I'm a firm believer that people can and will make a religion out of anything. Small and large gods are invented every day. I know a guy who's made a minor religion out of tea. Last month when I was sick I medicated myself with tea and honey. When my friend the Tea-ist heard about this he was as appalled as a priest who's discovered that the kids in the CYO had used altar wine to spike the egg nog at their Christmas party. Tea is sacred, there's a proper method of brewing it and serving it, and you imbibe every day because it's a form of prayer. You don't just stumble out to the kitchen, put the kettle on, dump hot water over a bag of Lipton you found in a box at the back of the cabinet, candy it up with some honey, and slosh it down. These things must be done delicately or you break the spell and offend the tea gods. What I'm getting at is that if all belief in God, Allah, Krishna, the Great Spirit, and Moloch was to disappear thanks to a sudden embrace of science, Science would become a religion, so the premise of Neal Stephanson's new novel, Anathem , is right up my alley.
In Anathem, Mathematics is a religion, with a priesthood, and its most devout adherents live cloistered lives in places very much like monasteries and go through their days robed and hooded, following rituals very much like monks and nuns did in medieval abbeys, except that their rituals are guided by "mathic" principles instead of theology.
Like I said, I'm down with the program. Trouble is, I'm feeling a strong sense of deja vu here in the early going. Didn't I read this book before, when it was called The Name of the Rose ?
The similarities to Umberto Eco's historical-mystery novel aren't just in the claustrophobic setting and my sense of being trapped in a tight space with a lot of characters with smelly robes and dirty feet.
What I'm afraid of is that, like The Name of the Rose, the point of Anathem is in navigating and decoding a strange, arcane, and overly-ritualized world that has deliberately made itself indicipherable to the uninitiated. In Eco's book, to solve the mystery you had to solve the setting and the characters. The clues had clues and the clues to the clues had clues. It was exhausting reading and at the end of it I didn't feel as though I'd done anything more clever than leap through intellectual hoops Eco had set up for me. In other words, I felt like a not particularly bright student who had been tricked by a professor with a wicked sense of humor into finishing a class I really had no interest in.
Anyone reading Anathem?
Please tell me that's not what Stephenson's up to. I don't like novels that require homework. Already my head's spinning from memorizing definitions and vocabulary words. If I'm going to need a calculator and graph paper to get through this, I'm dropping the course.
Follow the link to watch a video clip of Stephenson talking about Anathem.
if all belief in God, Allah, Krishna, the Great Spirit, and Moloch was to disappear thanks to a sudden embrace of science, Science would become a religion
Category error.
Posted by: Apostate | Saturday, December 20, 2008 at 11:05 PM
In Anathem, Mathematics is a religion, with a priesthood, and its most devout adherents live cloistered lives in places very much like monasteries
They're called "upper division math classes", and they're unlike monasteries only in that occasionally you might see a female walk past the doorway.
Posted by: Mike Schilling | Sunday, December 21, 2008 at 02:19 PM
Rituals based on numbers are simple enough to imagine, but I'm having trouble coming up with anything mathy that would work. Maybe that's reason enough to get the book (although I don't remember having to look up a lot of words with The Name of the Rose (other than latin, at least)).
Bourbaki is very much a cloistered world, but it's actually kind of anti-ritual in that everything is generalized to the max and formalized not quite to the extent of Russell and Whitehead, but still well past the point of mind-numbing cruelty. Some people love it, though; everyone else thinks of it as intentionally opaque...so I guess the parallel with medieval monks is pretty obvious in that respect.
I see from Stevenson's vlog intro that the main character is named Erasmus. My older brother lives in his namesake's old rooms. May make a nice Christmas gift with a connection like that.
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | Sunday, December 21, 2008 at 04:17 PM
Rituals based on numbers are simple enough to imagine, but I'm having trouble coming up with anything mathy that would work. Maybe that's reason enough to get the book (although I don't remember having to look up a lot of words with The Name of the Rose (other than latin, at least)).
Bourbaki is very much a cloistered world, but it's actually kind of anti-ritual in that everything is generalized to the max and formalized not quite to the extent of Russell and Whitehead, but still well past the point of mind-numbing cruelty. Some people love it, though; everyone else thinks of it as intentionally opaque...so I guess the parallel with medieval monks is pretty obvious in that respect.
I see from Stevenson's vlog intro that the main character is named Erasmus. My older brother lives in his namesake's old rooms. May make a nice Christmas gift with a connection like that.
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | Sunday, December 21, 2008 at 04:22 PM
Nope, it's what you think: hoops all the way down.
Posted by: Thomas | Monday, December 22, 2008 at 10:22 AM
I always thought worship came first, rituals second.
Posted by: Kathleen Maher | Monday, December 22, 2008 at 10:50 AM
I bought Anathem when it was released, on faith because I loved The Baroque Cycle, but have not had the energy to start it yet. When I saw in the cover blurb that it involved a whole imaginary world and language I knew it was going to take a lot of dedication. I will have time over the holidays to get into it. I'm not a big fan of imaginary worlds in general, but I will give it a try since I already plunked down my $25.
Glad to know I can come back and get your comments on it as I dive in!
Posted by: Dawn | Tuesday, December 23, 2008 at 04:29 PM
I bought Anathem when it was released, on faith because I loved The Baroque Cycle, but have not had the energy to start it yet. When I saw in the cover blurb that it involved a whole imaginary world and language I knew it was going to take a lot of dedication. I will have time over the holidays to get into it. I'm not a big fan of imaginary worlds in general, but I will give it a try since I already plunked down my $25.
Glad to know I can come back and get your comments on it as I dive in!
Posted by: Dawn | Tuesday, December 23, 2008 at 04:30 PM
Don't pay too much attention to Name of the Rose:
1. Eco got his Aristotle wrong
2. No medieval library (in Western Europe at least) was even remotely as large as the one in the novel. The Vatican library, the largest by far in Western Europe, only had 3,500 volumes in 1481. The first post-Roman Empire stand-alone library building was the papal library built in 1587. (There were buildings which contained library rooms, of course, but not buildings which were just libraries).
3. It's a very upper-class monastery - besides the extensive buildings, the gigantic library, the monks from all over Europe - these would have been very sophisticated men, quite adept and advanced at scholastic philosophy, and Eco portrays many of them as idiots. Go try reading someone like Ptolemy of Lucca (prior of an Italian monastery) or Albertanus of Brescia (an Italian lawyer living not too far from the location of the novel) and tell me idiocy was widespread then.
Posted by: burritoboy | Tuesday, December 23, 2008 at 11:12 PM
Anathem really busts loose in a bit. In the end, I think it's one of the least claustrophobic novels I've read. And don't worry about memorizing the vocab. After a while, it becomes second nature.
I read it in fits and spurts with a baby sleeping in my lap, and was able to mostly keep track of things in spite of the frequent interruptions. I'm not saying everybody will find it to be their cup of tea, but I dug it very much.
Posted by: Mike | Wednesday, December 24, 2008 at 11:16 AM
I'm looking forward to "Anathem" -- waiting now for my son to finish it -- but I sincerely hope it's nothing like "The Name of the Rose," which I thought was the most overrated "mystery" I've ever read. I loathe literary writers who slum in the genre fields, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, hell, even Westerns -- because to them it IS slumming, and it shows. They don't know how the genre they've deigned to try works, but they think they're better writers than genre writers because they read a lot of Camus and can quote Susan Sontag. For all I know Eco may be a genius, but as a mystery writer he was a complete flop.
Posted by: Tehanu | Tuesday, January 06, 2009 at 12:24 AM