Commentaries on Knowledge

In Vaestism, the Commentaries on Knowledge are a collection of twenty-one early exegetic texts, largely dating from the Marshalate period. Considered part of the Bibliography or textual tradition of Vaestism, the commentaries are written in similar style, typically taking elements of the Notaries of the Practice—records of the Prophet's sermons and aphorisms—and discussing them at length, clarifying points of meaning. The early commentaries are the most straightforward in this respect, acting as simple explanations of the Notaries; later examples take this as a basis, but proceed to depart from discussion of the texts per se to sustained essays on points of hierology, albeit usually with references to similar points made by the Prophet in the Notaries.

The texts that form the Commentaries are:

• the five Commentaries of Siluve, which intersperse records of the Prophet's informal teaching with the history of his ministry and the period immediately after his death;
• the two Commentaries of Dana and the single Commentaries of Pelmin, Cirran, and Viswald among the other Prophetic Marshals;
• the two Commentaries of Lasuris, mystical expositions of foundational Vaestic hierology with some historiographic comments;
• two separate Commentaries on the Notaries by Dana and Lasuris, which comprise interlinear additions to certain Notaries as well as records of statements by the Prophet not mentioned in the transcriptions—these Commentaries are dated to the time of the Prophet's ministry itself;
• the Commentaries of Niswan and Sillis the Elder (not the Marshal), mainly historiographic;
• the doctrinal and ethical Commentaries of Aidas and Sharunas, which also record numerous Prophetic judgements and aphorisms unattested in the Notaries, and
• the three Commentaries of the Savants (or of the Vesnites), which combine shorter fragments from a variety of sources, typically written as short exegeses of specific Formulae ascribed to the Prophet.

This corpus of twenty-one canonical Commentaries was fixed by Prophet Siluve II in 1476 as part of his attempt to consolidate the Orthodoxist definition of Vaestic doctrine, and more specifically to prevent the spread of forged additional Commentaries in the context of the incipient Wars of Heresy. One notable feature of the Commentaries of the Savants is the inclusion of several passages expressly attributed to the 'Protoheretic' Sirputis and presumably dated to before his schism with the Prophet; these are introduced by the inserted pretext that they are insights that 'the Prophet brought even Sirputis to see'.

In contrast to the Assembled Theoretics of 1511 and the Prophet's own Notaries, the Commentaries were subject to less official standardisation in Great Neritsia. In general, the summaries and exegeses of the Commentaries prepared by individual Theoreticists tended to displace the popular reception of the Commentaries themselves, and after Sobiebor II's institution of High Secote as the primary liturgical language the Commentaries were mostly familiarised through extracts in formula handbooks and apportative manuals that did receive official promulgation as approved liturgical texts from the Prysostaia. High Secote editions of the Commentaries as a whole were, of course, printed from an early stage, but various different translations remained in use by Scholars. An official edition of the Commentaries was published in 1760 at the order of Zafuvniprourkah, the first definitively post-Neritsovid Universal Prophet, for use in the Prysostaia itself, and was subsequently revised by Mezveim (1830) and Tarmo (1881), but this did not attain anything like the circulation of the Troborine Notaries, which are similarly the Prysostaia's official edition of those texts.