Yves de la Croix and Pope Innocent: Church Authority and a Questioner

Yves de la Croix and Pope Innocent are joined by Yves’s position within the Church and divided by what that institution permits him to conclude. Their conflict is not simply faith against science: Yves presents his inquiry as a search for God’s truth, while Pope Innocent insists that the Church’s categories and authority govern what the evidence can mean. As the sea people move from objects of investigation to possible persons, their disagreement exposes the moral stakes beneath that contest over proof.

Institutional Authority and the Question of Error

Pope Innocent treats Yves’s association with the sea people as a danger to his judgment. When Yves is challenged over his pity for Sherzad, Pope Innocent responds that pity for a beast signals serious error and tells Yves that his association with the creature troubles him. Yves answers, “I’m searching for God’s truth.” The exchange makes their difference explicit: Yves describes inquiry as a religious duty, whereas Pope Innocent regards the inquiry itself as a possible source of spiritual misdirection.

The Pope’s authority is not merely personal. He speaks from a framework in which nonhuman beings are beasts to be used or pagans to be converted, and in which the Church’s account of their nature determines how they may be treated. Yves, by contrast, is a churchman whom Pope Innocent can admonish and summon, but also a witness whose observations may unsettle that framework. Their relationship thus places the questioner inside the institution he questions, rather than safely outside it.

The Dispute over Humanity and Proof

The dispute sharpens when Pope Innocent asks whether Yves and his sister have discussed souls or Christian faith with the sea woman, or converted her. Yves admits they have not. Asked what evidence could justify his belief that his sister is right and the Church wrong, he rejects the framing that the Church is simply in error. He says instead that he believes God placed him in the position of witnessing a miracle and raised the sea monsters toward humanity. His answer is tentative in its evidentiary basis but momentous in its implication: the sea people may occupy a position between the Church’s existing categories rather than fit neatly within them.

That uncertainty has already been staged in disputes over what can be observed. At the Academy demonstration, Yves’s sister, Marie-Josèphe de la Croix, identifies an anomalous lung lobe and explains that the sea woman can breathe underwater. A senior scholar mocks her as mistaken and attributes her judgment to Yves’s influence. In a later argument before Pope Innocent, Lucien de Chrétien asks the King to let Marie-Josèphe prove her claim that the creature understands her, and argues that its status could change if it speaks a human language. Pope Innocent rejects the suggestion that the Church previously mistook beasts for demons. These scenes sharpen the pressure on Yves: the disagreement is not only about what he believes, but about who is treated as a credible observer and what kind of evidence is allowed to revise a classification.

Warning, Summons, and Separation

Pope Innocent’s questions about the sea woman’s soul and faith turn the debate from classification toward conversion. For him, an unconverted being cannot simply be recognized as human on the strength of sympathy or unusual abilities. Yves’s appeal to a miracle does not satisfy that standard. The Pope’s insistence on conversion makes religious authority an active demand, not a passive interpretation of events.

When Pope Innocent concludes that the opposition exhausts him, he rises and asks Yves to attend him. The summons preserves the hierarchy between them even as their disagreement becomes public: Pope Innocent can call Yves away, and Yves asks forgiveness before leaving at the King’s command. Yet this gesture does not resolve the dispute. Yves has voiced a possibility that the Pope regards as dangerous, and the departure leaves the difference between institutional obedience and intellectual conviction unsettled.

The Confession and Its Consequences

The later confrontation over immortality reveals a more compromising aspect of Yves’s challenge. Pope Innocent refers to Yves’s claim that sea-monster flesh had power, and Yves confesses, “I lied.” He says he made no tests and that the truth does not matter. The admission strips away the evidentiary foundation of that claim: what had been presented as a result of investigation was not tested at all. Marie-Josèphe immediately protests that what matters is what the King believes, underscoring how Yves’s false assertion has entered a contest over royal judgment as well as religious doctrine.

Pope Innocent’s reaction places Yves’s dishonesty beside the very question of authority that has divided them. The Pope has demanded evidence for claims that challenge the Church, but Yves’s fabricated proof cannot answer that demand; it instead makes the challenge more vulnerable. His confession therefore complicates any simple portrait of him as a principled scientific dissenter. He may question the accepted account of the sea people, yet in the matter of the supposed power of their flesh, he has abandoned the standard of testing he invokes elsewhere.

Significance of the Relationship

The relationship turns on a tension between inquiry and obedience, but neither term remains uncomplicated. Pope Innocent’s insistence on doctrine gives him the power to define the sea people before their testimony can be heard on equal terms. Yves’s search for truth opens that definition to revision, yet his false claim about immortality demonstrates that opposition to authority does not automatically produce reliable knowledge. The conflict gives religious scrutiny and empirical proof a shared demand: claims must be answerable to what can be established, even as the characters disagree over who has the right to decide what counts.

Most consequentially, Pope Innocent’s interrogation makes Yves articulate the possibility that a being classified as a beast might be moving toward humanity. The Pope answers with questions of conversion and souls; Yves answers with a miracle he believes he has witnessed. Their unresolved contest is therefore also a test of the boundary between human and nonhuman—and of whether that boundary can be changed by evidence, compassion, or institutional decree.