Opacan super men
Personally, I can accept that such a view ("the morality of Love and Reason must be transcended to reach the inhuman morality of Wisdom in order to defend Love and Reason morality from Theocratism and false religion") is within the bounds of belief tolerated at Quintus. I can even accept that the belief "the morality of lesser people is as nothing to us, the true heroes and the protectors of lesser beings" is secretly held by some Opacans. However, I have a hard time believing that Opacans openly believe the later position, or that the first position is universally held.

Also, I think the question of "What do Opacans actually believe, and what do they actually say" is far more important than the question of what do we as authors and readers think of the Opacan beliefs. It is not so much that I as reader think the Opacans are willingly sacrificing themselves as moral beings in order to preserve the morality of others, it is that I believe that the Opacans believe this.

I could see Frenum Lenis and perhaps Lux holding the radical position that they had transcended mere mortal morality and crossed into the realm of Wisdomic avenging angels (Lux, I think, is a self-rihteous prick of the first order, and Frenum is a raving sociopath who has never doubted the virtue of his most monsterous acts). frenum may even have meant Veritas's name in exactly that manner. I would say that Veritas and Nemo fall into the camp of believing that they are the immoral agents of a worthy cause, sacrificing themselves in Passionate excess in order that decent people may sleep peacefully, protected from the ravishes of diabolic and theocratic religions. I don't know what camp Ferramenta Subitor or any of the other mages would fall into (although I would guess that L116 falls into the "We really aren't that bad" camp), although Ferramenta would need to be very discrete about it if she is an avenging angel. I really don't think it is a philosophy that the Order as a whole will tolerate, and therefore can't really be a part (even an oblique part) of the Opacan manifesto if she wants it to heal the rift between Opacus and Order (rather than bring down an anti-Opacan mage war).

L,L&R it's music for the soul
I agree with Charles on this. I can see that most if not all Opacans view themselves as the shepherds of the world and that what lower people do that does not harm the world is of concern to lesser protectors. That some believe and act that you must transcend Love, Reason and Lem to do this, but the idea that all of them do 24/7 is a bit much to swallow.

On the other hand let me state I've never knowingly been part of a cult. Which the Opacans certainly are.

However they are a cult acting with in a strict and relatively rigid society that they do deal with occassionaly. I think there are certainly those who are sociopaths and have accepted their roles as protectors of the world and knowers of dark and terrible truths and then there are those who have been indoctrinated fully into this belief. Problem for me though is there are too many of the Opacans who are fresh off the boat or first generation Opacans and came from reasonable places.

I don't see both the Sphaerans (perhaps one of them) and L116 believing that they must always transcend L,L&R (Lem, Love and Reason) to battle the forces of evil or that they are in fact a lie. My view of L116 is that she feels we must do everything in our power to stop the invasion of diabolic thought into the Order and Tyr. Once done with that then to stomp out diabolism in whole. That to do this we may need to use unorthodox methods or in fact fight parts of the Order that are already infected, but I don't believe that she believes in going beyond the teachings of L,L&R (well except for that whole killing thing). She would allow her students to have other ideas (see note on her because something just struck me) and they would have them anyways.

The key here is secrecy and initiation.

I don’t think any Opacan openly maintains or even comes close to whispering a hint that they think they’ve transcended bog-standard Love and Reason. That would, indeed, be folly. —But I do think outside appearances and interpretations are important, if not so much the outside interpretations of us as authors and readers. Because it doesn’t really matter so much that Lux might think of himself as a necessary sacrifice, an immoral agent of a worthy cause, as a regrettable means whose justification is an end desired by all, if the rest of the Order has cause to think of him as a raving sociopath, which, I think, most who are paying attention do, at the moment—that’s the obstacle Ferramenta Subtilior has to overcome with her manifesto(es).

Quintus Opacus was founded by a Circulan, Nescius Balatu, who may well have been initiated into one of the mystery cults. Already we’re steeped in a thick fog of occult knowledge in a highly hierarchical, initiatory context. And it’s not the secrecy or the hierarchy or the initiations of the mystery cults that gets Balatu’s goat: it’s the diabolism. The cultivation of a great power that endangers the gift of Love and Reason and threatens to resurrect the Theocracy itself and doom us all. So it must be fought, there’s no argument there, but it must be fought by eschewing precisely that great power, the one that’s just sitting there begging to be used, that would make the fight so easy, and they could put it back when they were done, honest...

The major method Quintus Opacus has chosen to fight this battle is, of course, nasty intellego and rego and mentem and imaginem magic: mind-reading, -wiping, and -breaking; personality destruction and reconstruction; gentling and conditioning. They very blatantly violate the gift of Love and Reason in others to get done what they think needs doing. The trick is to manage this blasphemy, this little theocracy, so that it never crosses the line into actual diabolism, the thing that threatens to bring back the Theocracy writ large.

One powerful method occult, initiatory societies have of recruiting people and binding them to the society is a sort of bait-and-switch: you promise them that as they progress up the ladder they will learn the truth as it is, and then when they’ve proven themselves all-in, reveal that everything they’ve been taught is true and necessary is in fact a lie. —The Opacans tell the apprentices and red- and orange- and yellow-robes (titles merely, I’d think, reflecting their Circulan origins; but not actual costumes, since this is a sneaky working covenant with no time for such theatrical frippery) that the horrible things they sometimes see and hear are done to evil people who deserve it and it’s all spelled out in the Books of Lem, as you’ll see for yourselves when you’ve progressed just a little more. And then one day they’re taken (perhaps) to read Nescius Balatu’s top-secret copy of the Indigo Book (or so they claim, perhaps) and they find out it isn’t spelled out; that Lem has left them on their own; that the strictures under which they’ve been raised are obsolete, and nothing now is forbidden them but the final awful act of actually dealing directly with spirits of creation.

First build the scaffolding. Then build the mage. Then tear down the scaffolding; you don’t need it anymore.

Now, I think most of this has developed ad hoc, built up by accident and happenstance, trial and error, as the Opacans find their niche and settle in and get down to cases. Not one of them would ever articulate it in this fashion, perhaps not even with the pithy epigram above. But it’s still how (I think) they’ve come to work. It would be Ferramenta’s peculiar genius to see how this works, and why. And here’s the important thing: she doesn’t write it down.

Her manifesto(es) aren’t at all about how to build a secret society. They’re about the amazing things the Opacans have done to keep the Order safe and the horrible terrors that threaten the Order beyond more than just the Dawn; they’re about removing the Opacans’ fight from a venue that depends on nasty, messy, Love-and-Reason violating magic and taking it to a venue that allows for bashing and smashing and good, old-fashioned warfare—Gætan—where the amazing things the Opacans do can be done openly and with the support of other magi. See? We aren’t really scary and creepy after all. And the things we fight are really bad. Aren’t you glad we’ve had your back, all this time? —And then, as the Indigo Hand society (as opposed to covenant) grows, some select few of those Savacions and Manereans would come to find out that yes, well, some scary, creepy, horrible things are done, but it’s okay, and you’ll find out why, soon enough, and boom! They’re on the same initiatory treadmill.

It’s this level of deception I’m getting at with the whole Straussian riff.

Ferramenta Subtilior is about more than just healing the rift between Opacans and the rest of the Order. I’ve mentioned she’s ultimately after her own Knights-Templar–like organization. —What I think is up is that she’s had visions of a horrible threat coming, mere decades away, and she feels the Order must be whipped into shape: she feels she has to build a scaffolding for the whole dam’ Order so that the Order might be built anew, to face it. The Indigo Hand would be the first tentative steps towards that distant, megalomaniacal goal. (Why doesn’t she just tell people Something Awful is coming? She’s read Cletia’s Eschaton. [Obsessively, I bet.] She knows what happens to prophets, especially women, in the Order. And anyway, she’s a hated Opacan; who would trust a thing they say? —Personally? I think she’s seeing a-slant the coming plague, and interpreting her horrific visions as something she can fight, and if she’s successful in building up her Order-within-an-Order, putting it on a rapid-response, military footing, and if it’s still around in 60-some years, that that rapid-response, highly mobile structure is precisely what allows the plague to spread so fucking fast and far...)

Anyway. That’s kinda where my thinking is, at the moment. Gætan’s just a stepping-stone. Redeeming the Opacans is a means to and end.

I should make it clear—

—that they think Lem himself is clear about leaving them on their own. They don’t abandon Lem. Far from it. Merely his books, or some of them, or most of them. But they do still pore through them, looking for secret knowledge, validation, affirmation, the good bits hidden within the dross needed as scaffolding for other, younger, less-developed mages.

Hell, they don’t any of them see themselves as abandoning Love and Reason, either. Just cutting themselves off from it, sometimes, in the name of saving it for everyone else.

The veil is lifted from my eyes
This seems much more likely in my mind. I think my earlier hang ups were with the nihilism thought trail and stating that its all a lie. Two things I don't believe many if any Opacans would say if you sat them down for an evening of questioning/interrogation.

Secret initiations, bending the rules, tearing down the strictures you said were the founding stones in the first place. This is a more well thought out version of how I at least view the Opacans.

Ferramenta's obsession with her personal doomsday theory is quite interesting and will be interesting to see how it comes about in play, since I am sure Manus Cyaneus will have some dealings with Nimus Animae. Heck, Calvus is just now sending off the invitations. Her desire to show what the Opacans do above board by doing something at a new covenant, that is not at all what they really do, is brilliant.