simplification the regime required by collapsing the infinite cognitive space of both paganism and early Christianity into a severe and comfortable finitude. At the heart of the new enforced doctrine lay a binary code that sorted all of existence into mutually exclusive pairs: Saved or Damned, Good or Evil, Orthodoxy or Heresy, Faith or Unbelief.

Every complex moral dilemma, every philosophical subtlety, every shade of grey was abruptly funneled into a single axis of judgment. There was no spectrum of virtue, no partial enlightenment, no noble pagan — only the stark division between the children of light and the children of darkness. Even the Trinity, that most celebrated of Christian mysteries, represents not an expansion but a ceiling. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit form a closed, fixed triangle — a trinary ceiling that replaces a pantheon capable of indefinite multiplication. One couldn’t add a fourth force, nor imagine that a local river deity might be an expression of divine diversity. The number was locked, the revelation sealed.

The strategic genius of Rome’s ruling class was to recognize that this finite system could serve as a tool for cognitive simplification on an imperial scale. A population conditioned to think in simple binaries of good and evil, obedience and heresy, is a population far less likely to produce the sophisticated political dissent that had plagued the third century. The docile, predictable subject who had internalized a finite universe of thought was a triumph of political engineering.

Emperor Theodosius I completed the operation. His Edict of Thessalonica in 380 CE made Nicene Christianity the only legal religion of the empire. Paganism was criminalized. The move wasn’t a religious shift. It was the replacement of an open cognitive framework with a closed binary test of loyalty. The cognitive burden on the citizen shrank dramatically. One no longer needed to weigh the arguments of the Stoa against the Garden, or ponder the allegorical meaning of an ancient myth. One simply needed to recite the approved formula and obey. Complexity was no longer a reality to be navigated. It was an error to be eliminated. The state had effectively swapped the demanding task of governing thinkers for the far simpler task of managing believers.

VII. The Burning and the Silence

No account of this operation is complete without naming what was physically destroyed, because the physical destruction wasn’t incidental. It was doctrinal. The Game can’t afford to leave the libraries standing.

The great Library of Alexandria — or more precisely, the complex of libraries and research institutions that Alexandria represented — wasn’t destroyed in a single dramatic conflagration. It was dismantled across time, in phases, through a combination of deliberate destruction and managed neglect. The Serapeum, which housed a major collection, was demolished by a Christian mob in 391 CE, almost certainly with episcopal sanction. What had taken centuries to assemble — the accumulated texts of Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian learning — was reduced, generation by generation, as the institutional commitment to preserving non-Christian knowledge was withdrawn and then reversed.

Across the empire, temples were demolished, converted, or simply closed. The great healing sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus — where the ancient world practiced something recognizable as both medicine and psychology — was shuttered. The Oracle at Delphi, the oldest functioning institution of cognitive inquiry in the Greek world, gave its last response in 390 CE, silenced by imperial decree. The Mystery Schools at Eleusis, which had transmitted a form of initiatory wisdom for nearly two thousand years, were destroyed in 396 CE by the general Alaric, acting in the service of Theodosius’s Christian program. The sacred groves were cut. The ancestral shrines were demolished. The accumulated symbolic architecture of a civilization’s relationship with the infinite, the Divine, was systematically erased.

This wasn’t zealotry. It was strategy. The Game understands — has always understood — that the buildings and the books aren’t the real target. The real target is the transmission. Break the chain of transmission, and the knowledge dies with the generation that holds it. You don’t need to refute the Platonic Forms. You need only to ensure that no institution remains capable of teaching them. The Sport of Kings depends on transmission — on the capacity of accumulated wisdom to pass from one generation to the next through living institutions and living people. Destroy the institutions and the people who animate them, and you’ve severed the chain. The knowledge that would allow the next generation to see the Game clearly, and to respond with the sophistication the Sport requires, doesn’t reach them.

VIII. Hypatia and the War on Women’s Minds

On a March morning in 415 CE, a woman was dragged from her carriage in Alexandria, pulled into a church, stripped, and murdered with oyster shells or ceramic tiles by a Christian mob. Her name was Hypatia. She was a mathematician, astronomer, and Neoplatonic philosopher — the head of the Platonist school at Alexandria, a teacher whose students included Christians, pagans, and men of every background. She’d spent her life embodying precisely the open cognitive tradition this work has been describing: rigorous, non-dogmatic, committed to reason as the path to truth.

She was almost certainly killed with the knowledge, if not the sanction, of Cyril of Alexandria — one of the most powerful churchmen in the empire, who had spent years in conflict with the prefect Orestes, one of Hypatia’s former students and allies. Her death was a political act. It ended, effectively, the Alexandrian intellectual tradition. No comparable figure arose to replace her in that city. The school she led didn’t reconstitute itself. The chain was broken.

But Hypatia’s murder wasn’t only the destruction of a philosopher. It was a declaration in the oldest war within the long war — the war on women’s minds, which wages yet today. In the classical pagan world, women occupied a cognitive and social position that the enforced Christianity of the fourth century and after systematically dismantled. Female philosophers, physicians, poets, and priestesses had operated throughout the classical world with a sophistication the new binary order couldn’t accommodate. The Pythia at Delphi, the Vestal Virgins, the female initiates of the Mystery Schools — these weren’t decorative figures. They were custodians of knowledge, practitioners of traditions that the open cognitive system required and sustained.

The Christianity that replaced paganism — in its state-enforced, binary form — had one cognitive slot available for women: the slot defined by submission to male spiritual authority, with independence available only as its mirror image, equally bounded by the same binary frame. Wife or virgin. Obedient or fallen. The sophisticated middle ground — the woman who reasoned, who taught, who held the complex map and transmitted it — had no category in the new system. Hypatia was murdered partly because she had no category. She was illegible to the binary. And what’s illegible to the binary is, by definition, heretical.

The war on women’s sophisticated thought didn’t end with Hypatia or with the fourth century. It found new instruments in every era — the witch trials, the closing of female monastic intellectual life, the progressive constriction of women’s access to the philosophical tradition — and its contemporary forms will be examined in later related works. But its origins are here, in the deliberate collapse of the cognitive world in which women’s minds had always had room to move.

IX. The Nicaean Move as Institutional Capture

The Council of Nicaea deserves to be understood precisely, because it’s the prototype of every subsequent operation of this kind — and there have been many.

Constantine at Nicaea wasn’t a theologian. He was a manager of the most sophisticated kind: the man who arrives at the table of a living, disputatious, intellectually diverse institution, and leaves having converted it into an instrument of control without ever appearing to have seized it. The bishops came to Nicaea as representatives of hundreds of distinct theological traditions. They left having signed a creed that the emperor required, enforced by the emperor’s power, with anyone who refused to sign exiled. The council didn’t discover theological truth through deliberation. It manufactured consensus under coercion and called the manufacture revelation.

This is the polished man’s move, executed at civilizational scale. You don’t storm the church. You chair the meeting. You don’t destroy the bishops. You make yourself necessary to them — through imperial protection, through funding, through the legitimacy only the state can confer — and then you set the terms. The institution that emerges from the process appears continuous with the institution that entered it. It has the same name, the same buildings, many of the same people. But it’s been reoriented. Its purpose is no longer what it was. And the reorientation is invisible to those inside it, because they were present throughout the process and experienced no single moment of rupture.

Infiltration, not invasion. The doctrine is ancient. Nicaea was its masterwork.

X. The Long Paragraph Begins

What the Roman regime accomplished in the fourth century was the opening move of a very long paragraph. The armies — the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Christian-on-Christian wars of the Reformation, the burning of heretics across ten centuries — came later. They’re the last sentences of that paragraph, not the first. The first sentence was Nicaea. The second was the Edict of Thessalonica. The third was the closing of the academies. The fourth was the burning of the libraries. The fifth was the murder of Hypatia.

By the time the armies arrived, the cognitive disarmament was already largely complete. A population that’s spent generations thinking in binaries doesn’t require an army to keep it bounded. It bounds itself. The binary becomes the only available thought-form. Complexity becomes not just dangerous but literally unthinkable — not because the intelligence to engage with it is absent, but because the trained capacity to hold it has atrophied. The gymnasium’s been closed so long that no one remembers what it was for.

The work that follow will trace this paragraph across the centuries: through the systematic enforcement of doctrinal orthodoxy in the medieval period, through the 1054-Schism, through the inquisitions and burnings that punished those who reached for complexity in defiance of the creed, through the Reformation which appeared to break the binary but merely renegotiated it, through the Enlightenment which partially restored the open cognitive system before the next round of finite-game capture, and finally into our own era — the post-Christian world of machine intelligence and vast bureaucratic apparatus, where the binary has been reconstructed in the language of algorithm and policy rather than creed and heresy, and where the operation continues by other names.

The Great Game is forever Revolution — always destroying the previous cognitive world to install a simpler, more governable one. The Sport of Kings is forever Restoration — always working to recover and transmit the capacity for sophisticated thought that each round of the Game attempts to extinguish. The question of which is winning at any given moment is the question of whether the transmission chains are intact: whether there are still institutions, families, and individuals capable of carrying the complex map from one generation to the next.

In the fourth century, the transmission chains of the ancient world began to be severed — systematically, deliberately, but not yet completely. What was lost wasn’t intelligence. Intelligence persisted and grew. What was lost, where the operation succeeded, was the road on which that intelligence was permitted to travel — the sophisticated, open, infinite cognitive world that the pagan tradition had built across millennia and that the Sport of Kings had always depended on to produce the kind of mind capable of playing it. But the operation didn’t succeed everywhere at once, and to pretend otherwise is to misread both the scale of what the Game attempted and the tenacity of what resisted it. The pagan traditions of the Norse, the Germanic tribes, the Slavic peoples, the Celtic holdouts of the Atlantic fringe — these weren’t relics. They were living cognitive worlds, carrying intact the open cognitive architecture that Rome had moved to extinguish, sustaining in their myths and their practices and their unwritten philosophical traditions precisely the kind of mind the enforced creed was designed to prevent. Complex and sophisticated thinking didn’t vanish from the West in 380 CE. It retreated to the places the imperial apparatus couldn’t yet reach, and it held there.

What followed wasn’t a single catastrophic severance but centuries of grinding, violent, systematic pursuit — Christian-on-Christian doctrinal warfare, the burning of heretics, the Inquisition in its many forms, forced en-masse conversions, the progressive military and missionary absorption of every remaining pagan population, the witch trials that targeted the last living custodians of the old knowledge in the rural landscapes of a nominally converted Europe. Each of these will be examined in the essays that follow. What must be understood here is that they were required — that the binary had to be enforced with that degree of sustained violence across that span of centuries precisely because the open system wasn’t fragile. It was deeply rooted, ancestrally transmitted, and genuinely resistant. It took the better part of a millennium of organized brutality to reduce the whole of Europe and the Anglosphere to a cognitive world bounded enough to serve the Game’s purposes. The fourth century wasn’t the ending. It was the opening of a very long campaign.

The Common Man didn’t wasn’t disconnected from and didn’t lose the universe in a single moment. He lost it slowly, unevenly, district by district and generation by generation, as the campaign moved from the imperial centers outward into every corner of the world where the old roads still ran and the old gods still had names. In the mountains and the forests and the coastal margins where the apparatus couldn’t yet reach, the universe held. Men and women continued to think in the old way — not because they were resisting in any conscious political sense, but because the world they lived in hadn’t yet been bounded, and an unbounded world produces an unbounded mind. The loss, when it finally came to each of those places, came the same way it had come to Rome: not through argument, which the open system could survive, but through force — the sword, the pyre, the inquisitor’s torture, the missionary’s systematic destruction of every physical object through which the old transmission had moved.

What replaced the universe wasn’t nothing. It was a room. A well-administered, carefully maintained room with approved answers on the walls and a single door, watched. And what’s been replacing the universe in every generation since — by the same method in different instruments, the creed becoming the algorithm, the inquisitor becoming the policy apparatus, the burning of books becoming the demotion of search results and the management of permitted vocabulary — isn’t a theological question. It’s a strategic one. The room’s been renovated many times. The door’s still locked from the outside, watched by the enforcers of binary surreality.

That’s the reason this history matters now, in this moment, to the specific kind of person willing to carry it. Not as a grievance. Not as nostalgia for a world that’s gone. But as a map. The campaign that opened in the fourth century hasn’t ended. As Joseph Campbell tried to tell us. It’s only changed instruments. And the first thing the map tells you — the thing it’s always told those who could read it — is that the room isn’t the world. The universe is still there. It’s simply been waiting, as it always waits, for the minds capable of letting it back in.

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Next: The Long Inquisition — How Christian-on-Christian Violence Perfected the Binary and Prepared the Modern Mind for Its Final Enclosure