this book made me mad though

Big recommend.

A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr (first published in 1957)

#booktube

[georgemero]

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

[tomista-zjoz]

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.

[ryanhavanas]

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!

[talideon]

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.

[vikrantpulipati]

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.

[theKobus]

“This made more angrier than any other book. Go read it.” is high praise

[greenhawk]

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.

[joshuahitchins]

Calling the Eucharist the "you're a Christ" is hilariously incorrect, but extremely apt.

[TCGBulkKings]

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

[smithpauld]

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.

[robertstuckey]

"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.

[thylacoleonkennedy]

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.

[Robovski]

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.

[szaggasd]

The thought of illuminated schematics and circuit diagrams still makes me smile

[naternaut]

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!

[AnthonySimeone]

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.

[tykos]

It is incredible how each and every question Collie raises is a no-brainer if you are Catholic.

[kevinmcnamee]

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.

[malcolmanderson]

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?"