Acts of faith: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) by Walter M. Miller Jr.

The faithful preserve the past, and the future, after a nuclear war

On 15 February 1944, the United States military bombed the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, southeast of Rome. Mistakenly believing that the abbey was being occupied by German troops, the Americans dropped over a thousand tons of explosives on the structure, which had been built in 529 AD. The abbey was obliterated. The Cardinal Secretary of State described the act as “a colossal blunder … a piece of gross stupidity”.

One life permanently changed by the bombing was that of Walter M. Miller Jr. (1923 - 1996). He was a tail gunner whose aircraft was one of those which destroyed the abbey at Monte Cassino, and he was profoundly affected by it. Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War (1975), wrote that Miller “had post-traumatic stress disorder for 30 years before it had a name”. 

After the war, Miller studied engineering and converted to Catholicism in 1947. Between 1951 and 1957, he published over three dozen science fiction stories, which were often influenced by his faith. Of these, three were gathered and adapted into the only novel published in his lifetime: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). 

Long one of the most celebrated SF novels of the 1950s, the book deals with the efforts of monks in what was once New Mexico to preserve knowledge in the millennia after a devastating nuclear war. Told in three parts each separated by six centuries, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a powerful meditation on knowledge, faith, progress, and the hope and risks that come with science and technology.

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After the Simplification

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic novel focusing on the long, slow recovery of civilisation after a nuclear exchange at some point in the 20th century. At the centre of the book is the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, based at an abbey in the deserted wasteland of post-nuclear New Mexico. The monks there venerate I. E. Leibowitz, an electrical engineer who survived the “Flame Deluge”, and sought to preserve knowledge during the mass book burnings and purges of intellectuals that followed. In an irony lost on the faithful, Leibowitz was a weapons engineer whose work may have helped make the nuclear war possible.

This is a “fixup novel”, made up of three parts - a common form in the 1950s. Each part is an expansion of a story published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (or F&SF) between 1955 and 1957. Perhaps surprisingly, it did not dawn on Miller that he was writing a serialised novel until he was writing the third part. 

In “Fiat Homo”, a 26th century novice stumbles on a fallout shelter which contains a blueprint which Leibowitz had worked on. Brother Francis Gerard makes it his life's work to copy and try to understand this relic, a mission which causes great trouble for him inside and outside the abbey - but which also presents new hope for the future. In “Fiat Lux”, it is 3174 and the abbey is surrounded by petty fiefdoms. Thon Taddeo, a secular scientist from the city of Texarkana, visits the abbey while regional tensions are on the rise. Finally, “Fiat Voluntas Tua” is set in 3781, and new states have far surpassed the technical achievements of the distant 20th century. In the time of Abbot Zerchi, the abbey must confront the possibility of a second nuclear conflict.

Rites and rituals

Writing in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Brian Stableford and David Langford stated that “familiar definitions of SF imply that there is nothing more alien to its concerns than religion”. However, they go on to identify a “spectacular boom” in stories “which cut straight to the heart of theological matters” in the period following World War II. They describe A Canticle for Leibowitz as the “single most impressive work” of this period.

The monks in the novel practice a sort of corrupted form of Catholicism, shaped by the nuclear disaster of the Flame Deluge. Their community is steeped in Latin scripture, but has its own saints, rites, and rituals. In the surprisingly funny “Fiat Homo”, Miller exploits this for some dark humour, in one instance articulating the logic of nuclear deterrence in the language of the Bible:

“Only because the enemies have such a thing have we devised this for thee, in order that they may know that thou hast it also, and fear to strike. See to it, m’Lord, that thou fearest them as much as they shall now fear thee, that none may unleash this dread thing which we have wrought.”

Miller’s own faith and deep knowledge of Catholicism is evident throughout the novel. The book displays a deep respect for the religious vocation and for the longevity and patience of Christian institutions - the only ones able to survive the catastrophe. “Fiat Voluntas Tua”, in particular, is a deep exploration of faith which deals with the nature of religious calling, the relationship between religious and secular institutions, and the Catholic attitude to suicide - all in a science fictional context. 

To play the Phoenix

Early on in “Fiat Lux”, the scientist Thon Taddeo asks Abbot Dom Paulo, “How can a great and wise civilisation have destroyed itself so completely?” This is one of the key questions which animates A Canticle for Leibowitz. Across the arc of its three parts, the novel suggests that the human race is trapped in a tragic cycle of invention and destruction, capable of incredible feats but doomed to undo them in atomic hellfire, senselessly wasting billions of lives, time and again. As Abbot Zerchi muses in the novel’s final part, 
“Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?”

One monk’s initial answer to the scholar’s question is to suggest that the people of the 20th century were “materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.” This implies a spiritual lack, a spiritual failing in humankind. Over the centuries, the monks become the guardians of technical knowledge they cannot understand. The novel invites the question: if those at the abbey understood the great promise and the dire threat of the “treasured fragments of a dead civilisation”, would they keep them or cast them into the fire?

It is striking that the loss of worldly knowledge begun by the Flame Deluge, the nuclear war, is completed by mobs deliberately seeking out and destroying written information, and hunting down first intellectuals, and then anyone who could read. In this aspect, Miller’s novel connects with Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), also about a mania for illiterate “simplification”. In Bradbury’s work, book burning does not follow a nuclear war, but rather precedes it.

The long shadow of Saint Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz is one chain in a cycle of many other SF novels dealing with the tension between faith and progress, including Pavane (1968) by Keith Roberts and The Cloud Walker (1978) by Edmund Cooper.

Following the publication of A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr. ceased to publish. He experienced depression and eventually became a recluse, allowing no-one to see him - not even his agent, Don Congdon. Some months after the death of his wife, Miller ended his own life on 9 January, 1996. 

At Miller’s request, the writer Terry Bisson (1942 - 2024) completed Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (1997), Miller’s relatively little-known sequel to his classic novel. In the SFE, John Clute reflects that the original novel “remained a singleton for decades, and retains that autonomy for most readers.” Certainly A Canticle for Leibowitz retains and deserves its classic status, in part as a humane and troubling examination of humankind’s linked capacity to create and to destroy.

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• Each part of the novel had a different title when originally published separately in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction:
  • “Fiat Homo” was adapted from “A Canticle for Leibowitz” (April 1955)
  • “Fiat Lux” was adapted from “And the Light is Risen” (August 1956)
  • “Fiat Voluntas Tua” was adapted from “The Last Canticle” (February 1957)
• The fact that A Canticle for Leibowitz won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1961 is an oddity. The novel was originally dated 1960, but was actually available in 1959, so should have been eligible in 1960, not in 1961.
  
• In a sense, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman is not a sequel, as it is set between the second and third parts of the original novel.