How Do Paladins of Helm Live with Themselves?
Rao
Member Posts: 141
In the narrative playthrough I am documenting on the Challenges & Playthroughs subforum, my main character recently joined forces with Ajantis (see Chapter 1, Parts XXXII - XXXVIII: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/78398/ausar-the-riven-fighter-mage-playthrough/p3). As many of you probably know, Ajantis is a paladin of Helm, committed to stamping out all manner of evil and injustice in the name of his god.
While writing up the narrative, an interesting question occurred to me: How does a lawful good paladin who worships a lawful neutral deity (e.g., Helm in 2e) square his zeal for absolute righteousness with the understanding that his god not only accepts the worship of certain evildoers (n.b. lawful evil is only one step removed from lawful neutral, and so a valid alignment for Helmites under 2e rules), but even grants some of them (i.e., clerics) divine powers? The cognitive dissonance must be pretty substantial, no?
Would love to hear what you think!
While writing up the narrative, an interesting question occurred to me: How does a lawful good paladin who worships a lawful neutral deity (e.g., Helm in 2e) square his zeal for absolute righteousness with the understanding that his god not only accepts the worship of certain evildoers (n.b. lawful evil is only one step removed from lawful neutral, and so a valid alignment for Helmites under 2e rules), but even grants some of them (i.e., clerics) divine powers? The cognitive dissonance must be pretty substantial, no?
Would love to hear what you think!
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Comments
Good, can believe that laws exist to benefit society, so when just laws are in place and upheld, everyone benefits.
Lawful Neutral kind of already has this baked in, not much interpretation required.
Lawful Evil can see the laws as benefitting themself the most when society is stable. Laws are generally meant to be societies' stabilizers.
Personally, I think Helm is a douche. But to each their own.
@ThacoBell - that also seems to make a lot of sense, and to be a fair interpretation of the alignment system we were given. Tbh I struggle sometimes with how sharply the architects of the Forgotten Realms have alienated the concepts of good/evil, on the one hand, from chaos/law, on the other. The terms you use like "full expression of law" or even just "law" are really difficult to cache out in a value-neutral way (i.e., in isolation from the good-evil axis) without equivocation. You can try (this was Kelsen's entire project), but I think it is going to be very difficult to do so without making the "lawful" in "lawful evil" and "lawful good" mean different things. Anyway, it's a quandary I am still trying to think my way out of. I would love btw to hear why you have such a low opinion of Helm.
@Kamigoroshi hahaha that's a pretty funny association
Also, Helm killed Tyr, the god of justice during the time of troubles. There's something cynically poetic about the avater of law killing the avatar of justice.
Helm killed Mystra during the Time of Troubles. That's what got him a bad reputation among the people, and he lost a huge number of worshipers.
Also, Helm is the god of Guardians, Duty, and Loyalty, not of the law.
The citation below is the most unflattering summary of Helm I've ever seen, but I don't have time to look up a reference with less editorial bias right now.
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Helm
As for the portfolio, well, literally every Helm npc in BG talks about the law. Duty and loyalty are also law adjacent, if not synonymous in some contexts. I think I'd still personally consider Helm a god of law.
I guess in the end I am a little more sympathetic to Helm - he seems to represent an integral part of the human experience (i.e., the need for people in positions of responsibility to discharge their duties faithfully, even in the face of deep personal remorse or sacrifice). Of course, I think it's often worth interrogating the contents of these duties; for example, is the law just? is that personal obligation *really* indefeasible? But I do not think - at least on this side of Paradise - a life of authentic responsibility can come without personal costs, which we can and should mourn even as we accept their necessity.
Maybe Mystra should have been allowed to return before the Tablets of Destiny were retrieved, but - again - given the extremely role-oriented construction of the FR pantheon, I am more inclined to lay that sort of complaint at Ao's door rather than Helm's.
Rao makes an excellent point about every realms deity being neccesarily imperfect beings.
That was Mystra that got killed by Helm for trying to re-enter the heavens. You know we do have sources for these things. Here's an even better one. The official Forgotten Realms wiki.
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Helm
I guess you can make up whatever you want, but it's not what's in the D&D source material.
Admittedly, as you say, it seems pretty out of character for Tyr to have "taken the bait." Not necessarily how I would have woven the mythos haha . . .
@BelgarathMTH I'm not saying I disagree with what you've posted. All I said was what I have read in the past, and how I thought it weird to have never read the official source, apparently.
I don't think Helm would have viewed his slaying of Mystra as being "wrong". As the God of Guardians and Duty, his mission in life is to uphold the law at all costs, regardless of whether the law is just or tyrannical. Ao had commanded, so must Helm obey. That's precisely why he's Lawful Neutral. His sorrow over his actions (perhaps because Mystra was a personal friend?) will ALWAYS come second to his duty.
I'm of the opinion that the church of Helm probably has different factions or chapterhouses depending on which region they live in. Churches of Helm in goodly nations will espouse practices that emphasize justice and upright governance, while churches in evil nations/cities like Zhentil Keep or Thay would support the right of the existing power structures to rule, even if they are tyrantss, because adherence to law and duty is paramount.
Imagine, by way of example, a migrant (esp. in times of limited / no international communication / travel) who leads his wife and children to a faraway country in an effort to escape poverty. He may believe that, in the final analysis, this move is, however difficult, the best thing he can do for his family. But if - when he recalls all the beauty of the land, the culture, and the extended family that his children will only ever know (if they know it at all) as the distant realities of a faraway place - he weeps tears of "torment" and "guilt," I think we can understand why, even as he sincerely maintains that he chose the best option for his family.
Or to take a case involving the operation of law, imagine a judge who by some horrible twist of fate (and faulty / suspended / non-existent rules of recusal) finds himself compelled to sentence his closest childhood friend to death. This judge believes, without the least doubt, that his friend has committed an act that the lawmaker(s) justly criminalized and to which the lawmaker(s) justly attached a sentence of death. And yet, as the ink dries of the sentencing order, the judge sheds tears of "torment" and "guilt." Again, I think we can understand why, even as the judge sincerely maintains that what he did was right.
This theme has been with us for a long time. Consider Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia in the Illiad; Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac in the Old Testament; King Arthur's warring with Mordred in Le Morte d'Arthur; etc. If you think this theme died in the distant past, just think about how Thanos acquired the Soul Stone, and how he felt about it. I am not arguing that any one of the people in my hypotheticals or in the examples from literature/Scripture/mythology/pop-culture was objectively correct or right in their decision. I am only trying to show how their emotional reactions may be consistent with a subjective belief in the rightness of their own decisions.
Anyway, your interpretation - that Helm knew what he was doing was wrong and did it anyway because of some misguided zealotry for the law - is perfectly valid. The source material we are both working with (a wiki entry - LOL!) is so meager that it will support all sorts of interpretations. I am only trying to show the plausibility of an alternative perspective, in which Helm's decision was tragic, but not morally monstrous, especially considering the sort of being he is (i.e., a FR god with a sharply-defined portfolio).
If you ignore the whole murdering Mystra thing, or lawful evil followers. Heck, why not call all the gods good at that point?
The rightness or wrongness of the act is certainly up for debate. Did Helm have any non-lethal means to do his duty and stop the crime? When is deadly force justified? Those are big moral questions.
The D&D source material we have tells of the whole incident in about two sentences, and doesn't go into detail. So I guess it's easy to project one's own ideas and morality onto the story.
Still, given my own feelings about law, order, duty, and honor, I can be sympathetic to Helm based on what little we know. In his place, I absolutely would not have allowed Mystra to defy Ao. I would have tried to find a way to stop her without killing her if I could, though. We really need more details than we have about their respective abilities and about the incident before we could draw any conclusions.
But then again - where there is no "know alignment" to serve the faithful an answer on a silver platter, the moral qualities of even undisputed actions / events can be subject to controversy. Just look at the nature of the disagreement between @BelgarathMTH and @ThacoBell (between the pair of which, I myself tend on this issue more toward the former): one looks at Helm's slaying of Mystra and sees what may have been the necessary defense of a just order, another looks at the same exact set of facts and sees an insufficiently justified killing. On this basis (and the basis of other examples), they could come to different conclusions about Helm's alignment. Confusions of this nature could help explain the traction of false theological beliefs like the "Heresy of the Threefold God." While I think there are some theological avenues out of this ambiguity problem, they may not be consistent with FR lore. So yes, @Chronicler raises a really insightful point here.
As for the business about lawful evil Helmite clerics, does anyone know whether they are actually openly part of Helm's institutionalized church? I could see an institutionalized church whose clergy is publicly entirely lawful good or lawful neutral, whereas those Helmite clerics committed to lawful evil live and act with minimal or no contact with the institutionalized Helmite church (e.g., a LE Helmite cleric whose activities are pretty much entirely contained within the castle of a LE lord). Alternatively, LE Helmite clergy may secret themselves into the institutionalized church, posing as LN or LG; as long as they uphold their duties to act as guardians, etc. Helm might look the other way on them lying about their alignment? Admittedly, this latter possibility strikes me as dicier and less likely than the former.
Finally, to remark briefly on @ThacoBell's "Ao says jump, and Helm only asks 'how high'" - again, I agree it is entirely possible that Helm is just a deeply blinkered, callous god. Given the FR portfolio system, it may not even be possible for him to be / act otherwise. However, I would just offer, in the alternative, that Helm may have in this circumstance just been exercising a little epistemic humility. On the wiki, Helm is listed as either a "lesser" or an "intermediate" deity (2e). Ao is the *Overgod*. Helm may have recognized that he was not, especially over and against Ao, in the best position to determine for himself what would be "good" or "evil" when it came to Mystra's attempted trespass. What he did have, arguably, was Ao's command and the power to uphold it. In such a situation, deference to Ao could have been the only reasonable course of action. This might depend on a few other factors, like what Helm knew of Ao up to that point, etc. Unfortunately, as many have lamented, the source texts just won't get us there. We're stuck interpreting and inventing it for ourselves
A character's alignment speaks to their general motivation, but the goodliest of good characters can, under the right circumstances, perform a wicked deed. An alignment is not a straight jacket and all that jazz.