In his initial response to Doyle’s post, Wilkinson immediately diverts the conversation away from the Old Man’s question through the introduction of a bit of cloak-and-dagger chicanery. Wilkinson provides links to prior Sir Toby’s threads in which the intrigue motif figured prominently. That he felt compelled to re-introduce this ploy so quickly in the new post suggests that Wilkinson may have regarded Sir Toby’s simply as a diversion from the usual theological discourse that characterized OST. On the other hand, he might have suspected that Doyle’s post was in fact an opening salvo of skeptical confrontation hidden under the Old Man’s cloak. “Invisibility? Precipitation? Surely these were coded words” – the Trappist’s paranoiac musings at least hint at this alternative interpretation of Wilkinson’s authorial intent.

In his silent musings the disguised Trappist reveals his thoughts about Jesus’s supposed disappearance in Luke 4; namely, that the event ought to be understood as a rather ordinary human occurrence. Why did Wilkinson not have the Trappist reveal his opinion through conversation with the Old Man? Was he concerned that, in giving direct voice to his own non-supernatural interpretation of the passage, he would be subjecting himself to criticism within the Christian readership of OST? Perhaps this is so, since he does add the seemingly gratuitous caveat that Jesus’s escape from the crowd was “no doubt aided by his divine presence.” But again, why does the Trappist not discuss with the Old Man his understanding of how the natural commingles with the supernatural in Jesus’s earthly ministry?

In the next paragraph the Trappist contemplates the “unholy alliance” that had tried to kill him in a previous encounter. In this re-imagined version of the Sir Toby’s Revisited story, the Old Man is part of a conspiracy to encourage widespread adoption of the “Otherways” manifesto – clearly a reference to Perriman’s recently-published book of the same name, a book which would prove improbably influential over the subsequent decades. On OST Wilkinson persistently presented counter-arguments to Perriman’s exegesis of the New Testament. In his review of the Otherways book Wilkinson graciously yet directly noted his fundamental disagreement with Perriman:

"Andrew has been remarkably generous in allowing me to review the book –
given my consistent questions and criticisms of his strategy. My
questions and criticisms remain – and have not diminished with time. I
have often felt that Andrew does not see the theological wood for
exegetical trees - but I would make that comment with considerable
reservation in the light of the book as a whole. I am aware that I need
to come up with rather more convincing arguments than the stock answers."

Is it conceivable that Wilkinson believed that Doyle’s agnosticism was a ruse, and that in fact he was acting as a kind of undercover operative on Perriman’s behalf, and perhaps even at his behest? Or did Wilkinson regard Perriman’s theology as inherently dangerous to the Christian cause, inevitably precipitating a landslide into the radical skepticism that had already undermined Doyle?

At the end of this first comment the Trappist refers to a new scroll that he himself has penned. The reader presumes that the scroll in question will not offer yet another alternative cosmogeny to be added to the Old Man’s collection. Instead, it will constitute an alternative to, and probably also a critique of, the Otherways Manifesto, which the Trappist regards as the real threat. Here it becomes clearer that Wilkinson’s dispute wasn’t with the agnostic Doyle but with the emergent Perriman.

In the end, of course, the Sir Toby’s discussions and the names of those who engaged in them would have disappeared forever in the long-abandoned internet servers of the age were it not for Perriman’s historical importance. Is it conceivable that, if Wilkinson had directed his attention to Doyle’s agenda instead of Perriman’s, post-evangelicalism would have veered onto a different trajectory altogether?

The “Invisibility Cloak” thread must be deemed a failure both theologically and literarily. It does, however, illustrate certain paradoxes and anomalies we have come to associate with what, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, was termed the postmodern sensibility.

More than most other blogs of its time, OST cultivated the illusion of being a self-contained community. Any registered user could write a post, but neither posts nor comments provided links to the writers’ own blogs. As a result, participants in OST discussions knew very little about one another outside of the way they represented themselves at OST. This self-presentation was quite formal and rational and impersonal, focusing almost exclusively on serious theological discussion and debate. Though the reader might detect clues about the writers’ lives and character traits, consciously self-revelatory remarks were purposely kept to a minimum.

Doyle initially introduced the Sir Toby’s conceit in response to an anomalously personal post by Wilkinson in which he briefly described his recent visit to Prague. Sir Toby’s became an alternate reality embedded within OST, where frequent discussants were assigned fictional monastic alter-egos meeting in the common room of an inn where plenty of food and beer kept the discussion flowing freely. While donning their fictional identities inserted another layer of illusion between writer and reader, the very unreality of Sir Toby’s may have given Doyle and Wilkinson license to relax their characteristic writerly sef-discipline at OST. As a result, the reader catches brief glimpses of the individuals giving voice to their quasi-mythic doppelgangers.

As the ill-fated “Invisibility Cloak” post stumbles toward its inconclusive end, a metafictional layer is superimposed on the fictional world of Sir Toby’s. Doyle and Wilkinson present themselves as historians revisiting the post as if it had been written in the fairly distant past. Under the guise of exploring authorial intent and unconscious motivations of these supposedly long-dead bloggers, Doyle and Wilkinson further expose their own personal motivations to public scrutiny. Doyle in particular seems bent on psychoanalyzing Wilkinson, while in the process revealing more about his own resentments and frustrations. Doyle, who held a doctorate in psychology and who practiced psychotherapy intermittently during his rather unfocused career, infused his commentator persona with a degree of ruthless cruelty that his Old Man persona lacked. Doyle had by this time written three unpublished books, and his personal correspondence shows that he had approached Wilkinson with the possibility of turning the Sir Toby’s premise into a book. Doyle was experiencing a depressing sense of subjective invisibility due to his inability to get his books published, as is evident in many of his blog posts around this time. That the reprise of Sir Toby’s at OST was obviously failing undoubtedly frustrated Doyle and contributed to the rather abrasive tone of his commentary. In hindsight it is perhaps fortunate that the Sir Toby’s project never materialized, inasmuch as it might have distracted Doyle from writing what would prove to be his masterpiece.

We see layer upon layer of self-distancing at work in this otherwise unremarkable bit of theoliterary experimentation: OST the rational-impersonal virtual community, Sir Toby’s the fictional world-within-a-world, the metafictional commentary on the Sir Toby’s personae. And yet as each layer is added we witness a progressive unveiling of the writers’ “real” personalities. Or were these self-revelations too an illusion and an obfuscation? It was a pervasive and well-documented aspect of the postmodern era that the subjective sense of self was being decentered, multiplied and, in extreme cases, dissolved altogether. In a Moebius-like inversion, the Sir Toby’s writers revealed themselves by donning disguises. By objectively distancing themselves from their writing as “commentators" they exposed themselves as subjects presented themselves as subjects. By burying themselves ever deeper in fictional alternate realities they made themselves more real. Or perhaps none of this is true; perhaps behind every disguise was yet another disguise. One is left to wonder whether, by the end of the Invisibility Cloak thread, the writers had become more visible to themselves, or more invisible.