Brother Leibowitz Revisited

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Brother Leibowitz Revisited

 

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After World War II, U.S. Army Airman Walter M. Miller, Jr., feared that the world would explode. In his novel, it already had.

“A Canticle for Leibowitz,” Miller’s only novel, was published in 1959 amid fears of nuclear holocaust. Today, this classic work of science fiction brings us face to face with the darker side of man’s genius. When will man learn power cannot save him?

According to Miller, never. In the world of his dystopian novel, at least, human life and culture is left to the bookish and rather baffled monks who pick up the pieces of a dead civilization, again and again. For more than 50 years, Miller’s classic science fiction novel has provided a dark example of the chaos that ensues when man fails to use knowledge with love and humility.

Science fiction hums to the fears and fantasies of the age, and Miller’s “Canticle” plays out Cold War era fears of nuclear holocaust. Like a recurring nightmare stemming from man’s abuse of power, the characters in Miller’s novel live through the near-destruction of humanity not once, not twice, but three times in the story’s three novellas.

The book is a compelling read for sci-fi geeks and linguistics nerds alike (and those categories are not mutually exclusive). Time-garbled Latin quotations (“Apage, Satanas” and “Libere me, Domine” make appearances in the novel’s first pages) mix with a devastating dose of dystopian biological warfare. Space travel is a futuristic bonus.

“Fiat Homo” (“Let there be man”) opens on an already-dystopian future that reveals the weighty themes of the novel through the eyes of a novice in the order of Isaac Leibowitz. The monks of the order of Leibowitz attempt to recover knowledge from a long-gone advanced (read: 1950s-era) civilization, and their attempts reveal the tragedy — and the absurdity — of reviving a lost civilization: the monks preserve diagrams of electrical circuits with reverence and comically perfect ignorance of their use.

“Fiat Lux” (“Let there be light”) revisits the monks of Leibowitz after a second destruction, at a time when a new Renaissance is, at long last, coming into the light. A brilliant scientist enters the monastery, rediscovers technology from the past, and is tempted by the seemingly boundless power of science. The monks, for their part, must decide the best way to make use of the texts they have preserved for so long. Knowledge, it seems, is dangerous. Cue impassioned conversations about faith and reason.

By the third section of the novel, the moral that “knowledge is dangerous” seems clear. Man has destroyed and rebuilt himself through equal parts pluck and Providence, but this destruction threatens to be final: the monks send their treasured knowledge to space, abandoning terra firma with a prayer (“Fiat Voluntas Tua,” the title of the third novella, means “Let Thy will be done”) and an understandable doubt that humankind will survive his own destructive power on any planet. Cue equally impassioned debates about the nature of man.

If there is a weakness to the novel, it is one common to much of dystopian fiction: the broken world overshadows the broken characters. Jon Michaud wrote in the New Yorker that “there is a conspicuous absence of physical and emotional intimacy. Miller is grappling with Big Questions, but I occasionally wished for scenes in which the pressures of those big questions would manifest themselves in private moments of comfort between characters.” The novel certainly comes up short on comfort.

But perhaps that is part of Miller’s point: In his fear for humanity’s destruction, Miller does not allow his characters to become fully human. Regardless of its potency, the question of man’s destructive nature remains ominous in the abstract.

Late in the novel, a monk of the order of Leibowitz asks himself whether there is any hope for his prideful and self-annihilating race, and finds that his fellow men lack grace: “But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well.”

Hillsdale’s Raiders of the Stacks recently revisited “A Canticle for Leibowitz” in a book discussion in Mossey Library. Though it is enlightening to pull the book off the shelves and consider it in a modern context, readers enter at their own risk when revisiting a novel of such potent political content — the slip of a tongue or keystroke can explode into incendiary doomsday conversations about nuclear warfare, tyranny, and the general nastiness of politics circa 2016.

But Miller’s novel digs more deeply into the rubble left by man’s misuse of power. At the root of his novel’s three catastrophic events is a moral monster — pride. When faced with power of their own creation, politicians, scientific geniuses, and abbots all struggle to reconcile their personal use of the fruits of knowledge. For Miller, words and the wisdom they impart have an undeniable power, and understanding the roots of this power is essential to its proper use — and possible misuse.

Monks, scientists, politicians, and sci-fi lovers can read “A Canticle for Leibowitz” for many reasons: to glory in Miller’s obvious love of language, to discuss the philosophical and political themes underlying the novel, or even to escape politics entirely in favor of the most action-packed story about monks ever written.

But whatever motivation brings readers to “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” they should walk away from the rubble with a belief that words should support the truth, instead of destroying it. They should remember that knowledge must be humbly pursued, courted, and nourished with humility, not preserved in a crypt.

Can man survive his own tendency toward destruction — and dirty politics?

“Fiat voluntas tua,” indeed.