A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
What is the point of being human? This is a question Miller wrestles with in Canticle, and the question he wrestled with for much of his life, particularly after serving in World War II as part of a bomber crew that destroyed the ancient Roman Catholic monastery at Monte Cassino, Italy, founded by St. Benedict in the 6th century.
The experience had a profound impact on Miller and led him to the Catholic Church after the war. A decade later he began to write the three stories that would eventually become A Canticle for Leibowitz, which went on to win the 1961 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel.
In the Desert
The novel begins with a seventeen-year old novice monk performing his Lenten fast in a desert in the southwest of what used to be the United States, six-hundred years after a nuclear holocaust has wiped out civilization and much of humanity. The novice spots at a distance “a wiggling iota of black caught in a shimmering haze of heat.” He fears it may be something monstrous, as the effects of radiation have lingered for centuries, producing colonies of deformed humans. But the figure evolves into an old man who is on his way to the novice’s monastery some distance away.
The old man will appear again over the next 1200 years (in Parts 2 and 3), and can be understood to represent Judaism. Judaism’s unmistakable intimate connection with Christianity is further developed by Miller in the “historical” person of Isaac Edward Leibowitz.
The young novice, Brother Francis Gerard of Utah, belongs to the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, a religious order of Catholic monks dedicated to continuing the work of Leibowitz, a Jewish electrical engineer with the US military who survived the war and who, after the death of his wife, took vows to become a priest. He established a religious community dedicated to preserving knowledge by hiding books, memorizing, and copying them (reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, written a few years earlier). Centuries later, Leibowitz is canonized.
Why Hold on to the Past?
How much of being human has to do with the preservation of knowledge, that sum total of documented human experience, discernment and understanding? What would we be without literature and history, the sacred texts, science? How would we know who we are? The monks offer their lives to the preservation of the totality of human remembrance, which they feel compelled to do in obedience to God.
The conflict between belief and unbelief courses through the novel and informs human behavior. In Part 3 a doctor and an abbot argue over a certain course of action. Both are compassionate men. Without giving away too much of the plot, the doctor wishes to address an immediate situation, the abbot wishes to address an eternal situation. The doctor is accountable to his personal principles, the abbot is accountable to God and the Big Picture. Who is right?
This is a book that raises many questions and that unsparingly challenges the reader. It is a book that will remain embedded in my mind. I first read it decades ago when I was a youngster, and though I didn’t understand much of what was going on at the time, Canticle called out to me, intermittently, over the years. “Read me again! Read me again!” (And this time pay closer attention!)
Laughter and Horror
Canticle is very funny at times (laugh out loud), and at times horrifying and disturbing (man’s mindless obsession with power and the unwillingness of too many of our fellow humans to see the lives of other humans as worthy of respect and dignity). The novel is compassionate and heartbreaking, at times disorienting. It is a work of literature whose brilliance and complexity of theme, symbolism, and structure are beyond the scope of this review. It is a work of fiction that could be read numerous times and continue to produce new insights every time. It continues to ask, “What does being human mean to you?”
I was sad to read that Miller became a recluse in his later years and committed suicide in 1996 after suffering from deep depression. He was unable to finish his sequel to Canticle, though it was completed by an author friend of his and published posthumously.
Miller left us a magnificent work of the imagination and spirit that, despite all the horrors and warnings it presents, reminds us that there will always be among us individuals who will endure and persevere against all manner of darkness in order that hope, and humankind with it, may not perish. That this is an undeniable fact can only be explained by love.