Ethan Frye's Legacy: Exploring Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

It may come as a surprise to players of the game Assassin Creed Syndicate to know that the most pivotal character in the game does not actually appear in the game.  In fact, he is scarcely mentioned by name.  I refer of course to Ethan Frye, the father of the game’s protagonists, the twins Evie and Jacob Frye.

Our story begins in February 1868 with the inaugural mission of the twins.  They are filled with the hope of youth, having just turned twenty the previous November, and as their minds imagine the future possibilities there is a shadow.  Their father died of pleurisy less than a month earlier and his death is still fresh in their hearts as evidenced by their repeatedly references to him over the course of the game. What would father say?  What would father do?  It is what father would have wanted.  You sound just like father.  The ghost of Ethan Frye lingers throughout AC Syndicate.

The word syndicate means a joint collaboration, but also has certain criminal implications, such as the mob or a gang.  On the surface, the game invokes the underworld meaning, however the central theme and messages in the game indicate the former.  The collaboration is the union of Evie and Jacob as the two halves of Ethan Frye.  Each twin has a particular aspect their father.  Ethan was studious like Evie and impetuous and daring like Jacob.  In this singular person it worked, but in two different people we see division and hostility until the end when the two come together and vanquish the villain as one.  The name Syndicate works, but it could just as easily have been called Synthesis.  The story is about the reunion of Ethan Frye through his children.

THE FAMILY FRYE

One of the hallmarks of the Assassin’s Creed series is the use of names as Easter Eggs. For example, the names Altair and Ezio both refer to eagles. Edward Keyway’s pirate ship and Jacob Frye’s street gang are both named for members of the crow family, the Jackdaw and the Rooks.  In AC Syndicate, the name Frye comes from the Old English meaning free, as in free-born.  This is in keeping with the recurring theme of freedom throughout the series.

Evie’s name is of course a diminutive of the name Eve, from the Hebrew meaning life or to live, so Evie Frye literally means live free.  The name Eve appears also in the AC storyline pertaining to the human uprising against "The Ones Who Came Before” where Eve leads the rebellion with the implication that she was the basis for the Biblical Eve and the beginning of the Assassin lineage.  Whether the naming of the character Evie is intended to be a direct reference to the ancestral Eve is unclear, however I like to believe that Ethan knew the history and named his daughter after her.

Among of the most popular names in Western Culture are variations of James.  Jesus had a disciple and a brother both called James.  The name comes from the Hebrew name Jacob.  The original Jacob in the Bible was the son of Abraham’s son Isaac.  Like Jacob Frye, the Biblical Jacob was a second-born twin, literally grasping the heel of his brother Esau at birth.  The name Jacob means supplanter, someone who wrongfully takes the place of another.  Jacob was born clutching the heel of his brother, as if he was attempting to pull him aside to pass him in the birth canal to achieve first-born status.  As an adult, Jacob had a name change.  The story goes that he had a night long wrestling match with a mysterious stranger who renames him Israel, meaning “he who wrestles with God.” 

The names Jacob and Israel share a common theme.  Both infer a refusal to accept fate or one’s lot in life.  In this sense, the name reflects the second half of the Creed.  Everything is permitted.  We see this repeatedly in Jacob Frye as he is constantly pushing possibilities regardless of how impossible or crazy they seem to others.

Another recurring feature in the Assassin’s Creed series is this tendency to include ethnic or national heritage in their character creation.  Three of the Assassins featured in the games are of mixed race, Altair, Conor Kenway, and Aveline, while Arno is described as being half Austrian and half French.  We know that Edward Kenway is specifically Welsh but grew-up in England and of course Ezio Auditore is Italian.  Strangely, the ethnic or national heritage of the Fryes is completely missing. 

In examining these names, I discovered that the names Ethan, Evie, and Jacob are all of Hebrew origin.  Not to mention the choice to use the name Jacob rather than the more common James or Jim.  There is a Jewish name Frye, but that comes into Yiddish through Russian and refers to a sucker or a mark and does not fit the characters as well as the English origin of the name does.  However, it is interesting to speculate the possibility that Ethan’s wife Cecily was English and that Ethan was Jewish.  The twins would not technically be considered Jewish since their mother was not, but this would be in keeping with the mixed-race themes in the series and give us our first half-Jewish Assassins.  It would also highlight the important roles played by Jews in Victorian society, for example Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was Jewish, and hints at the rise of anti-Semitism that would come to London in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.

Finally, we see in Evie and Jacob (and Henry Green) the first legacy Assassins in the series since Altair.  I coined the term legacy Assassins to describe Assassins who were born and raised within the context of the order by one or both parents and have full knowledge of the Assassins.  Ezio was raised by Assassin parents, but not within the context of the Order or with full knowledge.  Connor and Aveline came to the Assassins as children, but were not born into it or guided by their parents.  Edward Kenway, Adewale, and Arno Dorian all came to the Assassins as adults.  As for Haytham Kenway, his father Edward took a similar approach to child rearing as Ezio’s father, Giovanni.  The children were taught skills and concepts, but without full disclosure as to why they had sword training when other children did not.

This gives us an interesting picture of the Fryes as a family of Assassins.  Ethan was likely a legacy Assassin judging by how young he was on his first mission.  His wife, Cecily, was an Assassin, though she was not born into it.  The twins were raised as Assassins, and so was Jacob's son and his grand-daughter, Lydia.  There is no telling if the legacy continues after Lydia, but there is a passing reference to an Emmett Frye in the modern day. So there is the possibility that the Frye Assassins cover over two-hundred years of history.

Legacy Assassins pose an ethical dilemma concerning how we raise children.  For the Assassins, freedom is the highest value, and yet they raise their children in a way that removes their freedom.   As Altair points out, he never had a choice in becoming an Assassin.  It was all that he ever knew so he could not can compare other options.  Ethan describes it this way in the novel Underworld.

What we are doing is right. My doubt, lies in the application of that ideology, and this doubt is what keeps me awake at night, wondering if we fail our children by moulding them into our image, when in fact we should be teaching them to follow a path of their own.

Every parent wants to impart to their children the right way to live.  For a Christian parent, this means raising your child to be a Christian.  I never gave much credence to the let the children decide approach.  Without teaching religion at a formative age, the child would not have the capacity for faith later in life.  Second, if a parent truly believed, then choice is not an option.  If you believe a stove is hot, then you will teach your child to avoid hot stoves. If a parent believes in eternal hellfire, then they would raise their children to avoid it.  Giovanni Auditore and Edward Kenway chose to teach around the Assassin training without directly training their children.  This approach left both children vulnerable.  It worked for Ezio, but Haytham was much younger and fell into Templar hands to be raised.  In the end. Ethan raised his children to be Assassins, and this worked best for them because they were part of a community.

THE DIVISION OF LABOUR

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is touted as the first game set in the Modern Era.  For the majority of human existence not much had changed.  The big shift happened with the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent birth of the Modern.  The world changed dramatically.  One of the principle features of the Modern is the division of labour and this is a key theme in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate.  Remember, a syndicate is a joint collaboration.  This is many parts working together, like cogs in a machine, to accomplish a shared goal.

Underworld gives important backstory to the events of the game.  Henry Green, the leader of the London Assassins, was born Jayadeep Mir, the son of Arbaaz Mir, the protagonist in the Indian chapter of the Assassin's Creed Chronicles game and originally featured in the comic book Assassin’s Creed Brahman. 

Needless to say, Arbaaz was proud of his son who proved to be a natural Assassin in terms of skill and technique, however Ethan Frye, Jayadeep’s teacher, saw something dangerous in the boy.  He lacked the killer instinct.  Unfortunately, his warnings went unheeded and Jayadeep went on his inaugural mission only to fail to make the kill.  To the Assassins, an Assassin who could not kill was of no use.  Worse than that, it meant death for poor Jayadeep.  Fortunately, Ethan intervened.

Ethan had a unique perspective.  He stood at the crossroads of the Pre-modern and the Modern.  The Assassins could be described as philosopher-warriors, but first and foremost, they killed Templars.  For the Indian Brotherhood, you could not be an Assassin and not be a killer.  However, the modern world would be characterised by the division of labour.  People of different skills working where their skills were of the most use for the benefit of the whole organisation.  Ethan saw that one need not be a killer to be an Assassin and recognised that Jayadeep’s skills lie in networking.  He may not be a killer, but he would be an excellent spy.

We see this division of labour in Ethan’s children.  Evie is the scholar and Jacob is the warrior.  Technically, Evie is the better fighter, but since this was a natural gift she never regarded it much.  She preferred learning.  Her fighting style is direct, calculated, and technical.  Jacob is less technical and more brute force.  His concern is getting the job done.

Evie represents the past.  She knows the history and folklore of the Assassins and can be both a philosopher and a warrior.  Jacob is the future.  His concern is with the now and accomplishing the mission at hand regardless of consequences. Evie is too enamoured with the past and Jacob is too concerned with the moment regardless of past examples or future consequences.  It is interesting to note that Evie believes in ghosts, remnants of the past, while Jacob does not.

Here is where the division of labour falls apart.  It is important for each part to value the other parts.  The spy, the philosopher, and the warrior all have value to the whole and none is more important than the others.  This mutual respect for the talents of others on your team is necessary for the division of labour to work.  Eventually, the twins learn to work together through mutual respect for each other’s unique perspectives and talents.

 THE DIVIDED CREED

Another division in the twins is the Creed itself.  Evie has set herself on a critical pursuit of the Truth, as dictated by the first part of the Creed, “Nothing is True”.  Jacob is a man of action representing “Everything is Permitted”.  During the course of the story both characters conflict with their evil counterparts who represent these areas of focus taken to extremes.  Evie has Lucy Thorne and for Jacob its Maxwell Roth.

For Evie, the purpose of knowledge is enlightenment, but for Lucy knowledge is power to be utilised for her ends.  Instead of being a light to share, it is a light to be kept and exploited.  In Aristotelian ethics, vices are the extremes of virtues.  Courage is a virtue but in its two extremes we find the vices of cowardice and rashness.  The pursuit of wisdom could be called a virtue.  Evie often mocks Jacob, first in jest and then seriously, for what she perceives as foolishness.  That is one of the extremes and the one most are familiar with daily, but what would the other extreme look like?  Is it possible to be too wise?

Wisdom is not possible without the capacity for abstract thought.  People who use too little abstract thought only see the concrete in front of them at the moment.  They do not consider things like underlying principles, potential consequences, or implications.  These people are commonly deemed fools.  Those at the opposite end are the “intellectual morons”.  The have too much abstract thought.  These are the people with all brains and no sense.  They only see the concepts in their minds and miss the concrete right in front of them.  We also see this with people with book knowledge but no experiential knowledge.  Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a handy word for this vice.  There is foolishness at one end of the spectrum, but nothing for the opposite end.  I have chosen to call this fancifulness. 

Granted, the word fanciful has a light air about it and hardly seems appropriate to describe a villain like Lucy Thorne.  She is cold, arrogant, and cruel.  These attitudes are symptomatic of a defensive posture.  It is not difficult for people with a large capacity for abstract thought to view others as stupid and to feel outnumbered by them.  There is a tendency to become impatient with fools and to develop an arrogant stance towards them.  For those who take abstract thinking to the extreme, people, things, and events are all secondary to the person’s idea of them which can lead to the objectification and exploitation of others.  An example that comes to mind is the way wealthy politicians, who have no direct experience of poverty or the poor, will exploit the idea of the poor to justify policies that will ultimately benefit themselves.

Lucy is quick to tell a henchman that a chest containing research documents is of more value than his life and the life of his family.  Once Evie obtains the chest, she is forced to abandon it to save herself and Jacob from their pursuers.  Jacob sees the adventure as a bit of fun, but for Evie this is the beginning of the wedge that will separate them because she blames Jacob for the loss.  So were the contents of the chest more valuable to Evie than her relationship with her brother, or did it simply confirm her perception of him as a meddling idiot?  Later, Evie bemoans the loss of artifacts in Edward Kenway’s mansion.  Here, Henry Green provides balance by reminding her that they could come back for it or perhaps find something better. 

Several times Evie repeats the mantra, “Do not allow personal feelings to compromise the mission”.   She learned this from her father.  It is only later that she discovers that Ethan adopted this stance as a response to grief following the death of his wife Cecile in child birth.

I love the character of Evie Frye.  She is filled with delight at learning something new possessed of a childlike enthusiasm.  Yet, as the game proceeds we see her become colder and colder as if she is on the path to becoming her shadow, Lucy Thorn.  Fortunately, Evie learns that her brother is not a fool.  He just has a different perspective and sometimes he is right.  Sometimes you have to act on the fly and there is no time to plan.

“Nothing is True” should serve as a warning to Evie against fancifulness and intellectual arrogance.  No matter how knowledgeable or enlightened we think we are, there is always the possibility that we will be proven wrong.  Also, no matter how much we know, someone with less knowledge may know things that we do not.  Ignoring the Creed in this instance would lead Evie to disaster, but in the end it saved her.

Critics have described AC Syndicate as Victorian Arkham City.  I don’t see that as a negative.  If this is true, then Maxwell Roth is the Joker.  He takes the literal interpretation of “Everything is Permitted” to its extreme and forces Jacob to face it.

At first, there was a certain comradery between Jacob and Roth.  Jacob had not long been in London before he began recounting his dream of becoming a “firm but fair” gang leader, and now he was in the presence of the actual leader of the London gangs.  Roth was equally impressed with Jacob’s accomplishments, despite these being at the expense of his own self-interests.  This mutual respect came to a sudden end when Jacob realised that for Roth everything being permitted included killing children as collateral damage.  Soon after, Roth set a trap for Jacob where he happily set fire to his own theatre.  In the wake of the chaos, as Roth lay dying from Jacob’s blade, the Assassin asks him, “Why did you do it?  All of it?”  Roth answers with a crazed smile, “For the same reason I do anything.  Why not?”

For those encountering the Creed for the first time, their immediate fear is that “Everything is Permitted” is a licence to anarchy and hedonism.  Throughout the game series, we see that this is not the meaning.  However, only now do we have a character who lives by the literal interpretation.  Roth is a monster.  The word monster is from the Latin meaning, “a warning” and serves as a moral example in narrative fiction.  Frankenstein’s Monster is a warning against meddling with powers beyond your control.  Maxwell Roth is a warning about literally interpreting the Creed.

As with Evie’s encounter with her shadow, Jacob’s youthful devil-may-care attitude could easily have evolved into Roth’s dark take on the Creed.  Jacob had the potential to become Roth.  Fortunately, Jacob recognised the warning.  He learned that everything is not permitted and came to realise what he already knew and what Evie tried to remind him.  That actions have consequences and to deny this will lead to madness.

FORMING A SYNDICATE

How does it feel to be wrong?  It feels exactly like being right.  People do not go through life thinking that they are wrong.  They may well be wrong, but they don’t know that.  So how do we get better at being right?

One of the problems faced today is what can best be called a lack of diversity.  True diversity is a variety of points of view, not a variety of skin-colours and gender representations.  Through the internet we are able to surround ourselves with people and information confirming what we already believe to be true and protecting our sensibilities against disagreement.   As a result, we are never challenged with new and different ways of seeing the world.  We are never placed into a position where we realise that we are wrong.

It is said that friends are God’s apology for family.  The difference is that we can chose our friends as people that we perceive to be like us.  They confirm our biases whereas family is more inclined to call us out.  They have nothing to lose because they are family and will always be family.  It is this familial bond that forces Evie and Jacob together even when they want to go their separate ways.  They are united as the children of Ethan Frye.

Diversity is not as advertised with people of all races, genders, social classes, and creeds sitting around in a grand love fest.  True diversity is about conflict and power.   Prior to the Eighteenth Century, the word diversity meant to be contrary to what is agreeable or right, often interpreted as wickedness.  A society had to work together to survive and diversity was contrary to that necessary unity.  With the advent of Classical Liberalism, the word took a positive turn.  Concentrated power was seen as a negative and the will of the social whole as expressed through democracy as being mob rule, therefore a danger to individual liberty.  Diversity became a sort of balance of power within society itself.  If no one group held absolute power, then liberty could be protected.  Diversity was seen as a safeguard against group-think and the herd mentality.  Ideally, it is through the conflict born of diversity that the stronger ideas rose to the top.

Imagine if the friendship between Jacob and Maxwell Roth had blossomed.  After all, they had much in common.  Evie and Lucy Thorne got off on the wrong foot, but they also had similar interests.  Relationships with these people would have been terrible for the twins.  Instead, they had each other to force themselves through conflict into the realisation that they were wrong.  Well, not wrong per se, rather to see the value of another person’s mode of action.

Just as diversity was seen originally a balance of power, so too are our beneficial relationships those that balance us out to make us better people.  Jacob helps Evie to let go and live a little, while Evie teaches Jacob the importance of taking responsibility for the consequences one’s action.  Through their syndicate, they let go of their pride and their prejudices to become more complete people.

In this sense, the idea of Ethan Frye becomes a goal symbolising balance and completion.  The last mention of Ethan Frye is in the very last scene where Evie turns to Jacob to say, “Father would be proud of you.”  In the context of the story, this is the highest compliment she could pay her brother.  He responds by saying, “Race you to the train” and she answers, “You’re on.”  They dash off leaving a bewildered Henry Green.  In the face of their great achievement, the twins are still challenging each other through competition to achieve more together despite their differences.  

If we see the twins as an example to follow, then we should not be afraid to have diversity in our lives and to form syndicates with those people.  There may not be agreement, but that is okay.  Nor do we have to compromise ourselves.  What we do need to do is to have mutual respect for each other despite our differences and hopefully learn to become better people through the experience.

The Stoic Assassin

This is the third and final instalment of a series looking at the three key philosophies in Assassin’s Creed.  You can read part one on Existentialism and part two on the Romantic at the links.

When you look over the philosophical landscape you will notice certain key features occupying a particular space.  I call these Philosophical Cohorts.  These are distinct philosophical ideas that have more commonality than differences and can actual work together without too much contradiction.  If there is contradiction, it can prove beneficial as some of the philosophical extremes temper each other.

In the space occupied by Assassin’s Creed we find philosophies like Existentialism, the Romantic, Stoicism, political libertarianism, and Objectivism to name a few.  The spotlight here shines on Stoicism.

Stoicism is unique among philosophies in that it is one of the few used in everyday language to describe a particular attitude or personality type.   Altair and Connor Kenway are both described as stoic by critics and fans.  This is due to the emphasis Stoicism places on cultivating a particular attitude.

It is this focus on proactive character shaping and building that has brought about resurgent interest in Stoicism in recent years as people use it as a sort of self-help path, which it is.  If you check for meet-up groups on-line, it is far easier to find Stoic groups than Existentialists ones.  It was when I when looking for an Existentialist group, and finding none, that I made-up a joke. “I was going to form an Existentialist club, but then I thought, ‘What’s the point?’”

So why is Stoicism making a comeback?  It’s been said that the study of philosophy began when someone asked a wise man, “What must I do to be happy?”  The five branches of philosophy are arguably built around this premise, making philosophy self-help, however this objective was lost along the way.  For example, happiness depends on context, so to establish this we have Metaphysics answering the question, “What is reality (context)?”, but so many philosophers get side tracked on this point and never get back to the happiness part.   Existentialism tends to do this.  Stoicism on the other hand retains the focus on happiness and this gives the philosophy something the people want.  Stoicism not only describes reality it also proscribes beneficial thoughts, attitudes, and actions. 

I believe that the Creed perfectly summarizes Existentialism.  Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted.  Likewise, the Romantic can be summarized by its values of Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Love.  For Stoicism, the Serenity Prayer serves as a basic summary:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Stoicism does not go as far as Existentialism in saying that “Nothing is True”, but it does tell us not to concern ourselves with things over which we have no control, such as things that are not true.  Take the past for example.  The past is an imagined construct.  The only reality of it lies in what it leaves behind.  These are the affects and effects of the past.  Your past experiences have affected your psyche making you who you are now and the effects of the past are the consequences present in your immediate now. 

Suppose you were in a fire as a child and now you fear fire.  That event is in the past.  It’s not real, however the psychological affect remains and that is what you have to deal with regarding fire today.  I am writing this on my computer.  The computer exists in the now as a consequence of me purchasing it.  Should something happen to my computer and it’s gone, then for all intents and purposes it no longer exists in my reality. Beyond affect and effect, the past is not real.  It’s just an idea.  So don’t worry yourself over it.  Stoicism encourages not wasting emotional energy on things that do not exist for us or that you cannot control.  The same hold true of the future.

There is a scene in AC Liberation where Aveline has just figured-out that her step-mother is her mysterious nemesis known only as "the company man".  This causes a bit of an existential crisis for her.  Aveline knows what she must do as an Assassin but has her doubts.  She turns to her fellow Assassin Connor Kenway for help. She asks, “Connor, are you always certain in the means and ways of the brotherhood?” He replies in his usual stoic brevity, "I trust my own hands".

What the hell, Connor? Aveline’s reality just came crashing down and she’s faced with a difficult decision and the best you can come-up with is some cryptic response.  Allow me the conceit of rewriting Connor’s reply.

Aveline, you say that you are having doubts about how we Assassins do things, and it’s good to question, but I don’t think that is the real issue here.  You are worrying about the future, about consequences that may or may not occur.  The future you imagine is not real and is beyond your control. What you can control is what is at hand right now and you can only trust yourself to do what you can with the information you have in the moment.

Aveline responds saying "Of course" as if Connor is simply reminded her of something already covered in her philosophy class at Assassin school.  We see this kind of behaviour quite a bit from the Assassins – this attitude of acceptance.

One of my favourite lines in AC Black Flag is something Edward Kenway says to Thatch. “I'm not of the same mind, mate. But I won't begrudge you the state of yours.”  The acceptance that other people should not be expected to think as we do.  When you read through internet comments it is as though people are in a constant state of outrage because others have a different point of view or have one that they find offensive.  Stoicism teaches that we must expect that people will be people.

One Stoic technique is to tell yourself at the start of the day that you will meet stupid, rude, annoying, and cruel people throughout your day.  By preparing yourself in advance you have no reason to be shocked when you do meet one.  It is about managing your expectations.  If you believe that you are destined to meet your soul mate and will live in perpetual bliss for the rest of your life, then chances are that life will disappoint.  Instead cultivate realistic expectations and accept life as it is and not as you wish it was.

One of the big issues that Stoicism has to contend with in regards to public perception is the idea of the stoic personality as someone cold, emotionless, and tacit. The prime Assassins for this are Altair and Connor.  The philosophy behind this is the recognition that we cannot control the actions of others, but we can control how we choose to respond.

Ten years ago my “soul mate” left me.  I was emotionally and psychologically devastated.  My life went from being a social man about town before the relationship to being a virtual hermit ever since.  It would be easy for me to scream, “She ruined my life!”, but that would be wrong.  Leaving me was her right as a human being.  What caused this damage was not her leaving but the way I chose to respond to it.  I spent months replaying events in my mind feeling constant pain and loss that took nearly a year to ease.  My brooding only aggravated the problem, prolonged the grieving process, and caused the damage.  I did this to myself.

Stoicism teaches that we are responsible for our own emotional responses and works on the premise that no one can make us feel something that we do not choose to feel.  In an age when emotions are encouraged and allowed to run wild and undisciplined, this choice may not seem apparent.  However, we know from examples among our fellow humans that emotional self-control is not only possible but also common in various cultures and zeitgeists.  The ancient Greek Stoics called the state resulting from emotional self-discipline apatheia, from which we get the modern word apathy, but the proper translation of apatheia is tranquillity.  This pursuit of tranquillity is just one of many similarities between Stoicism and Buddhism. 

It is the emphasis on cultivating emotional self-control that has led to apparently emotionless people to be called stoic.  The truth is we can also choose to be happy and that is the point that is missed by non-Stoics.  It is not about feeling nothing.  It is about taking responsibility for our feelings.

Another important Stoic concept is un-attachment and this figures into an interpretation of the Creed.  To recognise that Nothing is True is to see the impermanence of things.  Mary Read alludes to this in Black Flag when she describes the Creed as, “the world’s only certainty” possibly in reference to the expression, “the only constant is change”.  Things, people, and situations do not last.  They may be true today and right now, but they are not True in the sense of constancy.

A key Stoic philosopher was the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.   Every now and then he would sleep on the floor to remind himself that his comforts are impermanent. This type of self-denial serves to help us to not take our comforts for granted but also to remind us that we can exist without these comforts and conveniences.  One of the problems of wealth is that it protects the rich from the real world.  The trivial is given too much value and the demands of reality like food, shelter, and clothing are taken for granted as simply always existing.   In short, it’s what we call First World Problems.  Stoic practices show us that we can survive happily without our mobile phones, internet, or any number of luxuries that we have come to see as necessities.  Another common technique among Stoics when faced with challenges is to ask, "What's the worst that can happen and can I live with that?"

The second part of the Creed also has Stoic implications.  When we recognise that everything is permitted, remember that this applies to others as much as it does ourselves.  We cannot control or necessarily predict the actions of others because everything is permitted.  You must then decide how you choose to respond to how others use their freedom.

THE THREE PHILOSOSOPHIES OF ASSASSIN’S CREED

Throughout the Assassin’s Creed series there are constant references to a philosophical core belief system that is never revealed in full.  After all, this is a video game series and not some philosophical treaties.  What we do have is the Creed.

As mentioned in a previous essay, the phrase “Nothing is True, Everything is permitted” is most likely of ancient origin, at least Friedrich Nietzsche seem to think so in 1887.  It had been erroneously attributed to the Medieval Assassins of Iran and Syria, but it was not until the game series that it became known as The Assassin’s Creed.   I believe that within this simple phrase we have allusions to Existentialism, the Romantic, and to Stoicism and that all three of these philosophies can be found expressed in the game series. 

The Assassins of the game are wholly fictional works created by a committee of writers overseen by corporate interests.  However, the three philosophies behind the Creed are very real and accessible.  We may not know the philosophical core beliefs of the fictional Assassins, but chances are that a follower of a synthesis of these three philosophies would fit right in within the Assassin Order.

Since Assassin’s Creed is a modern work of fiction, it’s good to provide examples of the Assassin’s principles outside of the game context.  With this is mind, I have posted below a video of Dennis Hopper reciting the poem If by Rudyard Kipling.  Within its verses you will find this synthesized philosophy of Existentialism, the Romantic, and Stoicism that I believe represents the Assassin Philosophy.

The Romantic Assassin

This article is a follow-up to a previous piece revealing the Existentialism in Assassins Creed and there will be a third to follow this one.  You can read the first article here.

When I look at the philosophy of Assassins Creed I do not see one but three definite philosophical strands woven together.  These are explicit Existentialism, implicit Romanticism, and demonstrative Stoicism.  The Existentialism is explicit in that it’s right out there with the Creed.  The Romantic is implicit in that it is built into the structure of the stories themselves.  Finally, the Stoic elements are demonstrated primarily through the characters.

The Romantic is the most difficult of the three philosophies to approach.  Not because the subject matter is complex.  The issue is the diverse concept of the Romantic itself.  Assassin’s Creed is a Historical Romance, but we do not use that terminology anymore because the term Romance has come to be associated with the bodice-ripper novels found in the Romance section of the bookstore.  So instead we call it action/adventure.  There are actually just over fifty uses of the word Romantic which means that anyone discussing the Romantic has to define their terms to avoid confusion.

Jacques Barzun, possibly the foremost academic authority on the Romantic, identified four cornerstone themes in narrative Romances:  the hero’s quest/journey, unique settings, a love interest, and the supernatural.  The noble knight ventures forth across fields and mountains on a quest to save his beloved princess from a fierce dragon.  Taking inspiration from the film Moulin Rouge!, these four cornerstones can be distilled into the values of Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Love.

FINDING TRUTH IN THE SUPERNATURAL

Encountering the supernatural evokes any number of emotions from awe to disbelief.  The point is that the supernatural forces us to question reality.  Many of the early Gothic Romances were mysteries where characters sought to discover the truth behind apparently supernatural events through the use of logic and reason to find a natural explanation. In some stories, the victims of the supernatural go mad, in other words, they lose their rational faculties.  In modern Romantic stories, such as Science-Fiction, the extraordinary is used to challenge the character’s beliefs about the nature of reality and sometimes alter their preconceived beliefs

At first glance it may seem contradictory to acknowledge that Nothing is True and yet pursue Truth as a value.  To reconcile this we must remind ourselves that the Creed is not to be taken literally.  It is not a denial of Truth rather it is an admonition to independent critical thinking, an important tool in discovering Truth.  I see it like the Scientific Attitude that approaches life thinking oneself to be wrong until proven right.   This is the opposite of mainstream thinking where people assume themselves to be right until proven wrong.

The pursuit of Truth takes three forms in Assassin’s Creed.  The most obvious is discovering and uncovering the latest Piece of Eden which serves as the supernatural components in the stories. 

Another recurring theme is betrayal where the character believed a person to be one way but later discovered this to not be true.  Al Mualim’s plot is uncovered; Lucy Stillman, Daniel Cross, and Shay McCormack all become Templars; Juno manipulates Connor; Aveline’s step-mother proves to be the “Company Man”; Hornigold turns his back on the Pirate Republic; the Assassin Pierre Bellec murders the leader of the Paris Assassins.  The list is extensive.  The idea here is that people are not who they appear and the Truth must be uncovered.

The third is the over-arching conspiracy.  The ACU is a world where conspiracy theories are for the most part true and secret societies manipulate events behind the scenes. The thing about conspiracies is that they are hidden.   They are a truth to be uncovered and have secrets to be revealed.

In AC Syndicate there are a series of side missions harkening back to Victorian ghost stories.  Charles Dickens asks Jacob and Evie if they believe in ghosts.  Jacob answers no in a rather dismissive tone.  Who can blame him?  Afterall, nothing is true.  Evie on the other hand gives an emphatic and excited yes.  Of all the Assassins in the series, Evie is probably the most thrilled by the supernatural as seen by her intense interest in the Pieces of Eden beyond merely obtaining a McGuffin.  The Romantic encourages us to pursue possibilities with the same childlike enthusiasm we see in Evie’s response to Dickens. 

THE BEAUTIFUL ASSASSIN

Years ago there was a lecture at Glasgow University where someone argued that the Romantics were early environmentalists.  I disagree.  The often taught focus of the Romantics on Nature misses the point.  The real focus is not on Nature itself but on the beautiful and the sublime.  The object of attention just happens to be Nature.  This can be expanded to other objects such as architecture, design, and even fashion.  This carries with it the notion that life should aspire to imitate art and we should strive to make life beautiful.

The Romantic acknowledges two forms of beauty, the Beautiful and the Sublime.  Beauty is serene, calm, symmetrical, and ordered.  The sublime is big, powerful, and overwhelming like a rugged cliff set against a stormy sky.  When faced with the sublime we feel small against the grandeur and feel both terrified and yet inspired.

Beauty may not be the first word one uses to describe Assassin’s Creed, and yet it is not uncommon for a game to be described as beautiful.   Rather than being a value explicitly expressed in the game it is inherent in the game design itself as artists craft an amazing world from pixels extolling the beautiful and the sublime in both natural scenery and manufactured architecture. There was a scene in AC Unity where I stepped onto balcony of Arno’s home literally admiring the view when to my surprise an achievement popped-up for admiring the view.             

The set designers are not the only ones concerned with beauty.  In life we tend to view people with an over-interest in fashion as being shallow, vain, and foolish, however we watch our Romantic heroes run about in clothes designed specifically for them by fashion designers as if the hero just put that ensemble together themselves.

When we think about the Assassin’s appearance we are struck emotionally on some level.  This is a response to beauty.  No, we may not describe them as beautiful.  We might use words like striking, inspiring, or the ubiquitous cool, but these all fit into the Romantic concept of Beauty. Sartorially speaking, the Assassin’s do not hide in plain sight.  The hero dresses in a manner that stands-out from the crowds as something extraordinary.  We find this behaviour in many heroic/warrior cultures.  For example among the American Indians the warriors would adorn themselves to stand out and be noticed.  This practice was adopted by the likes of Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok who both dressed flamboyantly.

In philosophy, this takes us back to the philosophy of Dandyism particularly as expressed by Charles Baudelaire.  Most people think of the dandies as being simply over-interested in appearance, but that was not true.  At its core dandyism is the belief that those not born into wealth, privilege, and title can aspire through hard work to out-do the nobles of their time in character, manners, and dress. Baudelaire called dandyism “the last gasp of heroism in decadent ages”.  He believed that democracy promoted the lowest common denominator and that through dandyism one might rise above the mediocrity promoted by society. This was expressed through fashion, but it was really about manner and attitude.

This brings us to another aspect of the beauty, the character of an individual.  A beautiful person with a bad character is described as vain, a word meaning useless.  Physical and sartorial beauty is not enough.  Inner qualities like grace and charm are also necessary.  There is also the concept of being dashing.  These are all featured in the Assassins to varying degrees.  Charm is to show courtesy, respect and interest in others while being dashing is to demonstrate the virtue of courage.  I doubt that part of the Assassin education is charm school and no character in the game promotes these qualities, and yet nearly all of the Assassins possess them.

FREEDOM AND THE OUTLAW HERO

Consider this scene from the film Up in the Air:

Ryan Bingham: You know why kids love athletes?
Bob: Because they screw lingerie models.
Ryan Bingham: No, that's why we love athletes. Kids love them because they follow their dreams.

Replace that word athlete with the word hero and you have an idea of why we love heroes.  It isn’t so much that heroes follow their dreams as they have the freedom and power to do so.  Really it’s this freedom and power that is valued when we engage in hero worship and emulation.

Freedom is the right to act and power is the means to act.  The freedom to act is nothing without the power to act.  You are free to buy that expensive car, but without the means to buy the car you cannot take advantage of that freedom.

Power is a necessary requirement, but people tend to forget that there are various forms of power:

1. Internal Power: Character qualities, like ambition, charm, intelligence, or the will to act.

2. Physical power: These include things like strength, beauty, dexterity, and physical skill.

3.  Material power: This is basically money and those things money can buy. 

4.  Social Power:  The ability to harness the powers of others.

5.  Legislative Power: This is power granted by government.

6.  Titular Power: This is power inherent in a position, like being President of the United States.

7.  Time:  This may not seem like a form of power until you run out of it.

With this is mind, consider that to increase knowledge, learn a skill, make a new friend, or even for a woman to put on make-up is to cultivate one’s power.  The pursuit of power is not only, as most people believe, to increase political power for the purpose of ruling over others.  Power is merely an asset allowing you to act as you will – to follow your dreams.

We admire heroes because they have this freedom and power.  That may have been enough when the vast majority of people had no freedom or power, but since the Medieval Period most people have the freedom and power that our ancestors only dreamed about.  As a consequence our expectations changed in what we expected from our heroes.

For the ancient Greeks and Romans the concept of the hero had no moral dimension.  It was simply an extraordinary individual who could be either good or bad.  With the rise of Christianity, Biblical characters were seen as heroes to emulate and this sort of rubbed-off onto the concept of the hero making them exemplars of morality and community values. 

The heroes we are most familiar with are the Romantic heroes.  These characters were inspired by Medieval stories but given modern relevance. In Romantic narrative fiction the two primary figures are King Arthur and Robin Hood.  These translate into the archetypes of the Knight and the Outlaw.  The Knight is the defender of the benevolent social order.  In most stories the Knights are police officers, soldiers, or government or free agents working to protect the people.  The Outlaw is the opposition to a malevolent social order.  These are the plucky rebels like the Rebel Alliance of Star Wars, the crew of Serenity in Firefly, or the freedom fighters of the Hunger Games series.  Often they are depicted as the criminals with the “heart of gold” working to support the people.

Using this as a baseline, we can identify six variations of this theme.  In addition to the traditional knights and outlaws, who we’ll call white, are the black and grey versions.  The Black Knight is the defender of a malevolent social order usually opposing the White Outlaw while the White Knight primarily opposes the Black Outlaw.  In the film Die Hard, John McLain is the White Knight against Hans Gruber the Black Outlaw.  However the formula can vary.   In the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones is the White Knight hired by the American government to oppose the Black Knights of the Nazis.  As the colour implies, the greys are morally ambiguous.  They may have good intentions, but their means are negative.  So the Grey Knights might see themselves as bringing peace but do so by restricting freedom.  The Grey Outlaw might strike out against the authoritarian regime by blowing-up a government installation with no regard for innocent casualties.  A character like Daredevil is a White Outlaw fighting Black Outlaws but often finds himself against the Punisher, a Grey Outlaw.

In Assassin’s Creed, the Assassins are traditional White Outlaws, however they are perceived by the general public as being Black Outlaws while the Assassins themselves seem concerned with crossing the line into the grey.  The Templars are mostly Grey Knights.  Occasionally, there are Black Knights in the mixed, but for the most part they have nominal good intentions.  Haytham Kenway, Shay McCormack, and Elise de la Serre are all examples of Grey Knights who see the Assassins as well-meaning but ultimately misguided and a danger to society.

These moral delineations of white, grey, and black are largely fixed according to how selfless or selfish the actions. As White Outlaws, the Assassins fight for freedom as their primary value.  This is built into the Creed and explains cryptic statements found through the game series such as when Evie says to Queen Victoria, “But with the greatest respect, our philosophy forbids us from assisting with the expansion of the Empire.”  How does she get that from, “Nothing is True; Everything is Permitted”?  This is where Existentialism and the Romantic overlap.  As mentioned earlier, Nothing is True is an admonition to independent critical thinking.  This is not possible without the freedom to think as you choose.  To say that Everything is permitted is an existential truth, but a state of bondage is designed to control and prevent human action.  We might rephrase the Creed as, “Freedom to think and to act”.  Imperialism runs counter to the Creed so Evie rejects it.

LOVE AND THE ASSASSIN

When people think of love it is usually so-called romantic love that initially comes to mind.  Who can blame them?  It is the topic of countless songs, shows, movies, and books.  It can rightly be called a cultural obsession, but this mentality does love a great disservice. 

In the pie chart of love, romantic love represents the smallest sliver of the experience of love.  It is the dopamine driven rush found at the beginning of a relationship lasting about a year or two before settling into what we can call a proper form of love.  The big picture of love includes various forms of love such as family love, love for a spouse, love of friends, love of community, and even love of ideology.  The ancient Greeks had different words for each of these types of love, but unfortunately English only has the one word to work with in understanding the concept.

Another unfortunate twist of language is that the Romantic has lent its name erroneously to the concept of romantic love, so to keep these concepts clear; I’ll be referring to romantic love by its Greek name eros.

The foundational form of love found in the traditional Romances is what is today called courtly or fine love.  The knight acts to impress the object of his affection that he serves and worships mostly platonically.  There is no eros here.  So it seems strange that eros is today called romantic love when it’s absent from the Romances.

So what is love?  Love is a strong emotional response to values and values are those things that we act to gain or to keep.  This is why love is often associated with desire and sacrifice.  Values are those things we desire to possess and those things that we are willing to risk or sacrifice other values to preserve.

Love is an emotional response, so understanding love requires some understanding of how emotions work.  When the Creed states that “nothing is true” it is acknowledging that what people think is reality is actually their perceived idea of reality.  Your brain responds to these ideas with the chemical cocktail that we call emotions.  The basic process is: Perception -> Assessment -> Response --> Action. This process occurs so fast that the conscious mind barely notices it and not at all if the mind isn't paying attention. This creates the illusion that emotional responses emerge instantaneous from nowhere completely independent of the mind. The ancients believed the source of emotions to be a spirit that comes upon a person.

If someone pulls a gun on you there is sudden fear. You perceive the gun, assess that it is a gun (a lethal weapon), and the emotional response is fear for the purpose of acting in self-preservation.  But what if your perception is false and you only think it's a gun?  The chain of events is the same. The emotions are valid in the sense that they are truly believed and felt, but the premise of the emotion is faulty and can lead to harmful actions. Similarly, suppose someone pulls a gun on you but you have never seen a gun before.  You would not know to be afraid.  In this case the perception is accurate but the assessment is faulty leading to a flawed but understandable emotional response.

There is very little eros in Assassin’s Creed beyond passing encounters.  So you will not find much in terms of a love story.  The closest that the series ever came to making eros a central theme is AC Unity with Arno and Elise playing the Romeo and Juliet roles of lovers who belong to warring factions. 

AC Black Flag focuses on two forms of love.  The Greeks make a distinction between the love of lovers, eros, and the love of spouses.  Once the initial passions of a relationship cool down they settle into something more stable and mundane.  This is the love Edward feels for his wife Caroline.  It is his desire to be a worthy provider for her that drives him to become a privateer which in turn led to him becoming a pirate and then Assassin.  So you might say his story is driven by love. 

Another form of love in Black Flag is the love of friends.  The story takes a great deal of time building the friendship of Edward to Mary Reed, Edward Thatch, and Adelewale making them three of the most likeable characters.  Towards the end there is a melancholy scene where Edward imagines all his friends who had died gathered on his porch drinking and laughing like old times. 

Edward’s grandson, Connor Kenway, has a different focus.  For Connor there is his village and the settlement. His love is the love of community.  Looking at love as a motivator as we act to gain or keep values, most of Connor’s actions are towards preserving his village and building the settlement.  This involves the level of care and concern he feels particularly towards the settlement, but at the same time he Is largely disconnected from it in the sense that the members come across as positive acquaintances rather than friends.  So really it is the idea of the settlement and the people in it that he loves.

There is another form of love filled with strife and anger, but beneath the violent surface there is a deep connection.  This is the love between siblings and the embodiment of this is of course Jacob and Evie Frye in Ac Syndicate.  Their love for each other is a major theme in the game and the execution in the story makes their love palpable as it leaps from the screen.  Despite their playful mockery of each other that gradually deepens into conflict, in the end their bond of love is secure and sees them through as they realise that they are better together than apart.

Within families there is this sibling love but there are other forms as well.  I am told that the love a parent feels for their child is powerful.  This is not openly apparent in Assassin’s Creed though there are hints in Haytham Kenway towards his son, Connor.  The other form is the love of a child to their parent.  We see this in Ezio’s story.  All forms of family love can be found in the Auditores but the key to the story is how Ezio feels about his family as a concept particularly about his father’s legacy.  In AC Brotherhood we see the light and shadow of this with the Auditores versus the Borgias and the paternal legacy both sons look to uphold.

When early Christians described the love between God and Mankind the ancient Greek word they used for love was agape.  Today we may call this the love of ideology.  An ideology is a collection of beliefs and beliefs are sometimes described as being ideas with emotional attachments.  So yes, you can love an ideology.  This is why people become hostile when they feel that their ideology is being attacked.  This is the basis behind the notion of blasphemy. 

No doubt all the Assassins have a love for the Creed and each have acted to advance and preserve it, but as a story showing this kind of love, I will have to go with Altair in AC1.  In order to promote and preserve an ideology organisations are created.  The Assassins exist as an organisation for the Creed.  However, of all the Assassins we see, we see very little of any kind of organisation.  We know it’s there, but our main characters act independently of it, completely disregard it, or assume sole leadership of it.   Only Altair is a servant of it.  When he fails to do so he is demoted and must prove himself once again from the bottom rank.  Enduring this shows a level of devotion to the organisation that we do not see in the other Assassins.

To accept love as a Romantic value is not to simply value eros.  It is essentially to value values.  I recent learned of a fellow named Matthieu Ricard.  He is a Buddhist monk and the son of French philosopher Jean-François Revel.  According to the story I heard, young Matthieu grew-up in an atmosphere where the leading French Existentialists, Sartre, Bouvoir, and Camus, were regular guests of his father.  They would sit around smoking cigarettes and drinking wine.  Ricard noticed that these leading lights of Western philosophy looked miserable.  Ricard went on to embrace Eastern philosophy and is now known as “the happiest man on earth”.  In its rejection of imposed values Existentialism fails to replace them with new values.  A life without values is a life without love.  This is one area where the Romantic helps to support the truths of Existentialism by encouraging a life where we invest our emotions in the things that matter to us.

TRUTH, BEAUTY, FREEDOM, LOVE, AND ASSASSIN’S CREED

Romantic stories like Assassin’s Creed serve a valuable purpose in teaching values.  They inspire us through example and emotion to have inquisitive minds in pursuit of Truth and to be true to ourselves and to others.  They encourage us to allow our lives to become works of art and beauty and not settle for the mundane.  They give us heroes to emulate and who show us that we can cultivate the freedom and power necessary to make our dreams a reality.  Finally, the Romantic encourages us to make those important value connections with our values, our partners, our friends, our community, and with our own ideologies.

For the vast majority of people who have purchased and played games within the Assassin’s Creed series all they see is another video game and they judge it solely on its gameplay.  However, for the relative few who are touched on a deeper emotional level a connection is made with the Assassin’s Creed Universe and the conduit for this connection are the Romantic elements of the series.  This opens the doors to the deeper levels of Existentialism and Stoicism.    

The Lost Assassin’s Creed

In October 2014 I performed my usual ritual of buying the latest Assassin’s Creed game.  There was only one problem.  I didn’t own an Xbox One to play Assassin’s Creed Unity.  So I read the novelization and watched the “movie” on Youtube – a series of cutscenes edited together.  Eventually, I did get that Xbox One and finally played through Unity.

When I play an Assassin’s Creed game I play an Assassin’s Creed game.  There is no deep analysis and no taking notes.  I just scamper across rooftops, open chests, and climb vantage points just like any other player, but as I play through I start to see a pattern form.  A dominant theme seems to rise to the surface.  The theme that struck me playing Unity was the warning against radicalism.

The Assassin’s Creed series was inspired by the book Alamut by Vladamir Bartol.  The edition of the book on my shelf includes a brief essay after the final chapter by Michael Biggins where he writes:

“If “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” stands as a symbol of the licence granted to the Ismaili elite, then the unrelated subsidiary motto, “Omnia in numero et mensura” acquires an ultimately cautionary significance. All things within measure, nothing too much. In other words, skepticism and rationality are important assets, but overdependence on them at the expense of compassion leads to the tragedy that engulfs Hasan as much as it does his witting and unwitting victims.”

The motto, “Omnia in numero et mensura” translates as “all things in measure , and number , and weight” which is pretty vague without context.  It comes from a verse in The Book of Wisdom 11:21, one of the books in the Catholic version of the Old Testament, which reads:

Yea and without these might have been slain with one blast , persecuted by their own deeds, and scattered by the breath of thy power ; but all things in measure , and number , and weight.

The gist of the passage is declaring that God is all-powerful but acts in moderation.  So the meaning of the motto becomes “all things in moderation”.   This could be called the lost Assassin’s Creed and emerges as the central theme in the game Assassin’s Creed Unity.

When Arno Dorian begins his adult story the status quo sees a truce between the Assassins and the Templars at a time when the reins of leadership were in the hands of two political moderates, Honore Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau for the Assassins and Francois de la Serre for the Templars.  Over the course of the tale both men are murdered by extremists within their own ranks. Francois-Thomas Germain leads the coup against de la Serre culminating in his murder and the Assassin Pierre Bellec poisons Mirabeau.  Both Germain and Bellec see their leaders as embodying a corruption of the true purpose of their respective organisations and seek to purge that corruption by killing the leadership.

When running through the Parisian sandbox there comes a point when the verbal abuse hurled at poor Arno by the street thugs becomes repetitive.   One of the common phrases uses the term “moderate” as an insult.  This may seem strange to our 21^st century ears where radical, and not moderate, is the common insult. 

The media may deride radical Islam, fundamentalist Christians, or the extreme political right and left, but this could be spun in another direction.  We value people who are true to their beliefs and extoll their self-sacrifice for those beliefs, but we draw the line when they impose on our beliefs and values.  As for the moderates, they compromise.  They compromise their beliefs, their values, and their integrity.  So, t is not too hard to see the moderates as being false at best and traitors to the ideology at worse.

There is nothing inherently wrong with radicalism.   The word radical originally meant the root of a plant, but in the 18^th Century it came to mean the advocates of the root principles, or fundamentals, of an ideology.  This is paralleled in one interpretation of the origin of the word assassin as “those faithful to the foundation”.  This denotes an absolute uncompromising adherance to certain basic principles.  In theology, these are known as dogma, a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true that cannot be changed or discarded without destroying the ideology itself.  Dogma is different from doctrine in that a doctrine is a set of principles that can be compromised but a dogma cannot.

Douglas Bader famously said, “Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools”. Wisdom is knowing how the world works.  This includes understanding why the rules are in place, discerning which rules can be broken and when, and the possible repercussions.  This enables the wise man to make compromises without sacrificing the essential principles behind the rules.  It takes wisdom to know doctrine from dogma.

However, for the fool the rules become an easy ticket to being right and therefore righteous.  We have rules to keep the fools in line so they come to perceive the rules as an authority.  If you follow the rules then you are aligned with the authority and thus become the authority.  This is where radicalism, fundamentalism, and dogma get their bad reputation.  Today we see radicals as people to whom every principle of their ideology is dogma.  This leads to a strict adherence to the rules and a fanatical enforcement of them at the expense of the principles behind the rules.  A fool follows rules and the wise man is guided by the principles behind the rules.

The lost Assassin’s Creed of Omnia in numero et mensura puts the Creed into context by advocating balance and as an appeal to wisdom in interpreting all things, including the Creed.  It is a safeguard in whose light the Creed becomes, “Nothing is true except what is and everything is permitted except what is not”.  Truth must be judged on the authority of reality and actions must be judged on purpose and consequence.  Wisdom shows us which rules are dogma and which are doctrine, in other words, which can be broken and which cannot.

This is the lesson learned by Arno at the end of the game.

The Creed of the Assassin Brotherhood teaches us that nothing is forbidden to us. Once, I thought that meant we were free to do as we would.  To pursue our ideals, no matter the cost. I understand now. Not a grant of permission. The Creed is a warning. Ideals too easily give way to dogma. Dogma becomes fanaticism. No higher power sits in judgement of us. No supreme being watches to punish us for our sins. In the end, only we ourselves can guard against our obsessions. Only we can decide whether the road we walk carries too high a toll. We believe ourselves redeemers, avengers, saviours.  We make war on those who oppose us, and they in turn make war on us. We dream of leaving our stamp upon the world...even as we give our lives in a conflict that will be recorded in no history book.  All that we do, all that we are, begins and ends with ourselves.