On the eve of the feast of Saint Athanasius, anno Domini 1543, the brethren of the Order of the Beet, gathered in chapter at the principal house, did upon a matter of doctrine divide themselves into two factions, the which have continued in mutual non-recognition unto this present day. The matter of the dispute is here set forth in plain words, that the reader may judge of the gravity to which the brethren attached it.
The question put to the chapter was the following: whether the sacramental sufficiency of the beet is established by the root alone, or by the root in conjunction with the greens. The matter had not arisen in the foregoing fifty-six years of the Order’s existence; it was raised, the historical record indicates, by Frater Almaric, the third of his name, on the occasion of his ordination to the office of Cellarer.
Held that the root, alone and entire, sufficeth for the spiritual nourishment of the brethren. The greens are a worldly afterthought, an ornament of the field, and are not to be received at table. The Greater Beet retains its principal house at [name suppressed] in central Pennsylvania, the location of which it declines to disclose to the Lesser Beet.
Held that the beet without its greens is no beet, but an indignity offered to the beet’s natural form. The greens are not ornamental but constitutive; to receive the root alone is to receive only half of the vegetable, and is therefore (so the Lesser hold) a form of theft. The Lesser Beet retains its principal house likewise in central Pennsylvania, the location of which it declines to disclose to the Greater Beet.
Of the question on which both factions agree — namely, the prohibition of vegetables smaller than a man’s closed fist — the schism has produced no relaxation, and indeed the prohibition has, in both daughter-houses, been intensified by the addition of further restrictions, the catalogue of which is not in the present author’s possession.
Both factions claim continuous succession from the three original founders of 1487. Neither has ever, in this author’s researches, been observed to consume any vegetable smaller than the prescribed dimension in the past five centuries. Both maintain that the other has, on certain occasions, been seen approaching such vegetables, though never in the act of consumption. The accusation, in both directions, is the principal subject of the Orders’ otherwise sparse modern correspondence.
It is to be observed that both daughter-houses are sited in a single Pennsylvania borough, the name of which they refuse to commit to writing, and which they refer to in their respective chronicles only as “the place we did not choose” and “the place that did not choose us.” The present author has visited the borough. He has not visited either daughter-house. He was, on the day of his visit, given a particularly serviceable beet by a man at the local Sheetz; the man declined to give his name.