Welcome back to another Giant Art Reviews! It's been a while since I did an episode.I do have a huge backlog of things that people want me to review.I still have to do that Warhammer 40k movie.
I still have to do 2001 A Space Odyssey, but everyone covers that so I think I'm just going to purely do that as a sort of theory exploration. I have other things, The Bell Jar.
But this week I'm finally doing, it took me a while to read, I'm finally doing a Canticle for Leibowitz.And I believe it was, I forget, I think it was Charlie Mackey, a supporter and patron of the Digital Archipelago.
that donated for me to review Canicle for Leibowitz.
If you are interested in me doing a film or a text review or even an article review, my usual fee is $100, although for books it will be somewhere around $300 because it takes me a lot of time and effort to research.
But my usual fee is $100 for a movie review or an article. And of course, all my links are down below.And also support me on Patreon.Please like, share, and subscribe.You know, all that good stuff to boost the algorithm.
and support me on Patreon, patreon.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.
and i heard recently that youtube is also going to increase the shorts length to about three minutes so i'm going to really take advantage of that i want to get back to making a lot of shorts because i think youtube is weird they want they want like really long content and really short content that's the way the algorithm works now anyways a chemical for lebowitz is pretty much the golden standard of catholic sci-fi or rather
Catholic literature engaging in science fiction.And it's a very unique book.It's not the typical, like, if you're looking for sci-fi of the Asimov, Heinlein variety, this is not for you.
This is much closer to, I mean, I hate the differentiation between quote-unquote hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi. hard sci-fi being like what nerds like, like what science nerds love.
And it has to do with space, technology, describing technological and various other scientific processes.
Whereas quote-unquote soft science fiction is still within the science fiction genre, but is dealing with more humanistic elements and themes and motifs.I think that that distinction is sort of fake, if you will.
It's sort of just, it's something that people do to make themselves seem smart, to put things in dichotomies that don't belong as dichotomies.
That's usually a sign of midwittery, is to bifurcate things into dichotomies that don't deserve to be bifurcated.
But akin to Quivirilli, what's, let's call it, quote-unquote soft sci-fi, it's closer to, the usual example people use for soft sci-fi is Ursula K. Le Guin.
But as post-apocalyptic literature, there is some sci-fi elements at the end, but I would really classify this more as post-apocalyptic literature.
It is a very uniquely Catholic understanding of an apocalyptic event, but its Catholicism, in a way, is also coming into question. that is why the author Walter M. Miller Jr.has created something truly unique.
And a lot of people that do read Kenneka Verleibovitz, I mean there are some people in like hardcore theological circles that speculate if actually the real message of the book is nihilism, but there's quite a bit of redemptive qualities there that I'll explore.
And for those who see the For those of you who are discovering this channel for the first time, discovering Jiner Reviews for the first time, discovering my work, I don't really give you the usual book YouTube or book TikTok.
Oh, a book talk is something different, but whatever.I don't usually give you the standard quote-unquote review that goes in a very neat linear order. I'm much more off-the-cuff, podcast-style, conversational-style.
But what I'm trying to do with reviewing either films or texts is that I want to really get at the theory, get at the interesting exploration of ideas behind the text, as opposed to treating it merely as an object of literature or cinema.
But I will try to go through the book in linear order.It's basically three short stories into one, but they have a lot of interrelating parts together.It's in the same universe.
But just bear in mind that my interest is more philosophical, I guess you could say, and more sort of deriving at the ideas that this book invokes or speculating on it. or a film or whatever, than just the usual summary review of a text or a movie.
So that's really what my aim is.So bear with me if you find it sort of, I'm going in loops, I'm going in circles.Yeah, so I tend to do that a lot actually, but I'm going to try to get better at not doing that.
I'm going to try to tackle each piece individually and then go at the overarching ideas.
So what's very interesting is that the basic premise of Kynikow for Leibowitz is to try to create an element of understanding of what a medieval church would still look like in the future, post-nuclear apocalypse.
But before I get to the actual book, let me just say that It seems to be in the air.
Apocalypticism seems to be in the air and I have a number of theories as to why, apart from the obvious uncertainties of the current geopolitical picture around the world, whether it be in Eastern Europe or the Middle East, especially in the Middle East.
Now that Israel is intent to provoke a type of conflict with Iran, it doesn't seem to be ceasing operations.It just, at the time of recording, It is just past October 7th.
It's been a year of them basically pouring hellfire on Gaza and certain parts of Lebanon.
But whatever your opinion of the conflict is, again, I'm trying to not stray too far into politics like I do with the Core Report, Digital Archipelago, and of course Content-Minded.Of course, I want to keep Content-Minded more, I guess, high-minded.
It's more stuff that isn't overtly political.If you want my more overtly political current news item hot takes, then I would greatly appreciate if you subscribe to either Substack or Patreon, especially Patreon, to get the Cole Report.
You know, anyways.So, apocalypticism seems to be in the air.And at the time of reading it, I discovered this YouTube channel.I believe it's called
Ambience Escapade, that's what it's called, where it has a very interesting radio format where it will be like, your point of view, you're listening to the radio during an Ice Age apocalypse, you're listening to the radio during World War III.
And they have like other, I believe they have like similar characters.One of them was explicitly like, you are listening to the radio
like a decade after the apocalypse and the uh end of civilization and i believe they have like one main character that comes or a repeating character uh his name is dj apocalypse and he's like this black guy in the ghetto that somehow manages to survive every single apocalyptic crisis it's really great
and uh he's like this hip-hop this rapper and he talks about like living in the ghetto and how he survived the apocalypse but anyways it's pretty funny but i was like sort of uh i was sort of surrounding myself with a lot of this and given the current climate of if a war with iran would be possible if there is a massive escalation
as Ukraine is losing, if there is a massive NATO escalation against Russia, Russia having I believe, I believe they have numerically more nuclear warheads than America.
Don't quote me on that, but I believe it's roughly when I was a kid, I was always, you know, watching various Discovery Channel programs or whatnot. I was always told that America and Russia has roughly the equivalent number of nuclear warheads.
Now, whether they're ready and serviceable, as opposed to just rotting away in silos since the Cold War, I mean, that's debatable as well.But it seems to be in the air.
And I think that when it comes to venture into politics a little bit, because the book also covers this as well.
in terms of people's response to a even though i really do not like his work i think it's like kind of like neville uh yvonne harari what's his name noah um noah yvonne harari i like to call him noah evil harari yvonne harari whatever uh nick bostrom what does he call it existential threats or um existential security issues
even though I think his philosophy is sort of like Redeteer.
But the point being is that how does humanity respond in the aftermath of an extinction level apocalyptic event of a pure existential security threat, meaning that it basically a catastrophe that threatens the very foundation of a highly advanced technologically driven post-industrial society or industrial to post-industrial society, by which we mean the West.
but also the rest of the world, the global south, will also be affected because of the impact that the western world has in basically sustaining all these other quatrains of the world.
Now the book really doesn't get into what the global picture looks like because the whole point of the book is what would life be like
as the return of a medieval dark ages now the term dark age is of course overblown it wasn't really a dark age uh the term dark age is sort of like an enlightenment propaganda piece after the fall of rome and so forth but for for argument's sake let's say a dark age so there is the political element of an apocalyptic scenario that is pretty obvious that's being explored in sci-fi all the time
but in terms of a planetary politics that intersects with another very interesting theme of this book, of this work, but also other forms of post-apocalyptic dystopian literature, which is man's relationship, humanity's relationship to information.
and to the sources of information, but also how we experience information, which is a theme that from the very first chapter of the book, or rather the first section of the book, because there's different chapters, but there are three main sections.
So Fiat Homo, which is the, I believe, what's the term for it in Latin?It's the very first chapter that when I was reading it, I immediately discovered as a theme of information and knowledge.I mean, of course, that's the main theme of the book.
So the first chapter, which is Fiat Homo, which means becoming man, the theme of knowledge and information becomes readily apparent and a sort of rebirth of religiosity.
But I'm getting ahead of myself by saying this, but a theme that I'll explore in this review is that even when they jump to the future, so again, spoiler alerts, right?This is filled with spoiler alerts.
Even when you jump to the future hundreds of years, a few centuries into the future, where man rediscovers advanced technologically driven society.
In fact, even more advanced from when Miller was writing the book in the 1950s with robots and even inkling at AI, which is very interesting.
of course in the Cold War, especially in the beginning of the Cold War in the 1950s, these themes were incredibly salient of nuclear apocalypse.But even when man gets to it you don't really have secularization that is too rampant.
Now you do have questioning of religion.You do have a form of secular thought that is in the middle of the book coming into being.There's secular scholars and philosophers you don't really have the mass ditching of religiosity.
The church and even in the future that exceeds the technological advancements of the 1950s western world at that time and even you could argue uh in our reality because if they have like fully perfected
and integrated extraplanetary colonization and even AI, then, you know, of course that exceeds our capacity right now.Religiosity is still an important part.
The church still occupies an important role in the social and sociopolitical environment of the world in the future. that Miller is creating here.
But of course that could be a product of the church maintaining and storing knowledge the way that they did in the Dark Ages, the Medieval Period.And that monks are essentially the keepers of knowledge.
I find this strikingly contemporary, doing this review, not just because of the threat of a engagement between Israel and Iran or the Western world and Russia, but also we have a digital attempt to burn down the Library of Alexandria with various hacker attacks on the internet archive.
One of the most, if not the most important organ on the internet. a keeper and store of digital information, video, and history itself.Texts that you can never find again.To burn it all down.
Some group is claiming it's because of some pro-Palestinian cause, but who knows?It's probably some, I would speculate, some kind of glow in the dark, let's call it bioluminescent activity right before an election.
but they're saying, oh, because it's American.First of all, the Internet Archive is not American.It may have originated in America, in the UK, but it's really a storing of information for the whole world.
and to get rid of it over some ridiculous lawsuit by some middling author that doesn't mean anything, that nobody wants to read, who is a total goofball.I'm not going to swear.I mean, if this was the core report, I'd be like swearing up and down.
But Chuck Wendig or this new group of hackers that are very murky and shady, why would they even announce it in public on Twitter?Sorry, Axe.
But, you know, to get rid of the Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has a lot of enemies, unfortunately, a lot of very powerful enemies.
But a source of information and knowledge that is servicing the world, a global repository, the dream of the Internet, to unite all humanly knowledge.Some schizo on Twitter once said that
basically it's a fulfillment of the project of German idealism to synthesize all knowledge, all humanly knowledge.And so that's another theme that's strikingly contemporary.
When you read Canicle for Leibowitz, is that what does it mean for humanity to experience an existential crisis, an existential security threat so grave
that it thrusts us into a form of complete Ludditism and hostility to the keeping and storing of knowledge.But notice it is the religiosity that compels these monks to keep the flame of human knowledge alive.
Even if those bits of information are staggered and out throughout, you know,
Because essentially what they're finding is just pieces of information from an advanced technologically driven civilization that can't really tell you the basic nuts and bolts of scientific processes like electricity or biology or engineering.
They're really just manuals.Because essentially in the first book, that's what the monk of the first book is essentially illuminating. from St.Lebowitz.It's essentially just a manual for, I believe, I forget the exact part.Let me look it up.
I know I'm getting ahead of myself, but rather it's not a part, but it's a manual, a blueprint Francis finds.So someone on Twitter linked it.The blueprint Francis finds is a circuit.
There's only one pattern from before 1959 with transistorized control system.
it seems to match the description which means I believe this is the model that Leibowitz's blueprint and it's basically a science it's basically an engineering diagram for a conduit or an electrical transistor
And it's got all of the electrical signs and like the squiggly units and how it links up together in a connected circuit with the different parts.
And it doesn't really tell you that much about science or electricity at its core, but in the book, the monks, they speculate.Then later what this becomes is the memorabilia. sacred memorabilia of the previous world.
So it has like all the signal stages, positive high voltage, positive low voltage,
and the illumination done by Francis has all of the different symbols in gold and there is of course a depiction of Saint Lebowitz which comes up over and over again in the book.
One prominent one is the statue, the wooden, the sort of molding out old statue of what people think uh, St.Lebowitz looked like.
And of course it has the smirk that comes up time and again, especially in the middle, the middle chapter, or sorry, the middle section.
So the, the basic premise is that in the first book, you are viewing life a few centuries after the apocalypse, after a nuclear war, Uh, and I believe one reviewer, this is some Catholic school website, some Catholic website, uh, education website.
that you are viewing, the story begins in 26th century and spans a thousand years of history, terminating around the year 3781.
But the first one comes after what the monks in the order calls the flame deluge, meaning like the apocalyptic nuclear fires consuming the world.And it goes through the history of how The survivors of the apocalypse of nuclear war.
they go through this period of intense shredding of, well you could say IQ shredding, but essentially global lighted-ism is the norm because the survivors banded together to say that enough is enough, we are going to reject any form of knowledge of the past, any form of technology,
From here you have very primitive forms of animism and paganism that arise along with the surviving texts of Christianity.I'm assuming a few Bibles survived.
That's why you have monasteries, you have monkeries, you have a lot of these very isolated, for a reason, isolated monasteries that are connected by ladder and horseback.
that are near deserts, and of course you have the new Rome, which I believe is somewhere in Utah, which is kind of funny.But then there's other parts of Texarkana.
And so Brother Francis, he is a junior monk who is learning, and he's in the process of going through a, what do you call it?He's going through an ascetic period.
where you have to basically fast around Advent and he's multiple times he's weak and he almost doesn't make it and he's out in the middle of the desert middle of nowhere he only has like a few grains of corn and some polluted water to drink and it's very much desert father's tear type of suffering and asceticism but he then explains that the reason he
he became a monk is because he's in a little bit more high IQ than his average, the average peasantry.His family, he's disconnected from his family.
He was bought and sold by another one of these like shamanic pagan war tribe leaders, if you will, like these warrior bands that are going around.I believe he was bought and sold by some form of a witch doctor or shaman.
and if he were to be caught he of course would be you know redacted and so then he ran away and joined the monastery and it's implied that he really didn't join because out of any religious conviction but rather his passion was uh literacy and still being educated in uh i believe they still speak they were writing in latin and so forth
And so his passion was really education, but then the only real form of education comes through religiosity, comes through the remainder of the Catholic Church after the apocalypse.
And so the blueprint, let me just quickly read, because I'm going to read throughout the book.So he had not the slightest notion why the ancients had used white lines and lettering in the dark background.Again, this is a blueprint, right?
You have to realize a lot of blueprints, the white lettering, a lot of them were made very quickly and for convenience on the Xerox copies and so forth.They weren't really made to last.
So when you roughly resketched a drawing in charcoal, they were reversing the background.So again, this is basic, you know, this is basic tracing or putting in reverse, especially for printmaking, you put images and words in reverse.
Resketched a design in charcoal there by reversing the background, the rough sketch appeared more realistic than the white and dark, and the ancients were immeasurably wiser than Francis.
If they had taken trouble to put ink where blank paper would ordinarily be, and leave slivers of white paper where an inked line would appear in a straightforward drawing, then they must have had their reasons.
Francis recopied the documents to appear as nearby, nearly the original as possible.He copied an old architectural print, the drawing for a machine part whose geometry was apparent, but whose purpose was vague.
He read a Mandela abstraction titled Stater WNDG Mod 73A 3PH.So it goes on and on, right?And then you also, in the second book, there is hints of
a basic form of physical philosophy of physics because if you remember physics the root word of philosophy or sorry rather the root of science was connoted with phusis meaning the physical world which meant the philosophy of nature.
Natural philosophy is where born all of the sciences, or rather where all the sciences are born out of.
So you have this debate about the energies that, and of course, to spoiler alert, in the second book, they rediscover electricity, or at least a very primitive form of electricity.But the way they contextualize it as a form of almost near divination,
the way that you would have, for instance, mathematics being conducted by the Pythagorean cult in the ancient world, in ancient Greece, but also the way that they conceptualize what we would consider a hard science is through this very metaphysical lens.
is through a form of mysteries and energies and the properties of energy that are hypostasized by the natural, energies that hypostasize the natural world, that give essence to the natural world.This is the stuff they're rediscovering.
You have to realize that metaphysics and philosophy, they were the gateway to science, not the other way around.So that's, you know, but I'm skipping ahead.So In the first chapter, he's out there in his ascetic journey and he discovers an old hermit.
And it's speculated through, so first the hermit attacks him.This hermit then later comes up in the second chapter a few centuries ahead as Benjamin.
But here it's speculated that various literary critics that have read the book that speculated that it's Lazarus or a figure of a wandering Jew.
that is very important in that it's implied that Francis essentially maybe speculates, or rather the church, his head in the monastery, the church speculates whether or not he actually encountered Saint Leibovitz.
So Leibovitz is an engineer from our time, or rather the 1950s, not our time, right? that is dedicated to preserving human knowledge in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
Because what happens is when Francis is out in the desert, the old hermit attacks him, the wandering hermit, the wandering, you know, yeah.
I don't know how much I can say the J word, but the one, you know, the wandering person on YouTube, you know what I mean?So he's attacked by him, but then after, The hermit offers Francis food, which he rejects because he's fasting, of course.
And he's looking to build this shelter.Francis is trying to build a shelter, but he needs a capstone for the very top of this primitive structure.Then the hermit says, okay, I have one for you.He's searching around in the rock pile.
He said, here, and it fits perfectly. But their lettering, but then as soon as Francis goes to thank him, he leaves almost magically.Of course, you know, common trope, they leave like a ghost out of the blue.
But then he discovers two letters written in Hebrew that means TS, which could represent Lazarus. but is more likely Leibowitz, the Leibowit, or Isaac Edwards.So it's Isaac Edward Leibowitz or T.S.Leibowitz.
So, and of course, there was one thread I read that was reviewing Canicle for Leibowitz about the relationship.And again, you have to really understand at least
You have to have a cursory knowledge of biblical stories to understand where Miller is getting at.So the story of Benjamin, meaning the wandering traveler, who's cursed to never walk the earth until he's found Jesus again.
He's played a prominent role in the first second half of the novel, but he's almost completely absent in the last part.But in the last part we have the figure of Rachel.
And of course, you have the story of Lazarus and his sister, who is a follower of Christ.Rachel weeping.So then in the third book, Rachel is weeping for her child.
As a reference to the massacre of innocence after the burst of Christ, King Herod hears that a messiah slash king had been born.He orders every child born within a certain time to be redacted.So in the canicle, of course, there is a
well a child sacrifice but in the context of nuclear war but we'll get to that.So the Abbey then speculates and sends to the new Rome evidence that there potentially is a sighting and then what happens is a sort of legal battle if you will
between the new Rome and the Abbey of Leibovitz, the Monastery of Leibovitz, who, of course, every monastery, it says in the book, wants to have their saint recognized as an official saint, a Beatus to be recognized as an official saint, which eventually happens.
And then Francis, after many years of studying the memorabilia, this diagram and other things, and then trying to illuminate this very technical graph,
then has to venture to new realm but i'm getting at myself so he he sees the wandering traveler the wandering jay and again i'm i'm not i'm not very clear about using the the saying jay uh you know on youtube for a variety of reasons so he sees the wandering traveler he has this confrontation gives him the capstone that has the lettering on it ts on it
And then next to the place, because he goes back to the place where he finds the rock, he all of a sudden falls into a hole, a sort of cave-like hole that leads to an ancient fallout shelter.
And the way that they think, because you have to realize that if you go through a period of Ludditism, after an apocalyptic event, then you're going to have a folklorish, mystical, or rather mythical view of the past.
So Leibowitz, he's only heard of these places in which people escaped or rather... So it's first speculated by
Francis that these shelters can't be opened because it says like it has all the warning signs Do not open after a certain point that you know because of the fallout He speculates that these were chambers to contain the demonic entity of the flame deluge but then of course the monastery and the religious authorities they correctly interpret that it was rather to keep the flame deluge out and
which they have then personified as a demonic entity.Instead of like, you know, the basics of nuclear fission and so forth and nuclear fallout.
So then he discovers a skeleton clutching a sort of a keep safe box that has the memorabilia in it, that has this diagram and a bunch of other writings and papers in it.I believe they can still read English from our time.
And so then these objects become the subject of an inquiry with New Rome, and they grill him and interview him over and over again if they speculate that he actually saw St.Lebowitz in the desert, or rather, a reincarnation or a manifestation of St.
Lebowitz.But then they conclude that, oh, actually, he was just some wanderer.Who cares?And let me read you a little bit. So he goes, hey, over here, come shouting from beyond the rubble.
Then he says in Latin, Repugnant tibi, I think the translation's here.So then they exchange in Latin, and irritably from beyond the rubble mound, all right then, suit yourself, I'll make the rock and set a stake for it, try it or not, as you please.
And this is the part where he discovers lettering.
A sky heard of columnist clouds on their way to bestow moist blessings of the mountains after crucially deceiving the perched desert, begin blotting out the sun and trailing dark shadow shapes around the blistering land before, offering intermittent but welcome respite from the searing sunlight.
When a racing cloud shadow whipped its way over the ruins, the novice worked rapidly until the shadow was gone. rested until the next bundle of fleece blotted out the sun.
It was quite by accident that Brother Francis finally discovered the Pilgrim's Stone.While wandering thereabouts, he stumbled over the stake which the old man had driven into the ground as a marker.
He found himself on his hands and knees staring at a pair of marks freshly chalked on ancient stone, the Hebrew word for TS.But the old man had called God be with you.
As which would not, the novice pried the stone free from the rubble and rolled it over.As he did, the rock mount rumbled faintly from within.A small stone clattered down the slope.
Francis danced away from a possible avalanche, but the disturbance was momentary.In a place where the pilgrim's rock had been wedged, however, there now appeared a small black hole.
So then he goes into the hole, and of course the monastery tells him not to go.He's forbidden from going to that place to finish up his ascetic period during Lent.So he goes into the hole, he falls down into it.
A dust column which had plumbed out from the site of the cave-in was tapering away at the breeze.He hoped someone would see it from the abbey's watchtowers and come to investigate.
At first a square opening yawned in the earth, where one flank of the mountain had collapsed into a pit below.
Stairs led downwards, but only the top steps remained unburdened by the avalanche, which had paused for six centuries in mid-fall to await the assistance of Brother Francis.Six centuries into the future.
On the wall of the staircase, a half-burned sign remained legible.Mustering his modest command of pre-deluge English, he whispered the words haltingly, Fallout Survival Shelter Maximum Occupancy 15.
provision limits, single occupants, 180 days, divided by an actual number of occupants upon entering shelter, see first tashes secured and locked and sealed.The rest was buried, but the fallout word was enough for Francis.
He had never seen a fallout, and he hoped he'd never see one.A consistent description of the monster had not survived. But Francis had heard the legends, he crossed himself and backed away from the hole.
Tradition told that the Beatus Leibowitz himself had encountered a fallout, meaning he went he tried to go into a fallout shelter, and had been possessed by it for many months before the exorcism which accompanied his baptism drove the fiend away.
Brother Francis visualized a fallout as half salamander because according to tradition the thing was born in the flame deluge. and as half-incubus who despoiled virgins in their sleep.
For it was now the monsters of the world still called children of the fallout, that the demon was capable of inflicting all the woes which had descended upon Job was recorded fact if not an article of creed."
So yeah, the Bible did survive because of clearly he's mentioning Job. The novice stared at the saint and dismayed, meaning the plain had enough.He had unwittingly broke into the abode.
Deserted, he prayed, of not just one, but fifteen of the dreadful beings.He groped for his phial of holy water.
But of course, then the abbey corrects him, saying, no, actually, it's not that there was fifteen monsters, but rather it was to protect from the flame deluge.And of course, if you have
If you go through such an event, wouldn't you consider nuclear fallout a form of demonic power?Wouldn't you personify it?And then of course it says inner hatch sealed environment in big bold letters.
Evidently the room into which he was descended was only an antechamber, but whatever had laid beyond inner hatch was sealed there by several tons of rocks against the door.Its environment was sealed indeed unless it had another exit.
Warning, this hatch must be sealed before all personnel have been amended.So imagine a more primitive man discovering something of an advanced technological society.
You would think of things in terms of folklore, in terms of mysticism, in terms of these powers that were from a previous form of humanity. It's like the opposite of us rediscovering the ancients.
We like to think that they were primitive, that they weren't as advanced as us, and that we are sort of standing atop a development of human knowledge and technological development, but here you have the reverse.
You have, and who knows, I mean, maybe there's people that speculate this as well with the ancient world, but you have a previous advanced and great civilization that has come to an end by its own hand.
And imagine a medieval monk trying to rediscover this civilization, the way that a medieval monk would rediscover knowledge about the Roman Empire, for instance.
Then Brother Francis found himself slightly confused by the warning, but he intended to heed not by touching the door at all.
The miraculous contraptions of the ancients were not to be carelessly tampered with, as many a dead excavator of the past had testified at his dying gasp.
Which is also implied that there perhaps is some radioactive material or radioactive dust still around these fallout shelters that have made various other monk explorers sick when they've tried to explore and make an assessment of the various ruins and memorabilia that they find.
So then he speculates about St.Leslie's Theological Calculus and then whether St.
Lebowitz actually he was going to just um he was trying to connect with his wife when the nuclear war happened and there's speculations if he ever actually got to his wife or if if his wife perished in the flame deluge.Then he finds the box
Then he finds the box, it's half buried by debris, only the skull and the bones of one leg had not been covered.The femur is broken, the back of the skull was crushed.The box was shaped like a statue and was obviously carrying a case of some kind.
It may have served any number of purposes, but it had been rather badly battered by flying stones.Then he opens up the box and of course he discovers the memorabilia, and then he speculates that he's looking at the skull and bones of St.Lebowitz.
But I think later on it's determined that it was a female skull and bones that they find near the fallout shelter.So of course the paper's damaged and so forth.
I've forgotten of his abbey's stern warning against expecting vocation to come in any spectacular or miraculous form.
The novice knelt in the stand to pray his thanks and offer a few decades of rosaries for the intentions of old pilgrims who had pointed out the rock leading to shelter."
So they basically drag him along and they prevent him from gaining his vocation as a monk for longer than was reasonably expected for other novices.
And a lot of people, so Brother Francis speculates that it's because of his discovery of the fallout shelter that the Abbey was sort of like jerking his chain.So the knowing of hunger was less troublesome to Francis.
There's no impatient urge to run back to the Abbey and announce the news of his discovery.Then he goes to the main Abbey.Francis of Utah hatched to into the splendor of sealed environment beyond
catacombs of the flame deluge where where after all he would offer mass for them on the altar stone which enclosed a relic of the church's name saint a bit of burlap fiber from the hand hangman's nose fingernails clippings from the bottom of the rusty box uh racing form and so forth brother libu but the brothers of leibowitz needed only enough priests for the abbey itself and a few smaller communities of monks in other locations furthermore the saint
was still only a beatus officially and would never be formally declared a saint unless he wrought a few more good, solid miracles to underwrite his own beautification.
New Rome had seemingly left the case for the canonization of Leibowitz to gather dust on the shelf, contenting himself with a small shrine of the beatus and a casual trick of pilgrims.Brother Francis drowsed.
When he awoke, the fire was reduced to glowing embers.The novice helped him dive for cover, but then, of course, the abbey comes and gets him. basically it then categorizes how Francis discovers this memorabilia that has the name of Saint Leibovitz.
Leibovitz being an engineer having the name of his design for this conduit and this is what then creates the impetus for a new Rome to actually canonize Leibovitz as a saint.So
Francis is rewarded and he's thanked and then he goes to New Rome, but then he has the memorabilia with him along with the manuscript because then after he becomes a brother, he becomes a full monk, he gets his vocation, he's sent to the printing press room.
And there for 12 years, he tries to illuminate this script because he's basically from day to night, He's in charge with the other monks to basically copy holy texts and memorabilia and the Bible as scribes.
And then they debate whether they could have a printing press or not, or it would be too burdensome, and who would be there to work it.It was a smaller abbey.
So they basically are just scribes that have to copy out sacred texts over and over and over again for different monasteries and different churches.
And he's only given like an hour, like an hour a week, I think it was, to work on any project that he wants to, along with the other abbots who are scribes.
And so he spent, that's why it took like 12 years to illuminate a copy of this diagram from St.Lebowitz.
So then he goes to New Rome and he's confronted by a band of thieves, or rather one of those, you know, highwaymen, pagan tribal bands that then confiscates the illuminated manuscript, but lets him have the memorabilia.
But he says, you know, the church can pay a fine amount of money to get it back.
But then when he goes to New Rome, he meets the Pope and he meets a cardinal that tells that he befriends and tells him, actually, it's a miracle that, you know, you got the memorabilia here of the original instead of what you because he's really he's really dooming and blackpilling over the fact that he spent 12 years to illuminate one manuscript copy.
But then they said, well, actually, you know, God has intended that you serve this purpose to spend that amount of time because not only is St.
Lebowitz has become a saint because of your work, but it was a way for that moment of preserving the holy memorabilia of St.Lebowitz in that moment of the band of thieves.And so actually you were doing all of that work for 12 years.
to actually preserve the memorabilia.So he goes, okay, yeah, whatever.Right.I mean, it's, it's a crushing blow, but it starts to make sense.
And I realized that I actually have to go back to the beginning of this podcast in stating of the reasons why apocalypticism seems to be a particular cultural fascination.Um, you could say maybe five to 10 years ago, it was the zombie thing.
And that has its own, how shall you say, psychoanalytic implications.
And now it seems to be the sort of nihilative nothing of a possibility of the future without us or without the current iteration of society or the social picture that we live under.And that's always been around.
And certainly on the internet, it's been around for a long time.
It's the sort of like, back in the magazine I used to write for, Thermador Magazine, we had a term for it for a lot of, because in 2016 to 17, the whole anarcho-primitivism thing, the terror wave is static, stuff like that was very popular.
People were reading Ted Kaczynski, people were reading Petty Lincoln, at least in our spheres.
we had a term for it we called it doomsday optimism where society collapsing would then usher in a wholly new politics a politics that is pure and clean and bereft of any of the how shall you say it the bricklage that has been built up in western quote-unquote liberal democracies
although you could say we live under a form of authoritarian liberalism, I like to call it transnational progressivism, that has been built up for a few centuries now.
And to be totally free to have a clean slate is the purview, the optimistic view of that type of
complete existential security threat to civilization itself that is the hope of all political fringo you know all fringo political factions whether it be in the far left or the far right or whatever and even in the popular imagination this is what i i said this in this little video i did about the walking dead i believe i call it political norwoodism or something like that it was some pretentious title where i said that
The creators of The Walking Dead were creating something that was an extension of our morality and our belief systems present in the current iteration of global liberalism that we live under.
with all of its foibles of multiculturalism and egalitarianism, that was projected onto a world that had been devastated, a world in which 90 plus percent of the population had succumbed to the zombie illness or whatever.
When in reality, we know that when things fall apart, when the structures of civilization fall apart, we know that people will rely on things that are closer to themselves.
people will trust each other on the basis of race, religion, creed, and the sort of social egalitarianism that has taken form as a form of, I guess you could say, transnational progressivism or authoritarian liberalism.
Those things will quickly go by the wayside.People will quickly forget those values.But also when it comes to the form of what is important or what people predicate importance towards, even especially when it comes to things such as knowledge.
A Kinect over Leibovitz is a much more interesting exploration of those possibilities than a lot of pop-slop sci-fi and dystopian lit and dystopian productions in popular media that we have nowadays.
Because after the fall, this emphatic form of Luddianism that is basically an attempt to wipe the world clean of what had been to them, and surely even to us if this were to happen, a mere mythical apocalyptic event of the fire deluge.
Horrors that we cannot imagine.And so the church, when, as it states in the first chapter, goes through phases of persecution and goes through phases of being invaded, but then also finding favor with other armies.
And I believe this monastery, the Beatus Leibowitz Monastery, the Holy Brothers of Leibowitz, they are protected by a local war band or by a local knight's outfit.So anyways, so then I wanted to read this one passage.
Uh, the catacombs will after he would offer mass for them on altered and stone wall enclosed a relic of the church's name, Saint.
A bit of burlap, fibers from the hangman's noose, fingernail clippings from the bottom of the rusty box, or perhaps racing form, but he doesn't know what that means, racing form.It could be a track bedding or whatever.
Liebowitz was perhaps not a common name before the fire deluge and the I.E.could easily represent Ichabod Ebenezer as Isaac Edwards for Francis.There was only one. Isaac Edward Leibowitz.
The distant Abbey, three bells rang out across the desert, a pause and three notes were followed by nine.The novice dutifully responded, glancing up in surprise, see the sun had become a fat scarlet eclipse that already touched the western horizon.
Moving on though, it talks about his life in the... And also another thing that's interesting before I get to the scribe room is that he breaks a record for the most amount of time under a vocational selection process, but the most amount of time under a fast in the desert.
But he doesn't necessarily come off as that religious though. but through the power of the inspiration of keeping knowledge that Leibovitz, through that inspiration, to maintain the project of St.
Leibovitz, to carry forth worldly knowledge and humanly knowledge into the future, he endures to the point where he almost redacts, he almost sunsets from the starvation.So extreme forms of asceticism
come back into reality once again for most people because even nowadays it's very rare that you will meet someone who is a monk or an extreme ascetic of this nature unless you live in certain parts of the world such as in India with sadhus and so forth but in the western tradition even I mean there's still ascetic monks there's still
lot of Catholic orders and maybe not a lot but like a Catholic and Orthodox orders that still do this.So then it talks about how he's moved to the printing to the printing room and the head of I believe the head of the order was a prior Cherokee
that it basically it gives you a good view of life in a monastery but you have to realize the one thing that really fascinated me was life that was very slow the reduction of activity and the sort of incessant grinding away for sometimes generations over one task things that we do within a minute might take years in terms of like computing technology
So Francis had thought briefly of going to the Northwest if he failed to find a vocation to the Order, but although he was strong and skillful enough for the blade and bow, he was rather short and not very heavy.
Well, according to rumor, the heathen was nine feet tall.And of course, now you have the heathens, quote unquote, these pagan war bands that are in the border. Hermitage, Abbot Archytos, vestments were concealed under the cowl.
The lion almost managed to see a humble as kidnas and yell.Yeah, Archytos is sort of like the taskmaster that he has to report to.And then it talks about how if a church were to be invaded, they would send out a letter to the accompanying knights.
And I know that it wasn't going to really bore you with long summaries, but there are certain pages that I have to read that are quite meaningful.So here in 56 to 57, this really explains the whole thing.What else could he do?
He had donned the hobbit first of apostolate, later novice, but to suspect that God as well as nature had beckoned one to become a professional monk of the order.So this is a form of self-doubt.
And that's the thing that makes a canonical for Leibowitz so special.
because even though it is a catholic text it is not so much in catholic apologetics but rather it brings about a sincere engagement with questioning of faith that isn't your typical reddit fedora tip oh why do good things happen to bad people yeah there is like some of this there i mean then humanity eventually does you know succumb to another nuclear war
And so, but the point being is that it doesn't really moralize, because even at the end, we will get to the mystical vision that Father Zerkay, the last character in the three stories, experiences.
Father Zerkay, Father Zerkay, I'm not, I was debating whether to do that stupid joke when I get to the third book in Can't Go For Leaders, if we're gonna call him Father Zerkay, but I'm not gonna make that stupid joke, because honestly,
I'm not, listen, I'm not, I'm not going to say anything, but, uh, don't listen to that brain slob.Put it, you know, I don't know.I don't know.Yeah.I'm talking about the streamer, John Zirka.I'm not going to make that stupid joke.
Um, anyways, so what could he do?There were no returning to his homeland, the Utah, the Utah. As a small child, he had been sold to a shaman who would have been training him as a servant and acolyte.
Having run away, he could not return except to meet grisly tribal quote-unquote justice.He had stolen a shaman's property, Francis' own person.
And while thievery was an honorable profession among the Utah, getting caught was a capital crime when a thief's victim was the tribal warlock.
nor would he have cared to lapse back into the relatively primitive life of an illiterate shepherd people after his schooling at the Abbey.But what else?And this is the big problem.The continent was lightly settled.
He thought of the well-mapped out in the Abbey's library and of the sparse distribution of the cross-hatched areas, which were regions, if not of civilization, then of civil order, were some forms of lawful sovereignty transcending the tribal held sway.
The rest of the continent was populated very thinly by the people of the forest and the plains, who were, for the most part, not savages, but simple clan folk loosely organized into small communities here and there, who lived by hunting, gathering, and primitive architecture, whose birth rate was barely high enough, discounting monster births and sports.
To sustain the population, the principal industries of the continent, excepting a few sea-coat regions, were hunting, farming, fighting, and warcraft.Sorry, witchcraft.
last being the most promising industry for any youth within a true choice of careers and having in mind the primary end maximizing wealth and prestige and of course uh I'd imagine some tale is also involved there, becoming a village shaman.
The school which Francis had been given, the Abbey prepared him for nothing, which was of practical value in the dark, ignorant, and workaday world.
But then you have to realize that later on in the middle of the book, these tribal peoples, they unify into large armies.
and then you get the arrival of city-states again, and then after that you get the arrival of certain very primitive forms of science, and then what the secular scholar Taddeo in the second book predicted as a new renaissance, who is sort of like this quirky
like semi-aloof always like spinning in circles ever curious but also sort of shut off character i i basically when i was reading it i i imagined mentious mold bug uh even though i'm not a big fan i'm not
terribly a big fan of molebug but i mentioned like that type of character of like curtis yarvin in the new dark ages going around trying to find the essences of electricity i don't know why i had that picture but he he reminded me a bit of that type of temperament right um anyways
So a workaday world, ignorant, dark, ignorant workaday world where literacy was non-existent and youth therefore seemed of no worth to a community unless he could also farm, fight, hunt, or show some special talent for inter-tribal theft, or for the divining of water in the workable metal.
Even in the scattered domains where a form of civil order existed, the fact of Francis' literacy would help him not at all.
If he must lead a life apart from the Church, it was true that petty barons sometimes employed a scribe or two, but such cases were rare enough to be negligible and were as often filled by monks and by monastery school laymen anyways.
The only demand for scribes and secretaries was created by the Church herself.
whose tremendous hierarchical web was stretched across the continent and occasionally to far distant shores, although the diocese abroad were virtually autonomous rulers, subject to the Holy See in theory, but seldom in practice, being cut off from the new Rome, lest by a schism,
them by oceans not often crossed and could be held together only by communication networks that were very loose.
The church had become quite coincidentally without meaning to be the only means whereby news was transmitted from place to place across the continents and because the abbeys had a system of communication through various letters and so forth it was often the only form of mail for most people in this environment.
the plague came to the north west the south the north east the south west would soon hear of it as a coincidental a coincidental effect of tales told and retold by messengers of the church and monks coming and going from new rome so that's very interesting very interesting that literacy in this world is still somewhat of a detriment or rather a non-factor
And it's only really until you get the organization of city-states and other higher forms of the requirement of knowledge or knowledge work, I guess would be the colloquial term, to have scribes, to have people that are accountants, who are literate, who can read various texts and so forth, that only really can come about with the social apparatus that can facilitate such knowledge and people that can work these various jobs.
the nomadic infiltration in the far northwest threatened a church diocese, an encyclical letter might soon be read from pulpits far to the south and east, warning of the threat and extending the apostolic benediction to men of any station so long as they be skilled at arms, who having the means to make the journey, may be piously disposed to do so in order to
to swear fealty to our beloved son and lawful ruler of that place for such a period of time as may seem necessary for the maintenance of standing armies there for the defense of Christians against the gathering heathen hordes.
whose ruthless savagery is known to many, and who, to our deepest grief, torture, redacting and devouring those priests of God, which we ourselves sent them with the word that they might enter as lambs in the fold of the Lamb, of whose flock to earth we are the shepherd.
For while we have never been despaired, nor ceased to pray that these nomadic children of the darkness may be led into the light,
enter our realms in peace for it not be through the peaceful strangers should be repelled from the land so vast and empty nay they should be welcomed who come peacefully even ever should they be strangers to the visible church and the divine father so long as they hearken to the natural law which is written in the hearts of all men
binding them to Christ in spirit, though they be ignorant of his name."He does not know the name of Christ, but they know him in spirit.
It nevertheless met, meet, and fitting and prudent that Christendom, while praying for peace and the conversion of the heathen, should gird itself for defense in the Northwest, whose the hordes gather, and the incidents of heathen savagery have lately increased, and upon each of you, beloved sons, who can bear arms and shall travel to the Northwest to join forces."
So then it goes into some other things till we get to the part about the actual running of the print room after he is given his vocation.He's moved from light duty in the kitchen when he's strong enough to go into printing.
But what's very interesting is that like in medieval times the church was protected because the church was in a lot of ways the very first transnational body in Europe.
And so the protection of the church was not given to a standing army in name, but rather any standing army willing to defend Christendom as a whole.In this case, you remember the Crusades, which were a defensive war, by the way.
But that's, you know, PaxTube has a great video on this. the actual protectorate of the church would be any one of the kingdoms or any one of the city-states that had a standing army that could protect the church.
So now we've gone back to that system where the church is the sole vestibule of communication, of literacy, and of knowledge keeping and knowledge creation as we will get to this next section.So
I talked about the slowness, and that's a very interesting theme of the Canicle for Leibovitz, is that we can't really, because we live in what would you call it, liquid or hyper modernity, you can't really picture knowledge being slow.
You can't really picture the dissemination of anything taking sometimes years, if not decades, to reach the wider world.Because we are, we live with the sort of
We live with the repository of the world, and some would say the world spirit in our hands and on our fingertips with computers, smartphones.
But if you were forced to go back to that very slow level of learning and reading, that slow temporality, as we'll see in this next section, what would life be like?It would be radically transformed.And so there's this emphasis on the first chapter
of the very quiet, very trudging, slow and steady pace by which books, knowledge, learning, literacy is carried forward by the church.And the project created by one monk after he dies could be carried on by his apprentice for another generation.
But think of a translation of a text. Now we have AI translations, can translate a text in an instant.Now imagine having to scribe and translate a text that could take decades.To translate a Bible took decades.We can't really think of it that way.
Rather, we can't conceptualize that level of very slow burn knowledge dissemination.
But as the intensity of knowledge distribution increases, so does the various social, political, cultural machinations that come with it and facilitate the growth of larger and larger bodies and communities and city-states and eventually whole nations and civilizations.
So then we jump ahead and he's transferred to the printing room under the tutelage of a monk named Horner.
And if things went well for him, he might reasonably look forward to a lifetime in the copy room where he would dedicate the rest of his days to such tasks as hand copying of algebra texts and illuminating their pages with olive leaves and cheerful cherubim surrounding tables of large longarithms.
Brother Horner was a gentle old man, and Brother Francis liked him from the start.Most of us do better work on the assigned copy, Horner told us.
If we had our own project too, most of the copyists become interested in some particular work for the memorabilia, and likes to spend a little time on the side each week.For example, Brother Sorrel
Over there, his work was lagging and he was making mistakes, so he let him spend an hour a day on a project he chose for himself.
When the work gets so tedious that he starts making errors and copy, he can put it aside for a while and work on his own project.
I allow everyone to do the same, and if you finish your assigned work before the day is over, but don't have your own project, you'll have to spend the extra time on our perennials. Perennials?Yes, I don't mean plants.
There's a perennial demand for the whole clergy for various books.Missals, Scriptures, Breveries, the Summa, I'm assuming the Summa Theologica, Encyclopedia, and the like will sell quite a lot of them.
So when you don't have to pet projects, he'll put you on the perennials when you finished early.You've plenty of time to decide.What project did Brother Sorrow pick?And here's, here's the kicker.
The aged overseer paused, while I doubt if you'd ever understand it, I don't, he seems to have found a method for restoring missing words and phrases to some of the old fragments of original text in the memorabilia.
I don't know if this is going to work, by the way.Like, that seems crazy, right?But you could probably find a set theory or some kind of, not set theory, but you could probably find some kind of
equation by which you can guesstimate I hate that word guesstimate but you know you could find some equation which you can guess or posit the potential other letterings of a sentence given but but I wouldn't even think apart from like some you know thousands of calculations per millisecond with some AI program I mean I'm sure that people have come up with methods of doing such things but
Perhaps the left-hand side of his half-burned book is legible, but the right edge of each page is burned.With a few words missing at the end of each line, he's worked out a mathematical method for finding the missing words."
And so here you have the creation of, of course, mathematics being the backbone of a lot of functions of civilization.You have the beginning of various mathematical equations and theories that can become immensely useful, but given the right
bodies of knowledge the right access to certain technologies that can facilitate the usefulness because at this time we're at like the beginning stage of a growth of civilization where they have like a little bits and pieces here and there but they don't really have the full picture of anything and that will take literally centuries to get to the point where knowledge can crystallize into something productive
He's working on a mathematical method of finding missing words.It's not foolproof, but it works to some degree.He's managed to restore four whole pages since beginning the attempt.
Francis glanced at Brother Saul, who is an octogenarian and nearly blind.How long did it take him, the apprentice asked.About 40 years, said Brother Horner.40 years for four pages.
Of course, he's only spent about five hours a week at it, and it does take considerable arithmetic.Francis nodded thankfully, or thoughtfully.
If one page per decade could be restored maybe in a few centuries, even less, Croak brothers saw, without looking up from his work.The more you fill, the faster the remainder goes.I'll get the next page done in a couple of years.
After that, God willing, maybe, his voice tampered off into mumble.Francis frequently noticed that Brother Saul talked to himself while working.Sue yourself some, Brother Horner.
We can always use more help on the perennials, but you have your own project with what you want.And this is where he discovers the illumination of the Leibowitzian memorabilia, which is that schematic chart.
So then we finally get to the end of the first chapter before Fiat Lux.
where brother francis is redacted he goes back and instead of finding the original uh barbarian thief raider he goes to the same uh village or a little not village but little uh how shall i say yeah like little pageant or whatever but then he discovers a i think what was it a papal army
or he discovers another band of raiding thieves and heathens and an arrow flies through his head.And by the way, I believe his bones with the same arrow hole will come up in the very last chapter, which is centuries into the future.Sorry, last book.
And let me read you a little bit because the last part of Fiat Homo is quite important because it's a theme that comes up over and over again.So The Wanderer waited.Finally the buzzards descended among the trees.The Wanderer waited five minutes more.
At last he arose and limped ahead toward the forested patch, dividing his way between his game leg and his staff."So now the Wanderer comes, you know, conveniently enough comes the same area that Brother Francis took an arrow to the head.So,
After a while he entered the forest there, the buzzards were busy at the remains of a man.The wanderer chased the birds away with his cudgel and inspected the human remains.Significant portions were missing.
There was an arrow through the skull, protruding at the back of the neck.The old man looked nervous around at the brush.There was no other in sight, but there were plenty of footprints in the vicinity of the trail.It was not safe to stay.
Safe or not, the job had to be done.The old wanderer found a place where the earth was soft enough for digging with hand and stick.While he dug, the angry buzzards circled low over the treetop."
So keep in mind the memorabilia is now at the new Vatican, I guess you could say, in America.Ironic enough, the Vatican is located in America, which I think is quite interesting given the
while the long entangled history and the rather shaky history of Catholicism in America but also like this is the way that to go back to the previous section this is the way that politics were in the medieval times the church had of course some means of communication
there were a lot of instances in when local parishes, local diocesans, and so forth, when they operated not fully autonomously, but they had a lot of leeway.
But in this instance where transcontinental communication is cut off only to like the barest minimum extent, because I'd imagine there wouldn't be a lot of resources to have vessels
could cross oceans uh these churches had a large amount of autonomy so i wonder if
that would also mean that the catechism itself would be interpreted and reinterpreted in different ways by the different sections of the world the way that a lot of even as a totalizing and universal religion as Christianity is you still have instances of local practices seeping into ritual and belief and even Catholicism will take on
certain local ethnic characteristics depending on location.
So one bird finally landed it strutted uh indignantly about the mountain of fresh earth with a rock marker marker at one end disappointed it took winged again there were dead hog beyond the valley of the misborn the buzzards so the misborn is basically like uh
They are the savages on the borderlands, but they're also, from what it's implied, their descendants probably had some kind of like heavy mutational load or some kind of genetic disruption from many centuries of their ancestors having, you know, being the product of a nuclear irradiated wasteland.
So, The buzzards laid their eggs in season and lovingly fed their young, a dead snake and a bit of a feral dog.The young generation waxed strong, sword high, and farmed black wings, waiting for the fruitful earth to yield up to her bountiful carrion.
Sometimes dinner was only a toad, once it was a messenger from New Rome.Their flight carried them over all the midwestern plains.
They were delighted with the bounty of good things which the nomads left lying on the land during their ride over towards the south. The buzzards had laid eggs in season and lovingly fed their young.Again, that's repeated, right?
Earth had nourished them bountifully for centuries.She would nourish them for centuries more.That's very important. Pickings were good for a while in the region of the Red River, but then out of the carnage, a city-state arose.
For rising city-states, the buzzards had no fondness.Although they approved of their eventual fall, they shied away from Texarkana, which will be important in the next section of Fiat Lux. and ranged far over the plain to the west.
After the manner of all living things, they replenished the earth many times with their kind.Eventually it was the year of our Lord, 3174.There were rumors of war."So that's a very ominous ending to the first section.
So in other words, the buzzards become a metaphor for the forces of nature. for the cyclical time in which humanity is beholden to.Notice that metaphor of the buzzards flying overhead, an ominous and ever-present looming specter that haunts humanity.
Notice how the buzzards do not like city-states, because city-states imply a form of human existence
that is imbued with a form of techniques, efficiency, certain forms of order, then quickly comes forms of cleanliness, public works such as waterworks and so forth, public sanitation, which becomes immensely important for the maintenance of civilization and the furtherance of human longevity.
So the city-state becomes a metaphor for man no longer being subject to brutal nature, very Hobbesian view of nature.Small war bands, the church is the really only order that keeps people together, that keeps knowledge alive.
But the buzzards eventually can outlast any human endeavor, the way that nature can outlast any human endeavor. So then the buzzards, to skip ahead at the end of Fiat Lux, the second part of the book, the buzzards then make a comeback.So we'll see.
But the point being is that, and then the ominous end, there's rumors of war, meaning there's rumors of instability.And this comes up in the second chapter, which
can be quite a lot of people blow through the second part of the book fiat lux but there is points where it becomes quite boring and tedious in terms of going back and forth between the war brewing between the war warlord hennigan uh
Tadio who's the secular scholar philosopher slash scientist who wants to pick apart the new invention by a monk who just rediscovered electricity and who has a light but also there's this uh but there are some good parts though that are worth highlighting in the second part about the statue of Leibowitz
But yeah, the buzzards have no fondness, although they proved that they were eventually full.They shied away from Texarkana and arranged for the plains to the west, the manner of all living things.They replenished the earth many times of their kind.
The buzzards intergenerationally sustain themselves.There's plenty of death to feast upon the earth. Hence why buzzards are a perfect metaphor for the looming specter of nature itself upon humanity.
And notice how Brother Francis was redacted by a warring band of mutants who they call the Pope's children, who I'm presuming there probably is a lot of radioactive spots on the earth after the fallout of the flame deluge.
But yeah, the Pope's children, sort of like that other story, what was it called?Clowns of God?Or something like that, where disabled or mentally, mentally, what's the politically correct word?
Differently abled, mentally, mentally differently abled children were messengers of God.But in this instance, it sort of reveals the supreme
humanism of that period or rather the moralization and humanism of the catholic church that like the lepers and total rejects of society that serve no purpose and probably should have well not let's not say anything like that but the the people the the mutants and the rejects of humanity are protected in a weird way in their untouchable status
under the umbrella of faith of the church, even though they are violent, mutated, deformed.It really shows the sort of, the meek shall inherit the earth.But as we get to the second part, now we have the introduction of a split of knowledge.
You have to realize, like, I can't look over my head, but I'm going to read this great paper that I discovered that is a overview of the main themes of the Canonical for Leibovitz from a Schmittian and a Thomistic perspective.
It's by, uh, when was this written?By, um, Thomas Mark and, uh, Tranter Kieran.How do you say that name?Tranter Kieran.Fiat Lux, Fiat Lex.A Canonical for Leibovitz Reason and Law.Law and Literature Review.
and it was from oh but was it contemporary from 2022 yes uh oh it's by yeshiva university uh cardozo school of law of yeshiva university in queensland university of technology in brisbane and it's a great paper i believe you can still get it for free and i'll go over the paper because you have to realize the main theme of the chemical relief which
is in typical church fashion is about man's engagement with reason, both pure reason and practical reason.
Pure reason being the sort of theoretical metaphysics that hypothesizes the very existence of things, that underlines the very existence of things.
And this is where you get the debate between Tantadio, who is the representation of a pure practical reason. pure essence of utility.What can this knowledge, what can it gain us in terms of functioning and practical solutions to man's problems?
Whereas the church is always concerned with a form of stewardship of reason by intuiting that higher form of reason that is, again, imbued by grace to humanity, but also kept within a very special purpose in the church in terms of guiding humanity.
Now, you can argue that the guidance of humanity in this universe, and this calls into question Miller's Catholicism,
has ultimately failed and you'll see near the end why it failed so supremely and spectacularly not just that humanity gets annihilated but humanity reaches the stars but you'll you have a form of an a weird like inverse second coming at the end in the that culminates in the book at the very end in another nuclear apocalypse i say inverted because now the feminine comes into play
feminine of Mary rather than Christ which is depicted by the sort of masculine if you're going by the sort of archetypal Jungian definition of feminine polarity and masculine polarity then you know solar masculine lunar feminine at the dawn of the end of humanity you have the reintroduction of the chthonic the feminine
but one that delivers the divine grace and reason in that final act.And you'll see why at the very end.
But the second chapter is also very interesting because now you have this debate between Tantadio, the secular humanist, who's purely looking at things through utilitarianism and practical reason, and the church authority, uh, who, uh, Paolo.
Paolo is the, the head of the, the Leibowitzian order at this point. And Benjamin is another priest, another monk that debates with the old hermit who is, again, Lazarus.So think of it this way.
The wanderer, the J-ish wanderer that Francis meets a few centuries earlier is still living and is still wandering the barren wastelands of the desert and is a Lazarus type figure.
of the wandering, you know, the wandering J. So, but this debate about reason gets very ingrained in the second chapter, sorry, the second section, where you do have this debate over reason.And you have this debate over the role of the church.
And now that technological advancement, again, this goes back to any critic of technology, whether it be Jacques Ellul, whether it be Lewis Mumford, even other ones such as Ted Kay, that technology has with it a form of ideological comportment.
It has a belief system.It has a way of viewing reality that then becomes actualized, hence comportment, activity.And so technological development is not inert.
the grounding of technological development in secular sciences needs a form of unboundedness to operate.Hence why secularity often is accompanied by technological advancement in a weird way.
People like even I believe even Charles Taylor goes into this.It's been a while since I read any Charles Taylor but anyways
But, you know, Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul talks about this, how at the dawn of advanced technological societies, you have a mode of being that is also, that also becomes operationalized, a way of viewing reality, a way of viewing being itself.
Now, what does Jacques Ellul talk about in his book on the technological society as a potential remedy?Not an escape, because you have to realize there's no escape.
There can be, I mean, an event of a nuclear apocalypse where Luddite-ism is adopted by the survivors out of sheer necessity.
Apart from that fantastical situation, what does Jacques Ellul talk about in terms of a remediation of technological society and its excesses?Because again, he's a Catholic scholar.He calls for contemplation.
in typical, typical Catholic Thomist fashion.Similar to what Byung-Chul Han talks about in his own critique in the very end of the book, Psychopolitics, his magnum opus.
He says, he calls it idiotism, where you do not imbue, you're aware of it, but you don't imbue into the endless flow of data and information.You're sort of blissfully aloof. But it's more than that.I could go into idiotism.
Actually, in Giant Reviews, if you go to Patreon, I review Psychopolitics, chapter by chapter.Took me like seven episodes.I think like 10 hours I spent on Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics.I forget what the exact, it was like nine or 10 hours.
So go to patreon.com slash giantproductions or substack.com slash Geo's Content Corner. Man, I can really rifle that out fast when I'm grifting, eh?But anyways.Allul says contemplation is the key to navigating technological society.
And in a canonical for Leibowitz, this is why I bring up Jacques Allul.Because in a canonical for Leibowitz, you have the same remediation of technology or growing advancements in a quote-unquote new renaissance that Tantadio is predicting.
through the church.The church is saying in the very end with Father Zerkai, and with the theological debates, the moral debates over E starts with an E, ends with Asia, you know what I mean?
I don't think I can say it for YouTube, but you have the church trying to keep knowledge, keep reason, because they're the only authority that both connects humanity, but also is the one that is capable through grace.
of using and working out the various implications of technology we don't have that nowadays there's no governing body i mean there is like ethics bodies there's like for very practical sciences like for example the what's it called i forget the exact um the exact the exact name but it's the world commission of nuclear energy or nuclear sciences or whatever there's certainly international bodies of sciences
But in terms of a supreme divine authority that governs the machinations of technology, we don't have that.That's in fact unthinkable to us because we don't operate with the same consciousness that our ancestors did.
It's not that they're primitive or they're superstitious.They just had a form of a different mode of consciousness in their own new sphere, in their own world picture. to bring in a John David Ebert term.
Their world picture was fundamentally different.
It was the dome-like structure of the church, of the cathedral, that governed the consciousness of people, that governed the consciousness of civilization at large, to where the church would be influential in terms of technological development.
But in the very last chapter of Keanukover Libuets,
The church transforms along with technological society, along with the techniques of society that bring about these immense changes, that rediscover nuclear power, rediscover robotics, I'm assuming rediscovers things like cybernetics that lead to innovations in computing technology.
But yet the church is still stalwart as a guidance of humanity because they were the ones that delivered this knowledge of the past to humanity.And so, but then the sort of beasts of reason slip away, the fire in the, what's it called?
The fire in the heads of men. that sort of irreverent, profane, secularizing, dissolving of all things mindset of reason that is untethered from the reason that is untethered from the influence of grace.
Then you get the beasts of reason, the machines, machinic society. that is not beholden to anything.And there is a thanatoic principle in there.
You know, I don't think Freud was right about everything, but the sort of thanatoic principle of society ultimately leading to a mass principle of the death drive.Civilization will eventually come to its end.
In fact, civilization craves its own end through technological society, as we see in Kinnickle for Leibowitz.
And that death drive, that Thanatos principle, that yearning for a full return to that which is the most completed being, which is unbeing, which is the organic state of death, as Freud would say, that cannot be curbed by the church.
Now, who knows in those space colonies in Achaea and Kupferleibowitz, if they achieve a more perfected society,
But in that final act of humanity, going towards its death drive, satiating in an explosion, in an orgiastic ecstasy of death and destruction.In that final act, you have the moment of a return to the sacred.
You have the return of Christ or Mary, as we will see.But I'm getting ahead of myself.But I just, I wanted to lay all this out now, even if it's circular, even if we're going to go back to these themes, because it's very, very important.
Hence why A Canicle for Leibowitz, not only is it one of the best sci-fi books or post-apocalyptic literature, but in terms of a religiously informed work of literature,
It has, it goes beyond the usual technology leads to man's downfall, like grub brain type of stuff.Because that, the way in which technology leads to man's downfall is a very specific reason.
I use that word reason, but it's a very specific cause, which is the guiding hand of grace embodied by the church is no longer present.
and it slips away into a boundlessness of techniques, of reason, that leads ultimately to something, you know, quite sacred through, well, I mean, quite profane, but also something that is quite sacred, something that is very deep in the primordial, which is this death drive, which is the yearning, the thirst for annihilation, if you get that little reference.
That little reference, it's a Nick Land book that he wrote about Bataille.Again, bring Bataille into this.The very limit experience culminating in the erasure of humanity itself.That final divine act, that burnt offering.
Then you have the second coming.But notice how the second coming is through a woman. through the figure of Mary in Rachel, a mutant, a two-headed mutant.But by the way, two heads always represents, in the ancient world, a form of wisdom.
There were two-headed people.There was that one, that guy that said he had a, I think he was in Peru.I think he redacted himself.He sunsetted because he said at nighttime, his vestigial head of his brother would speak to him and it drove him mad.
were accounts of that in the ancient world they became shamans and so forth because in all real not all but like in most world religions whether it be uh vedic hinduism certain forms of mystical christianity even in islam uh you do have this like dual headed or multi-headed nature the multiple heads of shiva that look to both sides right that look to both horizons
east and west that represent the duality of nature and man.That you have the light and the dark, you have the shadow self and that which is conscious being.So the two-headed figure becomes a sacred symbol.
And in Kinako for Leibowitz, you have something very pagan.Again, that's another debate.
The degree of paganism in the Catholic Church, me being Italian, Italian Catholic, I am well aware of all the superstitions and near pagan ancient world type of rituals that go into Catholicism.
Us Italians are some of the most superstitious people in the world.But anyways, the point being is that that's also another debate because now you have, in the Canon Quo Verlibowitz, a Catholic book, a Catholic work,
a very ancient concept that was revered in the ancient pagan world before Christianity before the collapse into pure monotheism of the representation of the tripartite in one face that is both man and God so you have a lot of these themes and Rachel who is a cripple
who walks on stilts, she is now imbued as a young woman at the very end.She transforms into a divine form, going back from the crone to the mother maiden, archetypally.A transformation, a beautification.
Even in the East, they have such a concept as well, of when you achieve perfect Dharma, the physical body will also become beautified. Your jiva will shine through your physical self, your mere atman, right?
So you have this beautification of both the spirit and the flesh in that moment of awakening.But in this case, you have a beautification of Rachel or Miss Growley's slash Rachel.She takes on the form of her younger self.
she transforms into a divine being at the very end of humanity.So, but let's get to the second part.Let's go into the nitty gritty of it.I've talked for a long time.
I'm getting way ahead of myself, but I just wanted to have a moment to explicate a lot of these main themes.But also, before I go into the second chapter, Fiat Lux, there's also the implication of a cosmic pessimism.
the fact that the church did miss because the church now is going to the stars because Father Zerkai is going to deliver the Eucharist and the memorabilia on a spaceship going to the colonies because the colonies have to consecrate new bishops so as the church goes exoplanetary the apocalypse and the second coming arrives
yet the church is destroyed or the church is extracted to the stars before the second coming can happen.So in a sense there is a form of cosmic pessimism or at least a question of cosmic pessimism in A Canicle for Leibowitz.
Not only does humanity destroy itself again and again and this is an inevitability to the point where the earth becomes so barren that life cannot sustain, but only for the most ancient of beasts, in the case of the last book of Shark.
Only natural processes can outlast humanity, but the church and humanity going exoplanetary, meaning that the only salvation is in the stars, is somewhere else besides the kingdom of the earth.
that was imbued life and given to us by God, that God's green earth, that God can even become weary of his own creation, that even if it is true that there is
a strong thanatoic principle that will always drive God's children to destruction, to the glee, the psychoanalytic term, the jouissance of thanatos, the act so giving of pleasure that it destroys the organism, to use the Lacanian term of jouissance, that destruction can bring a profound
an almost sacred limit experience that leads to the total blowing out and destruction of the collective body of the organism, the self.But in this case, the collection of all of life and humanity on earth.
In a way, the nuclear apocalypse is the quinescence of reason It is reason that is so overcoming, so totalizing, that it leads to the very extinction of the only creature that can further and experience that reason.
It is reason in the, you know, if you want to go like all German idealism, it's reason that has reached its final synthesis, its final end, by ending the very thing that furthers itself.
by ending the very vessel, which is humanity, that reason is given life and given the legs to further itself over and over to the perfect, perfect synthesis of all knowledge, of all technological creation, the way that some, you know, you're looking at the weirdo accelerationist Nick Landian theories about AI being the perfection of reason to overcome humanity itself.
Reason so rapacious, so totalizing that it will eventually overcome the very vessel that gives life and legs and motion to reason.That makes sense.So I wanted to go back to the first part before we move on.
This article that I found, it talks about how
there's with a loss of knowledge you have sort of a loss of differentiation and so in that moment the monks don't really fully know something that because of course you know at this time you're not going to have the same ingredients of things in a shopping list and so let me read um the narrative of fiat homo is gerald's uh gerald's accidental discovery of a sealed fallout shelter
containing memorabilia from Liebowitz, including a shopping list, pound pastrami, canned kraut, six bagels.Do they know what, I mean, they may have had sauerkraut, but certainly a pastrami, they wouldn't have called it that, right?
Erasing form in the blueprint, an insipid relic.Francis' discovery shadows the narrative of his life.In the beginning was the word, and the word was, well, either electronic circuit design or pound pastrami.
The archivist monks cannot understand the nature of the signifiers with which they accumulate and store, and cannot ascribe appropriate significance to them, such the electronic circuitry essential to modern technological cultures cannot be distinguished from the quotidian banality of a shopping list.
The result, and the rest of the part, involves vignettes of Gerald as he ages as a copyist and how the miracle of the discovery is a catalyst in the Church's final process from the canonization of Leibowitz.
what I mean they don't really know uh the nuances of daily life the way that we try to piece together historical documents that try to find the nuances of what an ancient roman shopping list is and there's a lot of debate in history right now a lot of these uh I don't want to get into it but a lot of these like modern historians these you know
these Mary Beard types, you know what I mean?
There was this one tweet I saw the other day that summarizes the modern attitude of, you know, who cares about, don't think bad history is, you know, and it's like giving you the ick, like bad history, focusing on empires, good history, focusing on communities.
So in other words, like the banalities of average everyday serfs is more important than the great men of history.
that's what they want to convince you that's what they want you to believe but what's very interesting is that you have basically a banal quotidian functionary of a previous civilization who is Leibowitz is canonized as a saint
And through the loss of knowledge, through the process and the machinations of history in this world, a lowly engineer with a shopping list and with a circuitry board schematic becomes a saint.
So now you have fiat lux, you have the birth of new knowledge, a secularization of knowledge is now taking place as city-states are more assured.
So this, I mean, a lot of people, again, like I say, they think that, oh, this isn't that interesting compared to the rest of the book.But, you know, Fiat Lux means that there'll be light, by the way.
So then we have a hundred years, hundreds of years in the future.Now they piece together scientific knowledge.But I wanted to skip some of the part because it goes into the sort of,
uh, how Tantario goes to the, goes to the memorabilia and he goes to, uh, he's convinced by another head monk, uh, to go to, from Tex, I think from Texarkana, to go to the Abbey of Leibowitz, where he can discover this monk that has a new invention where they rediscover electricity.
there now we have uh i believe his father benjamin who confronts the abbot or sorry he convinced the hermit so that now he uh is friends he was friends with the old hermit the wandering hermit who is of course believed to be the one in the same wandering jay that brother francis saw so uh benjamin uh talks about abbot paulo
What does it say Benjamin?Does it attract much trade up here?What should it say?It says tense men adhere.The priest snorted in disbelief.All right, doubt me.
But if you don't believe me, what's written there, you can't be expected to believe what's written on the other side of the sign facing the wall, obviously facing the wall.So they're debating it.
So he goes to see him after he has to kick out this poet who's occupying the Abbey that they have to clear out for Tantadio. There's a few passages that I wanted to read that I felt was important.So here they're conversing.
He swallowed a throaty sound and lowered his face to his hand.You fish in dark waters.Forgive me.The burden, it was pressed upon me by others.He looked up slowly.Should I refuse to take it in?The priest sucked in his breath for a time.
There was no sound in the shanty but the sound of the wind. There was a touch of divinity in the madness.Don Paulo thought the Jewish community was thinly scattered in these times.
Benjamin had perhaps outlived his children or somehow become an outcast.Such as an old Israelite might wander for years without encountering others of his people."So again, I wouldn't imagine that there was a lot of his people at this time as well.
because again I don't know what the sea travel would be like from the Middle East to North America so Perhaps it is loneliness he had acquired, the silent conviction that was of the last, the one and the only.
And being the last, he ceased to be Benjamin, becoming Israel.And upon his heart had settled his history of 5,000 years, no longer a... Oh, sorry.
So Benjamin is the wandering hermit, but Benjamin's also believed to be the wanderer in the first chapter of the book.So he may have been surviving like Methuselah for multiple centuries. becoming Israel.
And upon his heart had settled the history of the 5,000 years, no longer remote, but becoming the history of his own lifetime.His eye was the converse of the imperial we.
But I too am the member of a oneness, thought Dom Paolo, a part of the congregation in the continuity.Mine too had been despised by the world, yet for me the distinction between the self and the nation is clear.
For you, the old friend, it has somehow become obscure, a burden pressed upon you by others, and you accepted it.What must it weigh?What wouldn't it weigh for me?
He set his shoulders under it and tried to heave, teasing the bulk of it, I am a Christian monk and a priest, and I am therefore accountable before God for the actions and deeds of every monk and priest who have breathed and walked the earth since Christ, as well as for his acts of my own.
He shuddered and began to shake.He said, no, no, a crush to the spine and this burden.It was too much for any man to bear, save Christ alone.
To be cursed for a faith that was burdened enough to bear the curse as was possible and then to accept the logic, the illogic behind the curses, the illogic which called one to task, not only for himself, but also for every member of his race or his faith, for the actions as well as one's own, to accept that too as Benjamin was trying to do.
And yet Don Paulo, his own faith told him, the burden was there, had there been since Adam's time, and the burden imposed by a fiery crying and mockery, man, a man, man calling each other to account for the deeds all since the beginning, a burden impressed upon every generation before the opening of the wound,
sorry, the opening of the womb, the burden of the guilt of original sin, let the fool dispute it, the same fool with great delight according to the other inheritance, the inheritance of an ancestor glory, virtue, triumph, dignity, which rendered his courageous and noble by reason of birth, right, without protesting that his personality had done nothing to earn the inheritance beyond being born of the race of man.
protest was reserved so again not the burden of being born of the race of man but you take this divine responsibility the protest was reserved for the inherent burden which rendered him guilty and outcast by reason of birth and again the verdict he strained too close to his ears the burden indeed was hard his own faith told him too that the burden had been lifted from him by the one whose image hung from the cross above the altar although the burden's imprint still was there and so here you have
You have to remember this is the 1950s.I believe this was before Vatican II.I don't know.This is kind of wrong thinking right here.That the wanderer of Benjamin takes up the burden of his own faith.
That he may be the only and sole carrier of his faith into the future or into the present.
Now this is an old Platonic ideal that is infused in Christianity, but also the both Hellenic and the Hebraic influences on Christianity, that you are the carrier, that the city is one in the soul of the person, that the greater community, the greater continuity of that community in faith,
in the Greek times it has a different conception, but in Christianity it becomes the community of the faithful, that you as a single unit of a self, a person, carries with you that grander totality of that community.
And that comes right from Platonism. but then also it gets mixed in with this obligation to the faithful that you have in Judaism that's carried over into Christianity.
But here you have, again, this is predispensational, you know, pre-Vatican II views of Catholicism in relation to the other faith in which Christianity originated from.This is before your Judeo-Christian sort of deal.
where he's saying that by faith told him too the burden had been lifted from him by the one whose image hung from a cross above the altar although the burden's imprint still was there
The imprint was too easier a yoke compared to the full weight of the original curse.He had not brung himself to sin the old man since the one old man had already knew he believed it.Benjamin was looking for another.
In the last Hebrew, sat alone in a mountain and did penance for Israel and waited for a Messiah and waited and waited.God bless you for a brave fool, even a wiser fool.
A wise fool mimicked the hermit, but you always did specialize in paradox and mystery, didn't you, Paulo? If a thing can't be in contradiction to itself, then it doesn't even interest you, does it?
You have to find a threeness in unity, life and death, wisdom and folly, otherwise it may make too much common sense.To sense the responsibility is wisdom, Benjamin.To think you can carry it alone is folly.So here's the Catholic view.
You need the community of faith to carry it, to carry that burden of the whole, of faith itself. A little, perhaps, but brave madness.You would call it the burden of being chosen.I would call it the burden of original guilt.
In other case, the implies responsibility the same, although we might tell different versions of it and disagree violently in words about what we mean in words by something that isn't really meant in words at all, since it's something that means in the dead silence of the heart.
Benjamin chuckled, well, I'm glad to hear you admit it finally, even if you all say is that you've never really said anything.So now they sort of leave on an aporia They end their discussion, but there's other things that pertain to memorabilia.
But what is he saying to the old hermit, the old Hebrew hermit?He's saying that the burden has been lifted from your shoulders, meaning the burden of finding Zion, the burden of finding the fulfillment of the covenant.
now the catholic priest is saying that burn's been lifted from you but yet you persist uh the the current attitude of the church towards israel and so forth and towards um you know
people the that they they have of course this very uh tolerant view that you can't say that christians are completed jews and so forth that you can't say that we fulfill the covenant because that's like violating their wholesome chungus whatever uh obligation to this wholesome chungus bird version of ecumenicalism and and equanimity between faiths right this is a 1950s version this is very right before vatican too
This is saying that, no, actually, there is a fulfillment of the covenant.The Messiah came, but you carry the burden of your people.And even still, Paulo, the priest, he still recognizes that there's somewhat of a virtue in there.
Even though theologically, it does not make sense.It's a paradox, it's a mystery.But now we have this.So even though the second part, fiat lux, can be very,
very uh anodyne and mundane and goes through the the different uh factions of wars and so forth it still carries with it a great immense theological importance in the whole book and now we get to the question of memorabilia and well the memorabilia and the question of a new age so then they're like hemming and hawing against each other um and uh
Because Benjamin Elizer, bar Joshua, if all the years of waiting for the one who isn't coming haven't taught you wisdom, at least they've made you shrewd.The old J closed his eyes, lifted his face ceilingward, and smiled cunningly.
Insult me, he said in mocking tones.Rail at me, bait me, persecute me, but do you know what I'll say? You'll say, hmm, huh.No, Elsie, I'm already here.I caught a glimpse of him once.What?What are you talking about?Tontadio?No.
Moreover, I do not care to prophesy unless you tell me what's really bothering you.Oil stirrer, brother corners, lamp, lamp.Oh yes, the poet mentioned he prophesied it wouldn't work.
he's like how do you know about the lamp you've been out here wandering he goes me wandering how close are we to the brink of something we're out close to the shore electrical essences in the basement they call it electrical essences in the basement so the wanderer
is like almost kind of implied that he's ancient that he actually remembers before the that he may have been living at the time of uh our you know well the 1950s but our time the flame deluge because he's like electrical essences in the basement you realize how much things have changed in the past two centuries
But then he says that an ancestor of his actually lived during the time of Leibowitz, during the flame deluge, but that he heard about these electrical essences.
And again, electricity, if you've gone through a primitive age or a dark age, and then you rediscover electricity, that would kind of be like a sort of ether or a sort of metaphysical concept.It would be an essential thing.
It would be a form of Ilan vital. or a world energy, if you will.
Soon the priest spoke at length of his fears with the hermit mender of tents, listening patiently until the sun had begun to leak through the chinks in the west wall to paint glowing shafts in the dusty air.
And then this is Paulo answering his question about do you think a new enlightenment, a new renaissance is coming about? Uh, since the death of the last civilization, the memorabilia have been our special province, Benjamin, and we've kept it.
But now I sense the predicament of the shoemaker who tried to sell shoes in a village of shoemakers.Heh, shoemaker trying to sell shoes in a village of shoemakers.
Uh, the hermit smawed it and said it could be done if he manufactured a special and superior type of shoe.
uh then go out of the shoemaker business before you were ruined a possibility the abbot admitted uh don paulo it's unpleasant to think of it however for 12 centuries you've been one little island in a very dark ocean keeping the memorabilia has been a thankless task but a hallowed one we think it's only our worldly job but we've always been bookleggers
and memorizers, and it's hard to think that the job's soon to be finished, soon to become a necessary.I can't believe it somehow.
Because again, now they've pieced together the knowledge of scientific and engineering achievements that's required for light, electricity, and then eventually data collection, as we see in the future of the last chapter.
or revive the machine at Analytica, or perhaps stop over their heads and resort to metaphysics.You shame me, you old J. You know we are monks of Christ first and such things are for others to do.
So even the Wanderer, it's funny, he calls it machine Analytica, but how does he know about machines?How does he know about computing? You live through a dark age.So it's implied that the Wanderer knows more than he's letting on.
Or actually maybe he might be a messenger, like a Lazarus type of figure of the second coming.Or revive the Machina Analytica.Meaning revive the technology of machine and computing power that existed before the flame deluge.
which is quite interesting.Benjamin Sprook, I have no sympathy for you.
The books you stored away may be hoary with age, but they were written by children of the world, and they'll be taken from you by children of the world, and you have no business meddling with them in the first place.
meaning that, again, he's saying, well, you know, you're using the memorabilia to try to recuperate what was once a great technologically driven civilization, but it's really, you're just children and you're doomed to the machinations of what, again, another very important theme in a canonical for Leibowitz, which is cyclical history.
That time will begin again and will be extinguished again. There is no linearity to time.
There is no, I mean, you could say that Christianity as a whole implies a form of linear time through a form of telos, whether it be the second coming, the rapture and so forth. or the culmination of all of history in Christ.
But you could say that in that, there is giving away to a cyclical form of history.And I know that Catholicism is kind of ambiguous in terms of the cyclical versus linear view of history.
But you could say that the transformation in the cycles of history, for argument's sake, is more of like, let's say, an Eastern concept, quote unquote. colloquially at least in Eastern concept.Although there's disputes there as well.
But in terms of like Hinduism, for instance, in terms of Vedantic Hinduism, certainly there is cyclical time.But anyways.
And you won't see Tantatio because he comes from the other direction if you wait to examine the entrails of an era until after it's born.It's too late to prophesy its birth. Nonsense.
Probing the womb of the future is bad for the children and bad for the child.I shall wait and then I shall prophesy that I was born and that it wasn't what I'm waiting for.
So again, if you wait to examine the entrails of an era until after it's born, it's too late to prophesy its birth.So you are trying to reverse engineer what was previous to your dark ages.
You are trying to revive something rather than rediscover something new.And you only have the sort of picked apart and desiccated entrails of little snippets of knowledge here and there from the memorabilia.You don't really have the whole picture.
So the second chapter, Fiat Lux is trying to prophesy a new age, a new Renaissance, but there's sort of doing it on very shaky foundations. and it gets further into the debates over electricity and so forth.
So skipping ahead it says quantities of facsimile copy were scrutinized, chains rattled and clanked as the more precious books came down from their shelves.
In the case of partially damaged deteriorated originals it seemed unwise to trust the facsimile makers interpretation and eyesight.The actual manuscripts dating back to the Leibowitzian time
which have been sealed in the airtight casks and locked away in special storage vaults for indeterminately long preservation were then brought out."
So they basically chained these memorabilia to the wall and put them in caskets in case there were like Luddite raiders trying to burn down the books as they did right after the flame deluge, the Luddites.
It obviously represents no one but a whole system of equations.The simplicity is deceptive. It obviously represents that no one but a whole system of equations in a very contradicting form.
It took me a couple of days to realize that the author was thinking of the relationships, not just of quantities to quantities, but of whole systems to other systems.
I don't yet know all the physical quantities involved, but the sophistication of the mathematics is just quite superb.If it's a hoax, it's inspired.If it's an authentic, we may be in believable luck.In other cases, it's magnificent.
I must see the early possible copy of it."Meaning, so this is Kornhauer talking to Tantadio, the monk that discovered electricity.But so now they're starting to think, they're starting to systematize in their thinking again.
They're saying that this memorabilia, this manuscript, this schematic is related to other physical properties that's required for a whole series of investigations into the natural world in order to even begin to think about base route engineering of a part.
You have to have all these other properties in place in order to truly understand what a basic schematic manuscript is.
Another interesting thing that I didn't realize was that Miller was actually an American veteran in World War II, and he was actually at the infamous bombing of the Benedictine Abbey in Monte Cassino in 1944.
I actually had a neighbor I lived next to my whole life who, when he was too young to fight in the war, He was about a younger teenager.
He actually came from Montecassino and he talked about how the Germans sold off all of his sheep, his father's sheep, and how he had to dig into the rock underneath to hide from the bombing and so forth.
But it is within the personal biography of Miller who participated in the bombing, the Abbey at Montecassino is the original community for the Benedictine Order founded by Saint Benedict in the 6th century.
The bombing had been considered a disaster to the Allied forces.It was ineffectual in displacing German troops in the area and was based on false intelligence.
The damage to the Abbey was possibly illegal under existing laws of war and the victims of the bombing were over 140 Italian civilians who sheltered in the Abbey.
So yeah, the Allies, they did commit quite a few atrocities as well, but of course you're never going to hear that right in history class.As a rear gunner of the U.S.
bomber for the genesis of Mechanical for Leibovitz, Miller's presence as a rear gunner, the images of an ancient community preserving knowledge and traditions for centuries, smashed in minutes by the war machines of technoscience, is reflected in the final pages of the novel.
The sense of endurance of this faithful community across generations that belongs to but also a part of, apart from the mundane material world, is also pervasive.
Miller's monks of Leibowitz know of the world around them, the comings and goings of vagabonds, princes, and thieves, yet there is a rich sense in the text of being beholden to their own daily and yearly rituals and rhythms.
A cloistered nomos, a cloistered law, or a dictate, a law that hypostasizes, gives meaning to that community or civilization or so forth.
There is something in seeing the novel as a form of apology by Miller for his minor role in the destruction of Monte Cassino, a resurrection of the architectural and governmental fabric of the Abbey.
However, the novel is clearly something more than an imagining of ebbs and flows, the petty rivals between monks and abital concerns of the community's interactions with a wider world, although the bulk of the text is at this level.
So a lot of The Clinical for Leibowitz is basically about the church as a form of a community that is a vessel.
for something greater, but a community that has a particular anomos that then this article will go into with its analysis of Carl Schmitt, the one essay Carl Schmitt wrote about Catholicism and the Roman law.
So, but let's get to the more, an interesting passage from, we're almost done the second part.
The third part is really quite interesting, but the, I mean, the second part is neglected by a lot of people, but here you do have a lot of important, uh, important concepts that can be, that can be wrapped into the greater whole of the Canicle for Liebowitz, such as this dictate by the warlord from Texarkana, the Mayor Hannigan, who says that, um,
all the Bishop of New Rome presumed to exert an authority, so he sends out basically a command to all the other neighboring regions
Presumed to assert an authority which is not rightfully his over the clergy of this nation, has dared to attempt first to place Texarkana Church under a sentence of interdict, and later to suspend their sentence, thereby creating great confusion and spiritual neglect among the faithful.
We are the only legitimate ruler of the church in this realm.
acting in concord with the Council of Bishops and Clergy, hereby declaring to our loyal people that the aforesaid Prince and Bishop, Benedictus, is a heretic, insomniac, murderer, other words I can't say, ait, an atheist, unworthy of any recognition by the Holy Church and lands of our Kingdom, Empire, or Protectorate, who serve him and not serve us.
A null declared void and of no consequence, for they are no originally valid. So basically he's saying to all bishops, priests, and parlors of the church or rightful realm, take heed for this law.
So basically he's asserting his authority even over the clergy, which is, I wrote in my notes, is this like a form of Cesaro papism?Because basically you have a religious structure being superseded by a political authority.
But then, of course, Don Paolo glanced at the rest of it only briefly.There was no need to read further.The mayor take heed.Order the license of the Texarkana clergy made the administration of the sacraments by unlicensed persons a crime and a loss.
So only the religious authorities that are sanctioned by the state is demanded that they are the only ones to give sacraments.
the mayoralty of conduction for law and recognition was signed not only with the mayor's mark but also by several bishops they put in scare quotes whose names were unfamiliar to the abbot oh okay so you have like some weirdo political corruption going on where some uh unnamed bishops that they didn't recognize that just you know flew in uh flew in overnight they they all of a sudden consented to hannigan's law over religious authority but anyways that's i thought that was very funny how
you really think of it in this time it would almost necessitate because the church has to be under the protection of secular political authorities who have standing armies that could protect the church it would almost necessitate that the church would have to be subsumed under some kind of political control that mixes faith with politics.
Now we know secularism is sort of a kind of a fable in a lot of ways but throughout history like this is how things worked
I mean, even the Catholic Church, when it gained sufficient power, unlike a lot of other churches, I mean, they could have some form of autonomy, but still the political, you know, I'm not going to lie, I mean, the Catholic Church was still swayed by a lot of secular authority.
so but here we have the debate which i think is very interesting from the catholic perspective because it has some certain theological implications that i think is quite i mean maybe uh maybe miller put this as like a humorous aside but it's kind of funny how
If you have a lot of records lost, if a lot of the encyclicals and scriptures from the church fathers were to have been lost, a lot of the lives of the saints tales were to have been lost, then really, I mean, you could have a case where like weirdo theological postulates that were considered heretical for centuries, they could potentially come back.
And then you'd have like this weirdo form of Gnostic Catholicism
uh but well so this is so here we go in the basement of the scholar's eyes i come in line with the the brash exuberance of one specialist invading the field of another specialist for the sake of straightening out the whole region of confusion as a matter of fact yes he sent the response to the novice um
I did locate one source here that should, I think, be of interest to Tan Maho.Of course, I'm no historian.Tan Maho?Is he the one who's trying to correct Genesis?Father Galt asked Riley.Riley?
Yes, that's the scholar broke off with a startle glance at Goulet.That's all right, the priest said with a chuckle. Many of us feel that Genesis is more or less allegorical.What have you found?Now that is a big debate in Catholicism as well.
I mean, I mean, I remember back in the 2000s with the whole new atheism thing, there was the whole like theistic evolution movement, which I was, I was pretty fond of, but then whether or not saying that Genesis is purely allegorical would violate
not violent, but it certainly would call into question a lot of different things but I think it's very funny how even here these Catholic priests are debating these theological questions
We located one pre-Deluvian fragment that suggests a very revolutionary concept.As I see it, if I interpret the fragment correctly, man was not created until shortly before the fall of civilization.Whoa!Whoa!
Man was not created shortly before the fall of the last civilization.Which, I mean, how long has man been around?
is it uh in in terms of like scientific literature let me look this up a hundred few hundred thousand uh oco is right it was in the hundred thousand three hundred thousand years according to science which is really really not quite nothing in the span of the earth if you believe in uh that the earth is what a few billion years old or something like that um
a few hundred million or a billion... I forget.I forget the exact age of the Earth according to science.But yeah, science is fake.But anyways, I'm not making a blanket statement like that.
I'm just saying that, I don't know, I mean I believe the Earth is, you know, I believe in the old Earth hypothesis.I guess people
I mean even the saying like old earth creationism like even creationism has become like this weird dirty word that the new atheists use and I think that uh it doesn't really describe the position of the church nor the position of most people of the faith so um anyways uh what what I love how they put the stutter in there what then when where did civilization come from not from humanity it was developed by a preceding race which became extinct during the Deluvian Ignis
Wow, the Anunnaki?The Hyperboreans?Oh, this is great.This is great.I love this.This is amazing.They're debating, it's like, where did civilization come from?It's like, well, there was a previous greater race.
There was the, you know, the Hyperboreans came before us.And so I circled the whole page, which means the whole page is important. but holy scripture goes back thousands of years before the diluvium.Thantadio remained meaningfully silent.
So he's like basically the secular pragmatist, utilitarian, you know, proto-scientist.He's like looking at all this theological debate.
You were proposing, said Goulet, suddenly dismayed that we are not the descendants of Adam, not related to historical humanity.
Wait, I only have for the conjecture the Predeluge race, which called itself man, succeeded in creating life shortly before the fall of their civilization.
They successfully created the ancestors of present humanity after their own image as a servant species."Oh boy!Yes!Yes!Yes!We were crea- That's just how it goes.We were the creation.
We were the, basically, the human Ewoks, the slave races genetically engineered and bred with eugenics by the Hyperboreans.And we were the descendants of a slave race. This is some crazy stuff.How did Miller come up with this?
He was intuiting the secret knowledge.He was intuiting when he was in Italy, he came into contact with the remnants of the Thule Society and he intuited the lesson, the sacred lessons of all ages.
that people like manly p hall and mcgill serrano and other ones talk about i'm just kidding i'm not kidding that's a totally factless i'm just joking i don't know if that's true or not probably not true i'm just joking okay but it's very interesting we came up with this idea
Oh boy.But even if you totally reject revelation, then completely unacceptable.Uh, so what called itself man succeeded in creating life shortly before the fall of their civilization.
Uh, they created the ancestors of present humanity after their own image.So as a servant species, like, uh, the grays or the Anunnaki or, uh, the Hyperboreans.
But even if you totally reject revelation, there's completely unnecessary complication under the plain common sense, Kool-Aid complained.The abbot had come quietly down the stairs, he paused on the lower landing and listened incredulously.
It might seem so, Tantadio argued, until you consider how many things it would account for.You know the legends of the simplification, meaning the Luddite scourge that tried to destroy all knowledge that the church preserved.
They all become more meaningful, it seems to me, if one looks at the simplification as a rebellion by a created servant species against the original creator species, as the fragmentary reference suggested.
It would also explain why present-day humanity seems so inferior to the ancients.Yes!Beast!Beast!
um why our ancestors lapsed into barbarism when their masters were extinct and why god have mercy on this house cried don paulo striding toward the alcove spare us lord we know not what we did i should have known the scholar muttered to the world ago
And I wrote in the notes, the simplification created the bug man, the servant slave races that Francis E. Deck Esquires talks about being created by the Slavoidic races by the gangster communist computer god.Anyways, do not research Francis E. Deck.
The only priest to advance like a nemesis on his guest.So we are but creatures of creatures then, Sir Philosopher, made by lesser gods than God. And so again, this is like Gnosticism.Call James Lindsay right away.
The Catholics are promoting Gnosticism, according to James Lindsay, if you read A Canicle for Leibowitz.I'm not joking.James Lindsay would actually say that if he read this book.And therefore, understandably, less than perfect.
Though no fault of our own, of course."And then Tantadio says, "...it's only a conjecture, but it would account for much.Then Tan said stiffly, unwillingly to retreat, and absolve of much, why it not?
Man's rebellion against his makers was, no doubt, merely justifiable tyrannicide against the infinitely wicked son of Adam, then."I didn't say, show me, Sir Philosopher, this amazing reference.So he's basically saying that, um...
The sort of like plebiscite in the form of destroying all the knowledge of previous generations is a justifiable tyrannicide, an uprising against a tyrannical superior race, against the rabble bugmen!
kind of like what Nietzsche said about Socrates using a malfeasant form of reason to rebel against the blonde beasts, the overmen, the spiritual superiors of the land, but uh anyways.
So then the Kornhauer comes and they go on to the slave revolt of their makers about the same people creating some artificial people as slaves.If Tantaglio read Venerable
Betelus del Inebus, he would have found one classified as probable fable or allegory, but perhaps then Thawne would care little for the evaluations of venerable Bodelus, who came to make his own.
And then of course, so again, Don Paulo, who I believe is controlling most of the Libowitzian abbey, he's like, well, you know, that's like a fable.But it's very interesting how like that's like a protonostic idea
the sort of like a semi-gnostic idea of like, we're the descent, we're like the bug men, descendants of a superior race that the flame deluge got rid of.And this is why you have the Pope's children, the mutants.
And I believe that there's still radioactive spots in the land that would create such a, you know, because think of it, the genetic table, the genetic stock of humanity in this cataclysmic event would have been fundamentally altered.
You would have all sorts of, as you will see in the last chapter, all sorts of deficiencies and mutations and the lowering of IQ, the purposeful lowering IQ, a literal IQ shredder of the great simplification that the church is trying to stave off.
When you have such a small amount of people who are literate and who have knowledge or the capacity for knowledge, as opposed to the thronging ignorant masses, well, that's simply a genetic
If you look at things as genetic, I know a lot of people don't want to look at this because it's very scary and invokes eugenics or whatever, but if you look at things from that lens, you would say that the human stock would essentially, like the IQ points, not to say that IQ is everything of course, but
The intelligence tables of the average human would severely lower after such an event.Add on to that this lighted, enforced, violent ludditism of the simplification.And so essentially Miller is intuiting what would exactly happen.
because a lot of writers they don't exactly know the implications of their literature but Miller is like fully aware of this that he's aware of the exact implications of that universe to say that okay if there was a grand simplification if only a very few learned men who are mostly monks and priests and bishops are the ones storing knowledge
then you would have a very nasty, brutish, and short society until the church can safely guide humanity.But then Tantatio drops a line that is the emblematic of all secular authority.
of all science and and all you know fedora tip i believe it was the line about well why would you consider uh why would all these stuffy priests when would they consider the right time for humanity to know knowledge to know this knowledge for humanity sorry to if you need to experience this knowledge for humanity to be ready to uh be entrusted with knowledge
He goes, when's the right time?And this is what drives all like your typical fedora, secular humanist logic of like, well, you know, from John Dewey onwards where it's like, oh, well, public education, knowledge, that should all be free.
And there should be no limits and no barriers and no authority. Because how dare you say that most people are unequipped for groundbreaking truth nukes, like giving a monkey a machine gun.
How dare you say that these lowly bug men, simple children, that they can't handle this, you know, these truth nukes.But it's true.
But when you think of it, it's when you ditch this sort of like the whole democratic artifice and the whole like sort of, humanistic pursuits that science claims to be about for the better part of a few centuries now, from the Enlightenment onwards.
I mean, when you really see it as another ideology, if you see it as another ideology among many, then you can start to question, if I know average people down the street who aren't equipped to handle higher concepts, then how can they make decisions about the whole of civilization together?
And so this is why you need the church.
if you believe that they are they are the vessel the vestibule of divine grace on earth then you could say well you know i mean maybe it's a good thing because clearly uh society the primitive society in this universe It's clearly not ready yet.
But then the whole point of Fiat Lux, let there be light, is that now there's coming into a new renaissance.Even Tantadio says, well, do you think there's going to be a new renaissance?Or Apollo asks him.And Tantadio's like, yeah, of course I see it.
You know, just trust the plan.There's going to be a new renaissance.There will be a new Botticelli.There will be a new Michelangelo.There will be a new Isaac Newton.We will rediscover everything once again.So that's what they're saying.
And here you have on page 234, I circled it because I wrote in my notes, first problem of evil in the world, atheism, secular versus religious. I believe it is, Tantatio, my remarks are often conjecture, Tantatio said.
Freedom to speculate is necessary, and the Lord God took man and put him in the paradise of pleasure, to dress it, to keep it, and to the advancement of science, if you would have us hampered by blind adherence, unreasoned dogma that you would prefer.
And so this is typical Carl Sagan, typical Richard Dawkins, who I believe is doing his last tour, because he's getting old, in North America. And this is a typical, like, oh, well, you know, oh, this stuffy dogma's hampering knowledge.
And it's, that's terrible.God commanded him, saying, of every tree of paradise, so I believe Don Paolo is cutting him off.
God commanded him, saying, of every tree of paradise thou shalt eat, but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt, to leave the world in the same black ignorance and superstition that you see your earlier struggled.
So this is, this is, they're cutting each other off. Paolo and Tantadio.And notice how you have these debates in A Canicle for Leibovitz.
You have this debate first and foremost in the first chapter over the actual pressing of Francis if he actually saw Leibovitz.If they could beautify Leibovitz as a saint, they could canonize him.Sorry, canonize him.
Now you have this debate between Paulo, the religious authority, and Tantario, the secular philosopher, proto-scientist, or proto-theoretician, that they're debating over the impact and the ability of reason itself upon humanity, either practical or divinely inspired and divinely kept logos.
right a higher form of reason that is entrusted by the church to the rest of that is entrusted by the church the rest of humanity so here you have this to be they keep cutting each other off here because it has the the little line there to leave the world so this is Tantatio to leave the world and seem black ignorance and superstition you see your order is struggled with
So then now Paulo is reiterating Genesis, the tree of the fruit of good, the knowledge of the fruit of good and evil, but then Tantati was like with the typical FedoraTip or Reddit logic of like, well, the humanity is struggling darkness, don't you want to help them?
not to eat for in the day so ever thou shalt eat of it thou shalt did the death the first death again against nor could we ever overcome famine disease or misbirth or make the world one bit better than it has been for then
Then Paulo comes in, and the serpent said to the woman, God doth know that in the day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be open, you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.You shall be as gods.But this leads to a divine folly.
And what is the whole point of the canonical for Leibowitz?Is that man reaches that crescendo of godhood at the moment of its destruction. at the moment of its thanatos, the thanatoic principle that reason as an undercurrent carries with it.
It is the parallax of reason.You could watch any Adam Curtis documentary, you could read any Slavoj Žižek book, you could read Theodor Adorno and Horkheimer.There is always that seed of reason.
It's dark undercurrent that leads to a form of thanato politics that leads to a form of death drive within a grander picture of civilization itself, and one that is undeniable.
And it may seem kind of theory-sellish, but this is the whole point of A Chemical for Leibowitz.It's a dramatic demonstration of the bastard shadow picture of reason itself.And so that's why.
That's why Paolo, as the religious authority, is quoting Genesis.But then of course, you know, Tantadio is like, what about famine?What about this?What about our mortal human concerns?
But really, I mean, if you see where that led, first of all, to the flame deluge, then I mean, well, you know,
And the serpent said to the woman, then twelve centuries, if every direction of speculation is to be closed off, and every new thought denounced, and then he gets cut off by Paulo, it never was any better.It never will be any better.
It will only be richer or poorer, sadder, but not wiser, until the very last day.Then the scholar shrugged helplessly.You see, I knew you would be offended, but you told me.Oh, what's the use of your account of it?
Then Tom Paulus said, the account I was quoting, Sir Philosopher, was not an account of the manner of creation, but an account of the manner of the temptation that leads to the fall. Did that escape?Did that escape you?
And the serpent said unto the woman, yeah, yeah, but the freedom to speculate is essential.No, no one has tried to deprive you of that, nor is anyone saying that they're offended.
But to abuse the intellect for reasons of pride, vanity, or escape from responsibility is the fruit of the same tree.That is the whole point. It's not that the church is saying, be ignorant.It's saying that these things are dangerous.
What did Michel Foucault say?It's not that everything is immoral, it's that everything is dangerous.You can speculate, but you are a learned man.Is that not what, was it Socrates or was it Aristotle?
I think it was Alcibiades actually that said, or was it misattributed to Alcibiades? That like, if there was no law, the philosophers wouldn't need it, they would just simply act the way that they were proceeding before.
Meaning that a learned man can act rationally and can act, and actually intelligence kind of does, I mean, they're very intelligent, evil people.But on the whole, it is true that a lot of people have a form of equanimity or they're equanimous.
If they have, you know, the subsequent IQ points to really have high, to have, you know, low time preference, decision-making, to realize that, you know, you have to operate in a civil manner in society with other people, that does require some insight.
In other words, intelligent people, such as a philosopher or a priest, they can act the same, but the unwashed masses cannot.
This is the point, it's not that the church is saying, we're going to cast, and this is where all of these new atheists, this is where all these fedora tipper redditors, that's where they get their childish, I'm still in high school, I hate you mom and dad, I'm an atheist now, worldview.
That oh, the church wants to keep people in ignorance.
it's not that you can keep it's not a matter of it's not a matter of keeping people in ignorance it's it's more so that these things have an inherent danger and needs a supreme authority that has a level of gravitas
to mead out the lessons of this reason of this knowledge that most people simply are not capable of most people will literally their brains will shatter if you deliver them some uh exciting truth nuke or they od on red pills and they go crazy i mean people listening this we're all terminally online you know what happens
Right?You give a 90 to 110 IQ person some truth nuke and it utterly obliterates them.They start spitting off into all directions.
They start, they start going crazy and they develop this form of monomania because the true intelligence realizes that there's not a lot you can do about it in some respects.So instead you become a ranting, raving lunatic.
so this is the point if you give most people if you shatter most people's illusions it's like it's not gonna work you know not shatter i'm not saying like i'm not sharing your illusions i mean that
It's not that most people can't handle certain things.It's just that they can't really integrate those things, that form of knowledge into their daily lives.And so it creates a form of dissonance.
I may be a bit too hyperbolic right now, but I think that ultimately there is a reason why the church preserved knowledge, but realized the limits of the average phenotype in handling reason and knowledge.So, This is the grand debate.
You have questioned the honor of my motives, then darkening.At times I question my own.I accuse you of nothing.But ask yourself this.Why do you take delight in leaping to such wild conjecture from such a fragile springboard?
Why do you wish to discredit the past, even to dehumanizing the last civilization? so that you need to learn from their mistakes, or can it be that you can bear being only rediscoverer?It must feel that you are a creator as well.
Then Thawne hissed an oath, those records should be placed in the hands of competent people, he said angrily.What irony is this? The light sputtered and went out.The failure was not mechanical.The novices at the drill mill had stopped working.
Bring the candles, called the abbot.Candles were brought.Come down, Don Paolo said to the novice atop the ladder, and bring that with you, Brother Kornhauer.
Well, call him, Don Paolo turned to the scholar again, handing him the document which had been found among Brother Claret's effects.Read if you can make it out by candlelight, Sir Philosopher.A merrily edict.
Read and rejoice in your cherished freedom. Then it goes into kicking out the poet, um, and, and, uh, oh, here we, here we have another reintroduction of, uh, here we have another reintroduction of the Wanderer.
In the years, the temple agreement was formalized and broken between the state of Denver and Tarksarkana.It was the year that the old Jay returned to his former vocation of physician and Wanderer.
That year, the monks of the Abertenian Order of Lebowitz buried an abbot and bowed to a new one.So Brother Clare, I believe, was the old abbot.There was bright hopes for tomorrow.
It was the year that a king came riding out of the east, Hannigan, to subdue the land and own it.It was the year of man.Now, it was the year of man, meaning now you have an overturning to a secular authority.And this is important.
the rise of the city-state, the rise of the crystallization of political power under a regional power, under a proto-empire, under a form of Cesaro-papism in which the church is also subdued by political authority.
This is the creation of a new Renaissance.But that comes at a cost of the insights and the ability, the phronesis of the church to handle reason. But notice, but this is what Don Paolo says to Tantadio.
He goes, why do you cast such aspersions on previous people that you know are greater than you?They built the nukes that destroyed all of civilization.That's a pretty great accomplishment, right?
But you have to say that they were tyrants and they were like these overmen and that the bug men had a right to castigate their authority and overturn them and vow to never, you know, go down that path ever again.
But this is the point he's saying, this is really just the arrogance of secular authority.
The voice of religious authority is castigating the voice of secular authority in a canonical for Leibowitz by saying that you're not intent to just be a rediscoverer.
You're not intent like the churches to rediscover and to piece together knowledge like what we've been doing for a few centuries with the memorabilia.No, you want to be a discoverer. You don't want to be a rediscovery, you want to be a creator.
You want the arrogance, the title, the fame of being a creator.When you know very well that everything was invented already under the sun.And so at most, you were just basically doing the Socratic notion of recollection.
That all knowledge is recollection from a higher form, or in this case, from the form of history.
from the ceasing of a previous moment, where the angel novus, the angel of history, to Benjamin, now it finally looked forward in the death of all humanity.And what does it see?It sees nothing but barrenness and ignorance and mutants.
But yet in this land, the voice of secular authority and philosophy, divorced from theology, is saying, no, I want to be a creator. even though I'm just rediscovering, that's not good enough for me.
All the pursuit of the church to rediscover knowledge, that's not me, I wanna create it.But the only way I can do it is to destroy the notion that the previous civilization that we descended from was great at all.
And this is very powerful, and he wrote this in the 50s, because what happens nowadays, this is the bedrock of all progressive, secular, liberal ideas.Whatever you want to call it, wokeness, I don't care, whatever.
That you have to basically destroy the notion of the past as being greater than ourselves.
That there is no such thing as traditionalism, there's no such thing as a previous great civilization, that there's no lesson that the past and that our ancestors can teach us.
It is the great ahistoricism of the current liberal moment, where history only really begins in the 1960s.That's the whole point.
Because to say that we have the greatest civilization, the most technological development history goes in a line, that means you have to denigrate the lessons and the wisdom of the past. and of the ancestors.That is the whole point.
So now you have that same perversion of reason, that same mindset present here in Tom Taddeo, where he's predicting a new renaissance, but he's saying, no, we are going to create one, not rediscover one.Because the vicious conceit
of that type of secular, borderline liberal thinking is that no, the past has no lessons.That we have the divine spark of creation in our hand as man.Man is a creator, not God, man.And that we are creating, not rediscovering.
And that the past and what creator above us has no bearing on what we do.That is the ethos of the modern world. And that is the ethos that Miller is clearly intuiting in a way more religious society than we live in nowadays.
I mean, yeah, you could say that the 1950s was the beginning of the end.A lot of the trends of the 60s didn't come out of nowhere.You could say that a lot of these ideas were sparking up in the 19th century, even way before it.
You could say that the political divide between left and right is something as old as time itself in a weird way. But really, I mean, the 1950s was still largely a religious, in North America, largely religious Christian society.
But he's saying that this is the vicious negative side of that quest, that arrogance of individual autonomous creator unto ourselves that is possessed by a lot of these scientism types.That's like, we create for ourselves and that's it.
Nothing above and nothing behind us can ever determine what we are creating.But really, you're just rediscovering.
A lot of lessons of the past are being rediscovered by modern science or even modern social techniques, you could say, or social technologies, because in the absence of things, those things of the past will always come back into view.
In strange and weird inverted ways, though, but that's just a little rant.Let's move on to the last page.The last chapter is a big one, but before that, you have the introduction of the buzzards once again.
Now, finally, the last part, the last part of Fiat Lux.As always, the wild black scavengers of the skies laid their eggs in season and lovingly fed their young.Again, same iteration.
They soar high over prairies and mountains and plains, searching for fulfillment in the share of life's destiny, which according to the plan of nature.They're philosophers demonstrated by unaided reason alone.The supreme catharsis alis ragnas.
End of each section is someone getting redacted.The poet gets redacted by the war band. had created the world especially for buzzards.They worshipped him with hearty appetites for many centuries.
Then after the generation of the darkness came the generations of the light, and they called it the year of our Lord, 3781.3781, a year of his peace they prayed.And of course, cathartis ora ragnas means reign of the turkey buzzards.So that which is a
living disposal, disposer of carrion, the garbage disposal of carrion, they become the kingdom of the earth.And so this is what is meant by the buzzards, why it's such a powerful metaphor. And in this other explainer, I found Walter Miller Jr.
gives the buzzards circling the poet's corpse a religious outlook on the world.They worship Carthus Ars Ragnus.
Carthartis Aura is the species name for the American turkey buzzard and also means golden purifier because buzzards purify the world by consuming corpses.There's that religious ritual in Tibet where when a monk slips his mortal coil,
They butcher his carcass and they feed it to the buzzards.I remember Nobody TM, there was a very famous video by Nobody TM.Well, not very famous, but you know, it was one of the better known episodes of Nobody TV where it showed the ritual.
Of course it was grainy and it had a lot of video filters over it, but it was very, I remember the music was very ambient and you know, it is like, I think the same soundtrack came from the Nobody TM,
you search up Nodetm mixtape you'll still find it on youtube the music and i believe you can still find the episode on youtube i forget the exact number um golden purifier because buzzards purify the world by consuming courses corpses
Ctharis or Arachnus could be translated to mean the reign of turkey buzzards.Miller's buzzards imagine God as a big reigning buzzard that has ordered the world to provide plenty of rotten corpses.
The idea of God as a buzzard in a world created for buzzards might seem preposterous to readers, however it shows the fragmentary partial understanding of any God's creatures can have of God. And before it goes on, Taddeo's interpretation was right.
It would mean all people in the novel are not original human beings, but creatures created by the original human beings.Taddeo's interpretation is similar to Gnosticism.
According to Gnostic beliefs, the two gods are the desired god who gives human souls divine spark, the god of light, lesser god, the demiurge created the earth.The earth is failed and fallen creation.Divine souls have their true home elsewhere.
and of course the Gnostic heresies were thoroughly debunked by Saint Ignatius and other ones and I believe was determined I forget which council uh meted out the Gnostic heresy but anyways the point being is that think of it this way uh the earth is a vestibule by which corpses are produced because this is I mean people look at this as morose and a lot of uh for example Eastern Orthodox people uh
they have that magazine the punk rock magazine death to the world but when you think of it that way like a lot of people are good it's life-denying and that's uh you know that's like that's such a terrible view of creation but when you really look at it the the dead outnumber the living by how many right there when we think of it the finality of our being is such that in a way you could see that
the production of death is integral to the whole of creation.That being towards death is fundamental.But in this universe, it is not the creation of God.It's God is weary of creation in a way.Now, I don't know if Miller is very vague in that sense.
Again, I know I'm doing a little sermon here and I'm basically treating a fiction author as almost like a religious sermon, but I'm just saying that given the confines of the universe, he's very vague on that notion of perhaps death and mortification is sort of the point.
That when you reach that final individualizing moment, that the earth in a whole way is a giant death factory.We live, we die.
And, but in this case, that thanatoic principle of nature that is so integral to creation, that becomes the whole of the nomos, the law.
Because what happens as we see here in the last chapter, fiat voluntas tua, it is basically the end of humanity once again, the final end, the final, the second death.Remember, The second death.There's the first mortal death.
But there is that second death. Remember in Revelation, and of course Miller was aware of this, the term second death occurs four times in the New Testament, specifically in Revelation 2.11, 2.6, 2.14, and 2.18.
According to Revelation 2.11 and 2.26, those who overcome the devil's tribulation has part in the first resurrection and will not be hurt by the second death, which has no power over them. What is the second death?
Reference to the lake of fire where the separation from God by their sins dwelt for all eternity.The mediation, the grand filter, if you will.
And so when you think of the death of all of the world in a canonical for Leibowitz is like the lake of fire, is the second death, is the final flame deluge. Those who overcome drove us to release part of the first resurrection.
Revelation 21, eight, we read as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all the liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur.This is the second death.
So that's, that kind of sounds like nuclear annihilation when you really think about it.
But when you see the thing with the canonical for Leibowitz, the part that I think Miller is sort of questioning his own faith, or rather examining his own faith, is that that second death is mediated by the hand of man, not the hand of God.
But there is an ambiguity because then Father Zerkai
sees Mary in his final moments when he was about to deliver the Eucharist to the ship to take to the new bishops now that these exoplanetary colonies on Taurus or I forget exactly where that they can also ordain new bishops so as I wrote in my notes here in the last chapter
There is still a theological significance to this society.The church still has a hand in politics to where they're meeting out the amnesia laws against the victims of this nuclear war from the east.
Because now the eastern powers, this vague murky eastern powers, they set off a nuke, sets off a chain of another nuclear war, and now you have the final second death, the final second flame deluge.
Which surely it's going to wipe out humanity this time.I mean, come on.They're already on shaky foundations anyways.So of course, fiat voluntas tua, thy will be done.
We fast forward hundreds of years again to the time of spaceships, space colonies, even and they're trying to get the holy memorabilia because now St.
Lubitz's memorabilia, the schematics have become holy objects because they deliver the gifts of rediscovery of scientific revelation to humanity once again.
And now we have, of course, in this time, it says, divergences of church and state and of science and faith,
The final part is an analog of contemporary civilization, which is technological marvels, its obsessions with material worldly power, and its accelerating neglect of faith and spirit.And so basically it's the final phase.We're so over.
We're never coming back. It's- it's done.It's cut.Uh, there's no more, it's- it's over.So, um... Here we have the highlight of the summary of the novel, each section of the novel focuses on various critiques.So this is at the end.
Brother Jarrus developed ambitions of building a printing press, but Archos quashed the plan.When he heard of it, there was neither sufficient paper nor proper ink available, nor any demand for inexpensive books in a world smug in its literacy.
The copy room continued with pot and quill, meaning dip pens.That's from the first section of the book.But now we have robots!
apparently we have highways but people uh it's alluded to in this chapter that uh the highways are extremely dangerous they're kind of like indian highways or or in china where like people just get run over all the time so the very first opening we have they were garish garish kind they belong to a race quite capable
So in the bold letters, the very first line of the last chapter or last section of the book, there were spaceships again that century.
Gigerius kindly belonged to a race quite capable of admiring its own image in a mirror and equally capable of cutting its own throat before the altar of some tribal god such as the deity of daily shaving.
It was a species which often considered itself to be basically a race of divinely inspired tool makers.Any intelligent entity from Archytas would instantly have perceived them to be basically a race of impassioned after-dinner speech makers.
What do you think we are? But this is 1950s version.We're not even toolmakers anymore.We're far and away from this like polaris society envisioned by people like Isaac Asimov.We're really closer to like WALL-E world.That's what we're closer to.
Our own decadence really condemns us.It was inevitable.It was manifest destiny they felt, and I circled it in letters.
and not the first time that such a race go forth to conquer the stars, to conquer them several times if need be, and certainly to make speeches about the conquer, but too it was inevitable that the race succumbs again to the old maladies on new worlds, even on the earth before, in litany of life's special liturgy of man, versicules by Adam, rejoinders by the crucified.
We are the centuries. We are the chin croppers and golly whoppers.Soon we shall discover the imputation of your head.We are you singing garbage men, sir and madam.And we march in cadence behind you. And so everything is erased now.
It's like imagine the earth without that human consciousness We have your ethos and your mesoliths and your neon lifts We have your Babylon's and your Pompeys your Caesars and your chromium plate vital ingredient impregnated artifacts so I guess he's alluding to silicon chips there and
The generation's regeneration again and again is a ritual with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin chasing a gleam, children too of Eve forever building Edens and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn't the same!
Ock, ock, ock, an idiot screams mindless anguish amid the rubble, but quickly, let it be inundated by choir chanting allulia Allulius at 90 decibels, again the cyclical death rebirth, the cosmic principle of Shiva
that we shall recycle the earth once again.We shall exit the planet before the earth is recycled.That's... Oh my God.Those who don't get it, that comes from the heaven's gate called Marshall Applewhite, Bo and Peep, right?His wife, Peep.
They allegedly never smashed, by the way.They never consummated.I think that's probably a lie, but who knows?That was the whole recruitment video.
where it says that we must exit the Earth to the Jesus-powered spaceship behind the Hillbop Comet before the Earth is recycled.And I wonder if he probably, I wonder if Marshall Applewhite, I wonder if he read a canonical for Leibovitz.
That's entirely possible.You know, before the incident in, what was it, 1996?
uh the earth is recycled you know what i mean so that's big that's literally a canicle for leibowitz escaping to an exoplanetary colony on another on another planet before the earth is recycled another flame deluge then it goes over about it introduces us to rachel or uh gelly's and and i'm going to basically okay
In order to do this, I'm only going to briefly touch upon the ethical implications of Father Zerkai protesting this, again, another man of science, a doctor who's sent to Let's call it MADE.Let's call it MADE.
The MADE program for the nuclear irradiated people.Do not research radiation poisoning.There's no cure.It's over.Literally the most painful and agonizing death ever known to man.The worst way to go.
If you've ever seen the miniseries Chernobyl, you know what I mean.So let's call it, he has to maid these, and he's working in the Abbey, the refugees of the second nuclear war.
And so this doctor basically is charged to maid all of the, by the way, maids the Canadian program, look it up, you know what I mean, I can't say it for YouTube, but let's just call it maiding.
He has to maid all the nuclear, the radiation poisoning victims.
so then there's a cover-up about there's this politics back and forth about the high council and by the way the the structure is again an interlinking between religion and secular powers but there seems to be an allusion to heretical monarchy in this world so Arthur Miller is basically
Uh, not Arthur Miller.What am I talking about?Walter Miller, not Arthur Miller.If I was reviewing a ju- If I was reviewing Arthur Miller, it'd be quite a different book.But, uh, Walter Miller is essentially alluding to the Nicklandian principle.
that anything besides outright monarchy or fascism in a highly advanced AI driven society would just be too complicated.
So you have this illusion to like a hereditary monarchy, but also like an aristocratic council that is warring with the powers of the East, the Asian strongmen.
And so the government knows that, so Father Abbott, who is running the Libycian Abbottry order,
the government knows the government must know several of them know and yet we hear nothing we are being protected from hysteria isn't that what they call it maniacs the world's been in a habitual state of crisis for 50 years 50 well hey oh man i guess i mean isn't that's how long the cold war lasted maybe 50 years to 70 years or so 50 years how long the cold war last
Yeah, I guess like about 50 years or so. Uh, what am I saying?It's been an habitual state of crisis since the beginning, but for half a century now, almost unbearable.
So was he predicting the end of the Cold War and a nuclear apocalypse after 50 years?Or was he interpret- intuiting the fall of Soviet Union?Who knows, right?
This was, this was written in the 1950s and it's more perceptive than anything written in con- 1959!And it was more perceptive than anything written today.
about the cold war in this period that's that's fascinating so skipping over uh where is it um yeah the cover up and why for the love of god why is the fundamental irritant the essence of the tension political philosophies economics population pressure disparity of culture and creed ask a dozen experts given doesn't answer to sound lucifer again
They directly say it, the Luciferian principle.That Lucifer is raining down, Lucifer being another flame deluge.This explains the defense alert, a cover up.New Lucifer is, again, is this the species contingently insane?
Brother, if we are born mad, what's the hope of heaven?Through faith alone, or is it any, God forgive me, I didn't mean that, listen Joshua.
Brother Joshua shook his head, meaning that the Lucifer has come again, the flame deluge, meaning that, and this is, oh, this is another, and the few pages over, you will have another very interesting page about the last chapter.
But basically, brother, the father of the Abbot, is saying, well, can we ever reach heaven if there's this fundamental flaw of the stanitoic principle at the base of human endeavors?
Somewhere within our unconscious is this death drive that leads us to the same mistake over and over again, that will never lead to our extinction.
And so is it questioning, and this is the question I really can't answer because I can't know the mind of Walter Miller, Is it really questioning the promise of salvation given to us by Christ?The fulfillment of the covenant.
Is it questioning our capacity for salvation?That we, in this Gerardian madness, will always go back over and over to that cyclical return of the same.That we will always lead to our own destruction. rather than giving ourselves over to divine grace.
That really is, I mean, that's a, for a Catholic or for any person of faith, that's an incredibly blackpilling statement, if that's true.And this is, I had Abbott saying this in this book.Now we have a very interesting passage
I said we went from, in the margins that I wrote, from pagan earth worship to Catholicism, existential threat, the Nirvanic principle of silver.Please collect, madam, the divination was wild.
He spun the globe again until the axial mountings rattled days. Fitted by a briefest instance.So it's talking about Madame Grayley's who is the two-headed soothsayer Who is the a psychic of sorts?
Because again in ancient cultures if you had that type of deformity you were given you were said to have divine powers of insight In reverse sense he noticed suddenly so this is the priest Joshua talking to to growlies miss growlies or Rachel and
Um, if Mother Gaia... Remember, this is a few years before the New Age movement, right?Before the Gaian thing was really popular.Really, the Gaian thing achieved popularity in the 1980s, if anything.
Pickery did the same sense, the sun and other passing sensory would rise in the west and set in the east, reversing time thereby, said the namesake of my namesake, move not, O sun, towards Gabon,
Gibeon, nor thou, O moon, towards the valley A neat trick, forsooth, the useful in the time too Back up, O sun, at two luna recidus in orbitus reversus He kept spinning the globe in reverse As if hoping the simulacrum of Earth Passed the chronos for unwinding time A third of a million turns Might unwind enough days to carry it back To the diluvium ignis, the flame deluge
The reversing of history, the reversing of the earth itself through a cataclysmic event, the final judgment.Better to use a motor and spin it back to the beginning of man.He stopped it again with his thumb once more, the divination was wild.
Book begins and ends in the same manner, I wrote.Stones which have been the rubbled concrete of a civilization that had died 18 centuries ago.
crossing the highway to the old abbey we like crossing the aeon and so again uh there is this other moment where uh don paulo is looking at the face of leibovitz the wooden statue which makes a appearance again that has the semi smirk on his face similar to the mona lisa and he's like i wonder he was contemplating i wonder if you knew all along leibovitz what was gonna happen
if in that little smirk that you were carved in that the little smirk that was carved in the statue of Leibowitz that's rotting away in the cellar of the abbey I wonder if you knew and he's looking up at it and almost like this he's transfixed by it but now that statue is even more rotten away it makes an appearance again in the third act of Mechanical for Leibowitz so
moving on uh the implicates of heritage monarchy um space colonization i know what the domain but not in detail well it starts as a plan to send a few priests along with the colony group headed for alpha centauri which i believe even the space age in the 1560s they thought that alpha centauri could harbor life
that didn't work out because it takes bishops to ordain priests and after the first generation of colonists more priests would have to be sent and so on.
The question boiled down to an argument about whether the colonies would last and if so should provisions be made to ensure the apostolic secession on colony planets without recourse to earth.
You know what that would mean sending at least three bishops I imagine Then we have the introduction of Father Zerkai.Before that, modern changes have made but few incursions upon the buildings and the grounds of the ancient monastery.
To protect the old building against the encroachment of a more important architecture, new additions have been made outside the walls and even across the highway.Sometimes at the expense of conveying the old refractory have been condemned.
So in other words, It's not because of a buckling roof.The six-lane highways and robotic traffic, they perfected robot traffic.They perfected self-driving cars.But it's incredibly dangerous.
People are getting run over all the time like it's in India or China.
low slug trucks with feeble highlights useful only warning purposes sped mindlessly past them with waning tires and moaning turbines with dish antennae they watched the road with magnetic feelers they feel the guiding strip of steel in the road bend that would give guidance thereby and they rushed along the pink fluorescent river of oiled concrete economic corpulences in the arteries of man
The beam hemoths charged headlessly past the two monks who dodged them from lane to lane to be felled by one of them was to be run over by truck after truck until a safety cruiser found the flattened imprint of a man on the pavement and stopped cleaning it up.
To clean it up, the autopilot sensing mechanisms were better at detecting masses of metal than masses of flesh and bone.So you have a very crappy version of self-driving cars, where even if you look at a highway, you're gonna get run over.
that's incredible that's insane it's funny he he saw it all right it's like the elon musk self-driving car but i i run the margins that it's form it's like a form of archaeo-futurism
where uh it's like the church and its architecture is preserved but you have all of these technological advancements surrounding this very ancient structure the ancient structure is like an upshooted like a fissure upon the city landscape
that remains the course of centuries, which I'll get to in this article about Carl Schmitt and Catholic law.
But remember what the article said, the previous passage I read, that the church stands as an up shoot that is of the world, but not that is from the world, but not of the world, that it stands the same over time in its own community to the point where the architecture
is intact in this like cyberpunk future right so miss growly sells fruit and she's a two-headed woman with her six-legged dog another another pope's child another radiation victim she's finished jipping the sisters in the price of tomatoes you can't write that nowadays
So, a cherubic head, but it never opens its eyes.It gave no evidence of sharing in her breathing or her understanding, meaning it may not have even a brain.It lulled uselessly on one shoulder, blind, deaf, mute, and only vegetatively alive.
Perhaps it lacked a brain, for it showed no sign of independent consciousness or personality. Her other face had aged, grown wrinkled, but the superfluous head retained the features of infancy.
Although it had been made toughened by the gritty wind and darkened by the desert sun.The old worm and curtsies of their approach, Father Zerkai, and now they have this big conversation.So I'm going to skip the part about the maid program.
But here is a quote from Father Zerkai, which I hate to say, if you look at the modern Catholic Church, I don't know, we're not doing so great, but you know, Um, so the monks are still politically important.They still have the order.
They can only, uh, give out the maid program.And of course, father Zirkei protests the, the mating of this mother and child, this infant child, this baby that is suffering from radiation poisoning.
But then he screams, let us not assume that there is going to be so be a war list.Remind ourselves that Lucifer has always been with us this time for nearly two centuries. Lucifer was there for two centuries.
Since the dawn of advanced civilization, Lucifer, the stanatos principle, has always been there.Again.And so that's a huge black pill.So I wrote in this other page, the metaphor for the deformity of an advanced society that tested its godly limits.
But Joshua slept badly, so another monk, Joshua slept badly afterwards in a dream he met Mother Miss Growlies.There was a surgeon who sharpened a knife saying, this deformity must be removed before it becomes malignant.
And the Rachel face opened its eyes and tried to speak to Joshua.But he could hear her only faintly and understood her not at all.So I said, is that a metaphor for the malignant curse of Lucifer upon humanity?
that will ultimately lead to our destruction?Are we the deformed children of a previous great civilization?So Miller is also questioning that thesis brought about by Taddeo and others, that Gnostic principle.
If he was reading church, the church fathers, of course, reading about Gnosticism and so forth.So I wrote here, a trad society run by the church.
uh law but they're they preserve civilization so of course they have an importance more revolt to anyone properly certified as a hopeless case if the sufferer desires uh meeting any victims of radiation who takes his own life in any manner other than prescribed by law will be considered a redacting a sunset case if you know what i mean
will jeopardize the right of his heir as an appendant to claim insurance and other radiation relief benefits under the law."So the church still has a place in society somewhat.
And now there's this theological debate over the dignity of the person between the doctor and Abbot Zerkai.
A radiation disaster act, the very existence of the act, unlike laws in other countries, is the plainest possible evidence that the governments are fully aware of the consequences of another war but instead trying to make the crime impossible.
They tried to provide in advance for the consequences of the crime.So Father Zurkay is saying, well, the government knew he's doing an Alex Jones thing.They knew about it.They knew it was an inside job.So the visitors shrugged.
like uh the maid program i'm sorry father i feel the law of society or what makes something a crime not a crime or not a crime i'm aware that you don't agree and there can be bad laws i'll conceive true but in the case i think we have good laws um if i thought i had such things sold and there was angry god in heaven i might agree with you so again this is now atheism is somewhat tolerated
Abbot Zerkai smiled and said, you don't have a soul doctor.You are a soul.You have a body temporarily.And that's the great difference.
But then it has all this debate about like morality and whether the maid program, if I have to say it for YouTube, you know, because if man is ignorant of the fact that something is wrong and acts in ignorance, he incurs no guilt, provides natural reason with not enough to show him that it was wrong.
But while ignorance may excuse the man, it does not excuse the act of what is wrong in itself.If I permitted the act simply because the man is ignorant that it is wrong, then I would incur guilt because I do not know it to be wrong.
It is really painfully simple.Then the father freaks out.He tries to smuggle the mother and child.He almost like kidnaps them in a car. But then the police do the whole like act of like, is he hurting you, ma'am?
And so the police are sort of like irreverent to divine authority.But what happens is he manages to punch the doctor in the face.He like, you know, Father Zerkai, he like chuds out and he punches the doctor in the face.
But then the doctor, of course, refuses to press charge.He's like, well, you know, the guy's religious, who knows, right?Like, you know, I can't really charge him.
So now we have the part where he's with the car, but this is right before the nuclear apocalypse.The girl will set expressionless her face for a moment.Are you in pain, daughter?Zerkai was in the fast lane.It doesn't matter, she said.
Offer it to heaven, child.She looked at him coldly.You think it would please God?If you offer it, yes.I cannot understand a God who is pleased by my baby's hurting. The priest winced, no, no, it's not the pain that it pleases to God, child.
It is the soul's endurance in faith and hope and love in spite of bodily afflictions that pleases heaven.Pain is like a negative temptation.God is not pleased by temptations that afflict the flesh.
And this is like suffering is endured by the body and beautification of the soul.Suffering produces great spiritual transformation.But of course, you know, in this case, well, What can I say to that?The priest wanted anomaly.
So the woman says, save your breath, father.I'm not complaining.A baby is, but the baby doesn't understand your sermon.I think she tells him to shut up.And you know, they're both, yeah.What can I say to that?Priest wanted anomaly.
Tell her again, that man was given preternatural impossibility.Impossibility once, but threw it away in Eden. that the child was a cell of Adam and therefore was true, but she had a sick baby and she was sick herself and she wouldn't listen.
So then I said, can we think of ourselves in a, I wrote in the margins, in a grand collective terms anymore, like your own individual suffering is for a greater purpose of the whole, of the moral law, the nomos.
We don't really think about that because we're creatures of pleasure and avoidance of pain.We are really, really are beyond the pleasure principle. Or rather, maybe we were signed up by Sigmund Freud.
But when you think of it like we don't really have that notion anymore, because we think of things in such individualist terms that you can't really think of your life as part of a greater project of civilization, of faith that has endured for millennia.
and that your individual life really doesn't matter in the essence of, in the face of something far greater, something with far more magnanimity.And so we can't really, we don't have that notion anymore.
At least not where we live, maybe in the rest of the world, but who knows.
I mean, I shouldn't say, I shouldn't reify this sort of weird exoticism because even those parts of the world, they're being seduced by our way of life and our media and so forth.
so then okay let's skip way ahead to the final act the final chapters um where is it oh yes oh it also includes the Hiroshima shadows as well Well, I'm sure Miller was aware.Dom Zurkay swallowed a dry place.
He glanced down at her bicephalous shadow on the floor.It hinted at a terrible justice, this shadow shape, the Hiroshima shadows, of people's shadows being burned into the concrete. So there you go.The blasted swept him clean out the church.
He decided he lay in sand and saw the remains of rosebush caught in rockfalls.Rose remained attached to the branch.One of the Salman Arminians, he noticed the petals were singed.
The singed rose petals, that of course is a metaphor for the transition of life to death.
um i remember like this part of the book has almost a comical tone because he's saying well i'm a priest now i have to live by my own rules and he gets trapped and he's like oh man now i have to suffer too oh boy he laughed a little at the one the laughing uh it's like just a series of blunders he's like a few feet away from the rocket
to deliver the Eucharist and it's just the beam falls on him of the church that he spent his whole life preserving. He laughed a little at one.The laughing caused a sudden blackout.
He clawed his way of the blackness to the accompanying of someone screaming.Suddenly the priest knew the screaming was his own.Zerkai was suddenly afraid.The itch had been transmuted into agony.
But the screams had been there of raw terror, not of pain.There was agony now of every breath.Breathing, the agony persisted, but he could bear it.The dread had arisen from the last taste of inky blackness.
The blackness seemed to brood over him, cover him, await him hungrily.Lucifer. A big black appetite with a yearn for souls, pain he could bear, but not that awful darkness.
Either there was something in there should be there, or there was something here that remained to be done.Once he surrendered to the darkness, there would be nothing he could do.So he's saying, is it really darkness?
Did humanity really mitigate upon the bed, if you will?And that really does call into question the final revelation of deliverance.Did humanity fail in its mission?
that the only remnants of the holy sea of Christ's church lives in the stars in space colonies in Alpha Centauri.But that church missed the revelation on earth.So that calls into question a number of theological implications.
What does it mean for humanity to miss its own resurrection?Sorry, its own rapture, its own revelation?What does it mean to miss out?
the church that worked so hard to maintain humanity missed the final act and is going to develop elsewhere among the stars.The descendants seemed to diminish the pain.He lay quietly for a time then cautiously looked back to the rock heap again.
More than five tons back there.18 centuries back there.The blast had broken upon the crypt. uh for the crypts where he noticed a few bones caught between the rocks.He groped with his free hand encountering something smooth and finally worked it free.
He dropped in the sand beside the cerberium.The jawbone was missing but the cranium was intact except for a hole in the forehead from which a liver of dry and half-rotten wood protruded.
Oh my god, I guess he met Francis from the first few centuries before.So Grollys, the two-headed woman, transforms into Rachel, into Mother Mary of course.
uh the dust when he awoke was not alone he lifted the cheek one of the mudden looked at them crossly three of them sat in the rubble heap and eyed him with funeral solemnity he moved then spread black wings and hissed venomously he
flipped a bit of stone at them two of them took took wing and climbed to circle but the third sat there doing a little shuffle dance then peered at him gravely a dark and ugly bird but not like the other dark this one covered so now he's greeted by the buzzards the divine messengers if you will uh and they're so they're waiting for him to die essentially
The two-headed woman wandered in his sight around a heap of rubble.She stopped and looked down at Zerkai.Thank God, Ms.Grali.See if you can find Father Li.Thank God, Ms.Grali.See if you can.He blinked away a film of blood and studied her closely.
Rachel, he breathed.Rachel, the creature answered.She knelt there in front of him and sat back on her heels.She watched him with cool green eyes. and smiled incessantly, but then he noticed that... Sorry, I'm skipping ahead.
That of Miss Grawley slept soundly on the other shoulder while Rachel smiled.It seemed a young, shy smile that hoped for friendship.He tried again.Melodies and psalm came her answer.Listen in anyone else alive.So she became eternally young again.
She is the dying and resurrecting goddess. She is either the mother of the earth or she is the mother of God, of Mary, perhaps both.I said feminine version of Christ's imagery of the goddess delivering the Eucharist to Father Zerkai.
Now she gives the Eucharist to him.She gives the symbol of her son.Not the symbol, she gives her son the flesh of Christ. that which holds eternal life to the religious authority, to the to the Don, Abbot, Father Zerkai.So that is a powerful symbol.
She delivers him the Dormition, if you will, that divine power filled with the peternatural light.
um of but but at man's end she still she was still keenly there facing him finally he could make one of the that was hoping the golden cup in her left hand and in her right deliver uh delicately between thumb and forefinger a single host she was offering it to him and him is of course in italics or it was only imagining it and he had imagined a while ago that he was talking to brother pat
He received the wafer from her hand.She replaced the lid of the syrborium and sat the vessel in a more protected spot under a jutting rock.She used no conventional gestures, but the reverence with which she had handed it convinced him of one thing.
She senses the presence under the veils.She who could not yet use words nor understand them had done what she had done if by direct instruction. in response to his attempt to conditional baptism.
She's divinely instructed, such as Mary, to deliver the child of the Son of God.
So, Magnificam anima ma dominium, he whispered, my soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior, for he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaid.He was to teach her these words, the last sacrament and nuclear fallout.
I wrote in the margins.So again, she is delivering a feminine version of the son of God, the daughter of God, if you will. So she is harboring this eternally young head, this eternally young being that transforms in the eyes of Father Zirkai.
Or why God gave it to the preternatural gift of Eden, those gifts which man had been trying to seize by brute force again from heaven, since first he lost them. He had seen primal innocence in those eyes, a promise of resurrection.
One glimpse had been a bounty.He wept in gratitude after words.He lay with his face in the wet dirt and waited.Nothing else ever came.Nothing that he saw or felt or heard.That was the final end.
The body of the mutilated woman is filled with innocence in the end.An innocence that delivers the promise of heaven. But the promise of heaven that man tried to wrestle for himself, mankind tried to wrestle this promise away from the Lord.
And then it goes into the metaphor of the shark swimming in the ocean.
After a while the breakers caught the seaplane and threw it on the shore, the driftwood it tilted and fractured in wings, its wing there was a shrimp caressing in the breakers, the whitting that fed the shrimp, the shark that munched the whitting and found them admirable in the sportive brutality of the sea, again like the buzzard's cyclical nature.
As brutal and as awe-inspiring as it is, the chain of life continues.A wind came across the ocean, sweeping with a pall of fine white ash.The ash fell into the sea and into the breakers.The breakers washed dead shrimp ashore with the driftwood.
Then they washed up the whiting. The shark swam out to the deepest waters and brooding in the old clean currents.He was very hungry that season.Life on earth prey upon each other.Nature is geared towards the Nirvanic and Thanatoic principle.
And that leaves a final question.Will we always succumb to this?And will nature always best our greatest intentions to deliver heaven on earth? in a weird way.So this is what the article says about Fiat Lux, the middle chapter.
Schmitt elaborates his claim of juridical logic to the rationalism of Catholicism.
In Roman Catholicism and political form, he embarks on explaining how the seemingly contradictory expressions of Catholic politics, the nurturing conservative authoritarians and socialist reformers is misplaced critique based in the dominant techno-economic worldview.
Of course, Catholicism goes beyond that worldview. It goes beyond merely the usual politics of capitalism or socialism, who gets what, where and when, that sort of deal.It's law is beyond that of the mortal political realm.
Rather Schmitt identifies in the Catholic Church a juridical order.By that he focuses particularly on his ideas of representation.
Representation is so completely governed by conceptions of personal authority that the representative as well as the person represented must maintain a personal dignity It is not a material concept.
Representation for Schmitt is the bedrock for politics, for the relation between the person and structured power.Indeed, it is the priority of the form of process of representation that gives Catholicism its formal juridical character.
The Church as a legal, that is, juridical entity, an entity made up of structures, offices, rules, and rights, Catholicism's called institutionalism, that forward grounds representation in its essential, essentially human space of politics.
It shows an order that endures through time and through change of leaders and members, yet what is not shown is an impersonal mechanism form
that Schmitt identifies as associated with economic collectives, the personal dignity of the abbots is intertwined with their authority in the case of Mechanical for Leibovitz.And it's very, it's a very Thomistic influence.
Platonic view of germinal cause hints at the scholastic tenor to the novel.It's tripartite.Three parts involve three fundamental investigations.Fiat homo concerns the metaphysics of proof.Gerald's discovery of the fallout shelter
facilitated throughout the intervention of the pilgrim, sets in train the juridical process for Leibovitz's canonization.
So here is the proof of the greatness of civilization previously, but also the proof of Leibovitz's intention to preserve reason itself in the beginning of the book.
Excitable scuttlebutt within a rank of novices, the miraculous discovery suggests divine or at least heavenly intervention, is crushed by Abbot Arctos, sorry, Abbot Arctos, process reasonable doubt and integration of inferences, along with the threatening and dispensation of physical punishment onto the wayward flesh of Brother Gerald, Brother Francis in the book.
Fiat Lux is a staged discussion of relationship between pure and practical reason. The Thanh Tadio can only see pure reason and crude empiricism.We read all that part.
And of course, the last order, the third part, Fiat Volatus Tua, focuses specifically on the interrelations between secular sovereignty and spiritual authority.
So here we have like classic Thomism, classic structure, all the classic debates of reason and practical reason, divinely inspired authority, morality as based on secular versus divinely inspired authority and so forth.
In the second part the geopolitics of Texarkana is keenly discussed by the abbot and other church officials.
Neither the schism by Hannigan nor the survey of the abbot's defenses by the troops that escorted Tontadio is considered unexpected or surprising.There is a sense of ordering and interaction between orders.So again I mentioned some Zoroapism.
The Catholic form emanates from perceived universal reason and orders.This is what is precisely shown in the canonical for Leibowitz, a knowing sequence of orders united by the central and essential gift to humanity, reason or logos.
Just because the fallout shelter appears to contain not only artifacts from before the flame deluge, but suggestions that are connected to Leibowitz through the signed note, the blueprint, and the gold-toothed skull of his wife, Emily, does not mean the Order and the Church accept them as prima facie truth.
The second part deals with the proper relation between pure and practical reason.The monks listen attentively and interestedly to Thon's excited accounts of the rediscoveries of knowledge from the natural world. Um, then it goes on and on.
I'm going to skip parts of the article.He also buries, uh, the, you know, the first part, Gerald, the final scene, Fiat homo notified, new Rome were to rediscover his mortal remains.
Further is Benjamin who spares playfully with Abbott, Paolo, uh, sparse payfully.He himself makes mention to have lived before the initial, uh, apocalypse indeed, since the crucifixion.
Superficially, Benjamin is the embodiment of the Wandering Eternal Jay metaphor, however his juxtaposition to Leibowitz's order and political material concerns is significant.
So again, even as the material concerns of war bans and politics and geopolitics takes the second part of the book and the concerns of the church, you have the much more ancient concerns as symbolized by Benjamin interacting, the Wandering Jay interacting with Paulo.
Benjamin's hovel up on the Mesa overlooks the road to the Abbey, is utterly simple so too is crude burlap, his only finery a prayer shawl.
There is no stark contrast with the materiality of stone and gold of the Abbey, wealthy and content after thousands of years.You have to remember the first, the Abbey of New Rome
new rome in the first book is seen as like dilapidating and kind of shabby and not very well maintained there's dust and cobwebs everywhere now there's finery of gold and the abbey is preserved because Leibovitz is a saint.
The interchange between Benjamin and Paolo, two old men discussing the state of the world over a bottle of wine as the sun sinks into the dry land before.
What is not shown as if a canonical for Leibovitz is to be understood as Catholic propaganda is a missionary scene of the seductive combination of revelation and reason convincing Benjamin to be open to the saving of church in Christ.
Paolo comes across with a stomach ache, a worldly worry, Warrior focusing on the materiality of man and the flows of heaven, not as in Benjamin, a simple intense communion with God.
The interchanges with Thon are essentially at the other end of the spectrum.The Thon is a secular scientist who can only admit to empirical universe and human senses.
As with Benjamin, the interchanges between Thon and Paulo do not resolve in a victory of faith.The Thon is not presented as a bad man.He has integrity. He returns to the drawings of the Abbey.So again, I went through all of this.
So it talks about MAD and so forth, and of course the geopolitics.But let me get to MAD is patently not enough wisdom, Catholic or not, is insufficient to tamper or tame, counter the aggressive instinct of power in a post-lapsitarian world.
interpreted through the narrow, blinkering secretarianism which ultimately described the heathen to the other, the enemy, the justice of the South, manifest in the endgame theory of global enslavement, of the mutually assured destruction of nuclear war,
For Freud to be expected Eros, which fosters human community, communion will assert in the eternal, eporetic struggle with the death instinct, Thanatos, the polar opposite, the B-side to Eros.
Freudian Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals and after families, then races, peoples, nations into great unities, the unity of mankind, unity of concepts, then Thanatos is to dissolve all of them, to triumph yet again over Eros.
Fiat Volatua explores a number of possible endings beyond the endgame itself.Explored by the fresh nuclear war unleashed on earth.Therein three each captured by a pungent visual imagery.
The Eucharist administered to a dying abbot by a born without sin Rachel in the bombed ruins of Abbott.That which is born without sin.The woman now gives the tree of knowledge.Finally, the final act of givenness to religious authority to the church.
by someone who is without sin, Rachel, the woman, the child's head, the female child's head.
And in the enigmatic Rachel, there is a promise of a fresh, if unrecognizable Eden, it's Edenic in nuclear apocalypse, the possibility of a fused and blanched celestial humanity, balanced celestial humanity, in which Miller presented something more radical than any conventional theology can offer.
Not the seemingly non-overlapping magisteria of faith nor science, but wholly different cosmic and inevitably legal order.A new order that goes beyond the mere bifurcation split between secular and religious authority.A cosmic order.
He's writing this right before the New Age movement.Right before the age of Aquarius and all that stuff.He's intuiting something.
so the diaspora faith the high-tech simulacra memorabilia manifesting hope not however hope for earth but hope for the soul and substance of man somewhere else so even the earth the vestibule the creation god's green earth that doesn't matter that burns away literally but the memorabilia
microfilm copies of them, those artifacts which have proved the seeds of rediscovery of technology generally, and nuclear technology specifically, are dispatched to a human colony in Centurius, where they will again presumably offer the colonists the opportunity for self-obliteration.
The diaspora proceeded under the auspices of a god who must surely be very wary of race of man,
temporal influence of the church had failed to redeem humanity once but twice if not indeed more often in some unrecorded past, a socio-historical cyclical nightmare dominated by humanity's struggle against its fallen nature.
Comprehended as Jameson would remind us by history itself, history which the church faithfully records, even when it does not fully understand it.The order conforms to modernity, to an age of uranium steel flaring rocketry.
The diaspora of God is paradoxically facilitated by the technology which obliterates society, working yet again in a mysterious way.Nomos one fears, or at least this particular Nomos, carries a fatal flaw in its DNA.So now it goes to Rachel.
Contemplating the implications of baptizing Rachel, as Ms.Grawler has requested, Abbot Zerkai is compelled to inquire how many souls an old lady with an extra head is that has just grown.
A childish singing, prelipsitarian innocence, childish singing, la la la la la, or pastien reiterations of Zerkai's attempt to communicate, interpreted by Zerkai as more than a reflective imitation, but an attempt to communicate a unity between Rachel and the Abbot.
is unlikely unity.Miss Grawley's head now sleeps her crippled, arthritic body, healed and revived as part of Rachel.There is a beautification of the body in that vision of the last act.
Zerka understands the universe apostasized union of flesh and spirit.Rachel is explicitly implicated in nomos.Miss Grawley's bisphorus, how do I say that?Bisphallous shadow shape hinting to the abbot of the terrible justice.
Yet, in another disruption of Catholic orthodoxy or the revelation of the otherness of this immaculate conception, the nunc dimis is a crucial detail inept.
Simeon's request to die, having witnessed the salvation of the world in the form of Christ, occurs at the moment of public revelation of Christ at the temple, salvation prepared and exposed before the face of all peoples.
Theolux Rachel's light to redeem the world from the hereditary curse of sin and death
is that of a nuclear flash, growing brightly and brighter, outshining the puny sun of Genesis, until the confessional housing of Zirchi and Miss Grawley's were full of bright noon. Uh, so this is where the article ends.
The Shark Huckabee is listed in two paragraphs at the end of the book.
Circumverse the inshore waters, taking the pre-natural places, the apex part of the sea, eating shrimp and whiting, and then when the failing radioactive ash has killed the food in the shallows of the ocean, retreated to the cool, clean current of his deep waters.
The fallout, literal and figurative, of new apocalypse will leave the shark hungry in the coming season.But we are left in no doubt that now withstanding the gnawing hunger, the shark will survive.
is a stark reminder of the need for nomos in human affairs for the shirk inhabits precisely the nasty producing short Hobbesian landscape or seascape of conventional post-apocalyptic sensibilities, the sport of brutality of the sea.
And so now we are left with a question.We are left with the question of revelation in terms of human affairs. the nomos of the law, the divine law is given over into apocalypse.
And so really this calls into question in a sense, and it's kind of a nuclear black pill when you think about it, pardon the pun, of the question of faith, of the Catholic faith.Now you have to realize something here in a canonical for Leibowitz.
And so this, you can only, really piece this out for yourself.But what Miller is questioning is that, okay, let me set this up for you.So Rachel fulfills the law, the nomos, in the Eucharist.
In that final act of humanity, the deliverance of grace is given over to religious authority, over to the representation of the church, Father Zirkai.Because Zirkai is saying that I am an embodiment of all the church,
As for example, Tantario is the embodiment of all secular knowledge.But in the final act, Zerkei is the embodiment of the church itself.And so the church carries on into a new community that is exoplanetary.
The kingdom of God in the earth is now obliterated.But before that obliteration, in the light of the nuclear apocalypse, you have this fulfillment of the law through Rachel, through a purely innocent child, as Christ was innocent, once again.
But here's the question, and now I've realized that I've gone on to four hours So Charlie Mackey, you got your money's worth.You got your $200 money's worth.Four hours of content.And I'm really, so I will leave you with this last thing, okay?
That this article brings up.That calls into doubt, not the Catholicism of Walter Miller Jr., but rather this message of apocalypse and salvation, okay? that is represented by science itself.
Or rather, the law of the church, the law of God, intersecting with this thanatoic principle that underlines the law of nature.And this complicates things.Because think of it this way.The memorabilia, or at least a record of it, becomes divinized.
Leibowitz, a scientist and engineer, wants to preserve humanly knowledge.So he carries with that the seeds of destruction.
The very thing that destroys humanity is then taken as a saintly divinization by the church to where the memorabilia is so important that they must carry it to the stars.Kind of like the black liquid in Prometheus.
I didn't see the new one, by the way.I should see the new one, Romulus. But it's basically like the poison of humanity, that Lucifer that is given over to humanity, that now it's going to go to the other colonies.
And presumably they're going to destroy themselves.And so the church itself, through its divine law, canonizes and sanctifies that very Lucifer thing.
that thanatoic principle, because the memorabilia represents the knowledge of a before time of a highly technocratic, highly technologically advanced society.But science and the malfeasance of reason goes overboard into the death drive.
So it calls into question, is this really nihilism?Is this a violation of Catholic faith? is that no longer is the faith delivering eternal life, but rather the death of the conscious element of the earth, which is humanity.
That God has grown so weary of his own children.Does this really invert as a novel? Does it really avert or reaffirm that Catholic faith?And that's the question.That's what science fiction, that's what fiction delivers us.
This is what literature brings about.Now I like to believe that nature lives on, metaphorically.That is human folly-ness.But the fact that the church worships the memorabilia. takes with it to the stars, to a new colony, a fresh new cosmic start.
Will that process, that Luciferian Thanatoic principle, will that come again?That is the real question.And so this is why I Can't Look Over Leibovitz.It's such a great work of literature.I highly recommend you read all of it.
And it leaves an operatic note in that way. But I think it really goes down to the essence of Catholicism is this nomos, is this law of both nomos, law, and logos, reason, that gives us over to the divine law, our capacity for reason.
And so this is why it's such a brilliant work.And so I highly recommend it.
the it's been if you want me to review a text it's obviously going to be more than a hundred dollars uh but if you want me to review a film or an article my usual flat fee is a hundred dollars uh i have a number of film reviews coming up and this has been such a blast uh yeah this has been oh my god almost four hours
so yeah all the links are down below if you want to contact me if instead of just you know paypal-ing me you could email me or you could you know leave a comment if you're interested I'll give you my email, but it's all down on my link tree.
So once again, as I always say, thank you.God bless.Goodbye.Too sweet.And I will see you on the next genre reviews and hopefully, uh, in the coming week, I'm going to release another content.I've been interviewing a lot of people for content minded.
So yeah, thank you very much.If you've made it this far, of course.Oh man.
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