The Multidisciplinarian

“Because a doubt is not a denial. Doubt is a powerful tool, and it should be applied to history.” – Thon Taddeo Pfardentrott

Walter Miller’s wrote the cyclical-apocalypse science fiction, A Canticle for Liebowitz, in 1959. Whoa. The novel’s structured in three major chunks spanning thousands of years. Despite the passage of time, each section mirrors the previous:

Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy Will Be Done): Civilization reaches technological heights again. And repeats the original sin of hubris and annihilation.

Fiat Homo (Let There Be Man): Humanity struggles to recover lost knowledge after nuclear apocalypse.

Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light): Knowledge is rediscovered, science flourishes again, and, yeah, you know what happens. 1960 readers didn’t.

Humanity learns nothing that sticks through each cycle of apocalypse. The monks capture and retain some history but fail to understand. The Church’s continuity is the thread stretching through the cycles.

Monks preserve knowledge as relic. Sacred texts like blueprints and purchasing orders are copied and illuminated with zero knowledge of their meaning. Preservation gets ritualistic reverence. Monks maintain continuity, its content opaque. It echoes the pre-enlightenment attitude that the past is authoritative, and the best we can do is safeguard it.

The book is too long and complex for a guy like me to summarize and interpret. My goal is smaller and more particular. Miller obviously knows history of Christianity. He seems to know history of science well and he weaves epistemology into it.

He uses two characters, Brother Kornhoer the monk and Thon Taddeo Pfardentrott, a secular scholar. Kornhoer is a  scientific-minded experimentalist, self-taught and deeply religious. He has a reverent awe toward natural phenomena. He invents an electrical dynamo and powers an arc lamp with it. Fellow monks deem it hellish.

Taddeo has immersed himself in electrical theory, which he is redeveloping, but has failed to demonstrate experimentally. He’s analytical, formal, and initially condescending to Kornhoer. Then seeing Kornhoer’s experimental progress, he praises him for his intuitive breakthroughs, commenting that it would have taken him, Taddeo, decades to discover this on his own.

Taddeo discusses Brother Kornhoer’s work with officials at the abbey:

“No, no, not the lamp. The lamp’s simple enough, once you got over the shock of seeing it really work. It should work. It would work on paper, assuming various undeterminables and guessing at some unavailable data. But the clean impetuous leap from the vague hypothesis to a working model—” Then thon coughed nervously. “It’s Kornhoer himself I don’t understand. That gadget—” he waggled a forefinger at the dynamo “—is a standing broad-jump across about twenty years of preliminary experimentation, starting with an understanding of the principles. Kornhoer just dispensed with the preliminaries. You believe in miraculous interventions? I don’t, but there you have a real case of it. Wagon wheels!” He laughed. “What could he do if he had a machine shop? I can’t understand what a man like that is doing cooped up in a monastery.”

On reading this, it hit me that Miller is quietly teaching History of Science. This is James Clerk Maxwell the theorist upon seeing the work of Michael Faraday, the self-taught, deeply religious experimenter associated with the Royal Institution – whose humility and faith mirrored the fictional monks’ values. And whose epistemic humility Maxwell took a lesson from.

Taddeo’s “wagon wheels!” exclamation is perfect. It grounds Kornhoer in practical mechanics rather than abstract scholarship. Faraday came from a bookbinder’s background and retained a craftsman’s relationship to apparatus. He manipulated coils, magnets, glass, wires. Maxwell then mathematized what Faraday felt.

Miller doesn’t name these references outright, but he seeds enough clues to suggest he’s fictionalizing them as archetypes of scientific discovery. This has to be common knowledge, I thought. Miller has put a a thin fictional veil on Faraday and Maxwell. Web searches find no discussion of the parallel.

Miller’s move here is shrewd. He’s not writing historical fiction per-se, but he’s dramatizing patterns from the history of science by pushing them into sci fi. Fiction as a tool for History of Science. (And here you’re supposed to understand that History of Science isn’t about names and dates.)

Miller has captured the tension between religious custodianship and scientific curiosity. He’s reminded us of the fragile transmission of pre-scientific knowledge through manuscripts and oral culture. He’s highlighted the way technological discovery (or recovery, here) precedes theoretical understanding (my Project Hail Mary review). He’s nailed the irony of having faith communities preserve secular knowledge better than secular institutions, especially post-catastrophe. The Jesuits, Aristotle’s Physics, and all that.

He’s hit on epistemology, that meeting of philosophy and science that genius nitwit scientists like Hawking and Dawkins are unable to grasp.

Maxwell deeply admired Faraday and treated his experimental insights as foundational. Though Faraday lacked formal mathematical training, his visual and experimental grasp of fields, lines of force, and induction profoundly shaped Maxwell’s work. Maxwell wrote:

“We are all, like Faraday, standing on the shoulders of giants, but the giant in this case is Faraday himself.”

More specifically, Maxwell’s 1856-65 work translating Faraday’s lines of force into a coherent mathematical model (culminating in Maxwell’s equations) was often accompanied by personal statements of humility and admiration. Maxwell saw his own equations as expressing Faraday’s intuitions in a generalized form, not as surpassing them.

In Canticle, Miller has distilled a real epistemological relationship: intuition feeds analysis, practice feeds theory. He dramatized it in a collapsed world where the expected roles are reversed. Instead of Cambridge and the Royal Institution, we get Kornhoer and Taddeo. One touches reality through experiment, another systematizes it. They recognize each other’s genius.

There’s another, less obvious, parallel. Taddeo’s reaction to Kornhoer also recalls Einstein’s attitude toward Georges Lemaître, a priest. Lemaître showed Einstein mathematically wrong. He derived an expanding universe. Einstein replied, “your calculations are correct, but your physics is abominable,” but was forced to concede.

Miller seems aware of a recurring pattern in the history of science. Posterity compresses the process of experimentation preceding theory into a clean but false narrative. He resists the “great linear progress” rational-reconstruction version of scientific progress and its history. In some ways, Miller preempted Feyerabend and Kuhn.

A final Feyerabendian point, which I don’t think I’m simply reading into Miller: “What’s a man like that doing cooped up in a monastery?” Miller undermines the modern belief that scientific brilliance belongs in institutions – secular or otherwise.

Taddeo questions the reliability of historical knowledge from the pre-apocalypse civilization. Someone challenges him along the lines of: if you doubt the old accounts, why study the ancient Leibowitz documents at all? Taddeo replies:

“Because a doubt is not a denial. Doubt is a powerful tool, and it should be applied to history.”