Truth Preservers

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) depicts the fall and rise of civilization and the preservation of fragments of its knowledge throughout, while highlighting the moral truths of the Christian faith. Remarkable for both characterization and thematic development, ithas come to be regarded as one of the greatest works of post-apocalyptic social science fiction. Its structure, replete with repeating symbols and parallel events, fully examines the cyclical nature of history, and the reflective reader will be moved to ask important questions.

The narrativefollows the post-apocalyptic mission of a Catholic monastery in the southwestern American desert, where monks preserve what remains of civilization’s recorded knowledge. Miller, a World War  II U.S. airman who participated in the bombing and destruction of the ancient Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino, Italy, first wrote Canticle as a short story about an order of monks arising from an abbey in a destroyed world. In the full-length, three-part novel that followed, Miller expanded the story of the monks into three episodes occurring at 600-year intervals, focusing in each section on one or two central characters as they work on their great project of preservation.

The Backstory

Six centuries before the story begins, the world became engulfed in nuclear war. Angry mobs decided—if mobs can be said to make decisions—to lay the blame for the ruin on politicians and scientists. A monastic history records their resolution:

Let us make a holocaust of those who wrought the crime, together with their hirelings and their wise men; burning, let them perish, and all their works, their names, and even their memories. Let us destroy them all and teach our children that the world is new, that they may know nothing of the deeds that went before.

The mobs execute any whom they blame for enabling the “Flame Deluge.” When some resist, calling them simpletons for utterly destroying a culture, the mobs accept the name and declare a great Simplification, ultimately directing their rage not merely at the learned but at any literate person.

Amid the melee, an engineer named Isaac Edward Leibowitz takes shelter with Catholic monks and eventually founds a new monastic order dedicated to preserving “human history for the great-great-great-grandchildren of the children of the simpletons who wanted it destroyed.” Risking death at the hands of the mobs, these monks smuggle texts to hide and memorize. They call the few surviving texts the Memorabilia, though in a short time no one remembers how to interpret most of them. Leibowitz finally is martyred by simultaneous hanging and roasting.

I: Fiat Homo (“Let There Be Man”)

The novel opens six centuries after these events, as the monks deal with the canonization of Leibowitz. Br. Francis, the central character in this section, discovers a long-buried space that includes a fallout shelter. Among the ruins, he finds a toolbox containing, among other things, a significant grocery list and a blueprint. Years later, working in the abbey’s scriptorium, Francis carries on the task of preservation. In his spare time, he copies and illuminates the ancient blueprint. In this era, circa 2575, the world is one where barbarians dominate and the light of civilization flickers.

II: Fiat Lux (“Let There Be Light”)

Six centuries later, a new Renaissance is dawning. The aging abbot, Dom Paulo, and Br. Kornhoer, an engineering-minded monk, encounter a secular scholar, Thon Taddeo, who covets the books preserved in the abbey. When Taddeo doubts how “a great and wise civilization could have destroyed itself so completely,” a papal nuncio replies, “Perhaps  . .  . by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.” Ironically, Thon Taddeo later concludes an address to the brothers on the progress of science by saying that the new age will occur “in the same way all change comes to pass  . .  . by violence and upheaval, by flame and by fury, for no change comes calmly over the world.” Indeed, Thon Taddeo’s uncle, the warlord of Texarkana, plots war to unite the continent under his authority. Now in the 3170s, the world teeters between renaissance and war.

III: Fiat Voluntas Tua (“Thy Will Be Done”)

Six more centuries pass. With the world on the brink of another apocalyptic war, Dom Zerchi commends the Memorabilia into the care of spacefaring Leibowitzian monks. He also struggles to cope with the aftermath of a nuclear bomb falling on the empire’s capital. On the abbey grounds, as a government doctor triages victims of radiation exposure, the abbot and the doctor clash over the morality of euthanizing casualties. Dom Zerchi believes no one has the right to take a life, especially to eliminate the evidence of policies that led to the tragedies of war, while Dr. Cors responds that pain is the only evil he knows and that “society is the only thing which determines whether an act is wrong.”

Later, after a nuclear shockwave levels the abbey, Dom Zerchi reflects:

When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.

Pinned under the crushing weight of the ruined abbey church, Dom Zerchi meditates on the world’s failures:

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 subjective truth of the will to power fails to grasp the objective truth of the power of the Will that created man.

In the year 3781, the Memorabilia and the faith live on, as a rocket manned by members of the order lifts off into space, leaving behind a world suffering another Flame Deluge. The novel concludes with Br. Joshua soaring into the heavens aboard the rocket to save the Memorabilia, providing yet another chance for humanity to do the right thing.

The Task of Preservation

The Simplification that follows the initial holocaust in Canticle much resembles the eradication of Western culture sought by the woke today. Both involve a mob mentality intent on erasing the past and those who seek to preserve it. Given how indoctrination supplants academic instruction in schools today, the simpletons’ efforts to destroy the learned also sound familiar, while Thon Taddeo’s insistence that the Memorabilia belong in more “competent hands” than those of the monks mirrors secularists pushing the faithful ever further into the background. And Dr. Cors’s denial of objective moral truth in the face of Dom Zerchi’s resistance to euthanasia echoes today’s culture of death. Written more than sixty years ago, A Canticle for Leibowitz explores a world frighteningly like our own.

Who will preserve Western civilization against the onslaught of cultural iconoclasts? Who will perseveringly await the return of sanity? Who will champion objective truth in the face of a thousand disparate and angry “my truth” voices? Those who read and talk about the great books of the West, those who organize homeschool cooperatives, those who insist on objective truth, those who preserve the legacy of the West—these could well play the role of the Order of St. Leibowitz today.