An Augustinian Wasteland: "A Canticle for Leibowitz" Fifty Years Later | Dr. Bradley J. Birzer | Ignatius Insight | April 15, 2010
An Augustinian Wasteland: A Canticle for Leibowitz Fifty Years Later | Dr. Bradley J. Birzer | Ignatius
Insight | April 15, 2010
http://ignatiusinsight.com/features2010/bbirzer_canticle_apr2010.asp
"There was objective meaning in
the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos
or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God's and not Man's,
until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind
and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to
the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For
Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not
immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections
of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning
resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps,
a resurrection." —A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959; New York:
Bantam/Spectra, 1997), pp. 145-146.
A Canticle for Leibowitz has been one of my favorite books for most of my
adult life. I have read it and reread it many times. In fact, I have read it
and perused it too many times to count. I find the work as compelling as the
best of T. S. Eliot. But, while Eliot always leavens, Miller always sobers. In Canticle, one discovers some of Eliot's thought, but also
Christopher Dawson's and Jacques Maritain's thought and especially St.
Augustine's thought. Much like his fifth-century forebear, Miller places a
variety of anthropologies and humanisms before the reader, as well as competing
visions of history. Unlike his North African counterpart, though, Miller never
answers his own questions and puzzles definitively. The reader remains
restless, for he never rests in Thee.
I also have taught the book
several times in various classroom settings. With only a few exceptions, bright
college students find it intriguing and thought provoking, even if the theology
confuses them, Catholic as well as Protestant. The characters of Mrs. Grales
and Rachel tend to cause much concern as well as wonder among students.
Walter Miller served as a tail
gunner on a bomber during the Italian campaign in World War II. His bombing
group, in part, aided in the destruction of Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery
in the Western world. The destruction of this Benedictine institution haunted
Miller, and after the war he found himself drawn not only to the study of
Western Civilization and its preservation, but, more importantly, to the
endurance and significance of the Roman Catholic Church as a protective
institution. Probably to the chagrin of many of those around him, Miller
converted in 1947, shortly after his marriage. He explored many of the ideas of
Roman Catholic theology in his many short stories written during the 1950s. As
it turned out, this decade proved to be Miller's Golden Age, an age that he
spent much of his remaining adult life trying to recapture but unsuccessfully
so. In the mid-to-late 1990s, frustrated with God knows what and taunted by who
knows what, Miller took his own life. Another author completed Miller's
unfinished sequel, St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. This second book takes place during the second of
the three eras featured in Canticle,
roughly 1,200 years after the atomic war of 1960.
Numerous readings of Canticle
for Leibowitz have left me with
this: it is a complicated, nuanced, and perplexing novel, a mystery to be
enjoyed, time and again, never to be solved. Set in the Intermountain Desert
West in the futureless United States of America, A Canticle for Leibowitz offers a vibrant image of a desiccated human culture
and a desiccated human politics, an irradiated landscape, and an inevitably
dark and shameful future. As with some of its contemporaneous
fiction—such as Ayn Rand's much less earnest Atlas Shrugged—Canticle for Leibowitz offers great insight into the nature and power of
ideas, set in a dystopian world. While Rand, by far better known in popular culture and in book
sales, possesses a stunning power to plot an intricate plot, she cannot match
Miller in character development or writing style. As an example of one
beautiful sentence: "The water was clouded and live with creeping uncertainties
as was the Old Jew's stream of memory" (p. 167).
Certainly, I am not alone in my
appreciation of this novel. Edmund Fuller, one of the best literary critics of
the 20th century, called Canticle
a "memorable fantasia" (New York Times (January 12, 1964, pg. BR2)), and Martin Levin called it "ingenious" (New
York Times (March 27, 1960), pg.
BR42)).
Many, though, have thought it a
waste of paper. An anonymous reviewer in Time magazine, for example, wrote of Miller: "His faith
in religious faith is commendable but not compelling," claiming the book
intellectually vacuous (n.a., Time (February
22, 1960)).
In the beginning of Canticle, set roughly five-and-a-half centuries from now, a
wandering Jew throws pebbles at a confused and seemingly not-so-bright monk,
Brother Francis. When the confused Catholic, led by the hand of the perturbed
Jew, discovers an underground tavern, office, and bunker, he finds what he
considers holy relics: a shopping list, some blueprints, and the body of a dead
woman. This encounter, shaped from its beginning by the will and observation of
the Jew, starts the cycle of civilization, corruption, decay, and death all
over again.
Throughout the novel, the cycles
of civilization revolve around two points: 1) the wandering Jew; and 2) the
monastery.
The question Miller asks the
reader and himself: can man escape Original Sin? Or, will man, doomed, carry it
wherever he goes, whether it be into the American West or into the new frontier
of space? And, if so, can man do anything by his own will to attenuate the
great evils of which he is not only so capable, but seemingly so desirous?
Throughout the novel, Miller asks
us and himself some of the most important questions to be asked by any person
at any time. What is the human person? How does one man recognize the dignity
of another man?
Few
theologians whose belief in Hell had never failed them would deprive their God
of recourse to any form of
temporal punishment, but for men to take it upon themselves to judge any
creature born of woman to be lacking in the divine image was to usurp the
privilege of Heaven. Even the idiot which seems less gifted than a dog, or a
pig, or a goat, shall, if born of woman, be called an immortal soul, thundered
the magisterium, and thundered it
again and again. (p. 98)
In the long run, can man use his
technological prowess for the good of society and the good of his fellows?
They
belonged to a race quite capable of admiring their own image in a mirror, and
equally capable of cutting its own throat before the altar of some tribal god,
such as the deity of Daily Shaving. It was a species which often considered
itself to be, basically a race of divinely inspired toolmakers. (p. 245)
Homo faber, indeed.
By what means and by what
authority do political bodies govern? In what ways can and does the power of
political bodies ignore, mock, or usurp cultural and religious bodies and
authorities?
That's
where all of us are standing now, he
thought. On the fat kindling of past sins. And some of them are mine. Mine,
Adam's, Herod's, Judas's, Hannegan's, mine. Everybody's. Always culminates in
the colossus of the State, somehow, drawing about itself the mantle of godhood,
being struck down by wrath of Heaven. (p. 282)
For better or worse, I must admit
that Miller's own suicide in 1996 makes me call into question much of what he
wrote and much of what he asked. Of course, one can take his suicide in two
ways when approaching his masterful novel. First, one could assume that Miller
meant all of the ideas presented by the various members of the Catholic Church
in his novel sincerely, that he truly did care about the dignity of man, and
the ability of the Church to defend the preciousness of human life across time.
Or, taking the suicide into account, the reader could assume that Miller is a
cynic and a nihilist from the beginning, allowing members of the Church to give
complicated and somewhat rote answers to complex problems, never fully
understanding them but parroting them as efficacious propaganda. Taken this
way, Canticle would prove nothing
but a brilliant if devastating satire on the history of the Church
Throughout all three parts of the
novel, Miller presents rather complicated characters, witty dialogue, and
never-ending questions about the most important things. It is not without
reason, then, that some aficionados of the novel consider it not only a classic
of the science fiction genre but also a classic of American and Western
civilizations.
I would put myself in this latter
category. While I write only from opinion and certainly not from expertise, I
do believe Miller to be one of the great authors—let alone
science-fiction authors and Catholic authors—of the twentieth century.
Horribly, Miller ended his own life in tragedy. I do not know, nor do I ever
expect to know, what demons haunted this brilliant artist. Clearly, he failed
to resist them in the end. But, of course, each one of us is deeply flawed.
Perhaps we are deeply flawed in ways different from the ways in which Miller
was flawed, but we remain flawed nonetheless.
I, along with many others, will
continue to teach this novel as a great work of imagination. I do hope,
however, that Miller was wrong not only about his own personal understanding of
hope, but also about the bleak, decaying, future of Western civilization and
its citizens.
Depending on what day and,
sometimes, on what hour, I agree and/or disagree with Miller. The novel means
different things to me at different times, but I always recognize its
profundity. As the last line of the novel reads, "the shark swam out to his
deepest waters and brooded in the old clean currents. He was very hungry that
season" (p. 338). The reader also broods and hungers at the end of the novel.
Miller never lets us rest.
But, I do pray—may the
author finally rest in He.
(Author's note: All quotes, unless otherwise noted, are taken from Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959; New York: Bantam/Spectra, 1997). Much of the
above comes from a discussion of the book with the students/scholars affiliated
with the McConnell Center, led by Dr. Gary Gregg, at the University of Louisville.)
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Bradley J. Birzer is Chairman of the Board of Academic Advisors,
Center for the American Idea, Houston, and the author of
American Cicero: The Life And Times of
Charles Carroll (ISI, 2010); Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of
Christopher Dawson (2007); and J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth (2003).
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