the question of the book's religion is complicated, but the ways in which it's complicated make sense when you understand the author was the most depressed catholic engineer in the world
The bombing the author participated in was actually the bombing of the abbey at Monte Cassino, which was incredibly controversial at the time. It was (is?) the oldest surviving monestary, and was founded by saint Benedict who is a very popular saint. The german army had encamped at the most fortifiable position in the area atop a mountain, blocking the allied advance towards Rome. This mountain just so happened to have the abbey as well, which prevented the allies from using more destructive means like bombs or artillery to push the Germans out for fear of damaging it. Fed up with the lack of progress after several weeks, allied leadership used dodgy intel to assume the Germans were using the abbey for military purposes, and thus considered it fair game to bomb. The resulting bombing killed no Germans, just several hundred civilians, and ultimately was utterly useless in pushing back the Germans as the battle of Monte Cassino lasted for months after this. I can see why it affected him so much tbh, and the theme of the book as you described definitely seems inspired by it!
It was counterproductive. The Germans and the Allies agreed the Abbey was to be demilitarized. The Allies then attacked it (based on dodgy intel), and afterwards the Germans actually moved in. Turns out that the basement was still quite intact and made quite a good defensive position.
As a rule, I don’t think it’s generally a good thing to valorize wars or the people who fight them, but in a war fought by the common people (aka heavy conscription) I have a ton of respect for men like Joe Sarnoski and the Eager Beavers. Bomber crew of a B-17 during the Pacific and island-hopping campaigns. *Twice* the Eager Beavers refused to bomb a geisha performance said to be attended by high-ranking Japanese admirals, instead blowing up first a fuel depot, and then ammo dump. It’s said that Joe stayed up all night poring over maps of Rabaul (the city) and found those targets, which Intelligence had overlooked, just on a really lucky educated guess. It takes a lot of balls to stand up to your direct boss and say “You’re in the wrong, this is a bad decision, I won’t do what you tell me,” especially in an organization as /brassy/ as the military.
The institution of the monastery was one of the oldest but the one destroyed by the Allies was the 3rd complex built on the site, restored in the 19th century and thus considered a modern fortification. (So the current complex is the 4th.)
Yup, the preservation of texts by the Catholic church was a real thing that happened. It's also why Ireland ended up known as the "Isle of Saints and Scholars" because of how much a part it played. Many older universities in Europe started as outgrowths of monasteries, often with a heavy Irish presence. One of the interesting consequences of this is that there's a poem that was written in Old Irish in Germany by an Irish monk about his white cat called "Pangur" that was written into the margins of a commentary on the Aeneid.
The Irish church at that time wasn't RC though, that came later. There was no recognised leadership from Rome or elsewhere. Also, hi Keith, we were in college together (CIT). Nice to see you 20 years later watching this cool channel
Most early universities started as religious academies. As soon as decided to teach lay persons (I guess for profit), they broadened their curriculum to more general subjects, such as astronomy, geography and (what thety then called) physics.
I would only add that the reason so many clerics were scientists back in the day is that nobody else had the time, nor resources for it. As much as a Church is a reactionary, progress-retarding entity, historically the Catholic Church boasted a bunch of science pioneers.
I just went from listening to the Canticle for Leibowitz archival adaptation on the NPR archives (my introduction to the book was listening to this as a freshman at Roger Bacon High School in Cincinnati) to watching "Fallout". I never played the game, but that series is absolute metal. Cooper THE Ghoul and the killer axolotls...damn. "I'm not torturing you, I'm fishing." ☠️🥶
Regarding the Abbot's actions: He's acting on the Catholic teaching that euthanasia is equal to murder, so from his perspective he is trying to prevent the murder (of both the mother and the child). When he goes to confession and feels guilty it has more to do with the fact that he punched the doctor who had lied to him about whether they would practice euthanasia. The Catholic Church has never supported Euthanasia. In the 1950s, the practice had a stronger association with Nazi Germany than it does today. The biggest public clash between the German Church and the Nazis was precisely over their institution of mass euthanasia programs in 1939-40. There was even a Nazi propaganda film called "Ich klage an" that argued for a right to die. Support for euthanasia in the US was at a low mark in the 1950s (see Gallup opinion polling). Miller likely meant for the abbot to be seen as a sympathetic character in the mercy killing dynamic. The scene is probably meant to highlight the suffering of nuclear war, depict a Church-state conflict with the Church getting steamrolled by the force of government, and in a dark sarcastic way point out the "sanitary" and hypocritical "mercy" of a government that starts a nuclear war and alleviates the great suffering they caused people by killing them--because they have unleashed something they cannot fix. The fact that modern readers have such a visceral reaction against the abbot speaks to the massive shift the last 60 years have brought in the way Americans think about those issues.
Part of the point of the storing of documents method is that they had no context to know what would or wouldn't be valuable, and the documents that survived would be more or less random because of the nuclear war and the actions of the Simpletons. There would be know basis to be able to prioritize one document over another, so the only way to hedge bets is to preserve and duplicate everything you find. It might one day be the thing that is important. This is meant to broadly follow the notion that this is how more advanced math, science, and philosophy eventually were rediscovered in the Middle Ages of Europe, because monks had been preserving ancient Greek and Roman texts. Thomas Aquinas is famous for having combined knowledge of these Catholic preserved texts with those of translations of Arabic texts acquired in Spain after its reconquest from the Moors by Charlemagne and later Ferdinand and Isabella. There is of course plenty to dispute that Aquinas was solely responsible for technological progress in Europe, as lots of things were already moving forward at that time in a lot of parallel ways, but this was the consensus of this story in the '50s. As an ex-Catholic physics nerd in college, I loved this book when I read it, on the recommendation of a friend who's Latin teacher had her class read it lol
I haven't read the book, but it seems odd that over the timespan of the plot, seemingly no-one would actually read or attempt to understand and make any real use of the information in the books that are being archived. Having said that, some years ago a Dominican Monastery in Europe sold some of its 1600's era library consisting of scholastic works from the Monks at the time. So I'm the proud owner of a few 400+ year old handmade, hand "printed" and ornately decorated books and I can't understand a word because they're in Latin in a typestyle that makes your eyes bleed... now really nothing more than conversation pieces.
@@rreiter take pictures of the pages and feed them to OCR and translation software, ChatGPT can likely do both and then also give you a short summary. AI powered analysis of historical manuscript is actually a big field within history nowadays.
I agree with your general idea that science would survive through the future, but I also think that's you thinking as a physicist, not a historian. Before the industrial revolution, there was no expectation of the future being different or more advanced than the present. Our culture has ingrained the idea that technology progresses into us, but it took approx 3 million years to go from stone tools to bronze tools. Then another 2000 years to go from bronze tools to iron. Humanity more or less used the same technology (bloomery/crucible steel) to make purified iron and steel for the next ~1900 years. It was only with the bessmer process in the mid 1800s that we developed a method of making steel that was cheap and reliable. The exponential growth of the last couple of centuries is not the norm if you consider all of history. So I'm not entirely sure if it's unrealistic for humanity to stagnate and lose a lot of knowledge, especially if there's no easy to find coal to kickstart the industrial revolution. I don't think 1200 years to go from nothing to a light bulb is that crazy. Especially since our culture has no real oral tradition, I think it would be hard to instill one in time to save important information.
Came here to bring up a similar point - and you made it better than I would have. 100% agree. Our current pace of technological change is absolutely incomprehensible to people from 100 years ago, let alone 600 or 1200 years ago.
Even if we just count modern humans and ignore our precursors, it took from 190,000 BCE to 1602 to invent the scientific method. So we've had "science" as a concept for a total of 0.2% of our time on earth. In a society that had to rebuild from "scratch" without access to all of the easy surface resources we've already tapped it's not hard to believe they wouldn't get there for a very, very long time.
What if a lack of progress was deliberate? What if progress was discerned as creating such a large surplus that society would split along the lines of those who administered the surplus and those that produced it. What if the state ‘visited', or haunted ‘primitive’ societies’ as the ghost of/in a time of surplus future? The fear may be the group loses control to ever larger abstraction led groups. It’s hard to ‘explain’ such human epochs as other than millennia of ‘no thanks’: After all, their cognitive abilities would be the same of ours.
@@alexsidney4796 No, it was a lack of built up knowledge, especially knowledge about how to learn more about the world. We have advantages they couldn't dream of, which are enabled by the high degree of specialization in our workforce (and how productive our crops are in comparison to the past). It's pretty hard to develop transistors when half your population is farming all day. And you have to consider how much larger our population is. Anything we discover is only possible because they gave us the basis. They didn't have anyone to do that for them. Humans have always been the same, and they will do a lot of work to make their lives a little easier. We just have the resources to expend so much more on development of new ideas.
I was nine when A Canticle for Leibowitz was published. We had bomb drills where we ran out into the desert schoolyard, knelt and covered our heads because the blast would tear down our lightly-built schoolrooms. Dark doesn’t begin to get it.
One of my all-time favorites! I think the middle part of the book definitely raises the most complicated questions of all of them. To me, the most interesting one is raised by the secular scholar (sorry, it's been a while, names are hard!) who theorizes that the pre-apocalypse civilization was created by something other than humans. This is challenged by the monks, who say it goes against both the evidence and Catholic doctrine, and that the scholar's theory is motivated by his own pride. It comes back around in the third part - the second head of the woman is denied baptism, but offers the priest absolution at the end. She's something other than human, maybe better than human. Humans destroyed the world *again* - can the ones who escaped to space be trusted to not destroy themselves again again? I think the book is the result of the author wrestling with the question of human nature. Like you say, science is discovered and rediscovered. It's constant, objective, universal. Is the same true of human nature, or the soul? We blew ourselves up once - will we blow ourselves up over and over, as soon as we rediscover atomic theory and build nuclear weapons each time? I really love this book, so I'm happy you like it. I hope we can get reviews of the others!
It is CRAZY hearing a review of this book from a non-Christian. It’s not a bad thing and I think you picked up on some of the points of this book but I also think a few of the most major points went right over your head unintentionally. Great video, definitely a different reading experience when you read the book from the vantage point of a Christian and not strictly just a more scientific point of view
"The buzzards laid their eggs in season and lovingly fed their young. The Earth had nourished them bountifully for centuries and she would nourish them still" brings me back to this book whenever im stressed by big changes.
I read Canticle for a college sci fi literature course way back in the 90s, and it left a huge impression on me. I've never forgotten the emotional effect it had on me. A classic of the genre, in all its bittersweet glory! The class discussion in that course came down to a mixture of nihilism and hope, the endless cycle of human creativity and stupidity and how the interplay between those aspects of our nature drive our repetition of our mistakes, no matter how much we say we want to learn from the past so we dont repeat it...but we always seem doomed to that depressing repetition. I guess, given all that, it's not surprising Miller committed suicide.
Yeah. It's exactly what a naive copyist would do. I really like the bit about slavishly copying the negative print only to later realize that the negative impression was an artifact of reproduction and of no significance to the information in the document.
4:04 I think it would be funny if we later learned that the schematics were for one of those Robosapien kids toys or something. They build the robot in the hope that it will provide some kind of ancient wisdom or help repair society and instead it just starts dancing.
For Catholicism, suicide is a mortal sin and the priest was fighting to prevent that from happening. From his perspective the suffering in this life is worth the preservation of your reward in the next.
She mentions in the video telling stories to inform later generations n they might not understand it. Sure it's a "sin" but it's also a good tool to stop humanity from giving up, even in the worst of times i think that's the bigger picture, even if the priest didn't know
There is also an enduring cult of suffering in the Catholic Church. Some of the faithful belief that suffering brings people closer to Christ because through their suffering they relate to His suffering on the cross and to take away that suffering is "anti-Christ" and denies people a way to religious epiphany. It manifests as harmless fasting on Lent or wearing a painful cilice or in extreme cases denying pain relief to others as St. Mother Teresa purportedly did. To quote her "There is something beautiful in seeing the pour accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering."
I just turned 60. I grew up during the height of the Cold war. It's really hard to explain the mindset of living during the Cold war. There was a level of Hope and despair and it was low-grade despair it. The question was "are we doomed to repeat ourselves?"
I was born in 1949. Growing up in the 1950s/1960s was living in the shadow of nuclear annihilation and also the times that are looked upon fondly as somehow uncomplicated and innocent. Notable films of the early sixties such as Fail Safe and On The Beach (50s) reveal this.
As a former catholic, I understood Miller's issues every time I read this book. 8 times. He questions faith, and humanity's goodness. Suicide and despair was apparently his answer. Not mine. Great book, it's sort of ageless.
Glad you read Canticle - as an atheist from a Catholic background who loves postapocalypses I always hugely enjoyed it. Edit: There are passages with Thon Taddeo where it's somewhat clear that he has been doing empirical science and is looking for prewar texts to try to help connect some of the dots and locate info on advanced subjects beyond current experimental reach.
Exactly! I only listened to the audio book. I generally get less from an audio book than by actual reading. Nonetheless, I clearly remembered that the scientist had already done independent research. If I recall correctly, the brother who built the dynamo and arc lamp relied largely on information from Thon Taddeo. So I didn't understand Angela's reaction saying something like, "that's not how science actually works."
One of the common theories about "the old guy" who keeps turning up in the various chapters, is that he was the Wandering Jew, a figure who started appearing in stories during the Middle Ages.
I paused your video on your recommendation to go and read the book which I knew nothing about. My impression while experiencing the book was that the author was struggling personally with the themes depicted and that the science fiction genre was the most convenient way to frame the questions of death and self-inflicted, large-scale destruction. I also had no idea that the author had committed suicide, but given the book’s ending, it was not surprising but was saddened to realize that he was unable to resolve his apparently very intense emotional conflict.
Please look at the history of print making. When I took my SF Literature class in University (B.A. English Literature, State School) we did this whole activity about book binding. I also took a history of print from the same professor, and the history of printing in Europe IS the history of the church. Although the two weren't bound together, much of the history of science can be traced back to seminaries, monasteries, and nunneries. I also want to say, You can look up a shit ton of articles on Miller! That book won a Hugo and a Nebula award, and you can easily find an interview via letters in Analog Magazine. There's also a lot of stuff about Miller we get from his children, including a SINGULAR plot that takes place in between the events of this book! Also there's so much Christian mythology and allusions in yhe book cause Miller was DEEPLY religious. There's the wandering jew, a satire of William of Occam, a satire on Abalard, and the whole "6 months to work on a manuscript" is straight up just like, Miller transferring the ordering of manuscripts in 1400s Europe. Okay hope any of that was helpful sorry if that was annoying
None of that was annoying. Having read the book for school myself--and having my own take that may or may not be 'right'--I nonetheless found this video to be EXTREMELY uninformed about practically everything regarding the Church, the reasons behind wanting to collect/store ancient documents, or even the development of science and technology. Your comment was pretty informative.
The church monopolized science and burnt anyone at the stake who dared be a scientist without also being Catholic. Science is and always has been worse off and slower because of the Catholic church. Whatever benefits the church had brought to science is incidental and much less than what science would have accomplished if the church didn’t exist.
I read this book shortly after I finished graduate school. While you come at this from the perspective of a physicist, my training was in anthropology and archaeology and I had no problem with the development of religion and science in this book, it all seemed to track as a possible post-nuclear development. You are correct that science doesn't develop this way in our current culture, but in a culture developing after a devastating war that some might see as caused by technological development, I could see things going along this trajectory (obviously, without such a war, we will never really know). I don't know what the author's view on religion was at this point, but I took it to be very ambivalent while reading the book. On the one hand, the Catholic church has actually preserved a lot of information, on the other hand, the church has also suppressed information, and just sat on a lot of information without suppressing it or actively sharing it. Similarly, while the Catholic Church has done a lot to help alleviate suffering through it's various medical missions, it's adherence to dogma has also caused or at least allowed a lot of suffering to continue (it's opposition to condom use even in areas with high rates of HIV infection comes immediately to mind). I suspect that the author was struck by this ambivalent nature and was trying to explore it in his writing, not necessarily trying to reach a specific conclusion or push the reader in a particular direction.
I think this author is modeling his time frames based around the real world time frames of mathematical and scientific knowledge being post western Roman Empire falling. There is another real world reason someone in the 50s would do this, is back then they tended to underestimate the technological level of the middle ages in Europe (the referred to as the dark ages). However I think you vastly underestimate how long it would take to rebuild after a catastrophe. All the stuff you mention in this book is heavily based on things people did for hundreds of years. The priest traveling hundreds of miles and facing banditry and being pointlessly killed is something that's been repeated a billion times across the world for explicitly religious motivations over things that today we would call equally pointless. You can say "why would people do this" but that's exactly what happened with the catholic church. The Vatican today has a basement filled with literal thousands of years of letters and correspondences between clergy and other saintly figures which may never ever see the light of day. The Vatican is a huge source for letters and stuff between figures like the Pope and Genghis Khan. Or diaries from missionaries who made contact with Buddhists in the 1200s. I don't think it would take AS long as the author puts forward, because I think ideas like the scientific method would linger, and mean people start civilization up faster than 1200 years, but on the other hand, a nuclear catastrophe could be way worse than anything that's come before so who knows. But imo if catholicism survives then a concept like capitalism or the scientific method would survive. Not saying capitalism surviving would be good, but I think it would result in imperialist colonialist societies which would expand faster than feudal tribes. If I were writing it, I'd compress his timeline to 600-800 years but I absolutley stand by the idea people would treat documents which seem trivial to us now with reverence because they don't understand them. So many Greek and Roman letters survived to the modern day this way.
From what you describe about the man, it sounds like to me is a believer in divine provedence. Tolkien believed in divine provedence. That things would happen which coincidently would play out according to a divine plan. Like the fellowship saving Gollum and him being the reason the ring is thrown away. That being said, that ending is bleak as hell. And I suspect that's also rooted in the catholic belief in the broken nature of mankind due to original sin. Mankind is doomed to make certain mistakes and will only see redemption through christ. Mankind in their earthly state are incomplete/naturally evil beings, and they can only be reedeemed/made whole through christ. I went to catholic school as a kid. EDIT: I also want to add because I thought of this afterwards. He is clearly a believer in what is called the "Cyclical view of history". Its a philosophy which essentially amounts to history is not a linear progression from one state of "civilizedness" to the next. But it is a graph more like a Stock Market with highs and lows. This view can be a bias(especially the idea that "civilizedness" is one distinct quantity), just as the opposite view can be too and I think it clearly informs his writing. But in particular Catholic scholars have always had affinity to this view. It was also MASSIVLEY in resurgance for the generation of people who lived through WW1 and eventually saw nuclear weapons come into existance in their lifetime.
To be fair, I think some ancient Roman letters are incredibly valuable and worth preserving, just as any random messenger or forum chat will be seen in a thousand years. There's just something about people trying to connect to one another, trying to fulfill their needs or share something and still being seen and unnderstood way outside of the scope they could imagine is cool. But if there is a work written by Euclides about math, I wouldn't want it to rot on some forgotten shelf for thousands of years: I'd wish that it was discovered sooner, preserved, studied, disseminated and built upon. I believe that depending on the technologies and the society in place, the amount of time to recover from a given catastrophe may vary. While we have some contingencies and vaults in case of the worst, we don't shape our entire society around the post-apoc recovery efforts. I want to hope that the more advanced we become, the more resilient we become and the more decentralized we become, the more of our knowledge we can store in more places with less effort. The entire sum of our books, patents and communication can fit on an obtainable storage device, but it's not enough. Technology is not just blueprints, not just textbooks: it's also people, the experience that can only be transferred through working together solving real day to day problems, it's the logistics, it's economic possibility and incentives. Lose the people, lose the culture, lose the logistics, lose the feasibility and technology may easily become a curiosity unable to compete with something much simpler and cheaper to produce in its current socio-economic environment. There has to be place for the science within that culture. P.S. If we could measure our progress in the collapses, that didn't happen because we moved past them or the collapses that shook, but didn't destroy us, we would've, but it's hard to see the what ifs, that never happened.
Liebowitz wasn't just saving blueprints he was saving books of knowledge from the book burning. And when Francis pleads to his muggers to take the copy and leave him the original Relic they misunderstand which is which and refuse. Because his copy is beautiful and the original blueprint schematic looks crude and worthless to them. while he's upset that his work of 12 Years is lost he does get to bring the original that he asked to keep.
Great video! heap thank you, much appreciated! A Canticle for Leibowitz is actually not about science, but about worldviews and the practical effects/consequences of those worldviews. I'd say if any science is involved here it's cultural and social anthropology. What Miller was describing is a situation that was very real at the time, where groups of people in islands in the pacific created what anthropologist called "cargo cults". This was big (scientific) news in the 50's. That's what the book is about. The islanders didn't have much contact with the "modern" world but saw the planes flying above passing to deliver cargo or bombs somewhere else. "Cargo", which arrived with these planes - by serendipity or because the belligerents had stationed lookouts on the islands. After the war all that disappeared and in places a new religion developed around those planes that would come back and deliver "cargo", the good stuff. It's the development of a creation myth/story that's not uncommon around the world, a deliverance, a going back to a golden age. Miller uses this deliberately to tell a story about his conmtemporary world and its affairs. As you say, the possibility of a nuclear WW3 was very much around and palpable. And as you say, he uses the Catholic church in a parallel to the story of the medieval libraries and copyists - he probably thought the Catholic church managed to survive through a couple of thousand years of upheaval, it probably would be the one to survive this nu cataclysm several hundred years on. He doesn't mean that it necessarily is the same Catholic church, it just has the name and general trappings for making it relatable to contemporary readers, and it also involves a kind of backhanded praise of it: yes, they will be (again? kinda, sorta) the repositories of knowledge from where a rebirth, a renaissance will arise. And criticism: they were also serious loonies among them, and the church it's gonna church, and if you don't toe the line, it's gonna church you too. Edit: the Fallout game uses quite a bit of that fifties worldview and the Canticle in it's univierse
girl I feel sEEEEEEEEEEEN. Your feelings exactly reflect mine from when I was a teenager and the nice man at Barnes and Noble *insisted* to me and my mom that I needed to read this book.
It has been a while since I read this book but I didnt take it as trying to make a coherent argument about the value of religion or science specifically. I took it to be a call to reflect on whether man's intellect exceeds his wisdom, whether we actually learn from the past or are too self centered and short sighted, whether self destruction is an instrisic part of man's nature. The last point being a very heavy question Miller obviously grappled with in his own life being a ptsd survivor and contemplating suicide. I read this book at the same time as Slaughterhouse Five and think its an excellent companion piece as a book about an author grappling with their ptsd.
I'm glad you read this and made a video about it. More people need to know about A Canticle For Leibowitz because as you say, it is a book that makes you think about some very uncomfortable assumptions. I made a video on my reading experience a while ago and after several readings I still have not come to any definite answers but I have definitely spent a lot of time thinking about it. Also, the vulture paragraph at the end of the first story is an absolute masterclass in despair and poignancy. Thanks for talking about this!
Another book from about the same period that deals with the loss of civilization and the questions of preservation for the sake of it vs. finding a new path for humanity is The Earth Abides. The book The Postman also goes roughly in that direction as well (the movie is decent, but the book is so much more). Then there's Lucifer's Hammer and Battlefield Earth (the book, not the horrid movie). So many good aftermath stories out there that in their journey ask similar questions about what we could or should save of our society. Or if we can at all.
Earth Abides was my dad's favorite book and I've read it more times than I can count. It definitely belongs on any thoughtful sci fi-fan's 'must read' list.
As someone who was brought up Catholic it sounds like the book is exploring a crisis of faith. So is it god's plan or human actions which are determining the outcome. Also a monastery is where monks live, if the head monk is an abbot then it's an abbey, the monastery might have a church as part of it but even if it doesn't the monastery is part of The Church. I recommend the brother Cadfael mysteries, I couldn't get into the books but the tv series staring Derick Jackobi is very good. It's about a 12 century Benedictine monk who moonlights as a forensics officer for the local Sheriff during a civil war.
I had the feeling that that Miller, by the third part, was conflicted about his own relationship to the church for reasons I don't know, but I've seen in other RCs as life becomes less and less comprehensible through some nebulous lens of faith, and more like All Quiet on the Western Front. As Science Fiction goes, it's the softest of soft SF - as you say, none of it works that way. However, as a framework for a pretty strong meditation on futility and cruelty "in nomine Dei' it works really well.
At 1:30: you are probably thinking of Isidore of Seville, a chalcedonian (basically Catholicism before the schism of 1054 ) clergyman that collected knowledge from Antiquity and whose works had major influences on the Middle-Ages understanding of classical works. He is sometimes said to have written one of the first encyclopedias and has for this reason been made saint patron of the Internet.
I read this book like 30 years ago and I always thought it was blueprints for things or documents , but they remained ignorant or chose to be ignorant of the documents. Or couldn't understand what the documents were so they might have had something really useful but just absolutely no idea what the document was that they had.
Ok I stopped at 2:17 because now I want to read this book. So far it sounds a lot like what monks did during the dark ages - they collected literature of all kinds and made copies, to preserve them. Because monasteries are generally secluded, these copies survived through the dark ages; there are even some books that we would not have today if not for monks.
Which is fascinating to compare with the Middle East, where they were collecting and transcribing and translating heathen classics in quantities the Europeans couldn't even imagine. The reason we have so much ancient knowledge is because of preservation efforts by the new Arab caliphates (i.e. the House of Wisdom) and the rescue of these documents before the siege of Baghdad by the Mongols. Hence, not a Dark Age at all, only dark in Europe. It was actually a Golden Age for learning. And hence the famous quote: "If it was dark, it was the darkness of the womb." - Lynn White And Canticle remains a masterpiece almost 70 years later...
@@UnMoored_ Hmmm. They're not myths, but they sure are narratives. It's clear that Islamic and Jewish scholars were discovering things as much as 400+ years before their European counterparts, and it's clear that they were likewise rediscovering things their Greek and Roman counterparts knew a thousand years before. While the preservation efforts of medieval monks may seem paltry in comparison to the Abbasids, by the Almohads this was just not the case. We owe a lot to the Enlightenment, as we do to the Muslim and Jewish scholars who preceded them, and to the philosophers of Antiquity too!
I read this book when I was 17, and now I’m nearly 64. It’s still my favourite book. So I’m biased, I guess. I’m a scientist, and an atheist. The details of whether Miller captures the scientific process “correctly” , or whether he captures religious doctrine “correctly” simply is not the point. He captures what it is to be human, as an individual or as part of various social constructs. He captures our fragility. He captures our arrogance and idiocy. He captures our smallness in the face of eternity. The fact that the book has affected you is the point. The fact that it has drawn your attention to just how close we stand to the edge of the precipice is the point. In half a century we have grown complacent about nuclear annihilation, and right now we have the spectre of it waved in our faces by a calculating populist. Science cannot easily recover everything we have learned from barbarism, and we assume that at our peril. Maybe that’s the gospel of Leibowitz.
This book is one of, if not my absolute, favorite pieces of literature ever. I read it as a teenager craving post-apocalyptic media after becoming engrossed by the Fallout franchise and it was formative in developing my stances on war, my view of reactionary violence, how education has more to teach us than rote recitation of formulas, dates, and names. I am glad I read it at such a formative age, where I could handle both the complex messages and the gruesome world depicted. I have read it at several points in my life, each time taking new lessons from the text. When I was deciding what I wanted to study in college, when I was an undergraduate physics major, when I was a new physics graduate student, each time there was more to glean. I am about to finish my PhD in Nuclear and Particle Physics; the relationship between the plot of this novel, the context of its creation, and the history of my field of study are completely intertwined and makes me take pause sometimes. I constantly find myself actively balancing learning from the pioneers of my field with out putting them on a pedastal, being concious about the moral ramifications of how/where I use my knowledge, and how I can encpurage people to see education as a net positive for society instead of a pipeline to industry.
In 1944 (WWII) Miller saw the abbey of Monte Cassino, Italy bombed into rubble because Germans were using it as a base. It was over 1400 years old. This traumatized Miller, who was Catholic, and started him thinking about what was right and wrong, what values were important, etc. The issue with the baby deals with absolutes. Are there things it is always wrong to do? Is life so sacred you should never take it no matter what? If there are no absolutes, when is a generally wrong thing the right thing to do? These are tough moral questions without clear answers. Miller was asking us to think about them.
Very good video. This sounds really thought provoking. I feel like the point might not have been to show science being like a religion, but to contrast dark ages style religion with modern science's epistemology. I think about John Dee spending years trying to talk to angels just to help him decode something called The Book of Soyga, or Abramelin the Mage secluding himself underground for 18 months claiming it was part of some magic ritual, or how weird it is that the Catholic Church sought to preserve the Greek writings despite so much of it really being opposed to church teaching. Like I wonder if there was ever internal pressure to remove all the gay stuff from Plato's writings for example, and they still kept it in. There are even some scholarly arguments that parts of the Bible change dialects in hebrew, implying parts were added later in transcription, as copying errors, which implies that a lot of the people transcribing the texts didn't really understand them. Is that true? I don't know. Were the early mathematical manuscripts only preserved due to oversight? I can't imagine Galileo or Euler making the same progress without there being cultural awareness of Archimedes and Euclid, but I got the impression that the church of their time was more interested in occultists like Agrippa or Paracelsus. Sorry if this is slightly rambly. I'll have to read this book. Thank you for the recommendation. I always enjoy your videos.
If you're interested in the question of the medieval Church's attitude towards "gay stuff," I highly recommend Dr. Eleanor Janega's writings on her blog, "Going Medieval." To summarize, while they thought "gay stuff" was sinful, their attitude was actually much more nuanced and contextual than you might think from a lot of modern Christian homophobia.
Ancient Rome had steam powered machines in a primitive sense, there were also mechanical calendar calculators (giving models of the Helio (Sun)centric solar system, showing the phases of the moon and times of solar and lunar eclipses) called the Atrikeyea Mechanism over 2000 years ago. Democritus around 6-3rd centuries BCE came up with the ideas of atoms, literally coined the term atom. Who knows what could have happened if the Roman Empire never fell? A possible industrial revolution 1500 years earlier than the one we got?
i think it's a good question to ask why something like our modern science movement, of the last 500 years or so, only happened after literally thousands of years of preceding human history in which not a whole lot changed. maybe it was just luck that the right circumstances came together where and when they did. under slightly different circumstances it might never yet have happened at all
as a Catholic, I think one of the crucial things you're missing out on is the idea that we believe that we have a divinely led church made entirely from fallible, sinful people, who are guaranteed to make mistakes and miss the point - but that God will keep saving the human race through one strange way or another, regardless of the individual wins and losses we experience. He Himself mourns the times where we miss the message, but there's always going to be good with the bad.
Re. your comments about the time this was written - in the grade school I attended we had weekly duck-and-cover drills where we children crouched under our desks with our arms wrapped over our heads. This was supposed to protect us when a nuclear bomb was detonated over nearby Detroit. Imagine two decades of living through the COVID pandemic to get an idea of what life was like. For me, I will always think about the poet in 'Fiat Lux', the way he lived a selfish, self centered life, yet he died because he tired to rescue someone who was being slaughtered. He and the vultures are the central characters of the book. And, you are right. A Canticle of Leibowitz. is one of the finest books ever written.
it's a post-apocalyptic saga talking about the rebuilding and redestruction of civilization. It talks about relations between science fiction and religion, with a redo of the history of the church and the past 1800 years of history. Fiat Homo is roughly 11th century AD/CE (Medieval, Premodernity), Fiat Lux is 17th century AD/CE (Rennaisance/Enlightenment, Modernity) and Fiat Voluntas Tua makes it roughly a future (from 1960s) around the 23rd century AD/CE (Future Space/Atomic Age, Postmodernity). Its also some magical realism with the Wandering Jew, is a rehash of historical fiction, and its in ways a retelling of history. Brother Joshua leading the Catholic Church into the Stars, is a nod to Yeshua/Jesus leading the Jewish church into Rome (give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and God what is God's). Joshua is literally a modern day pronunciation of Jesus's actual name. There have also been films and books about how the United States of America is basically the modern day Roman Empire, particularly through films by Denys Arcand (The Decline of the American Empire (1986), Jesus of Montreal (1989), The Barbarian Invasions (2003), Days of Darkness (Dark Ages) (2007), and The Fall of the American Empire (2018)).
It’s been a long time since I read it, but I did manage two or three readthroughs; I plan on picking it back up again now. If I recall correctly, part of the significance of creating an illuminated copy of the blueprint and then witnessing its destruction is because its scientific value is two-fold; the monk knows its ‘true value’ is the information it preserves, not the gold, but the monk was also ignorant; through studying the document, he realized that the blueprint didn’t need to be copied exactly with the valuable blue ink, but went the wrong way in making an illuminated copy rather than in making a printing press. But nevertheless, the information was preserved, although it is a waste of a few more centuries of human effort in preserving the status quo rather than advancing the cause of literacy. The Catholic Church is often praised for having preserved many classical scientific works, but also criticized because in other cases, works of huge historical value were scraped away to make palimpsests for the propagation of church dogma.
I read A Canticle for Liebowitz as a pre-teen in the early 1960s, and loved it -- it inspired me to write a paper (long since lost) in high school about religion in science fiction . Glad to hear that the novel stands up. Another book from the same era that I would recommend is A Case of Conscience by James Blish.
Clap clap. The robbers thought the original was the one he spent 12 years copying. The blueprints in the 1950's were very simple, it would be very easy to reverse engineer almost anything.
Have you read Anathem by Neal Stephenson? It's starting with a very similar premise (religious-like system for tech/science because tech dangerous) but goes in a radically different way, essentially being a philosophical argument interwoven with a lot of quantum quantum in disguise and a bit of good ol' adventure sci-fi.
I think AC4L reflects a lot of the history of science, of the remnants we have of the past. Like look at archaeology, at us having a customer complaint from ancient mesopotamia. Or trying to read a bunch of ashes from pompeii. We dont pick what info we get from the past.the book isnt like. I didnt know that the author had offed himself. Sometimes
The side discussions in this book are some of the most important parts. Those side conversations illuminate the meaning you are looking for. This really comes out in the second and third parts. In Fiat Lux, when the abbot talks to Benjamin, the old Jew, he has an existential crisis about what the monastery is supposed to be. They preserved knowledge, now they're handing it over to secular scholars. Glad to do the world a favor, but now what are we? Later, there are extremely rich exchanges between Thon Taddeo and the monks. While the monks are clearly wrapped up in absurdity about certain points, the abbot is clear-eyed about the danger the secular scholars are in. Yes, it's true, they do research because they love the pursuit of truth, but the king can enslave them all to force them to build weapons and do research to increase his power. There is also the monastery's fight to remain independent: the Church gives benefits to the world, but it can't be subordinated to secular power and remain itself. From Fiat Voluntas Tua: I actually borrowed from the abbot's discussion with the woman with the child at the end when I spoke at my sister's funeral: the world is always progressing toward paradise because of technology and convenience, but we are all the more angry because we never get there. The abbot, discussing euthanasia with the doctor, says that it becomes a moral problem for states preparing to use nuclear weapons. They're not just preparing to treat inevitable casualties from war, they're preparing to cover up the consequences of their own misdeeds.
The book doesn't sound like it is about how to do science (I have not read the book but I am watching this video) from your description sounds like it is about the nature of record-keeping and archives. A lot of the things happening in that you are describing are straight out of my book history class from my information science degree. You are observing that people are going around from place to place to look at documents and that this is not a good way to learn science. This is because people didn't learn about science this way. This seems to be based on how information was transmitted pre-printing press where manuscripts are produced in monasteries. The reason why people would travel is because manuscripts were produced by hand, so a lot of early copies would have errors in them. A lot of book history is just people traveling from place to place comparing different copies of the same book to create the most "authentic" version. Most book history scholars debate the meaning of this word, and many have theorized that when information is created in this way there can never be one authentic ur-text, but many variant texts. What is the Gospel of Liebowitz? Well it appears to be spreading word of a past that doesn't exist, just like an "authentic" text does not exist. Archives do not keep every single bit of knowledge, archives keep knowledge that we know is valuable and usable. Just because it is old does not mean it is important. When the scribe is copying a blueprint that they don't understand the value or function of and are not trying to understand the value or function, it is not an act of scholarship: it is an act of faith. Faith that in the future the gospel will be proven right like the rapture. If they were doing scholarship, these documents would have been used to learn from their mistakes, instead these documents became the center of a religion where they uncritically recreate the past that resulted in lost knowledge in the first place. The baby seems to be an allegory about how they have fundamentally been standing in the way of progress the entire time. In the beginning the church was lauded for its foresight in keeping the documents which were supposed to be used for the sake of humanity, but in the end the knowledge was not used for saving humanity and preventing human suffering. Information science is not a theoretical field, but we have one theory that data must be transformed into information, which is then transformed into knowledge. The documents are data, but because if they are not understood they do not become information. If they were understood, they can be analyzed and turned into knowledge, which would be knowledge of the wrongs of the past. tldr; if we don't learn from past mistakes we are doomed to repeat them.
The preservation of ancient texts by the Catholic Church happened, but is also overstated. They're mostly preserving Aristotelian philosophy and related works like Virgil, and not a whole lot of scientific information. That's mostly preserved and discovered by the Eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empire and medieval Islamic scholars. E.g. European scholars like Avagadro snuck into Islamic schools to learn their advanced math, medicine, and astronomy.
I loved radio dramas growing up (70s/80s) and there was a radio drama adaptation of this book. Mostly I remember the young monk getting killed by the bandits. Having read it as a novel as an adult, I mostly remember the ending of the wild large-scale perspectives of civilizations rising, nuking themselves, gradually rebuilding back into civilization again, nuking themselves again, over and over and over for thousands and thousands of years. Absolutely wild.
The blueprint WAS crucial to experimental redisovery of electromagnetism. The ignorant monks read the title without understanding it, but they note the silly phrase "squirrel cage". That's (in my opinion) almost certainly an intentional reference to the idiomatic but accurate name for the conductor windings of an induction rotor. The church wouldn't have known that because squirrels were extinct. Also the reason the young monk went back to work for 12 years was implied to have been his superiors trying to maintain the "sanctity" of this evidence of the sainthood-worthiness of the blueprint's author, who happened to be their patron not-yet-saint. They kept it secret for a lot of years to prove it really was preserved knowledge...i guess instead of demonic influence? I don't know what rigor exactly they were attempting, but it definitely implied patience is a virtue.
But Francis brought the original to New Rome, and his gilded copy was stolen. His first copy (where he duplicated the inverted nature of blueprints) may have survived at the abbey, but I don't think it had anything to do with Kornhoer's arc light, given that it was titled "Transistorized Control System for Unit Six-B", and that Kornhoer figured out how to make it by reading a collection of fragmentary writings and making deductions based on theories/working axioms by Thon Taddeo.
I read it as the original having actual useful information which Francis didn't understand well enough to copy onto his illumination. So the pope was actually right that preserving the original was _more_ valuable. But regardless yeah - the original was studied by the new (new new?) vatican as part of Lebowitz's beatification. It was also studied locally by the higherups doing to the same thing. For real though - this is all just my headcannon. I haven't read this book for a decade. It was also the monks who actually put it into use - i think in the 2nd short-story-stapling. The visiting secular scholar accused them of holding back secret technology, then the monks yelled at him because two of them literally went blind making this naked electric arc light as a demonstration, which they considered to be pointless. But the scholar hadn't realized that this electricity generating system was actually functional.
(For what it's worth, NPR did a nice audio series of the book. It gets the medieval quality especially very nicely.) It really isn't about science, per se, but human nature and technology, it seems to me.
Over the years every time I've heard Rush's "2112," I've thought of Canticle. I don't know if that's what the band had in mind, but I've just always connected the two.
Another book you may enjoy is Anathem, but it also might make you angry because quantum quantum quantum, but it also plays with idea of cause and effect, multiverses, and how the universe protects itself from the inconsistencies of faster-than-light travel. It is similarly (ostensibly) about monks in a monastery, but is really about science.
I read the book because of this video and I found it fascinating and had none of the questions you did while reading it. To me this book wasn’t “how does Science react to the apocalypse” it was “ how does the religion (specifically the Catholic Church) react to the apocalypse.” I never had any religious training so my interpretations of anything religious related is ultimately skin deep but this feels like a thoroughly critical take on human nature. The abbey holding on to inane technical documents didn’t signal to me a “this is how science would preserve itself into the future” it was a “this is how a large, superstitious bureaucratic organization would fumble its way into doing anthropology”. There are comedy channels that do skits parodying this kind of thing that historians do today. If I had to take a stab at the book I’d say the main message is just a cry of despair, a pure scream into the the void at the impossibly large and vast cyclical patterns of human progress and the seemingly inevitable march towards destruction. That last scene to me was an indictment of the church in the way it attempted to hold fast to a strict moral system that was ill equipped to deal with the world it had survived into. That the church was unable to change from one apocalypse to the next all the while lamenting humanity for failing to do that very task was an exceptional piece of irony.
_ACfL_ is a really well known book, for those who liked it but haven't also read _Pavane_ by Keith Roberts. It's alternative history rather than post-apocalyptic, but it deals with many of the same themes. I *highly* recommend it. For those who don't know, the chapter headings mean: _Fiat homo_ - Let there be man; _Fiat lux_ - Let there be light; _Fiat voluntas tua_ - Let there be whatever you want.
Canticle for Lebowitz was a must-read list book when I was a teenager in the 1980s. It is both seminal and ovarian for so many other works of literature, film, and games. It was prescient to China's own cultural revolution that didn't even need a nuclear war to start. Maybe Mao Zedong read the book I read it once when I was about 17 and then recently listened to the audiobook a couple of times on RUclips. I'm not religious but I'm fascinated with how religion makes people think and how people think when they have a vacuum of scientific knowledge to base that on. The book Rings really true four decades later. You have to imagine that the book burners were successful in wiping out a vast majority of technical knowledge and probably anything that looked like science. So the monastery (abbies are where nuns live) devoted to Lebowitz is portrayed as a sole Repository of Old World Knowledge. And the people who venerated Liebowitz weren't scientists they were Monkish scribes and librarians with the mission to save and recopy by hand because there weren't any printing presses anymore because all those engineers and technicians been killed by mobs. And they were just waiting for someone to request the knowledge but nobody ever did until book 2 where one of the monks has recreated the ArcLight and a theoretical scientist finds out about this trove of knowledge and is furious that it's been secret for so long and is angry that he's wasted his life puzzling things out on his own when it's just sitting there for him to ReDiscover.
A Canticle for Liebowitz is one of my favorite books ever. Read it in high school a long time ago and I re-read it on occasion now. There is something about the cyclical nature of the story that brings me back.
I love the book too. My assumption was that none of the information they saved had any practical value and that they didn't really understand what most of it meant but we're too caught up in the preservation to actually try to figure that out
After a period of reflection, I've realized that me listening to you find the point, yet orbit around it without ever arriving, has to be an experience similar to the frustrations you expressed with reading the book itself.
From my reading I always got the sense that there were two types of people in the story (ignoring the simpletons and the mutants). Theres the pious, dutiful people who build and preserve and the movers and shakers who change things. The idea is that the briliant people who change things and pull us out of the mud eventually value progress/power over humanity and bring us to destruction. Characters often wonder if theyre doomed to it and in the end we get a "new" humanity to baptize the world and break the cycle. This combined with the monks beating the dirt from their sandals before entering the ship sumbolizes rejecting the world that brought about two nuclear wars.
this has nothing to do with the video but if you want some really REALLY good hard sci fi give blindsight a try. it's been living rent free in my head for years now
I've been chasing the high of this book ever since I read it. Don't sleep on the sequels either, The colonel and Echopraxia, in that order. As a bonus there's the short story The Things by the same author, narrating The thing events from the perspective of the alien.
It's helps to have been raised Catholic to really appreciate all the nuance of the book. And a note for acollieralso, if you don't understand words, look them up.
I think Miller was grappling with the questions his faith made him ask, in the light of the horrors he had seen in war, even as a convert. The baby is a helpless innocent in excruciating pain, for which there is no cure or relief save death; and yet thou shalt not kill. If God is all knowing, all powerful, and all good, then why does evil exist? And so on.
Thank you so much for the last chance spoiler alert! I really enjoy your videos. I get many smiles and chuckles from your humorous delivery and perspective. As well as, almost always learn something new! Your introduction, description of the plot, along with touching on its most probable historical basis in its concept, right up to the point where you said " This is your last chance!" really inspired me to read it! But, not wanting to spoil the reading experience, thus not being able to watch the rest of your video until I read it, "made me mad though" ♥
I read the first third of Canticle for Leibowitz, and became so saddened and frustrated by the wasted life and senseless death of the protagonist of that section that I quit there and didn't continue. (You didn't even mention the way he was repeatedly beaten by a superior monk when he first tried to tell them of the "vision" he experienced, and how he took the beating stoically but tefused to go back on what he said. Then he *finally* is accepted and finally spends years creating an art piece which is ultimately destroyed... I saw his copy of the diagram as an art piece, so it could have been meaningful even divorced from its initial context, had it been preserved for others to see.)
The Canticle to me was a book of many merits. First I was very thankful for the author that it was not retelling an old myth (like 99% of books) but invented something brand new. It's not the usual coming age story where the next bullshit champion saves the planet or brings the ring to Mordor. It seems the author took the advise of PKD very well, "all the parts of that book did not add up; all the ingredients did not make a coherency. Now some people are put off by that. They think that’s sloppy and wrong, but the thing that fascinated me so much that this resembled reality ... Reality is a mess, and yet it's exciting." I also enjoyed a lot that most of the characters in the book are wrong most of the time. It's just ridiculous how much of our literature is heavily idealized. It's very refreshing too see somebody like Newton who is not just angry, not just detached, but also keeps failing in his own craft without even knowing it. They never show this to little children. The weakest part to me was the internal monologues of monks and the whole Christian arc especially towards the end. I completely buy that religious principles like "don't kill your fellow man" and "be humble" and "be selfless" and "work together" have values and they help groups to survive hard times. The Christian theology is an iffier thing, that is something I respect less and less as I get older. While there are not much good mystical traditions and Christianity is definitely one, I don't know much authors who are able to command it properly and these childish and uneducated monks are definitely not doing a very good job with it. And detailing the Catholic church was the weakest part, it's shoking how accidental, backward and ossified it is. From the moment when the papal infallibility was created, it just keeps rotting from the core. So to me the whole Christian tangent was slightly misdirected and I think someone like PKD does a much better job with the very same topic.
I love reading but have been too depressed to actually do much reading lately, so I will unironically applaud your progress in actually reading things: 👏
I love this book, it is my favorite sci-fi book after Blindsight. I get most of what it says because I am catholic. And no, God does not want nuclear winter, it is all on man, we bring it to ourselves.
Quite glad you read this one. I was in high school not too many decades after it was written, and it was mandatory school reading at a fair fraction of schools (I wouldn't be surprised if it's currently banned in the same fraction of schools). I do not recommend you read the "sequel", it was written or at least published much later and I didn't find it until well after it was published, and my recollection of it was that it was just weird and maybe completely unnecessary (lol, maybe that means I should re-read it). It would be immensely fun/interesting to be in the same room with others who subscribe to your materials and discuss Canticle, but I don't think it would work as an online discussion, it would require the ability to gauge interrupts in real-time, not with low or medium millisecond lag times. It definitely =is= a thought provoking book, and definitely do remember feeling many of the same frustrations(?) you express. Have you posted your full/target 2024 reading list someplace? I'd like to compare to my past reading, or fill in any blanks. I loved your TV-series recommendation for Station Eleven, for example (though I found the book a lot harder to get into, one major part of which was the odd way that minor characters were frequently referenced by terms like Third Cello, where their function and rank in the Travelling Symphony are used instead of their name) Keep up the great work, I always find your content fun, and usually a good source of fresh thinking in my day/week/month.
Sam Harris once said that if all human knowledge was lost, and humankind had to start over again, it would be hard to imagine at what would need to remind ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin. This book is interesting because it does address that sentiment in a science fiction context. (Yes, the book came before the Sam Harris quote)
It's not how science works, but it is how worship works. This is a satire on how we treat religious texts, not how we treat science. However, those with little knowledge of science do also treat scientific works like this, no understanding but still worshipping. Just put "quantum" in a search and see how utterly nonsensical the stuff people make of scientific discoveries can be.
In the dark days before Amazon, when you had to search used book stores for out-of-print books you wanted, I read about ACFL on some Greatest SciFI Novels list and searched for it for several years in many cities. Several shop owners said they'd read it and loved it but didn't have it. Then, of all places, I found a copy this book in the window of a rug shop in Istanbul! I couldn't believe it! If you're wondering, backpackers weary from their long treks often come down with an insatiable urge to sit down some place and read. So smart shop owners trying to lure tourists in sometime display books in the window to lure them in. I didn't buy a rug in that shop, but they sure did try.
I think you calling it the Gospel of Leibowitz is strange. They're Catholic. Orthodox (in the sense of not being outside of their normal) and devoted to the faith, while also keeping the documents. Leibowitz's goal was absolutely the preservation of knowledge, to the point where I've wondered if his conversion was a play to exploit the monastery as a means of preservation. As for how science works, I didnt get that myself? I thought the book seemed to indicate Thon Thaddeo was working towards science already, and the monastery just sped things along. I didn't really get your comments about AC or random doodads. There's a certain sadness in the monk dying to preserve a blueprint, but Thaddeo marvels over complex equations preserved in the documents. The monks didn't know what they were handling, especially with the blueprint fumble, but they preserved it all as best they could, from less useful blueprints to more relevant things. And they struggled for it in post apocalypse anti intellectual period. For a long while it was thankless, perhaps even dangerous to proclaim their work, but they keep at it. Then Thon Thaddeo comes in and they argue about how that technology should be used. We see how science is used for bad things later in the book, we see how they worried the monastery would become a military base. It's secular power pushing against the church as states grew more powerful, in contrast with the abbeys preserving the light of civilization before. I think it's interesting how the monks keep the same mission even as the secular world gladly walks the path to its second destruction. I think a big point is man's depraved violent nature. The initial monk dies due to banditry while on religious travels (not an absurd thought in medieval ish times), while the others die to increasingly massive things. Mundane and then nuclear war, started by men. The euthansia is absolutely a brutal part (the Catholic stance is that deliberately killing is bad, although pain medication can and should be used) but part of it is that it's government orders. Instead of making the crime impossible, they tried to mitigate the consequences. It's like the absurdity of duck and cover drills when the government could, you know, try not to get nuked? It's an inarguably depressing book, I will admit, but it seems to point at something divine outlasting the secular world. The monks getting away wipe the dust off their sandals, referencing Christ telling the apostles to do so if a town rejected them. The monk says thus passes the world, as if highlighting how the violent cycle continues, but perhaps builds toward the end of days. But eh, my thoughts. It's a great book and I'm glad people are thinking about it. Also an inspiration for the After the End Crusader Kings mods, which are real fun.
i also noticed when she said that nobody would want to make the dangerous journey to the abbey when they could just do their own experiments, and i wanted to point out that, yes indeed thon taddeo did not want to make that journey. his initial request was for the monks themselves to send their books to him instead. the monks declined to do that of course, and only then did thon taddeo impose on his powerful family connection to a certain warlord, to obtain the protective escort he needed for the journey. and of course that warlord was more interested in surveying the abbey as a prospective military fortification, than he was in any books that might be there. thon taddeo himself said he didn't expect the monks to have much of consequence. he was stunned and offended to find how much deeply significant information they had- stunned that he had wasted so much effort on his own investigations, and deeply offended that this monks had so presumptuously kept all this information hidden in the desert, away from him. he was kind of a dick.
Still my favorite syfy book, i can absolutely see that ending, with the priests, and the children seeing the horizon lit a flame, rushing away and seeing the world bathed in fire again
I would compare and contrast the Canticle for Liebowitz with Asimov's Foundation series, or at least the first few books (the only ones I've read as of writing this comment). Both are themed with civilizational falls (vis-a-vis the "fall" of Rome and the threat of nuclear annihilation) and the work of specific organizations to retain knowledge for the future, and both are structured with short stories that highlight the overarching plot. Asimov's focus seems to rest on repudiating the Great Man theory of history in favor of a dialectical materialism.
I'm 2 yrs older than the book. The first time I read it was for a college class called Religious Themes in Science Fiction. I love religion in sf. Watching you climb through the ins and outs was entertaining and enlightening. I'm a retired United Methodist pastor, so I didn't find the churchy details confusing, but I can see why you might have. Thank you very much for your dedication to your calling among the books. If I can be of any help theologically, please let me know.
I think we do not understand or appreciate how much what we have today is based on a fairly unstable tower of interrelated systems. Once the underlying bricks are kicked out from underneath, building back up will require more than we expect.
You could have made it clearer that the monks don't understand what they're copying; this is very like monasteries in the dark ages where often the monk copyists didn't speak or read the languages of the texts they were copying. There were simply not enough Latin and Greek speakers. They were copying the letters - which they knew - but sometimes they might not realise they had accidentally transposed a "un" into a "mi".
The book reflects the ideas of either Oswald Spengler or (more probably of an English language writer) Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee's A Study of History enjoyed a brief period of success in the 1950s before plunging into the deepest unfashionability. Deducing or imposing a single model on the whole of human history over 12 volumes is an act offensive to scientific sensibilities, but for this exact reason I can recommend at least looking into the ideas and reading some chunks of the work as a whole. Was Toynbee a nutcase? A man whose religious sensibility overwhelmed his academic judgement? Is there any truth to his model? Can we even have models of history? Or is the work best understood more as a challenge to our reason as applied to human societies? Edward Skidelsky wrote a book called Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture that tied more disparate threads together in my mind than any other book I've read. Toynbee's motivations were likely similar to those of Cassirer, a man whose philosophical project failed but for the best reasons and, instead of coming up with superior alternatives, scholars since have instead skirted the central issues. At question is whether humanity can hope for progress on the basis of shared reason. Thomas Mann addressed the same issues, especially in The Magic Mountain, and contemporary scholar Mark Lilla is a fine guide. In Toynbee's time, the grand ambitions of the enlightenment were unravelling. Because the project has now been abandoned, it's impossible to make sense of the world on the basis of anything anybody argues. To even begin to do this, it's necessary to consider the questions that are avoided in contemporary culture, as well as why they're ignored. Cassirer addressed these questions directly, and Toynbee and Mann did so more obliquely. In so far as they represented a civilisational ambition that ambition failed but the aims were surely necessary.
This is a great review. At the risk of sounding melodramatic I was actually shedding a tear by the end of this. "How dare he make us..." think about these matters without telling us exactly what to think and how to feel? Indeed. I've been a huge fan of mid-century SF since I was about 13. Would love to hear your thoughts on another of my favorite novels from that era of literary science fiction - Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination
the question of the book's religion is complicated, but the ways in which it's complicated make sense when you understand the author was the most depressed catholic engineer in the world
The bombing the author participated in was actually the bombing of the abbey at Monte Cassino, which was incredibly controversial at the time. It was (is?) the oldest surviving monestary, and was founded by saint Benedict who is a very popular saint.
The german army had encamped at the most fortifiable position in the area atop a mountain, blocking the allied advance towards Rome. This mountain just so happened to have the abbey as well, which prevented the allies from using more destructive means like bombs or artillery to push the Germans out for fear of damaging it. Fed up with the lack of progress after several weeks, allied leadership used dodgy intel to assume the Germans were using the abbey for military purposes, and thus considered it fair game to bomb. The resulting bombing killed no Germans, just several hundred civilians, and ultimately was utterly useless in pushing back the Germans as the battle of Monte Cassino lasted for months after this.
I can see why it affected him so much tbh, and the theme of the book as you described definitely seems inspired by it!
It was counterproductive. The Germans and the Allies agreed the Abbey was to be demilitarized. The Allies then attacked it (based on dodgy intel), and afterwards the Germans actually moved in. Turns out that the basement was still quite intact and made quite a good defensive position.
As a rule, I don’t think it’s generally a good thing to valorize wars or the people who fight them, but in a war fought by the common people (aka heavy conscription) I have a ton of respect for men like Joe Sarnoski and the Eager Beavers. Bomber crew of a B-17 during the Pacific and island-hopping campaigns. *Twice* the Eager Beavers refused to bomb a geisha performance said to be attended by high-ranking Japanese admirals, instead blowing up first a fuel depot, and then ammo dump. It’s said that Joe stayed up all night poring over maps of Rabaul (the city) and found those targets, which Intelligence had overlooked, just on a really lucky educated guess.
It takes a lot of balls to stand up to your direct boss and say “You’re in the wrong, this is a bad decision, I won’t do what you tell me,” especially in an organization as /brassy/ as the military.
The institution of the monastery was one of the oldest but the one destroyed by the Allies was the 3rd complex built on the site, restored in the 19th century and thus considered a modern fortification. (So the current complex is the 4th.)
Love this book, and I love rereading it.
"Where the f* is Monte Cassino?" - Bill Guarnere, E Company, 506th Paratrooper Battalion
Yup, the preservation of texts by the Catholic church was a real thing that happened. It's also why Ireland ended up known as the "Isle of Saints and Scholars" because of how much a part it played. Many older universities in Europe started as outgrowths of monasteries, often with a heavy Irish presence.
One of the interesting consequences of this is that there's a poem that was written in Old Irish in Germany by an Irish monk about his white cat called "Pangur" that was written into the margins of a commentary on the Aeneid.
The Irish church at that time wasn't RC though, that came later. There was no recognised leadership from Rome or elsewhere. Also, hi Keith, we were in college together (CIT). Nice to see you 20 years later watching this cool channel
Most early universities started as religious academies. As soon as decided to teach lay persons (I guess for profit), they broadened their curriculum to more general subjects, such as astronomy, geography and (what thety then called) physics.
The Venerable Bede reported Irish clergymen teaching English refugees, recovering from plague, how to read and write.
I would only add that the reason so many clerics were scientists back in the day is that nobody else had the time, nor resources for it. As much as a Church is a reactionary, progress-retarding entity, historically the Catholic Church boasted a bunch of science pioneers.
See "How The Irish Saved Civilization" by Thomas Cahill
This video made me realize that this book is a major inspiration for the Brotherhood of Steel in the Fallout games which is very cool.
Oh definitely!
@@davidhays2846 bc we who read it knew
@@davidhays2846 word bruh we just got a Fallout show lmao
I just went from listening to the Canticle for Leibowitz archival adaptation on the NPR archives (my introduction to the book was listening to this as a freshman at Roger Bacon High School in Cincinnati) to watching "Fallout". I never played the game, but that series is absolute metal. Cooper THE Ghoul and the killer axolotls...damn. "I'm not torturing you, I'm fishing." ☠️🥶
And the followers of the apocalypse
“This made more angrier than any other book. Go read it.” is high praise
Regarding the Abbot's actions: He's acting on the Catholic teaching that euthanasia is equal to murder, so from his perspective he is trying to prevent the murder (of both the mother and the child). When he goes to confession and feels guilty it has more to do with the fact that he punched the doctor who had lied to him about whether they would practice euthanasia.
The Catholic Church has never supported Euthanasia. In the 1950s, the practice had a stronger association with Nazi Germany than it does today. The biggest public clash between the German Church and the Nazis was precisely over their institution of mass euthanasia programs in 1939-40. There was even a Nazi propaganda film called "Ich klage an" that argued for a right to die. Support for euthanasia in the US was at a low mark in the 1950s (see Gallup opinion polling). Miller likely meant for the abbot to be seen as a sympathetic character in the mercy killing dynamic. The scene is probably meant to highlight the suffering of nuclear war, depict a Church-state conflict with the Church getting steamrolled by the force of government, and in a dark sarcastic way point out the "sanitary" and hypocritical "mercy" of a government that starts a nuclear war and alleviates the great suffering they caused people by killing them--because they have unleashed something they cannot fix. The fact that modern readers have such a visceral reaction against the abbot speaks to the massive shift the last 60 years have brought in the way Americans think about those issues.
Calling the Eucharist the "you're a Christ" is hilariously incorrect, but extremely apt.
I heard it as "eurochrist" which is even funnier
@@NotaWalrus1Ur-Christ
Also Canticles does intrinsically sound rude, as in, 'With no regard to the Queensbury Rules he tried to grab my Canticles'.
I'm not one for blasphemy but...
Urichrist, now with demonic prevention
Part of the point of the storing of documents method is that they had no context to know what would or wouldn't be valuable, and the documents that survived would be more or less random because of the nuclear war and the actions of the Simpletons. There would be know basis to be able to prioritize one document over another, so the only way to hedge bets is to preserve and duplicate everything you find. It might one day be the thing that is important.
This is meant to broadly follow the notion that this is how more advanced math, science, and philosophy eventually were rediscovered in the Middle Ages of Europe, because monks had been preserving ancient Greek and Roman texts. Thomas Aquinas is famous for having combined knowledge of these Catholic preserved texts with those of translations of Arabic texts acquired in Spain after its reconquest from the Moors by Charlemagne and later Ferdinand and Isabella. There is of course plenty to dispute that Aquinas was solely responsible for technological progress in Europe, as lots of things were already moving forward at that time in a lot of parallel ways, but this was the consensus of this story in the '50s.
As an ex-Catholic physics nerd in college, I loved this book when I read it, on the recommendation of a friend who's Latin teacher had her class read it lol
I haven't read the book, but it seems odd that over the timespan of the plot, seemingly no-one would actually read or attempt to understand and make any real use of the information in the books that are being archived. Having said that, some years ago a Dominican Monastery in Europe sold some of its 1600's era library consisting of scholastic works from the Monks at the time. So I'm the proud owner of a few 400+ year old handmade, hand "printed" and ornately decorated books and I can't understand a word because they're in Latin in a typestyle that makes your eyes bleed... now really nothing more than conversation pieces.
@@rreiter take pictures of the pages and feed them to OCR and translation software, ChatGPT can likely do both and then also give you a short summary.
AI powered analysis of historical manuscript is actually a big field within history nowadays.
@@alakazam15 Not a bad idea, thanks, maybe I'll do that over the winter as a hobby!
I agree with your general idea that science would survive through the future, but I also think that's you thinking as a physicist, not a historian. Before the industrial revolution, there was no expectation of the future being different or more advanced than the present. Our culture has ingrained the idea that technology progresses into us, but it took approx 3 million years to go from stone tools to bronze tools. Then another 2000 years to go from bronze tools to iron. Humanity more or less used the same technology (bloomery/crucible steel) to make purified iron and steel for the next ~1900 years. It was only with the bessmer process in the mid 1800s that we developed a method of making steel that was cheap and reliable. The exponential growth of the last couple of centuries is not the norm if you consider all of history. So I'm not entirely sure if it's unrealistic for humanity to stagnate and lose a lot of knowledge, especially if there's no easy to find coal to kickstart the industrial revolution. I don't think 1200 years to go from nothing to a light bulb is that crazy. Especially since our culture has no real oral tradition, I think it would be hard to instill one in time to save important information.
Well said. It's refreshing to read comments which disagree, but respectfully, and further the discussion. Your comment did both.
Came here to bring up a similar point - and you made it better than I would have. 100% agree. Our current pace of technological change is absolutely incomprehensible to people from 100 years ago, let alone 600 or 1200 years ago.
Even if we just count modern humans and ignore our precursors, it took from 190,000 BCE to 1602 to invent the scientific method. So we've had "science" as a concept for a total of 0.2% of our time on earth. In a society that had to rebuild from "scratch" without access to all of the easy surface resources we've already tapped it's not hard to believe they wouldn't get there for a very, very long time.
What if a lack of progress was deliberate? What if progress was discerned as creating such a large surplus that society would split along the lines of those who administered the surplus and those that produced it. What if the state ‘visited', or haunted ‘primitive’ societies’ as the ghost of/in a time of surplus future? The fear may be the group loses control to ever larger abstraction led groups.
It’s hard to ‘explain’ such human epochs as other than millennia of ‘no thanks’: After all, their cognitive abilities would be the same of ours.
@@alexsidney4796 No, it was a lack of built up knowledge, especially knowledge about how to learn more about the world. We have advantages they couldn't dream of, which are enabled by the high degree of specialization in our workforce (and how productive our crops are in comparison to the past). It's pretty hard to develop transistors when half your population is farming all day. And you have to consider how much larger our population is. Anything we discover is only possible because they gave us the basis. They didn't have anyone to do that for them. Humans have always been the same, and they will do a lot of work to make their lives a little easier. We just have the resources to expend so much more on development of new ideas.
I was nine when A Canticle for Leibowitz was published. We had bomb drills where we ran out into the desert schoolyard, knelt and covered our heads because the blast would tear down our lightly-built schoolrooms. Dark doesn’t begin to get it.
One of my all-time favorites!
I think the middle part of the book definitely raises the most complicated questions of all of them. To me, the most interesting one is raised by the secular scholar (sorry, it's been a while, names are hard!) who theorizes that the pre-apocalypse civilization was created by something other than humans. This is challenged by the monks, who say it goes against both the evidence and Catholic doctrine, and that the scholar's theory is motivated by his own pride. It comes back around in the third part - the second head of the woman is denied baptism, but offers the priest absolution at the end. She's something other than human, maybe better than human. Humans destroyed the world *again* - can the ones who escaped to space be trusted to not destroy themselves again again?
I think the book is the result of the author wrestling with the question of human nature. Like you say, science is discovered and rediscovered. It's constant, objective, universal. Is the same true of human nature, or the soul? We blew ourselves up once - will we blow ourselves up over and over, as soon as we rediscover atomic theory and build nuclear weapons each time?
I really love this book, so I'm happy you like it. I hope we can get reviews of the others!
It is CRAZY hearing a review of this book from a non-Christian. It’s not a bad thing and I think you picked up on some of the points of this book but I also think a few of the most major points went right over your head unintentionally. Great video, definitely a different reading experience when you read the book from the vantage point of a Christian and not strictly just a more scientific point of view
"The buzzards laid their eggs in season and lovingly fed their young. The Earth had nourished them bountifully for centuries and she would nourish them still" brings me back to this book whenever im stressed by big changes.
I read Canticle for a college sci fi literature course way back in the 90s, and it left a huge impression on me. I've never forgotten the emotional effect it had on me. A classic of the genre, in all its bittersweet glory!
The class discussion in that course came down to a mixture of nihilism and hope, the endless cycle of human creativity and stupidity and how the interplay between those aspects of our nature drive our repetition of our mistakes, no matter how much we say we want to learn from the past so we dont repeat it...but we always seem doomed to that depressing repetition. I guess, given all that, it's not surprising Miller committed suicide.
Yes, that's the exact message of the book.
@@user-yz7sr6od1x then I guess Miller achieved his goal, and so did the class! 😁
The thought of illuminated schematics and circuit diagrams still makes me smile
Yeah. It's exactly what a naive copyist would do. I really like the bit about slavishly copying the negative print only to later realize that the negative impression was an artifact of reproduction and of no significance to the information in the document.
4:04 I think it would be funny if we later learned that the schematics were for one of those Robosapien kids toys or something. They build the robot in the hope that it will provide some kind of ancient wisdom or help repair society and instead it just starts dancing.
For Catholicism, suicide is a mortal sin and the priest was fighting to prevent that from happening. From his perspective the suffering in this life is worth the preservation of your reward in the next.
She mentions in the video telling stories to inform later generations n they might not understand it. Sure it's a "sin" but it's also a good tool to stop humanity from giving up, even in the worst of times i think that's the bigger picture, even if the priest didn't know
Which is yet another reason why no intelligent person should ever be religious. Pure insanity and delusion.
There is also an enduring cult of suffering in the Catholic Church. Some of the faithful belief that suffering brings people closer to Christ because through their suffering they relate to His suffering on the cross and to take away that suffering is "anti-Christ" and denies people a way to religious epiphany. It manifests as harmless fasting on Lent or wearing a painful cilice or in extreme cases denying pain relief to others as St. Mother Teresa purportedly did. To quote her "There is something beautiful in seeing the pour accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering."
The author eventually committed suicide. He had converted to Catholicism soon after service in WWII. So that scene is more meaningful, and sad
@uzul42 we believe in redemptive suffering. It's not the suffering itself, but offering up our suffering.
I just turned 60. I grew up during the height of the Cold war. It's really hard to explain the mindset of living during the Cold war. There was a level of Hope and despair and it was low-grade despair it. The question was "are we doomed to repeat ourselves?"
I was born in 1949. Growing up in the 1950s/1960s was living in the shadow of nuclear annihilation and also the times that are looked upon fondly as somehow uncomplicated and innocent. Notable films of the early sixties such as Fail Safe and On The Beach (50s) reveal this.
This mindset is prevalent at every point in human history.
A question asked by many, including James Thurber in "The Last Flower."
As a former catholic, I understood Miller's issues every time I read this book. 8 times. He questions faith, and humanity's goodness. Suicide and despair was apparently his answer. Not mine. Great book, it's sort of ageless.
I'm sorry for you. But how did you get despair and suicide as an answer in the book?
@@chase6579 the answer in the author's real life, is what he's saying.
Glad you read Canticle - as an atheist from a Catholic background who loves postapocalypses I always hugely enjoyed it.
Edit: There are passages with Thon Taddeo where it's somewhat clear that he has been doing empirical science and is looking for prewar texts to try to help connect some of the dots and locate info on advanced subjects beyond current experimental reach.
Exactly! I only listened to the audio book. I generally get less from an audio book than by actual reading. Nonetheless, I clearly remembered that the scientist had already done independent research. If I recall correctly, the brother who built the dynamo and arc lamp relied largely on information from Thon Taddeo. So I didn't understand Angela's reaction saying something like, "that's not how science actually works."
One of the common theories about "the old guy" who keeps turning up in the various chapters, is that he was the Wandering Jew, a figure who started appearing in stories during the Middle Ages.
Ive always wondered about this
I paused your video on your recommendation to go and read the book which I knew nothing about. My impression while experiencing the book was that the author was struggling personally with the themes depicted and that the science fiction genre was the most convenient way to frame the questions of death and self-inflicted, large-scale destruction. I also had no idea that the author had committed suicide, but given the book’s ending, it was not surprising but was saddened to realize that he was unable to resolve his apparently very intense emotional conflict.
Please look at the history of print making. When I took my SF Literature class in University (B.A. English Literature, State School) we did this whole activity about book binding. I also took a history of print from the same professor, and the history of printing in Europe IS the history of the church. Although the two weren't bound together, much of the history of science can be traced back to seminaries, monasteries, and nunneries. I also want to say, You can look up a shit ton of articles on Miller! That book won a Hugo and a Nebula award, and you can easily find an interview via letters in Analog Magazine. There's also a lot of stuff about Miller we get from his children, including a SINGULAR plot that takes place in between the events of this book! Also there's so much Christian mythology and allusions in yhe book cause Miller was DEEPLY religious. There's the wandering jew, a satire of William of Occam, a satire on Abalard, and the whole "6 months to work on a manuscript" is straight up just like, Miller transferring the ordering of manuscripts in 1400s Europe. Okay hope any of that was helpful sorry if that was annoying
None of that was annoying. Having read the book for school myself--and having my own take that may or may not be 'right'--I nonetheless found this video to be EXTREMELY uninformed about practically everything regarding the Church, the reasons behind wanting to collect/store ancient documents, or even the development of science and technology.
Your comment was pretty informative.
"the two weren't bound together" I see what you did there.
Also, nice comment.
The church monopolized science and burnt anyone at the stake who dared be a scientist without also being Catholic. Science is and always has been worse off and slower because of the Catholic church. Whatever benefits the church had brought to science is incidental and much less than what science would have accomplished if the church didn’t exist.
He did appear to lose his faith at the end of his life.
I also found "A Canticle for Liebowitz" one of the most brilliant Sci-Fi stories I have ever read.
The wooden statue of martyred leibowitz was my favorite recurring character.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
That familiar grin.
I read this book shortly after I finished graduate school. While you come at this from the perspective of a physicist, my training was in anthropology and archaeology and I had no problem with the development of religion and science in this book, it all seemed to track as a possible post-nuclear development. You are correct that science doesn't develop this way in our current culture, but in a culture developing after a devastating war that some might see as caused by technological development, I could see things going along this trajectory (obviously, without such a war, we will never really know).
I don't know what the author's view on religion was at this point, but I took it to be very ambivalent while reading the book. On the one hand, the Catholic church has actually preserved a lot of information, on the other hand, the church has also suppressed information, and just sat on a lot of information without suppressing it or actively sharing it. Similarly, while the Catholic Church has done a lot to help alleviate suffering through it's various medical missions, it's adherence to dogma has also caused or at least allowed a lot of suffering to continue (it's opposition to condom use even in areas with high rates of HIV infection comes immediately to mind). I suspect that the author was struck by this ambivalent nature and was trying to explore it in his writing, not necessarily trying to reach a specific conclusion or push the reader in a particular direction.
what he said
I think this author is modeling his time frames based around the real world time frames of mathematical and scientific knowledge being post western Roman Empire falling.
There is another real world reason someone in the 50s would do this, is back then they tended to underestimate the technological level of the middle ages in Europe (the referred to as the dark ages).
However I think you vastly underestimate how long it would take to rebuild after a catastrophe. All the stuff you mention in this book is heavily based on things people did for hundreds of years. The priest traveling hundreds of miles and facing banditry and being pointlessly killed is something that's been repeated a billion times across the world for explicitly religious motivations over things that today we would call equally pointless. You can say "why would people do this" but that's exactly what happened with the catholic church.
The Vatican today has a basement filled with literal thousands of years of letters and correspondences between clergy and other saintly figures which may never ever see the light of day. The Vatican is a huge source for letters and stuff between figures like the Pope and Genghis Khan. Or diaries from missionaries who made contact with Buddhists in the 1200s.
I don't think it would take AS long as the author puts forward, because I think ideas like the scientific method would linger, and mean people start civilization up faster than 1200 years, but on the other hand, a nuclear catastrophe could be way worse than anything that's come before so who knows. But imo if catholicism survives then a concept like capitalism or the scientific method would survive. Not saying capitalism surviving would be good, but I think it would result in imperialist colonialist societies which would expand faster than feudal tribes.
If I were writing it, I'd compress his timeline to 600-800 years but I absolutley stand by the idea people would treat documents which seem trivial to us now with reverence because they don't understand them. So many Greek and Roman letters survived to the modern day this way.
From what you describe about the man, it sounds like to me is a believer in divine provedence.
Tolkien believed in divine provedence. That things would happen which coincidently would play out according to a divine plan. Like the fellowship saving Gollum and him being the reason the ring is thrown away.
That being said, that ending is bleak as hell. And I suspect that's also rooted in the catholic belief in the broken nature of mankind due to original sin. Mankind is doomed to make certain mistakes and will only see redemption through christ. Mankind in their earthly state are incomplete/naturally evil beings, and they can only be reedeemed/made whole through christ.
I went to catholic school as a kid.
EDIT: I also want to add because I thought of this afterwards. He is clearly a believer in what is called the "Cyclical view of history". Its a philosophy which essentially amounts to history is not a linear progression from one state of "civilizedness" to the next. But it is a graph more like a Stock Market with highs and lows. This view can be a bias(especially the idea that "civilizedness" is one distinct quantity), just as the opposite view can be too and I think it clearly informs his writing. But in particular Catholic scholars have always had affinity to this view. It was also MASSIVLEY in resurgance for the generation of people who lived through WW1 and eventually saw nuclear weapons come into existance in their lifetime.
To be fair, I think some ancient Roman letters are incredibly valuable and worth preserving, just as any random messenger or forum chat will be seen in a thousand years. There's just something about people trying to connect to one another, trying to fulfill their needs or share something and still being seen and unnderstood way outside of the scope they could imagine is cool.
But if there is a work written by Euclides about math, I wouldn't want it to rot on some forgotten shelf for thousands of years: I'd wish that it was discovered sooner, preserved, studied, disseminated and built upon.
I believe that depending on the technologies and the society in place, the amount of time to recover from a given catastrophe may vary. While we have some contingencies and vaults in case of the worst, we don't shape our entire society around the post-apoc recovery efforts. I want to hope that the more advanced we become, the more resilient we become and the more decentralized we become, the more of our knowledge we can store in more places with less effort. The entire sum of our books, patents and communication can fit on an obtainable storage device, but it's not enough. Technology is not just blueprints, not just textbooks: it's also people, the experience that can only be transferred through working together solving real day to day problems, it's the logistics, it's economic possibility and incentives. Lose the people, lose the culture, lose the logistics, lose the feasibility and technology may easily become a curiosity unable to compete with something much simpler and cheaper to produce in its current socio-economic environment. There has to be place for the science within that culture.
P.S. If we could measure our progress in the collapses, that didn't happen because we moved past them or the collapses that shook, but didn't destroy us, we would've, but it's hard to see the what ifs, that never happened.
I hope the Vatican is copying all those old letters. I mean copying them digitally. Maybe putting some of them online somewhere.
Liebowitz wasn't just saving blueprints he was saving books of knowledge from the book burning. And when Francis pleads to his muggers to take the copy and leave him the original Relic they misunderstand which is which and refuse. Because his copy is beautiful and the original blueprint schematic looks crude and worthless to them. while he's upset that his work of 12 Years is lost he does get to bring the original that he asked to keep.
Great video! heap thank you, much appreciated! A Canticle for Leibowitz is actually not about science, but about worldviews and the practical effects/consequences of those worldviews. I'd say if any science is involved here it's cultural and social anthropology. What Miller was describing is a situation that was very real at the time, where groups of people in islands in the pacific created what anthropologist called "cargo cults". This was big (scientific) news in the 50's. That's what the book is about.
The islanders didn't have much contact with the "modern" world but saw the planes flying above passing to deliver cargo or bombs somewhere else. "Cargo", which arrived with these planes - by serendipity or because the belligerents had stationed lookouts on the islands. After the war all that disappeared and in places a new religion developed around those planes that would come back and deliver "cargo", the good stuff. It's the development of a creation myth/story that's not uncommon around the world, a deliverance, a going back to a golden age.
Miller uses this deliberately to tell a story about his conmtemporary world and its affairs. As you say, the possibility of a nuclear WW3 was very much around and palpable. And as you say, he uses the Catholic church in a parallel to the story of the medieval libraries and copyists - he probably thought the Catholic church managed to survive through a couple of thousand years of upheaval, it probably would be the one to survive this nu cataclysm several hundred years on. He doesn't mean that it necessarily is the same Catholic church, it just has the name and general trappings for making it relatable to contemporary readers, and it also involves a kind of backhanded praise of it: yes, they will be (again? kinda, sorta) the repositories of knowledge from where a rebirth, a renaissance will arise. And criticism: they were also serious loonies among them, and the church it's gonna church, and if you don't toe the line, it's gonna church you too.
Edit: the Fallout game uses quite a bit of that fifties worldview and the Canticle in it's univierse
girl I feel sEEEEEEEEEEEN.
Your feelings exactly reflect mine from when I was a teenager and the nice man at Barnes and Noble *insisted* to me and my mom that I needed to read this book.
It has been a while since I read this book but I didnt take it as trying to make a coherent argument about the value of religion or science specifically. I took it to be a call to reflect on whether man's intellect exceeds his wisdom, whether we actually learn from the past or are too self centered and short sighted, whether self destruction is an instrisic part of man's nature. The last point being a very heavy question Miller obviously grappled with in his own life being a ptsd survivor and contemplating suicide.
I read this book at the same time as Slaughterhouse Five and think its an excellent companion piece as a book about an author grappling with their ptsd.
I'm glad you read this and made a video about it. More people need to know about A Canticle For Leibowitz because as you say, it is a book that makes you think about some very uncomfortable assumptions. I made a video on my reading experience a while ago and after several readings I still have not come to any definite answers but I have definitely spent a lot of time thinking about it. Also, the vulture paragraph at the end of the first story is an absolute masterclass in despair and poignancy. Thanks for talking about this!
Another book from about the same period that deals with the loss of civilization and the questions of preservation for the sake of it vs. finding a new path for humanity is The Earth Abides. The book The Postman also goes roughly in that direction as well (the movie is decent, but the book is so much more). Then there's Lucifer's Hammer and Battlefield Earth (the book, not the horrid movie). So many good aftermath stories out there that in their journey ask similar questions about what we could or should save of our society. Or if we can at all.
Earth Abides was my dad's favorite book and I've read it more times than I can count.
It definitely belongs on any thoughtful sci fi-fan's 'must read' list.
As someone who was brought up Catholic it sounds like the book is exploring a crisis of faith. So is it god's plan or human actions which are determining the outcome.
Also a monastery is where monks live, if the head monk is an abbot then it's an abbey, the monastery might have a church as part of it but even if it doesn't the monastery is part of The Church.
I recommend the brother Cadfael mysteries, I couldn't get into the books but the tv series staring Derick Jackobi is very good. It's about a 12 century Benedictine monk who moonlights as a forensics officer for the local Sheriff during a civil war.
I had the feeling that that Miller, by the third part, was conflicted about his own relationship to the church for reasons I don't know, but I've seen in other RCs as life becomes less and less comprehensible through some nebulous lens of faith, and more like All Quiet on the Western Front.
As Science Fiction goes, it's the softest of soft SF - as you say, none of it works that way. However, as a framework for a pretty strong meditation on futility and cruelty "in nomine Dei' it works really well.
They were grabbing everything because they didn't know what was important.
At 1:30: you are probably thinking of Isidore of Seville, a chalcedonian (basically Catholicism before the schism of 1054 ) clergyman that collected knowledge from Antiquity and whose works had major influences on the Middle-Ages understanding of classical works. He is sometimes said to have written one of the first encyclopedias and has for this reason been made saint patron of the Internet.
I read this book like 30 years ago and I always thought it was blueprints for things or documents , but they remained ignorant or chose to be ignorant of the documents. Or couldn't understand what the documents were so they might have had something really useful but just absolutely no idea what the document was that they had.
We need to know what the other eight classic scifi books you've read so far this year are though 👀
One of them is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham.
i'm patiently waiting for Angela to bring up Dune... does anyone know if she has? 😭
Ok I stopped at 2:17 because now I want to read this book. So far it sounds a lot like what monks did during the dark ages - they collected literature of all kinds and made copies, to preserve them. Because monasteries are generally secluded, these copies survived through the dark ages; there are even some books that we would not have today if not for monks.
Which is fascinating to compare with the Middle East, where they were collecting and transcribing and translating heathen classics in quantities the Europeans couldn't even imagine. The reason we have so much ancient knowledge is because of preservation efforts by the new Arab caliphates (i.e. the House of Wisdom) and the rescue of these documents before the siege of Baghdad by the Mongols.
Hence, not a Dark Age at all, only dark in Europe. It was actually a Golden Age for learning. And hence the famous quote: "If it was dark, it was the darkness of the womb." - Lynn White
And Canticle remains a masterpiece almost 70 years later...
@@e.matthewswell said!
@@e.matthews Nice reference to the myth of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment which Europe and the West tell themselves.
@@UnMoored_ Hmmm. They're not myths, but they sure are narratives. It's clear that Islamic and Jewish scholars were discovering things as much as 400+ years before their European counterparts, and it's clear that they were likewise rediscovering things their Greek and Roman counterparts knew a thousand years before.
While the preservation efforts of medieval monks may seem paltry in comparison to the Abbasids, by the Almohads this was just not the case. We owe a lot to the Enlightenment, as we do to the Muslim and Jewish scholars who preceded them, and to the philosophers of Antiquity too!
A Canticle for Leibowitz is literally my favorite book and youre one of my new favorite youtubers, so this is a match made in heaven
I'm delighted that you enjoyed and endorsed the book on your channel. I came across Canticle last year, and it stood out as my favorite read of 2023.
I read this book when I was 17, and now I’m nearly 64. It’s still my favourite book. So I’m biased, I guess. I’m a scientist, and an atheist. The details of whether Miller captures the scientific process “correctly” , or whether he captures religious doctrine “correctly” simply is not the point. He captures what it is to be human, as an individual or as part of various social constructs. He captures our fragility. He captures our arrogance and idiocy. He captures our smallness in the face of eternity. The fact that the book has affected you is the point. The fact that it has drawn your attention to just how close we stand to the edge of the precipice is the point. In half a century we have grown complacent about nuclear annihilation, and right now we have the spectre of it waved in our faces by a calculating populist. Science cannot easily recover everything we have learned from barbarism, and we assume that at our peril. Maybe that’s the gospel of Leibowitz.
This book is one of, if not my absolute, favorite pieces of literature ever. I read it as a teenager craving post-apocalyptic media after becoming engrossed by the Fallout franchise and it was formative in developing my stances on war, my view of reactionary violence, how education has more to teach us than rote recitation of formulas, dates, and names. I am glad I read it at such a formative age, where I could handle both the complex messages and the gruesome world depicted.
I have read it at several points in my life, each time taking new lessons from the text. When I was deciding what I wanted to study in college, when I was an undergraduate physics major, when I was a new physics graduate student, each time there was more to glean. I am about to finish my PhD in Nuclear and Particle Physics; the relationship between the plot of this novel, the context of its creation, and the history of my field of study are completely intertwined and makes me take pause sometimes. I constantly find myself actively balancing learning from the pioneers of my field with out putting them on a pedastal, being concious about the moral ramifications of how/where I use my knowledge, and how I can encpurage people to see education as a net positive for society instead of a pipeline to industry.
In 1944 (WWII) Miller saw the abbey of Monte Cassino, Italy bombed into rubble because Germans were using it as a base. It was over 1400 years old. This traumatized Miller, who was Catholic, and started him thinking about what was right and wrong, what values were important, etc. The issue with the baby deals with absolutes. Are there things it is always wrong to do? Is life so sacred you should never take it no matter what? If there are no absolutes, when is a generally wrong thing the right thing to do? These are tough moral questions without clear answers. Miller was asking us to think about them.
Very good video. This sounds really thought provoking. I feel like the point might not have been to show science being like a religion, but to contrast dark ages style religion with modern science's epistemology. I think about John Dee spending years trying to talk to angels just to help him decode something called The Book of Soyga, or Abramelin the Mage secluding himself underground for 18 months claiming it was part of some magic ritual, or how weird it is that the Catholic Church sought to preserve the Greek writings despite so much of it really being opposed to church teaching. Like I wonder if there was ever internal pressure to remove all the gay stuff from Plato's writings for example, and they still kept it in. There are even some scholarly arguments that parts of the Bible change dialects in hebrew, implying parts were added later in transcription, as copying errors, which implies that a lot of the people transcribing the texts didn't really understand them. Is that true? I don't know. Were the early mathematical manuscripts only preserved due to oversight? I can't imagine Galileo or Euler making the same progress without there being cultural awareness of Archimedes and Euclid, but I got the impression that the church of their time was more interested in occultists like Agrippa or Paracelsus. Sorry if this is slightly rambly. I'll have to read this book. Thank you for the recommendation. I always enjoy your videos.
If you're interested in the question of the medieval Church's attitude towards "gay stuff," I highly recommend Dr. Eleanor Janega's writings on her blog, "Going Medieval." To summarize, while they thought "gay stuff" was sinful, their attitude was actually much more nuanced and contextual than you might think from a lot of modern Christian homophobia.
Ancient Rome had steam powered machines in a primitive sense, there were also mechanical calendar calculators (giving models of the Helio (Sun)centric solar system, showing the phases of the moon and times of solar and lunar eclipses) called the Atrikeyea Mechanism over 2000 years ago. Democritus around 6-3rd centuries BCE came up with the ideas of atoms, literally coined the term atom. Who knows what could have happened if the Roman Empire never fell? A possible industrial revolution 1500 years earlier than the one we got?
i think it's a good question to ask why something like our modern science movement, of the last 500 years or so, only happened after literally thousands of years of preceding human history in which not a whole lot changed. maybe it was just luck that the right circumstances came together where and when they did. under slightly different circumstances it might never yet have happened at all
Only half of Rome fell. If we didn't have an industrial revolution in Constantinople than why would there be one anywhere else?
as a Catholic, I think one of the crucial things you're missing out on is the idea that we believe that we have a divinely led church made entirely from fallible, sinful people, who are guaranteed to make mistakes and miss the point - but that God will keep saving the human race through one strange way or another, regardless of the individual wins and losses we experience. He Himself mourns the times where we miss the message, but there's always going to be good with the bad.
Re. your comments about the time this was written - in the grade school I attended we had weekly duck-and-cover drills where we children crouched under our desks with our arms wrapped over our heads. This was supposed to protect us when a nuclear bomb was detonated over nearby Detroit. Imagine two decades of living through the COVID pandemic to get an idea of what life was like.
For me, I will always think about the poet in 'Fiat Lux', the way he lived a selfish, self centered life, yet he died because he tired to rescue someone who was being slaughtered. He and the vultures are the central characters of the book.
And, you are right. A Canticle of Leibowitz. is one of the finest books ever written.
Yeah that's not how science is done, it's actively being stifled. That's part of the point
it's a post-apocalyptic saga talking about the rebuilding and redestruction of civilization. It talks about relations between science fiction and religion, with a redo of the history of the church and the past 1800 years of history. Fiat Homo is roughly 11th century AD/CE (Medieval, Premodernity), Fiat Lux is 17th century AD/CE (Rennaisance/Enlightenment, Modernity) and Fiat Voluntas Tua makes it roughly a future (from 1960s) around the 23rd century AD/CE (Future Space/Atomic Age, Postmodernity). Its also some magical realism with the Wandering Jew, is a rehash of historical fiction, and its in ways a retelling of history. Brother Joshua leading the Catholic Church into the Stars, is a nod to Yeshua/Jesus leading the Jewish church into Rome (give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and God what is God's). Joshua is literally a modern day pronunciation of Jesus's actual name. There have also been films and books about how the United States of America is basically the modern day Roman Empire, particularly through films by Denys Arcand (The Decline of the American Empire (1986), Jesus of Montreal (1989), The Barbarian Invasions (2003), Days of Darkness (Dark Ages) (2007), and The Fall of the American Empire (2018)).
I love these book reviews, Angela. Please keep them up!🙏
It’s been a long time since I read it, but I did manage two or three readthroughs; I plan on picking it back up again now. If I recall correctly, part of the significance of creating an illuminated copy of the blueprint and then witnessing its destruction is because its scientific value is two-fold; the monk knows its ‘true value’ is the information it preserves, not the gold, but the monk was also ignorant; through studying the document, he realized that the blueprint didn’t need to be copied exactly with the valuable blue ink, but went the wrong way in making an illuminated copy rather than in making a printing press. But nevertheless, the information was preserved, although it is a waste of a few more centuries of human effort in preserving the status quo rather than advancing the cause of literacy.
The Catholic Church is often praised for having preserved many classical scientific works, but also criticized because in other cases, works of huge historical value were scraped away to make palimpsests for the propagation of church dogma.
I read A Canticle for Liebowitz as a pre-teen in the early 1960s, and loved it -- it inspired me to write a paper (long since lost) in high school about religion in science fiction . Glad to hear that the novel stands up. Another book from the same era that I would recommend is A Case of Conscience by James Blish.
"The Eurochrist" is a banger name for a disco act.
Clap clap. The robbers thought the original was the one he spent 12 years copying. The blueprints in the 1950's were very simple, it would be very easy to reverse engineer almost anything.
yes i was surprised she didn't mention that. maybe after she's read it another six or seven times like all its fans have
Have you read Anathem by Neal Stephenson? It's starting with a very similar premise (religious-like system for tech/science because tech dangerous) but goes in a radically different way, essentially being a philosophical argument interwoven with a lot of quantum quantum in disguise and a bit of good ol' adventure sci-fi.
I think AC4L reflects a lot of the history of science, of the remnants we have of the past.
Like look at archaeology, at us having a customer complaint from ancient mesopotamia. Or trying to read a bunch of ashes from pompeii.
We dont pick what info we get from the past.the book isnt like.
I didnt know that the author had offed himself.
Sometimes
The side discussions in this book are some of the most important parts. Those side conversations illuminate the meaning you are looking for.
This really comes out in the second and third parts.
In Fiat Lux, when the abbot talks to Benjamin, the old Jew, he has an existential crisis about what the monastery is supposed to be. They preserved knowledge, now they're handing it over to secular scholars. Glad to do the world a favor, but now what are we?
Later, there are extremely rich exchanges between Thon Taddeo and the monks. While the monks are clearly wrapped up in absurdity about certain points, the abbot is clear-eyed about the danger the secular scholars are in. Yes, it's true, they do research because they love the pursuit of truth, but the king can enslave them all to force them to build weapons and do research to increase his power. There is also the monastery's fight to remain independent: the Church gives benefits to the world, but it can't be subordinated to secular power and remain itself.
From Fiat Voluntas Tua: I actually borrowed from the abbot's discussion with the woman with the child at the end when I spoke at my sister's funeral: the world is always progressing toward paradise because of technology and convenience, but we are all the more angry because we never get there.
The abbot, discussing euthanasia with the doctor, says that it becomes a moral problem for states preparing to use nuclear weapons. They're not just preparing to treat inevitable casualties from war, they're preparing to cover up the consequences of their own misdeeds.
The book doesn't sound like it is about how to do science (I have not read the book but I am watching this video) from your description sounds like it is about the nature of record-keeping and archives. A lot of the things happening in that you are describing are straight out of my book history class from my information science degree. You are observing that people are going around from place to place to look at documents and that this is not a good way to learn science. This is because people didn't learn about science this way. This seems to be based on how information was transmitted pre-printing press where manuscripts are produced in monasteries. The reason why people would travel is because manuscripts were produced by hand, so a lot of early copies would have errors in them. A lot of book history is just people traveling from place to place comparing different copies of the same book to create the most "authentic" version. Most book history scholars debate the meaning of this word, and many have theorized that when information is created in this way there can never be one authentic ur-text, but many variant texts. What is the Gospel of Liebowitz? Well it appears to be spreading word of a past that doesn't exist, just like an "authentic" text does not exist.
Archives do not keep every single bit of knowledge, archives keep knowledge that we know is valuable and usable. Just because it is old does not mean it is important. When the scribe is copying a blueprint that they don't understand the value or function of and are not trying to understand the value or function, it is not an act of scholarship: it is an act of faith. Faith that in the future the gospel will be proven right like the rapture. If they were doing scholarship, these documents would have been used to learn from their mistakes, instead these documents became the center of a religion where they uncritically recreate the past that resulted in lost knowledge in the first place. The baby seems to be an allegory about how they have fundamentally been standing in the way of progress the entire time. In the beginning the church was lauded for its foresight in keeping the documents which were supposed to be used for the sake of humanity, but in the end the knowledge was not used for saving humanity and preventing human suffering. Information science is not a theoretical field, but we have one theory that data must be transformed into information, which is then transformed into knowledge. The documents are data, but because if they are not understood they do not become information. If they were understood, they can be analyzed and turned into knowledge, which would be knowledge of the wrongs of the past.
tldr; if we don't learn from past mistakes we are doomed to repeat them.
The preservation of ancient texts by the Catholic Church happened, but is also overstated. They're mostly preserving Aristotelian philosophy and related works like Virgil, and not a whole lot of scientific information. That's mostly preserved and discovered by the Eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empire and medieval Islamic scholars. E.g. European scholars like Avagadro snuck into Islamic schools to learn their advanced math, medicine, and astronomy.
I loved radio dramas growing up (70s/80s) and there was a radio drama adaptation of this book. Mostly I remember the young monk getting killed by the bandits. Having read it as a novel as an adult, I mostly remember the ending of the wild large-scale perspectives of civilizations rising, nuking themselves, gradually rebuilding back into civilization again, nuking themselves again, over and over and over for thousands and thousands of years. Absolutely wild.
"Canticle" reminds me of the luddite war against machines in both "Dune" and in the movie "The Terminator."
The blueprint WAS crucial to experimental redisovery of electromagnetism. The ignorant monks read the title without understanding it, but they note the silly phrase "squirrel cage". That's (in my opinion) almost certainly an intentional reference to the idiomatic but accurate name for the conductor windings of an induction rotor.
The church wouldn't have known that because squirrels were extinct.
Also the reason the young monk went back to work for 12 years was implied to have been his superiors trying to maintain the "sanctity" of this evidence of the sainthood-worthiness of the blueprint's author, who happened to be their patron not-yet-saint. They kept it secret for a lot of years to prove it really was preserved knowledge...i guess instead of demonic influence? I don't know what rigor exactly they were attempting, but it definitely implied patience is a virtue.
But Francis brought the original to New Rome, and his gilded copy was stolen. His first copy (where he duplicated the inverted nature of blueprints) may have survived at the abbey, but I don't think it had anything to do with Kornhoer's arc light, given that it was titled "Transistorized Control System for Unit Six-B", and that Kornhoer figured out how to make it by reading a collection of fragmentary writings and making deductions based on theories/working axioms by Thon Taddeo.
I read it as the original having actual useful information which Francis didn't understand well enough to copy onto his illumination. So the pope was actually right that preserving the original was _more_ valuable. But regardless yeah - the original was studied by the new (new new?) vatican as part of Lebowitz's beatification. It was also studied locally by the higherups doing to the same thing. For real though - this is all just my headcannon. I haven't read this book for a decade.
It was also the monks who actually put it into use - i think in the 2nd short-story-stapling. The visiting secular scholar accused them of holding back secret technology, then the monks yelled at him because two of them literally went blind making this naked electric arc light as a demonstration, which they considered to be pointless. But the scholar hadn't realized that this electricity generating system was actually functional.
(For what it's worth, NPR did a nice audio series of the book. It gets the medieval quality especially very nicely.) It really isn't about science, per se, but human nature and technology, it seems to me.
Over the years every time I've heard Rush's "2112," I've thought of Canticle. I don't know if that's what the band had in mind, but I've just always connected the two.
Another book you may enjoy is Anathem, but it also might make you angry because quantum quantum quantum, but it also plays with idea of cause and effect, multiverses, and how the universe protects itself from the inconsistencies of faster-than-light travel. It is similarly (ostensibly) about monks in a monastery, but is really about science.
Religion, religion never changes!
I read the book because of this video and I found it fascinating and had none of the questions you did while reading it. To me this book wasn’t “how does Science react to the apocalypse” it was “ how does the religion (specifically the Catholic Church) react to the apocalypse.” I never had any religious training so my interpretations of anything religious related is ultimately skin deep but this feels like a thoroughly critical take on human nature. The abbey holding on to inane technical documents didn’t signal to me a “this is how science would preserve itself into the future” it was a “this is how a large, superstitious bureaucratic organization would fumble its way into doing anthropology”. There are comedy channels that do skits parodying this kind of thing that historians do today. If I had to take a stab at the book I’d say the main message is just a cry of despair, a pure scream into the the void at the impossibly large and vast cyclical patterns of human progress and the seemingly inevitable march towards destruction. That last scene to me was an indictment of the church in the way it attempted to hold fast to a strict moral system that was ill equipped to deal with the world it had survived into. That the church was unable to change from one apocalypse to the next all the while lamenting humanity for failing to do that very task was an exceptional piece of irony.
_ACfL_ is a really well known book, for those who liked it but haven't also read _Pavane_ by Keith Roberts. It's alternative history rather than post-apocalyptic, but it deals with many of the same themes. I *highly* recommend it.
For those who don't know, the chapter headings mean: _Fiat homo_ - Let there be man; _Fiat lux_ - Let there be light; _Fiat voluntas tua_ - Let there be whatever you want.
Isn’t the last one translated more commonly as “thy will be done”?
@@mahashrayasundararaman1562 You know, I think you might be right. I never spotted that before!
Canticle for Lebowitz was a must-read list book when I was a teenager in the 1980s. It is both seminal and ovarian for so many other works of literature, film, and games. It was prescient to China's own cultural revolution that didn't even need a nuclear war to start. Maybe Mao Zedong read the book I read it once when I was about 17 and then recently listened to the audiobook a couple of times on RUclips. I'm not religious but I'm fascinated with how religion makes people think and how people think when they have a vacuum of scientific knowledge to base that on. The book Rings really true four decades later. You have to imagine that the book burners were successful in wiping out a vast majority of technical knowledge and probably anything that looked like science. So the monastery (abbies are where nuns live) devoted to Lebowitz is portrayed as a sole Repository of Old World Knowledge. And the people who venerated Liebowitz weren't scientists they were Monkish scribes and librarians with the mission to save and recopy by hand because there weren't any printing presses anymore because all those engineers and technicians been killed by mobs. And they were just waiting for someone to request the knowledge but nobody ever did until book 2 where one of the monks has recreated the ArcLight and a theoretical scientist finds out about this trove of knowledge and is furious that it's been secret for so long and is angry that he's wasted his life puzzling things out on his own when it's just sitting there for him to ReDiscover.
A Canticle for Liebowitz is one of my favorite books ever. Read it in high school a long time ago and I re-read it on occasion now. There is something about the cyclical nature of the story that brings me back.
I love the book too. My assumption was that none of the information they saved had any practical value and that they didn't really understand what most of it meant but we're too caught up in the preservation to actually try to figure that out
As a child I listened to an old radio play adaptation of this and hearing you describe this I can hear bits of it in my memory
I posted a link to the recordings of it 🙂
After a period of reflection, I've realized that me listening to you find the point, yet orbit around it without ever arriving, has to be an experience similar to the frustrations you expressed with reading the book itself.
From my reading I always got the sense that there were two types of people in the story (ignoring the simpletons and the mutants). Theres the pious, dutiful people who build and preserve and the movers and shakers who change things. The idea is that the briliant people who change things and pull us out of the mud eventually value progress/power over humanity and bring us to destruction. Characters often wonder if theyre doomed to it and in the end we get a "new" humanity to baptize the world and break the cycle. This combined with the monks beating the dirt from their sandals before entering the ship sumbolizes rejecting the world that brought about two nuclear wars.
this has nothing to do with the video but if you want some really REALLY good hard sci fi give blindsight a try. it's been living rent free in my head for years now
The absolute best novel I've read.
Blindsight is fantastic, more ideas per page than any other novel I've ever read
I've been chasing the high of this book ever since I read it. Don't sleep on the sequels either, The colonel and Echopraxia, in that order.
As a bonus there's the short story The Things by the same author, narrating The thing events from the perspective of the alien.
@@nmlss-r9Give Diaspora by Greg Egan a try.
It's helps to have been raised Catholic to really appreciate all the nuance of the book. And a note for acollieralso, if you don't understand words, look them up.
I think Miller was grappling with the questions his faith made him ask, in the light of the horrors he had seen in war, even as a convert. The baby is a helpless innocent in excruciating pain, for which there is no cure or relief save death; and yet thou shalt not kill. If God is all knowing, all powerful, and all good, then why does evil exist? And so on.
Thank you so much for the last chance spoiler alert! I really enjoy your videos. I get many smiles and chuckles from your humorous delivery and perspective. As well as, almost always learn something new! Your introduction, description of the plot, along with touching on its most probable historical basis in its concept, right up to the point where you said " This is your last chance!" really inspired me to read it! But, not wanting to spoil the reading experience, thus not being able to watch the rest of your video until I read it, "made me mad though" ♥
I read the first third of Canticle for Leibowitz, and became so saddened and frustrated by the wasted life and senseless death of the protagonist of that section that I quit there and didn't continue. (You didn't even mention the way he was repeatedly beaten by a superior monk when he first tried to tell them of the "vision" he experienced, and how he took the beating stoically but tefused to go back on what he said. Then he *finally* is accepted and finally spends years creating an art piece which is ultimately destroyed... I saw his copy of the diagram as an art piece, so it could have been meaningful even divorced from its initial context, had it been preserved for others to see.)
The Canticle to me was a book of many merits. First I was very thankful for the author that it was not retelling an old myth (like 99% of books) but invented something brand new. It's not the usual coming age story where the next bullshit champion saves the planet or brings the ring to Mordor. It seems the author took the advise of PKD very well, "all the parts of that book did not add up; all the ingredients did not make a coherency. Now some people are put off by that. They think that’s sloppy and wrong, but the thing that fascinated me so much that this resembled reality ... Reality is a mess, and yet it's exciting." I also enjoyed a lot that most of the characters in the book are wrong most of the time. It's just ridiculous how much of our literature is heavily idealized. It's very refreshing too see somebody like Newton who is not just angry, not just detached, but also keeps failing in his own craft without even knowing it. They never show this to little children.
The weakest part to me was the internal monologues of monks and the whole Christian arc especially towards the end. I completely buy that religious principles like "don't kill your fellow man" and "be humble" and "be selfless" and "work together" have values and they help groups to survive hard times. The Christian theology is an iffier thing, that is something I respect less and less as I get older. While there are not much good mystical traditions and Christianity is definitely one, I don't know much authors who are able to command it properly and these childish and uneducated monks are definitely not doing a very good job with it. And detailing the Catholic church was the weakest part, it's shoking how accidental, backward and ossified it is. From the moment when the papal infallibility was created, it just keeps rotting from the core. So to me the whole Christian tangent was slightly misdirected and I think someone like PKD does a much better job with the very same topic.
I love reading but have been too depressed to actually do much reading lately, so I will unironically applaud your progress in actually reading things: 👏
I love this book, it is my favorite sci-fi book after Blindsight. I get most of what it says because I am catholic. And no, God does not want nuclear winter, it is all on man, we bring it to ourselves.
I read that book in the 70s. It is masterpiece.
Quite glad you read this one. I was in high school not too many decades after it was written, and it was mandatory school reading at a fair fraction of schools (I wouldn't be surprised if it's currently banned in the same fraction of schools).
I do not recommend you read the "sequel", it was written or at least published much later and I didn't find it until well after it was published, and my recollection of it was that it was just weird and maybe completely unnecessary (lol, maybe that means I should re-read it).
It would be immensely fun/interesting to be in the same room with others who subscribe to your materials and discuss Canticle, but I don't think it would work as an online discussion, it would require the ability to gauge interrupts in real-time, not with low or medium millisecond lag times.
It definitely =is= a thought provoking book, and definitely do remember feeling many of the same frustrations(?) you express.
Have you posted your full/target 2024 reading list someplace? I'd like to compare to my past reading, or fill in any blanks.
I loved your TV-series recommendation for Station Eleven, for example (though I found the book a lot harder to get into, one major part of which was the odd way that minor characters were frequently referenced by terms like Third Cello, where their function and rank in the Travelling Symphony are used instead of their name)
Keep up the great work, I always find your content fun, and usually a good source of fresh thinking in my day/week/month.
Sam Harris once said that if all human knowledge was lost, and humankind had to start over again, it would be hard to imagine at what would need to remind ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin. This book is interesting because it does address that sentiment in a science fiction context. (Yes, the book came before the Sam Harris quote)
It is incredible how each and every question Collie raises is a no-brainer if you are Catholic.
My favourite work joke is, "Alright, we're done the first 80% Time to start the second 80%"
It's not how science works, but it is how worship works. This is a satire on how we treat religious texts, not how we treat science. However, those with little knowledge of science do also treat scientific works like this, no understanding but still worshipping. Just put "quantum" in a search and see how utterly nonsensical the stuff people make of scientific discoveries can be.
In the dark days before Amazon, when you had to search used book stores for out-of-print books you wanted, I read about ACFL on some Greatest SciFI Novels list and searched for it for several years in many cities. Several shop owners said they'd read it and loved it but didn't have it. Then, of all places, I found a copy this book in the window of a rug shop in Istanbul! I couldn't believe it!
If you're wondering, backpackers weary from their long treks often come down with an insatiable urge to sit down some place and read. So smart shop owners trying to lure tourists in sometime display books in the window to lure them in. I didn't buy a rug in that shop, but they sure did try.
I think you calling it the Gospel of Leibowitz is strange. They're Catholic. Orthodox (in the sense of not being outside of their normal) and devoted to the faith, while also keeping the documents. Leibowitz's goal was absolutely the preservation of knowledge, to the point where I've wondered if his conversion was a play to exploit the monastery as a means of preservation.
As for how science works, I didnt get that myself? I thought the book seemed to indicate Thon Thaddeo was working towards science already, and the monastery just sped things along. I didn't really get your comments about AC or random doodads. There's a certain sadness in the monk dying to preserve a blueprint, but Thaddeo marvels over complex equations preserved in the documents. The monks didn't know what they were handling, especially with the blueprint fumble, but they preserved it all as best they could, from less useful blueprints to more relevant things. And they struggled for it in post apocalypse anti intellectual period. For a long while it was thankless, perhaps even dangerous to proclaim their work, but they keep at it. Then Thon Thaddeo comes in and they argue about how that technology should be used. We see how science is used for bad things later in the book, we see how they worried the monastery would become a military base. It's secular power pushing against the church as states grew more powerful, in contrast with the abbeys preserving the light of civilization before. I think it's interesting how the monks keep the same mission even as the secular world gladly walks the path to its second destruction.
I think a big point is man's depraved violent nature. The initial monk dies due to banditry while on religious travels (not an absurd thought in medieval ish times), while the others die to increasingly massive things. Mundane and then nuclear war, started by men. The euthansia is absolutely a brutal part (the Catholic stance is that deliberately killing is bad, although pain medication can and should be used) but part of it is that it's government orders. Instead of making the crime impossible, they tried to mitigate the consequences. It's like the absurdity of duck and cover drills when the government could, you know, try not to get nuked? It's an inarguably depressing book, I will admit, but it seems to point at something divine outlasting the secular world. The monks getting away wipe the dust off their sandals, referencing Christ telling the apostles to do so if a town rejected them. The monk says thus passes the world, as if highlighting how the violent cycle continues, but perhaps builds toward the end of days.
But eh, my thoughts. It's a great book and I'm glad people are thinking about it. Also an inspiration for the After the End Crusader Kings mods, which are real fun.
i also noticed when she said that nobody would want to make the dangerous journey to the abbey when they could just do their own experiments, and i wanted to point out that, yes indeed thon taddeo did not want to make that journey. his initial request was for the monks themselves to send their books to him instead. the monks declined to do that of course, and only then did thon taddeo impose on his powerful family connection to a certain warlord, to obtain the protective escort he needed for the journey. and of course that warlord was more interested in surveying the abbey as a prospective military fortification, than he was in any books that might be there. thon taddeo himself said he didn't expect the monks to have much of consequence. he was stunned and offended to find how much deeply significant information they had- stunned that he had wasted so much effort on his own investigations, and deeply offended that this monks had so presumptuously kept all this information hidden in the desert, away from him. he was kind of a dick.
Still my favorite syfy book, i can absolutely see that ending, with the priests, and the children seeing the horizon lit a flame, rushing away and seeing the world bathed in fire again
I would compare and contrast the Canticle for Liebowitz with Asimov's Foundation series, or at least the first few books (the only ones I've read as of writing this comment). Both are themed with civilizational falls (vis-a-vis the "fall" of Rome and the threat of nuclear annihilation) and the work of specific organizations to retain knowledge for the future, and both are structured with short stories that highlight the overarching plot. Asimov's focus seems to rest on repudiating the Great Man theory of history in favor of a dialectical materialism.
I'm 2 yrs older than the book. The first time I read it was for a college class called Religious Themes in Science Fiction. I love religion in sf. Watching you climb through the ins and outs was entertaining and enlightening. I'm a retired United Methodist pastor, so I didn't find the churchy details confusing, but I can see why you might have. Thank you very much for your dedication to your calling among the books. If I can be of any help theologically, please let me know.
I think we do not understand or appreciate how much what we have today is based on a fairly unstable tower of interrelated systems. Once the underlying bricks are kicked out from underneath, building back up will require more than we expect.
Before I read Canticle after I’d listened to the NPR radio drama. Definitely recommend
I posted a link to the recordings of it
You could have made it clearer that the monks don't understand what they're copying; this is very like monasteries in the dark ages where often the monk copyists didn't speak or read the languages of the texts they were copying. There were simply not enough Latin and Greek speakers. They were copying the letters - which they knew - but sometimes they might not realise they had accidentally transposed a "un" into a "mi".
The book reflects the ideas of either Oswald Spengler or (more probably of an English language writer) Arnold Toynbee.
Toynbee's A Study of History enjoyed a brief period of success in the 1950s before plunging into the deepest unfashionability. Deducing or imposing a single model on the whole of human history over 12 volumes is an act offensive to scientific sensibilities, but for this exact reason I can recommend at least looking into the ideas and reading some chunks of the work as a whole.
Was Toynbee a nutcase? A man whose religious sensibility overwhelmed his academic judgement? Is there any truth to his model? Can we even have models of history? Or is the work best understood more as a challenge to our reason as applied to human societies?
Edward Skidelsky wrote a book called Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture that tied more disparate threads together in my mind than any other book I've read. Toynbee's motivations were likely similar to those of Cassirer, a man whose philosophical project failed but for the best reasons and, instead of coming up with superior alternatives, scholars since have instead skirted the central issues. At question is whether humanity can hope for progress on the basis of shared reason.
Thomas Mann addressed the same issues, especially in The Magic Mountain, and contemporary scholar Mark Lilla is a fine guide.
In Toynbee's time, the grand ambitions of the enlightenment were unravelling. Because the project has now been abandoned, it's impossible to make sense of the world on the basis of anything anybody argues. To even begin to do this, it's necessary to consider the questions that are avoided in contemporary culture, as well as why they're ignored.
Cassirer addressed these questions directly, and Toynbee and Mann did so more obliquely. In so far as they represented a civilisational ambition that ambition failed but the aims were surely necessary.
This is a great review. At the risk of sounding melodramatic I was actually shedding a tear by the end of this. "How dare he make us..." think about these matters without telling us exactly what to think and how to feel? Indeed.
I've been a huge fan of mid-century SF since I was about 13. Would love to hear your thoughts on another of my favorite novels from that era of literary science fiction - Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination