/lit/ - Literature

The first short story follows a monk of the Order of Liebowitz and the initiation of its founder (600 years prior) into sainthood. The Order of Liebowitz was founded to protect documents and information left from before the “flame deluge,” which ended the previous age. Though the various monks and the abbot do not understand that which they guard, indeed, many of them do not even speak English; the Lingua De Franca in North America has defaulted back to latin. Yet it’s their holy duty to guard that information and preserve it until the day it’s once again needed. A young novitiate of the order has a chance experience and uncovers several ancient relics believed to have belonged to the order’s founder: Liebowitz. Among these relics is a blueprint he cannot read, a skull, and an array of electronic vacuum tubes. (The book was written in the 50s, and it shows).

Reading through old texts, the novitiate-turned-monk concludes that the blueprint was blue as a byproduct of a cheap copying process, a color choice not required for the information to be legible or displayed. With that understanding, he turns to creating his illuminated(hand-copied and artfully rendered) form of the text with intricate gold ink and carefully selected bright colorations. A beautiful rendition compared to the original. The novitiate-turned-monk dedicates the rest of his life to this creation. In his later years, he travels cross-country to New Rome to present both the original relic and the illuminated copy to the Papacy as gifts. On the way to New Rome, he is robbed by bandits who mistake the original, shoddy, and worn blueprint for the copy. The bandits steal the illuminated text, but leave the original blueprint with the monk; the bandits being too illiterate to realize which is the copy and which is the original.

When he speaks to the pope, the monk states that, while the original relic, the blueprint, was successfully saved… he remains in mourning for the years of his life wasted in creating the stolen, beautiful, illuminated copy.

“It was nothing, Holy Father. I only regret that I wasted 15 years.”

“Wasted? How ‘wasted’? If the robber had not been misled by the beauty of your commemoration, he might have taken this[the original blueprint], might he not?”

The second story takes place several hundred years later. The dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, or the next iteration of it. Where scientists have begun to appear among the various noble factions. The abbey, long rumored to be a source of secret ancient knowledge, finds itself as a proxy to a struggle between the ways of the old and the ways of the new.

Roads have been widened, and foot traffic has increased. Nomadic horsemen of the plains vie with the Papacy and the nation of Texarkana. An expedition in one of the major nations is created for a “real” scientist to investigate the information stored in the abbey. The new abbot is torn between the old world and the new. Torn between faith and progress. In many ways, the abbey itself is placed at the intersecting knife edge between the faith and consistency that works and the sudden drive for scientific and territorial conquest that has grown up in neighboring great nations.

War is coming with all its horror and all its glory.

The new world that’s growing up around the Abbey seems not too different from our age of enlightenment. An understanding of germ theory and chemistry allowed for mass fertilization and medicine… but also chemical and biological warfare.

At the abbey, another brilliant monk has, in reading the ancient texts, discovered how to make a simple generator and an arc-light. Copper wires guiding electrical current once again under the control of Man for the first time in 1000 years. There is a three-way competition… between the Old Abbot, the Foreign Scientist, and the Monk. The Old Abbot wishes to resist the changing world. The foreign scientist wishes to accelerate progress for the goal of ascending mankind. The Monk takes a stance that’s more centered between the two. They represent three different approaches to the Enlightenment and radical differences in worldview. As the three play off one another, it becomes apparent that this is a microcosm of the larger world. One of these three perspectives will eventually necessarily dominate the other two. How that takes place, and which faction rules, will determine the future.

In the third story, the world has changed once again. It’s going into another atomic age of automation and industrialism. 1000 years after the bombs fell, the world has rebuilt from the ruins, going through a period of religiosity, reason, and then industrial technology. Similar to a vision of the late 1970s, rockets and explorers are reaching for the stars. Also similar, great powers are pointing intercontinental ballistic missiles at each other with atomic warheads. The world has turned in a great cycle to build civilization back again from the ruins.

The real question that’s posited in the third story is whether human civilization will consign itself to the same mistakes it made in the past. The tension in the third story is between the Church and what it deems moral, and the state and what it deems rationally necessary. The social response to impending disaster and how humanity copes with it.

Ultimately, you’re left considering whether there is divine intervention and considering the nature of God. Whether humanity is a party of The Plan, or if people have a penchant for reading meaning into things that don’t hold it.

Each of the stories contains a side-character, an old beggar, seemingly immortal as the wastes change to city-states and then nations, and then reemergent industrial discovery. The same old man is always there watching things play out once again, similarly to the way culture shifted from the year 1000 and 2000 AD.

While the book was published in the late 50s and seemed to hold a decidedly non-theistic contextualization, it also accesses the root of the problem in rationalism and materialism. It identifies that the 20th century would ultimately end in an encompassing nihilism. Even if the bombs don’t drop, even if society continues to “progress,” there is something fundamentally missing from the materialist-humanist philosophy of liberalism and reason.

One would imagine an atheist in the 70s would regard this book as describing silly old monks who do not understand the world, instead attempting to ritualize it. They don’t understand the origins of their superstitions and go on to simply cling to that which their dogma permits. At the same time, it indicts progressive liberalism on the basis that there is no underlying foundation to prevent rationality from ending in disaster.

Rather than consider the book in the context of its own time, I think it’s better to look at the book from the perspective of ours. At this point, we have really identified that fundamental pieces are missing in the foundation of materialist-liberalism. Something the book clearly alludes to, but which we (better than a half-century later) have the background to more properly articulate.

Religion, particularly Christianity, serves a spiritual and social purpose. It serves a Truth that cannot be casually cast aside when it inconveniences the servants of Reason. Without Truth, the servants of reason become creatures of nihilism, hedonism, and create a world that must end in degeneracy and disaster.

The modern demographic collapse is indicative of this proposition. The limits to industrial growth. The demographic implosion. The continued degradation of our environment. All of these slow-motion trainwrecks that are occurring not despite the world of rationality, but because of it. At the same time, without the force of rationality, the modern world would not exist.

Is it silly that a monk spent 15 years producing an illuminated copy of a text he did not understand? From a materialist perspective, yes. What about a theist perspective? Through the dark ages, entire works of text from the ancient days were protected, guarded, and studied by monks and abbots. For a thousand years after the fall of Rome, these works were guarded and meticulously preserved despite the content of their text often being a mystery. As recently as the 1980s and 1990s, ancient manuscripts written hundreds of years ago in languages no one speaks have been found in old church basements. Entire cultures and arts have been resurrected from the dead because information once deemed useless was preserved anyway.

Off the top of my head, I can cite the HEMA martial arts as an example. An entire codified system of combat resurrected from 600-year-old manuscripts because a warrior-poet historian found a few preserved books in forgotten basements.

It is rational to throw away useless traditions and information. Surely. It would require an act of faith to value those things not for the now, but for some indeterminable moment in the distant future. One can argue, then, that rationality is not a basis for a civilization. Rationality doesn’t build temples, preserve history, or identify a cultural foundation.

At the heart of A Canticle for Liebowitz is the pull between theism and rationalism, progressivism and traditionalism. The book, however meandering it is, recognizes the soulless foundation of rationality and acknowledges that something greater is required. There is a space for ritual and the sacred in all societies, and those societies that do not make space for such things inevitably collapse on themselves. We have entered a strange new world in the last few hundred years, and human nature is ill-adapted for it.

What we need, more than anything else, is time. We need time to build new traditions and experiment with post-global-industrial modes of existence outside of “that grind” and “progressivism.” We need space and we need time as a species to regain our footing as the world shifts around us. Technophiliacs seem to think that “slowing” progress is itself a sin. Yet we’ve seen the culture reject the Marxist arc of history, and progressivism appears to have finally found its endpoint. It took humanity several hundred years of introspection to really come to understand the principles provided by Christ… We need time to develop a new understanding of Truth contextualized by high Technology.

We are entering a new Axial Age of experimentation, and right now, Humanity is adrift and rudderless in a world we’re ill-adapted for and looking for new ideas. There is a need for tradition. There is a need for virtualization. There is a need for the spiritual in an age of blind over-rationalization. The materialist religions have been a disaster. Fascism and Communism self-evidently destroy the individual human spirit. Liberalism exalts the individual spirit and attempts to make Man his own god: degeneracy, lunacy, nihilism, demographic collapse, and an ideological death-cult intent on killing the very civilization that birthed it and harming the innocent, claiming innocence itself to be a sin against their gods of the self.

C’thulhu no longer swims Left as of 2024, but the death-cult of the Left is still going to have to run its course and be weeded out of society. That process will be painful. In response, we have a cultural resurgence towards tradition, but an older tradition. One that is perhaps not as well adapted to the modern age as we should like. We need time to seek out a new form of post-rational enlightenment. Time that we’re unlikely to be afforded as the mountain of “progress” continues to steamroll its way into AI and digital realities.

There’s something wholesome about an age where lifetimes pass by like raindrops, each comfortable in its contribution to the whole rather than consumed by narcissism. In an age where change is slow, we have time to contemplate and grow as both individuals and as a people. Not consumed by a quest for greed, gluttony, or hedonistic whimsy.

I highly recommend the book.

>>421 (OP) 

I just finished reading the book. It was fantastic and very enjoyable. Thank you for the recommendation!