A Canticle For Leibowitz
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Copyright
About
Introduction
Dedication
Acknowledgment
Fiat Homo
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Fiat Lux
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Fiat Voluntas Tua
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Copyright
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TITLE: A Canticle for Leibowitz
AUTHOR: Miller, Walter M. Jr
ABEB Version: 2.8
Hog Edition
Introduction
THE HISTORY OF MODERN SCIENCE FICTION is largely dominated by a score or so of writers who have produced extensive bodies of work over two or more decades — novelists like Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Henry Kuttner, Brian W. Aldiss, and Philip K. Dick. But science fiction has also produced its share of literary meteors, flashing into prominence with a book or three that stand with the best written by the prolific masters, and then vanishing into the shadows from whence they came. In this second category are writers like Daniel F. Keyes (Flowers for Algernon), Richard McKenna, (a great short story writer for a few years whose only novel, The Sand Pebbles, was outside the science fiction field), and Walter M. Miller, Jr.
In the brief period between 1950 and 1959, Walter M. Miller, Jr. published about forty stories, one of which, "The Darfsteller", won a Hugo Award for best short story of 1955, and a single novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, (which was first published in 1959 and won a Hugo in 1961.) After that, except for a very occasional short story, Miller has been silent.
But since 1959, Canticle has had three hardcover and (at this writing) nineteen paperback printings, has sold over three quarters of a million copies, and has become one of a small handful of truly enduring modern science fiction novels.
Typically, science fiction writers are a gregarious lot, and, at least within the restricted field of science fiction readers, maintain high public visibility. They attend science fiction conventions and writers' conferences, write letters to fan magazines, and in general conduct themselves as public figures to the best of their opportunities. But not Walter Miller. He has remained a name on two Hugo Awards and on one classic science fiction novel, even to most of his colleagues. He was born in Florida in 1923, served in the Air Force in World War II, took a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Texas in 1951, then returned to Florida, where he lives today in public obscurity.
Readers of Canticle will hardly be surprised to learn that Miller is a convert, a Catholic by decision rather than birth. And the possibly apocryphal story of his conversion, if true, certainly casts a powerful light on the major themes of A Canticle for Leibowitz, and indeed, may even help to explain why it is Miller's only novel.
According to the story, Miller, while serving in the Army Air Force in Italy during World War II, took part in the massive bombing of the Monte Casino monastery, which the Germans were using as an artillery spotting post. He did not learn of the nature of the target until after the raid, and apparently had not even been clear on just what a monastery was. It was this incident which, according to the story, aroused his interest in Catholicism, and became the kernel of his conversion.
If this is true, it would not be unreasonable to speculate that this same incident also inspired Miller to write A Canticle for Leibowitz. Most of the story takes place in a monastery in the American Southwest after nuclear war has created a new dark age, and, after describing the role of the order of St. Leibowitz in the rise of a new technological civilization, the novel ends with a second nuclear war. In between, the novel deals with the position of the monastery in a war of consolidation waged by one of the successor American empires, and more than once neighboring villagers attempt to use the monastery as a fortified position. During the second nuclear war, the abbot of the monastery is persuaded to allow an "Exposure Survey Team" of the "Green Star Relief Organization" to set up a facility just outside the monastery's walls. Initially, this Survey Team is engaged in treating the injured and the dying, but later it turns out that they are giving out "Red Tickets" to the hopeless radiation sickness cases, which entitles them to voluntary euthanasia. Finally, a euthanasia facility itself is set up outside the monastery over the strenuous protests of the abbot. Thus, the spiritual, moral, and temporal relationships between monastery and military, church and state, are a central, perhaps the central, theme of the novel.
Further, Leibowitz (who never appears as a character in the book) was, like Miller, himself a convert to Catholicism. Still further, Leibowitz was an electronic technician in a missile base near the site of the monastery at the outbreak of the first nuclear war. That is, he bore guilt in the destruction directly, just as Miller must have born direct guilt in the destruction of Monte Casino.
However far all of this may or may not be taken, it is certain that A Canticle for Leibowitz was not written off the top of Miller's head and was not just an interesting story to him. The book was based on three earlier novellas which appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, making it rather clear that Canticle was created from material upon which Miller had ruminated for many years. What is more, Miller began writing science fiction in 1950 while recuperating from a car accident which forced him to interrupt his engineering studies, and in the next six years he sold some forty stories — all of which tends to indicate that he originally began writing at least partially out of economic necessity. And after he completed the final version of A Canticle for Leibowitz, this literary torrent dwindled off to a trickle. Thus, in diverse ways, Canticle was the core of Miller's literary career, his archetypical story, perhaps his driving literary daemon. Once the story was finally told, Miller's output faded away.
This, I believe, may explain how a writer can produce one masterwork and never a second. Miller's case may be typical of the literary meteor. Some men choose writing as a career because the life appeals to them, because they have the skill, because they enjoy the status, much in the way that one might choose to become a lawyer or an engineer or an accountant. These writers become, at the lowest level, commercial hacks, and at the higher levels, the accomplished literary craftsmen, the "master story tellers." Typically, they are prolific and have long careers. Such writers form the backbone of science fiction, indeed of fiction in general. Others come to writing through a burning urge to create, because the words, when they come up at all, come bubbling up from the nether reaches, impelling them towards the typewriter. At the lower levels, these are the passionate amateurs, the part-time writers stealing time away from their workaday jobs to court the muse, and at the higher levels, these are the literary artists. Typically, whether prolific or not, they are dedicated to writing all their lives, though they may suffer from years-long writing blocks. Such writers form the heart of fiction.
But a few men, like Walter M. Miller, Jr., are, perhaps, not really writers at all, but men with a book or two throbbing inside their souls aching to burst forth. Some event or events in their lives, some convergence of inputs, has created within them an insi
ght, a system of imagery, a constellation of feelings, a single story, which moves to the center of their souls and, at least for a time, causes their lives to become structured around it, moves them towards setting it down as words on paper. In preparation for this task, they may write other things, honing their skills until the magic moment arrives; after the great work is done, they frequently are spent as writers or go on producing ghosts of their one mighty tale. On the lower levels, these are the patrons of vanity publishers. On the higher levels, they are the producers of lonely pinnacles of literature like A Canticle for Leibowitz. The singer is the song.
And what of the song, the canticle Miller has written for Leibowitz, the canonized military technician? What has made it one of the two or three most enduring and popular science fiction novels of the post-war period, not merely among aficionados of the genre but among the reading public at large, perhaps ultimately among a generation of critics as well? On a superficial plot and setting level, Canticle is only one of a host of post-nuclear-war stories in the science fiction canon; in the 1950s, science fiction writers were obsessed with the subject. The novel at first glance seems to lack unity: no single character appears throughout except Benjamin, the (immortal?) ancient Jew, who exists almost entirely as a symbol and whose internal reality is scarcely touched on. Indeed, a case could be made that Canticle is not a novel at all, but a series of three novellas on the same theme. Further, Canticle at times seems to be almost a science fictioning of the story of the relation of Church and State during the Middle Ages, even including Thon Taddeo, a character almost schematically modeled on Leonardo da Vinci. Why has A Canticle for Leibowitz endured after so many similar stories have largely been forgotten?
Certainly not because of dazzlingly brilliant or unique prose style. Miller's prose is clear and serviceable (except in a few passages near the end of the final section where it takes somewhat purple leaps into a kind of jumbled stream of historical consciousness which does not quite succeed), but not really poetic, and it never calls major attention to itself. No, the appeal of Canticle lies not in the telling, the characters, or the plot, but in its theme, its setting, and perhaps most of all, in its philosophical complexity and ambiguity.
On a straightforward level, A Canticle for Leibowitz is that rarity, a genuine Catholic science fiction novel — a novel in which not only are Catholic prelates the major characters, not only is the focus of the story on the Church, but a novel in which the author's outlook on the material is itself a Catholic viewpoint.
The first third of the novel deals with the process by which the already beatified Leibowitz is canonized and becomes a bona fide saint. It is told from the alternating viewpoints of Brother Francis, a novice who finds fresh relics of Leibowitz in a buried fallout shelter during a desert vigil, and Arkos, abbot of the Brothers of Leibowitz. The focus here is on the life of the monastery and the process of canonization. Francis is on vigil in order "to receive his vocation" and later spends years making an illuminated and embellished copy of a Leibowitz blueprint that he finds. From his viewpoint this might as easily be 1200 A.D. as 2200 A.D.; here Miller gives us an excellent picture of the timeless aspect of the Church, the consciousness-filling ritual and rules, the true simplicity of this dedicated monk.
Through the eyes of Abbot Arkos we see a different and more sophisticated picture. First, the mission of the Order of Leibowitz in its historical context: to preserve the books and fragmentary surviving knowledge of the lost past in an age of intellectual darkness. Second, the subtle, intricate, and sometimes contradictory politics of canonization. At first, the Order of Leibowitz seeks to suppress Francis' discovery of the relics because it is felt that such "flashy" material will hinder rather than advance the cause of the canonization of their patron. Intense pressure is put upon Francis by the Abbot to induce him to recant; only his simplicity and faith allows him to maintain his adherence to his original story. Until we see the delegates from New Rome conducting their inquiry, this makes little sense, but then we realize that Arkos has been acting as a surrogate for the devil's advocate from New Rome. After what he has put Francis through, the delegate from New Rome cannot shake him.
What this section seems to be all about is the dialectic between simple faith and subtle reason within the Church itself. Francis (faith) is attacked by Arkos (calculation and reason) not so much to destroy him as to hone his faith down to bedrock — just as the whole process of the canonization inquiry is designed to test the belief in the sainthood of Leibowitz in the crucible of merciless doubt. That faith which survives (and is strengthened by) the full onslaught of intellectual processes and logical attack is pure and true; faith which can be destroyed by such a process is false and worthy of destruction. Thus the paradox of a religious truth surrounded by Byzantine levels of dogma, ritual, fear, and political maneuvering is shown not to be a paradox at all, but the dialectical heart of the Church itself. And yet…
The second section of the book take place centuries later and concerns itself with the conflict between the Church and the re-emergent State, between the things of God and the things of Caesar, and the question of which category knowledge falls into. Here the viewpoint is primarily that of Dom Paulo, Abbot of the Order of St. Leibowitz, but we occasionally see things through the viewpoints of others, such as Mad Bear the barbarian chieftain, Marcus Apollo the apostolic delegate to the court of Hannegan whose ambition is to conquer a new American Empire, and his protégé Thon Taddeo, the Leonardo of the age.
For centuries, the Order of Leibowitz has been preserving the fragmentary knowledge of the lost past, but now that a new Renaissance is aborning, Dom Paulo fears that a new fallen secular age is arising in which Man will consider himself and not God the Lord of Creation. As Hannegan maneuvers and conquers in the manner of petty feudal monarchs consolidating national states during the early renaissance (ultimately pulling a Henry VIII and declaring independence from New Rome), Thon Taddeo, the secular and perhaps atheistic scientist, comes to the abbey of St. Leibowitz to absorb the lost science of the ancients stored therein. Brother Kornhoer of the Order of Leibowitz is reconstructing a dynamo in the bowels of the abbey.
The question here seems to be whether the renaissance of science leads inevitably to the renaissance of the devil, whether original sin dooms man to an endless cycle of rising knowledge leading to hubris an a fall from faith, leading to the attainment of the nuclear power of self-destruction, leading to the inevitable exercise of that power, leading once more to a dark age and the (arbitrary) beginning of the cycle.
In the final section of the book, Millers answers this large question in the affirmative. A new technological and secular world civilization has arisen, and with dread inevitability the world slides into a second nuclear war which destroys civilization. Members of the Order of Leibowitz flee to stellar colonies on a starship to carry the faith to man's survivors.
So the novel appears to live up to its title. What we have is a true canticle, a Catholic paean of faith and belief centered around St. Leibowitz, a Canticle of Leibowitz for fair. But the title of the novel is A Canticle for Leibowitz, and here we begin to run into a rather strange philosophical counterpoint, a thin thread of which runs throughout the book and saves it from being merely a science fictionalized Catholic homily.
Leibowitz, after all, is a stereotypical Jewish name, and surely Miller would not have chosen it without some reason, without meaning it to tell the reader that St. Leibowitz began life as a Jew. And the canticle is not simply of Leibowitz but for him. It is Benjamin, the immortal Jew, who guides Brother Francis to the buried fallout shelter in the opening of the book, and one of the relics he finds is Leibowitz's shopping list indicating ethnic Jewish food.
Later, in the second section, Benjamin comes to the abbey to inspect Thon Taddeo, and declares "It's still not Him". Finally, in the conclusion of the last section, we have Mrs. Grales, the old two-headed tomato lady. Her second and childlike head has been in a coma all of her life. Just before t
he bombs begin to fall, she asks the abbot to hear her confession, but before she confesses, she expresses the need to forgive God. "Shriv'ness to Him who made me as I am . . . I never forgave him for it. . . . Mayn't an old tumater woman forgive Him just a little for His Justice. Afore I be askin' his shriv'ness on me?" And then, after the bombs have fallen, the old-lady-head falls asleep and begins to shrivel, and Rachel, her other head, awakes, a creature in a state of sinless original grace. Benjamin’s "Him"?
What does all of this mean? It remains artfully ambiguous, but one thing it certainly is not is orthodox Catholic dogma, science fictionalized! What it does do is draw the reader into some philosophical depths beneath the surface polemical theme of the book.
For instance, is Leibowitz an authentic saint? The very notion of a "St. Leibowitz" seems deliberately chosen for irony. Further, from what we gather indirectly, Leibowitz was a military technician who originally fled to the abbey to save his own life from the roving mobs of "simpletons" who were slaying such people after the first nuclear war. He only became a priest after he was sure his wife was dead, and nowhere in the book is there the story of his psychic conversion, or even an apocryphal anecdote or legend alluding to it. The relics of Leibowitz that are treated so weightily are things like a blueprint and a shopping list. What, aside from the official canonization, makes this man a saint? Is Miller, consciously or not, casting doubt on the whole notion of sainthood, or at least on the Church's methods and criteria for awarding sainthood?
Consider the history of the Order founded by this saint. An Order founded by a military technician preserves knowledge from his age which is ultimately used to help bring about a renaissance of technology which then results in a second nuclear holocaust. What is Miller saying about the Church's preservation of knowledge that would otherwise be lost? That it is folly? That it is the devil's work? Or perhaps much more subtly that the dialectic between the world and faith exists at the very core of the Church's mission on Earth, that the Church itself is infected with original sin, carrying both salvation and damnation inside of it?