Kelly Green ([info]saycestsay) wrote,
@ 2008-03-27 22:11:00
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A Canticle For Liebowitz
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/science_fiction/canticle.html

Study guide stuff.

But my imagination was caught by the wonderful, insightful, distressing scene in the Abbey's basement, where the scientist upsets the religious... who decide it's time to extinguish the arclight (modern convenience supplied with an overwhelming amount of physical effort) and re-mount the crucific on the wall.

"Any further illumination will be provided by the light of Christ," says the Abbot (I'm paraphrasing a trifle here.)

And yet still... the world goes down one more time in a "diluvium ignis."

Is Miller stating that scientific knowledge is the end of mankind, because it unleashes our worst impulses?

As usual, I looked for the women here, and as usual for a 1959 scifi novel, they were pretty much excluded. Until the last section, where the tomato woman is slid in front of us as the mutant twin of the virgin mary.

I do not know if he truly meant anything more serious here than what he wrote of nuclear disaster and religious obfuscation. Thoughts?

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[info]dotar_sojat
2008-04-10 03:21 am UTC (link)
Sorry it took me so long to respond to this. Been busy with Important Things.

Tragically, I can't remember as much about CANTICLE as I thought I could... I don't recall that much about the "light of Christ" scene.

And I wish I had found the study guide so I could have hacked through all the Latin.

Anyway, I thought the crucial scene was when the scientists asks the monks if they regard it as heresy to believe that white light could be split into its component colors by a prism before the rainbow at the end of the Flood, and they laugh that he would think they were so backward.

I'm not sure what the scene meant, but it it meant something. I think that "faith" loses to "knowledge", because to a True Believer it IS heresy to claim that light would split into colors before god performed a miricale to make it so. BUT, if you look at the three stories though that lens you kind of get this: Story one they have faith, they are surrounded by knowledge they can't understand, and they are just a hair less ignorant than the people around them. Story two they have knowledge and it has replaced knee-jerk faith(for the most part, for most of the monks), they are conducting experiments and such. Book three- they are behind the knowledge/tech curve and are back to appealing to more ignorant people.

To engage in some shade-tree psychology, Miller had some obvious problems with Catholicism- even though he was a life-long Catholic. He committed suiced- pretty much a Big Sin in the church's view. So he may have been working through some issues with these stories, perhaps even unciounciously.

We should each read "St. L. and the Wild HOrse Woman" next.

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