An Eternal Song: Remembering ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’

The Enduring Appeal and Witness of Walter M. Miller Jr.’s Classic Novel

Monte Cassino, February 15, 1944. For Allied forces seeking a path to Rome, the holy building on the hill was an immovable obstacle. On each side of it stretched the Gustav Line, 161 kilometers from the Tyrrhenian Coast to the Adriatic. From it, you could see Highway 6. Within its walls, 230 Italian souls took refuge. At headquarters, British Commander-in-Chief Sir Harold Alexander received intel that it had been occupied by the Germans. The order came down: Launch the planes.

So it was that on a cold winter morning, in the blink of an eye, an ancient abbey died. Among the pilots who dropped the bombs was one Walter M. Miller Jr.

The phrase “PTSD” was not in vogue at Miller’s time. In retrospect, it’s clear that he suffered from it, as well as from clinical depression. His war experience didn’t immediately inspire A Canticle for Leibowitz, but as he was drafting a pivotal scene at the end of the novel, he realized it had been hovering over his work the whole time. “Good God,” he remembered thinking, “What have I been writing?”

Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, UK edition published in 1960 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

A Dystopian Future

While Miller wrote a number of short stories before Leibowitz, it’s the only work for which he’s remembered. (For good reason, nobody talks about its unfinished sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman.) It’s composed of three novellas, set in three epochs of Earth history. Early versions of them were published as standalone works in magazines. After realizing that a through-line was emerging, Miller overhauled and unified them. The rest is literary history. 

Sixty-five years later, the novel has lost none of its power. Indeed, its urgency has only increased. Though sometimes classified as science fiction, it uses no classic sci-fi tropes. It belongs more properly in the genre of dystopian fiction like P. D. James’s The Children of Men.

The three novellas are separated in time but united in space by the Abbey of St. Leibowitz in the desert of the southwestern United States. As a world shattered by nuclear holocaust groans through rebirth out of its second Dark Ages into its second Enlightenment, and from there hurtles inexorably on to a new apocalypse, the Abbey remains, as constant as the North Star. Each abbot in each age leads in his own way, with his own particular combination of fire and ice, grit and guts. 

The book doesn’t lend itself to easy description for the first-time reader. Whenever I try, I just keep saying that it’s very weird, and very Catholic. The cadence of the book is suffused with the cadences of the liturgy, the give-and-take of Versicle and Rejoinder. The corridors echo and re-echo with the sounds of masses sung and Latin spoken, no translation provided. A young Protestant friend told me it was enough to make him almost cross the Tiber. 

As an Anglican, I sit in that middle space where I can simultaneously understand my young Protestant friend’s jealousy and feel the pain of my traditional Catholic friends, some of whom would give anything to find a Latin Mass in their town. In the world of Leibowitz, the Church is unified, unflinching, bloody but unbowed. As the end of days approaches, she thinks and moves as one, flawlessly executing her Final Protocol. We struggle to imagine this in our world, where the reality is far messier and more dispiriting. Still, there remains a remnant to keep Miller’s vision alive.

Age-Old Conflicts

The story is full of defining moments, but one particularly stands out. It comes from the beginning of the second novella, on the threshold of mankind’s second Scientific Revolution. The avatar of the revolution is Thon Taddeo, a figure of Newtonian proportions whose genius is matched only by his ego. But before that genius can bear fruit, he must humble himself and make a pilgrimage to the desert Abbey, there to examine the treasures its “book-leggers” have faithfully stored up for such a time as this. 

In conversation with a papal nuncio, he chafes at this requirement, hiding his wounded pride with the careless suggestion that, after all, the grapes might be sour. The precious Memorabilia might be nothing of consequence. The whispered stories of a lost golden age might be nothing more than wishful legend. He knows man as a species scattered and stunted, some left “monsters” by nuclear fallout. How could these wretched specimens possibly be traced back to those Great Men who allegedly harnessed gravity and flew to the moon?

Various Canticles for Leibowitz.

He delivers these reflections while looking out the nuncio’s window. Then he motions the priest over to observe a walking illustration of his point: a disease-ridden old peasant man, shuffling home with his horse in twilight. Taddeo mocks the peasant for seemingly not realizing that the once-full sacks on the horse’s back are now empty. He waxes eloquent on the observable symptoms of the paresis that has addled the man’s brain, on the sick soul within the sick body that would doubtless sell his own daughters for a mess of pottage. “Look!” he enjoins the priest, pointing. “Tell me, what do you see?”

“The image of Christ,” answers the priest. “What did you expect me to see?”

The question mark around man’s origins, or at least Thon Taddeo’s generation, is raised again in a later climactic confrontation with then-Abbot Jerome. Taddeo proposes that this generation might be a sub-creation of the superior, previous one. The ensuing clash with Jerome takes on an operatic quality, as the abbot’s thunderous recitation of Genesis 2 braids itself into a duet with the Thon’s equally thunderous apology for the necessity of scientific progress. 

A man of science struggling to become a man of faith, Miller breathes fresh life into the age-old conflicts of faith and science, church and state. In the book’s most triumphant scene, which I would not dream of spoiling, we watch the Thon pull himself as it were to the top of the cliff of progress, only to find a cheerful band of monks waiting for him. 

Taddeo champions Enlightenment Now with the fervor of a Steven Pinker, but the abbot tells us what we all know in our hearts and bones to be true: that our world never will be any better, “only richer or poorer, sadder but not wiser, until the very last day.” For in Miller’s vision, modern man is no less capable than ancient man of slitting his own throat before the altar of a tribal god. Modern men are Adam’s sons and Eve’s daughters still, “forever building Edens—and kicking them apart in berserk fury, because somehow it isn't the same.” 

Through Miller’s tortured eyes, we see a world where the holy men pray for deliverance from the rain of the cobalt and the fall of the cesium. A world where life is weighed fast and ruthlessly in the balance, by a blindfolded king who holds crooked scales in one hand and a pair of loaded dice in the other. A world where an old tomato woman at confession might presume to offer pardon to God, even as she is pardoned. In this world, the second abbot tells Descartes’s truth slant: “Pain is. Ergo sum.”

The Comic and the Tragic

Pain is a thin red line running through all three novellas. In sure, sharp strokes, Miller brings the intimate physicality of human afflictions into tight focus: the cramp in the gut, the metallic taste of blood in the teeth, the unreachable itch that may even be the more basic evil than pain. Here there is no incense to cover the smell of death, no angel choir chanting Alleluias at 90 decibels to drown out the screams amid rubble.

Pain is also felt in subtle, quiet moments, some provided by the one character present in every epoch: the Wandering Jew, that mythic figure here rendered in cantankerous particularity as a desert tramp named Benjamin. Empires rise and fall, but Benjamin remains, forever wandering, forever watching, forever waiting for a Messiah who never comes. Tzaddik-like, he takes upon himself the burden of all Israel for all time, and no man will take it from him.

Yet, amid the bleakness, there are also flashes of black comedy. In the beginning, we laugh (affectionately) at an innocent young novice who labors over an illuminated copy of a faded electrical blueprint. In the second novella, we laugh at a poet-clown incapable of keeping his wise folly to himself. And in the future, we laugh at a robotic Autoscribe which must surely have known good and evil and chosen the latter. Somehow, Miller always finds odd moments for whistling in the dark. Whenever I revisit the novel, it’s a delight to rediscover these little gems, like a satirical dialogue about the provability of God's existence. (The two agnostics conclude that the limit of an infinite sequence of negations of certainty is absolute certainty at infinity. More specifically, “an infinite sequence of doubting the certainty with which something doubted is known to be unknowable when the ‘something doubted’ is still a preceding statement of ‘unknowability’ of something doubted.”)

The third novella is the most eerily prescient. Despite the obligatory nods to space travel, it feels little different from 2024. We recognize the well-oiled machine of corruption, the truth pulsing like a tide behind the dike of official secrecy. We’re all too familiar with the coy defense ministers and other “bureaucratic Dutch boys.” We recognize too the well-lit clinics of abandoned hope, where death is prescribed only after due process of law. 

Still more Canticles.

The story wears Catholic social teaching on its sleeve in matters of life and death. Still, like Dostoevsky, Miller allows the opposition to make its strongest possible case in the voice of Dr. Cors, an anguished clinic worker who urges euthanasia for a radiation-cursed mother and child. The last abbot holds his ground, but the clash is bruising. A later crucial scene between that mother and the abbot also leaves an ache in the throat. It’s especially haunting for the reader who knows a devastating biographical fact: that Miller himself would go on to commit suicide.

Unquenchable Flame

By the time of his death, Miller had abandoned not just Catholicism but Christianity altogether. After losing his wife, he wrote in a letter to a local newspaper, “Life is impersonal. Eastern religions make clear that personhood is an illusion. There is nowhere for my dead wife to go, because there is no dead wife. To the extent that she exists, she exists inside of me. And outside of me too. . . .” Blackly comical to the last, Miller called 911 to report that there was a dead man on his lawn. They arrived three minutes later to find him in his own lawn chair with a bullet to the brain.

I couldn’t say what brought the story of Walter M. Miller Jr. to such a despairing end. I know only that when I have encountered the arguments of Dr. Cors in my own life, I have gone back to the words Miller placed in an old abbot's mouth sixty-five years ago, and I have been steadied. I know only that when I have encountered that divinity which dwells under seal in the most ruined of souls, I have seen once more the peasant shuffling home at twilight, and I have been awakened. I know only that in my own striving to beat back the darkness of my own age, I have had occasion many times to visit the abbey of St. Leibowitz, and I have been strengthened. 

Like the builders of the chapel where Charles Ryder kneels at the end of Brideshead Revisited, its builder did not know the use to which his work would descend. The flame it carried was a flame not its own, but the ancient unquenchable flame of priests and martyrs, old knights and old prophets. 

It burned bright then. It burns bright still. It always shall.

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Portions of this essay originally appeared in The Critic.