T/N: This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and storylines in this novel are entirely fictional. Any public agencies, institutions, locations, or historical figures mentioned are used solely as fictional backdrops and do not represent their real-world counterparts.
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"A very good answer."
The elderly professor smiled, then turned and wrote two terms on the blackboard.
ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē, knowledge/science) and πίστις (pistis, faith).
"The dilemma faced by the philosophers of medieval Greece, or rather, the intellectuals of the entire Roman Empire, Byzantium, can be summarized by these two words."
Setting down the chalk, the professor turned back to his students.
"But before you can understand their dilemma, you must first understand one thing: at that time, philosophy was not an independent discipline."
"Philosophy was the handmaiden of theology."
His tone was calm, but the words left the classroom in complete silence.
Some students frowned. Others nodded. But most simply looked at the professor with eager, inquisitive eyes.
That look stirred something deep within him. Before Amphoreus, his course had been one of the least popular subjects at the university.
Most of the students who attended did so only for the credits, barely paying attention during class.
But now every seat in the classroom was filled.
The longing for knowledge in their eyes was exactly the scene he had imagined when he first dreamed of becoming a professor and lecturer.
He had wanted to share his research and his insights with the younger students.
Now that dream had finally come true. And it had all begun because of that era-defining series.
It truly was remarkable. The old professor had never cared much for entertainment. In fact, he had stubbornly believed that entertainment was little more than poison for the youth.
That was until he first encountered Honkai: Star Rail and Amphoreus. He saw the students become fascinated and excited by the upcoming appearance of Amphoreus.
Alongside that excitement came a complete revival of interest in classical studies. It was as though, overnight, people had developed a profound curiosity about their country's past.
So the professor watched the series himself.
Many of its terms and novel concepts took an old man like him some time to grasp, but he could still perceive the spirit that lay beneath it.
Once he got through the difficult first few episodes, he finally reached the Amphoreus arc.
From the moment the first episode brought him into that dreamlike world, it felt as though he had come home.
All the difficulty he'd felt while watching simply melted away. At last, the professor understood why Amphoreus had become such a phenomenon in Greece.
As a joke, one might say: MiHoYo creators understood Greece even better than the Greeks themselves.
But that was a good thing. After waiting for decades, the old professor had finally received the opportunity he had always hoped for.
Looking at the eager faces filling the classroom, he slowly began.
"In 529 AD, Emperor Justinian I ordered the closure of Plato's Academy in Athens."
"This is generally regarded as the symbolic end of the ancient Greek philosophical tradition."
"But the significance of this event is far greater than a single sentence in the history books, a simple ending."
"What truly came to an end was the independence of philosophy itself."
"From that moment onward, if you wished to contemplate truth, existence, goodness, justice, the very forms of inquiry the Greeks once took pride in, you could only do so within a prescribed framework."
"That framework was Christ."
The professor spoke plainly. Because that was simply the truth.
One of the world's greatest peoples when it came to rational thought and philosophical inquiry...
After that, they entered a long period of decline.
The ancestors of the Greeks had invented formal logic and laid the intellectual foundations of medieval world's understanding of truth.
Yet afterward, they found themselves trapped by an enormous contradiction. They could no longer explore the world or define it through their own observation and reasoning.
Instead, everything revolved around interpreting a single book.
The Bible.
For God was omniscient.
God was omnipotent.
Everything God declared was without error.
Therefore, the Bible inherited that same quality.
It too was regarded as all-knowing. And if something is truly omniscient and omnipotent, then everything in existence must already be contained within it.
Nothing exists that has not already been recorded. Every question must already have an answer somewhere in its pages.
Yet Greek philosophers continually asked questions that the book could not answer. Or they discovered principles that the book had never mentioned.
Ecclesiastical authority could never allow anyone to challenge its own authority. Much like the Council of Elders of Okhema.
So they used political power to silence a people gifted in rational inquiry. Then they reinforced that silence with divine authority, hoping they would remain silent forever.
From that moment on, the people ceased discovering truth.
Instead, they devoted themselves to explaining an already established truth, the Bible.
"That meant that every thought we produced, every philosophical idea we created, became a tool in service of religious authority."
"Our reason itself became a servant with a master."
The professor spoke quietly. Yet many of the students below felt uncomfortable.
Some felt angry.
Some felt humiliated.
And yet there was nothing they could do.
This was history.
"Religious authority drew the boundaries of our reason. Within those boundaries, you could become as subtle, as profound, as intricate as you wished."
"But you could never cross them. Do you understand what that feels like?"
"Knowledge acquired boundaries. The unknown was no longer allowed to remain unknown."
At this point, the professor's voice suddenly rose with emotion.
A man in his sixties or seventies now wore an almost absurd smile as he explained the tragedy to his students.
"Our people, from the very moment of our birth, possessed an immense love for knowledge and reason."
"And yet we were trapped inside a cave."
"Outside lay a far greater world. But we were forced to believe that this cave was the entirety of reality."
"But even more tragic is that we were not like everyone else trapped inside that cave."
"For our ancestors and our history made us clearly understand that the world everyone else believed in... was nothing more than a cave."
"It is precisely because we are more rational than others, more clear-headed, because we know more... that we suffer even more!"
"I call this... the curse of knowledge!"
His final words rang through the classroom like thunder. Never before had the students understood so clearly where their pain came from.
Yes.
They were different from everyone else. There has been too much glory and too much knowledge on this land. It is precisely because of those things that, today, they suffer more than anyone else.
Because they know more than others. The elderly professor had finally spoken the thoughts that had long weighed on his heart, his tone calming somewhat.
He asked: "Everyone, do you know what the scholars of the Byzantine period were studying?"
"Questions like whether Christ has one will or two, whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from both the Father and the Son, and how God's grace should be reconciled with human free will."
"Back then, these were literally matters of life and death. People truly died over them."
"If one side won, the other would be exiled, imprisoned, or even executed. Put yourselves in their shoes."
"When the brightest minds of an entire civilization are consumed by questions like these, even turning against one another because of them how can that civilization continue to progress?"
The students suddenly felt enlightened.
This had originally been an activity class, where the professor and his students were watching the portions of the series involving Anaxa.
The students were young and still rather superficial; they hadn't looked deeply enough.
To them, Anaxa was simply a scholar who perfectly matched their tastes, someone overflowing with unmistakable and unsatiable curiosity.
But they had never understood why Anaxa appealed to them so much.
Now the professor explained it in a simple yet ingenious way, he gradually guided the students toward the deepest meaning behind Anaxa as a character.
That meaning was the other side of the Greek philosophers of the medieval era.
At Anaxa's core was the philosopher Anaxagoras, who proposed that the heavenly bodies were stones rather than gods, and was condemned by the Athenians for impiety.
Layered upon that foundation was the deepest obsession shared by nearly every Greek philosopher since the land had come under the complete rule of religious authority.
It was also Anaxagoras' own obsession.
To prove the Nouspore.
Nouspore means the mind and reason.
"My goodness... So there was actually a connection like this."
After putting everything together, one of the students couldn't help but shiver. He was no longer moved simply because Anaxa openly rebuked religious authority.
Instead, he felt, on a much deeper level, the connection between Amphoreus and Greece.
He even vaguely grasped one of the central threads running through the entire Honkai: Star Rail storyline.
The connection between Erudition and Amphoreus. Perhaps it was far more than just the Emperor's Scepter.
Just then, the professor smiled and said,
"So, congratulations to the young lady who answered earlier. Your answer, that the conflict was between divine authority and ecclesiastical authority, was correct."
"I told you all this simply to help you better understand the deeper meaning behind Anaxa as a character, and what the struggle surrounding Okhema in the series is truly fighting for."
"Through the series, we can better understand reality. We can better understand that the philosophers of the Middle Ages weren't merely fighting against the religious, but against an entire world where reason itself was trapped inside the cave."
"In that era, those philosophers did everything they could to preserve knowledge and reason."
"What they could do was fight for even the tiniest bit of freedom in the narrowest of cracks, for example, using philosophical concepts to explain religious doctrine, making theology appear more like philosophy."
A student below raised a hand and asked, "But did that actually accomplish anything?"
The professor answered without hesitation, "Yes, it did!"
"It was precisely because of those interpretations that our philosophical tradition survived. Medieval scholasticism, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, all of them, if you trace them back to their roots, owe something to the preservation and reconciliation achieved by Byzantine scholars."
"They danced while wearing shackles, but at least they preserved the dance itself."
"So when the day finally came that those shackles were broken, the dance could continue."
At this point, the professor smiled.
"Of course, that's the perspective of later generations. For the philosophers of that time, it was a source of profound suffering."
"Do you know what Plethon, the last great philosopher of Byzantium, said before he died?"
The students shook their heads.
"He said, 'I spent my entire life trying to set truth free, but I never succeeded.'"
His words drifted through the classroom, leaving it silent for a few moments.
Afterward, the professor's voice became much lighter. He had already imparted everything he wanted the students to understand.
The professor clapped his hands and wrote a large sentence across the blackboard:
"The theme of today's activity class is to explore why Anaxa is so much more popular in Greece than in other regions."
"Now you should understand. Why, when you watched Anaxa point at Caenis and berate her, expose the truth before Kephale, and finally walk away alive, you became so emotional."
"Because Anaxa accomplished what those medieval philosophers never could."
"He spoke the truth and lived to leave."
After saying that, the professor took a sip of water and looked at the young faces before him.
With complete sincerity, he said, "Anaxa is not Anaxagoras. But he is the ending Anaxagoras should have had."
"Amphoreus is not Greece. But it is what Greece should have become."
"Oh, and there's also Phainon"
"A very interesting character. When I look at him, I don't think he's modeled after any one specific historical figure."
"He's more like hope."
"And, in a way, he's also like all of you."
"Like us?"
The students froze, unable to fully grasp what he meant.
The elderly professor burst into laughter. "That's right. Like you. Like the future you guys would grow into."
"One, no, a whole group, of young people carrying the convictions of everyone who came before them, standing atop the ruins and declaring: 'If nothing but darkness lies ahead, then I will carve out the dawn myself.'"
"You are hope. And you are the dawn that has yet to arrive."
That class was recorded by one of the students and uploaded online.
It resonated with an enormous number of people.
Even Xia Wen, somehow, got to see the video. And what Xia Wen saw was more than what everyone else did.
He recognized even more familiar elements.
The cave. The prophecy hanging overhead.
He understood as well, why the Greeks loved Amphoreus with such overwhelming passion.