A Canticle for Liebowitz.

Returning last night from "guest-teaching" a class on early Christian history - thanks, Jim - I was reflecting on Walter Miller, Jr.'s "A Canticle for Liebowitz."  I was thinking that it was possibly the best book I have ever read in terms of historical scope, humor, suspense, characters and literary qualities.  I was thinking in particular of Miller's description of sharks feeding in the ocean as they enjoyed the bounty that resulted from the destruction of civilization and how it was a very good year for the sharks.

But I haven't read "Canticle" for years, and, so, I was wondering if it would hold up under my mature scrutiny and resolved to put in my "to be read" pile.

As providence would have it, Ignatius Insights has this essay "An Augustinian Wasteland: A Canticle for Leibowitz Fifty Years Later" by Dr. Bradley J. Birzer on its site today.  Birzer is as enthusiastic about Canticle as I am.

He offers this bit of Miller's writing:

"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.

Birzer offers this explanation of Canticle's background and style:

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).

I did not know that Miller was a convert.  His writing - even that beyond Canticle - was quintessentially Catholic in spirit and orientation.  Along with Anthony Boucher, Miller seems to exemplify a Catholic ethos in the same way that Asimov exemplified a Jewish ethos, even when Asimov wasn't writing anything remotely Jewish (think of "A Pebble in the Sky" where Earth was a pariah Judea to the Galactic Empire's Rome.)

I did not know that Miller committed suicide, which, for a traditionalist Catholic, is about as damning an act as anything imaginable.  We can only pray that it was not Miller who committed suicide as a rational, deliberate turning away from God, but a distorted piece of Miller under the compulsion of depression who committed that act.
Birzer ends with this:
 

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.

So, the image of the sharks stands the test of time for others.