Catholicism and Nuclear War: A Canticle for Leibowitz Review

For in those days, the Lord God had suffered the wise men to know the means by which the world itself might be destroyed…

Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of the most profound books I’ve ever read. You could say it’s as deep as Dungeon Crawler Carl is shallow. It correlates religion (mainly Catholicism) with the history of civilization, the rise of technology, and the threat of nuclear holocaust. The book is less concerned with questions of belief, however—this is not an apologetic, as the existence of God seems almost inconsequential—and instead focuses on humanity’s need to believe in the transcendent, in something beyond the cold logic of science. Where science asks “how,” religion asks “why.” And in light of human extinction by way of unbridled technology, the necessity of faith becomes all-too convincing.

It was said that God, in order to test mankind which had become swelled with pride as in the time of Noah, had commanded the wise men of that age, among them the Blesset Leibowitz, to devise great engines of war such as had never before been upon the Earth, weapons of such might that they contained the very fires of Hell.

While brilliantly conceived, the writing style was sometimes too dense for me (Miller loves showing off his Latin), and the messaging often gets bogged down by heavy-handed preachiness. I would have preferred a bit more subtlety, and a more intimate narrative told through the eyes of one or more characters. The characters we are presented with are typically flat, serving as little more than mouthpieces for the author.

Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece […] America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries.

Fire, loveliest of the four elements of the world, and yet an element too in Hell. […] How strange of God to speak from a burning bush, and of Man to make a symbol of Heaven into a symbol of Hell.

A Canticle for Leibowitz retells Man’s Fall and exile from the Garden of Eden, except here, humanity’s ruin stems from his pride, his idolization of science, and the knowledge that brings nuclear destruction. This results in our exodus—or should that be banishment?—from the Eden that is Earth to another home in the stars, and the foreign soil of an exoplanet where humanity’s survival will be tenuous, if not much harsher.

Due largely to a lack of storytelling and character development, the book falls just short of the masterpiece it strives to be. But what Miller achieves here is nothing short of brilliant, the most brilliantly realized metaphor in all of Sci-Fi, and I admit it gave me goosebumps.

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow.

But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well.

GREAT!