A Canticle for Leibowitz, a review

A nuclear firestorm has caused the downfall of civilization, followed by a wave of benighted barbarism and book-burning. But the wake of the holocaust sees a slow unearthing from oblivion. Monks transcribe the literature of a lost age of mankind over centuries, cloistered in monasteries in the arid landscapes of the Southwestern United States.

This is the world of Walter M. Miller Jr.’s wonderful A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) which I recently had the pleasure of re-reading after a span of many years.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a fragmented read, consisting of three discrete stories separated by centuries of time. Each were short stories originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. As a novel this stitched-together structure helps to reinforce one of Miller’s central messages: The painstaking, fragmentary, and precarious state of knowledge transmission and preservation.

At its heart Miller’s book is a re-imagining of what the medieval monks did with classical Greek and Roman literature, transcribing it laboriously and preserving the flame of past knowledge until it could be used in a more enlightened age. While historical monks survived barbarian predation and Viking raids, in Miller’s novel nuclear war and predatory radiation-scarred scavengers are the equivalent of barbarian invasions circa 476 AD. The survivors of the nuclear exchange are subject to a brutal period called the “Simplification,” where mobs of bitter, vengeful survivors attempt to eliminate any trace of the science that led them down the path to oblivion. Books and men that dare to read them are burned and destroyed.

This scenario is played out again in A Canticle for Leibowitz, with the monks of Albertian Order of Leibowitz carefully preserving the old scientific literature, resurrecting an arc lamp from old electrical blueprints. By the second and third act technology has again risen from the ashes.

But Miller’s book is dark. History is cyclical, and so as in the works of Robert E. Howard apocalypse and barbaric overthrow will ultimately triumph. Man is fallen, and fallible. At the end of the book (unknown date but I believe the late third millennium AD), nuclear annihilation again envelops the earth, and mankind’s priceless artifacts and knowledge survive only by being taken to another planet, where starship pilgrims attempt to give civilization another shot.

Throughout the book Miller drops many wisdom bombs worthy of pondering. For example, the only way that we as a species can truly evolve, and stop endless cycles of war, is to “give up the bitterness.” It’s a Christian concept, turning the other cheek. This is of course easy in principle but extraordinarily hard in practice, as old grudges, distrust (leading to the need to strike first in a nuclear war), make this almost impossible to achieve in practice. See the Israelis and Palestinians. We fail because the evil we succumb to is not suffering, but the unreasoning fear of suffering. Nature has given us all the tools we need to live and die with grace, but our craving for worldly security is the root of evil. From the book: “To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.”

The book presents a dark vision of humanity. And we are seeing its vision play out today with our unbridled pursuit of technology and political utopias while abandoning the meaningful conversations: What is it all this for, what should a just society look like, what is our ultimate end and purpose? Our species is unwilling to accept responsibility, which starts by looking at oneself. We’d rather find enemies to blame, and start the war, then do the painful work of self-introspection. Again from the book: “The trouble with the world is me—No ‘worldly evil’ except that which is introduced into the world by Man—me thee Adam us—with a little help from the father of lies. Blame anything, blame God even, but oh don’t blame me.” Our species has to “forgive God for allowing pain, for if he didn’t allow it, human courage, bravery, nobility, and self-sacrifice would all be meaningless things.”

Miller portrays the peace-loving and preservationist Monks sympathetically but not uncritically. A visiting atheist scientist chastises them for not doing anything with the knowledge they preserve. It’s not enough to mindlessly copy it and embellish it with art around the edges and seal it in tombs, the scientist says, but it should be used to improve humanity. But here the scientists errs, because he fails to temper his desire for progress with wisdom. Technology must be balanced and kept in check with our higher order principles—wisdom, charity, mercy. Because life here on earth will never be Eden. We have eaten of the fruit of knowledge, the serpent is among us and within us.

After a limited nuclear exchange scientists round up the most grievously wounded and hopelessly sick from radiation exposure and admit them to a camp, where they can end their pain with assisted suicide. The monks protest with homemade signs that evoke Auschwitz: Not work will set you free, but Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

At the end of the book the Abbot Zerchi (the A-Z is interesting, the monk’s alphabet has reached its end) encounters an old tomato farmer who lives around the periphery of the chapel. She has been deformed by radiation and has a “twin” growing out of her shoulder, a small, dormant second head which she calls Rachel. With Zerchi pinned under the wreckage of a blast, his life blood draining away, he sees the woman, whose Rachel head has awakened with eyes of pure innocence—a new Eve in this hellish garden. Rachel refuses Zerchi’s formal blessing of the cross on her forehead. Perhaps she represents humanity starting over again, this time without the old prior hurts and wounds, religious and scientific baggage that prevents us from advancing to a higher stage of development. Or perhaps Rachel is the promise of resurrection, the image of Jesus and his (possible) return for which we have been waiting for millennia.

Postscript: This re-read of A Canticle for Leibowitz was prompted by the Online Great Books Podcast, one of my favorite podcasts. I highly recommend checking it out. The hosts are entertaining, bright, forthright, and not plagued by political correctness. They always plug the next book they plan to read on the prior show, and when I heard they were going to do A Canticle for Leibowitz I wanted to read the book in advance and “participate” in the conversation.