A brilliant scientist asks a monk about the past, about the world of the Twentieth Century that created the bomb, "How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely?"
"Perhaps" (The monk replies)"By being materially great and materially wise and nothing else."
Under the pessimism of the view that man will prevail only to repeat every mistake, there is one note of hope. It is a radical hope. It is not preached. It is simply there, woven into the framework of the story. There is available to man another way to live. Man does not have to confine himself to the search for wealth and power. So long as he does, he is doomed to the endless repetition of rise and fall of civilization, but it is the focus on wealth and power that dooms him. As the dying abbot of the monastery broods to himself,
"'What does the world weigh?...its scales are crooked. It weighs life and labor in the balance against silver and gold. That'll never balance...It spills a lot of life that way...Do they laugh at us in heaven?' He wondered."
There is another way. It is seen in little glimpses. There is the monk who reinvents electric lights and then shrugs at his accomplishment. Science is a hobby he takes pleasure in, but his true joy lies in being a monk, in serving God. In that moment, religion and science are seen, not in conflict, but in their proper perspective.
Then at the end of the book, in the last pages of the final chapter, a woman appears who is like no other human being on the earth. Who is she? What does she represent? Is she a figure pointing the way to a future that can be different from the past? Or is she only a hallucination? We are not told. We are only left with a question.
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