The Burden of History & the Promise of Divine Life

A Canticle for Leibowitz. By Walter M. Miller Jr.

Thirty-some years ago, I was in a dark, musty used-book store in downtown Milwaukee when a man appeared around the end of the aisle, handed me a book, and said, “Here, you really ought to read this.” I suppose if I were to add that he then mysteriously disappeared — which he did — you would think I’m making it up. But no, that is how I discovered A Canticle for Leibowitz.

As with most readers of Canticle, what intrigued me were the various parts of the novel: the lovable Brother Francis and his sad end; the Poet and his eyeball; the mystery of Benjamin, a Jewish wanderer; the introduction of the lightbulb to the monastic library; the two-headed Mrs. Grales; the monks picketing the euthanasia station; and extraplanetary colonization. But as fascinating as the parts are, I wasn’t looking at the whole. After reviewing the literary journals, I discovered that the novel’s few existent studies likewise did not look at the whole. Accordingly, I put Canticle in my teaching curriculum, forcing myself to grapple with the thing. At this remove, it seems to me that Walter M. Miller Jr.’s novel attempts to study nothing less than the whole problem of history.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, published in 1959, centers on the abbey of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz in the southwestern desert of the United States. The purpose of the order — as established by its founder, former electrical engineer Isaac Leibowitz — is to preserve the knowledge of a civilization destroyed by the Flame Deluge, or nuclear holocaust. The order’s monks rescue, copy, and memorize ancient knowledge, which, by and large, they don’t understand, as they wait for a new era of peace and reason. While they wait, though, history has its own ideas. Clans develop into kingdoms, which develop into empires; war is waged; and, eventually, nuclear capacity is again achieved and then exploited in a second Flame Deluge. The surviving monks shake the dust of the Earth from their sandals, enter their starship, and depart in order to preserve human civilization, and the Church, in the Centaurus Colony.

Such a barebones summary camouflages a work of enormous complexity.

First of all, the novel’s structure, like time, is cyclical. It opens in the ashes of the first nuclear cataclysm and closes in the rubble of a second. Similarly, it covers a significant chronological stretch, more than a thousand years, from A.D. 2600 to 3800, more or less. Metaphorically speaking, though sometimes literally, the reader looks out at the passage of time from the walls of the monastery, and from the eyes of its abbots. The monastery, then, functions as a still point from which to measure time’s movements.

The monastery, however, is not the only still point. Benjamin the wanderer — who, if he is to be believed, is 3,800 years old by the novel’s end — inevitably shows up at the monastery’s most critical moments. In Book 1, he wanders into the abbey’s area; in Book 2, he lives on the other side of Sanly Bowitts, the nearby village; in Book 3, apparently he lives somewhere in what is now the city of Sanly Bowitts. As a constant reference point, he is parallel to the monastery but never actually in it. As a Jew, of course, he wouldn’t be.

As an unchanging reference point, Benjamin has a similar role in the novel’s structure to that of the monastery: providing one of two perspectives on the mystery of history. The first perspective is from the abbots, who believe that salvation has already entered history, while Benjamin believes that history is still desolate, that salvation has not yet come. From either perspective, history itself is a burden — a burden to be carried either by the Son of God or by a willing agent of mankind, who, in the context of the story, is Benjamin. For the Christian, the burden of history is carried by the Christ; for the Jew, it must be borne alone — a feat Dom Paulo, abbot of Book 2 of the novel, considers impossible: “What must it weigh?… No, no. It crushed the spine, this burden. It was too much for any man to bear, save Christ alone.”

Underscoring the sense of history’s burden, each of the novel’s three books closes with a visit from buzzards. At the end of Book 1, they hop around the dead body of Brother Francis; at the end of Book 2, they show up for the body of the Poet; and at the end of Book 3, they come for all those crushed in the second Flame Deluge: “Their philosophers demonstrated by unaided reason alone that the Supreme Cathartes aura regnans had created the world especially for buzzards.”

Canticle is not an easy book to read. Like history, it is heavy — very heavy. And with that sense of the heaviness of history, the novel portrays man’s smallness in the flow of time: “In a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seemed to flow, a lifetime was only a brief eddy, even for the man who lived it.” Accordingly, the abbots of the order — Arkos, Paulo, Zerchi — come and go, and the many, many others who fill in the gaps of the 1,200 years are recounted. In Book 2, the assistants of the visiting scholar Thon Taddeo use a level to measure “the concave depression worn in the floor stones by centuries of monastic sandals” — generations of monks, leaving behind little more than a certain amount of wear in the stone of the steps.

The novel also gives us several distinct images of rubble having covered over the accomplishments of man, as in the rock pile over the fallout shelter wherein lies the skeleton of Emilie Leibowitz, wife of Isaac. Rubble covers Abbot Zerchi after the fall of the nuclear missile on the city of Sanly Bowitts. “More than five tons back there,” Zerchi considers before he dies under the weight. “Eighteen centuries back there.” Finally, there is the rubble of the abbey itself — not, of course, the same kind of rubble, but in the simplest sense a pile of rocks guarding, first, those who seek to seal themselves within its walls and within its life of prayer, and, second, at its deepest level, the Memorabilia, the storehouse of knowledge preserved for centuries by the monks.

The clearest expression of history as burden is found in Abbot Zerchi’s lament in Book 3. After listening to a news conference discussing two recent nuclear explosions, events understood around the abbey in the simple expression “Lucifer is fallen,” Zerchi turns off the television and ruminates:

Listen, are we helpless? 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…. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?

Rather than providing a warm and fuzzy conclusion in which the nations sit together around a table to find a John Lennon-type path to peace, the missiles do fall, and Earth is incinerated. So, yes, we are slaves to the cycle; we are condemned to repeat the pattern.

That is the conclusion to a novel written by a man who flew more than 50 bombing missions over Italy during World War II and participated in the destruction of Monte Cassino. That is the conclusion to a novel written by a man who, finally overcome by a sense of futility, killed himself. If only Miller had perceived the lessons of A Canticle for Leibowitz. Beneath the rubble of history, the novel presents readers with a promise — the promise of life, of divine life.

Appropriately enough, as the novel uses the image of a pile of rubble to portray the burden of history, the promise of divine life consistently is beneath the rubble.

In Book 1, Brother Francis is making his Lenten vigil and discovers — by means of a cave-in — a fallout shelter that contains the remains of Emilie Leibowitz. Moreover, in the antechamber where Francis finds her body, there is also a metal box with notes and a blueprint belonging to Blessed Isaac Leibowitz himself. The discovery leads, years later, to Leibowitz’s canonization. For Francis, though, it’s the voice of God that is discovered under the rubble: Francis “had found what he was sent into the desert to find…. He was called to be a professed monk of the Order.” The voice of God in the discovery seems even more obvious by the wandering Benjamin’s role in the discovery. At the top of the rubble pile concealing the shelter, Benjamin picks one particular stone on which to write two Hebrew letters, lamedh and sadhe — key to Francis’s discovery. Abbot Arkos later comments, “If it had some letters between those two, it might sound like Lllll — guess who?” Leibowitz.

The most important stone pile, however, is the abbey, containing beneath its levels the library and the Memorabilia, making clear that the novel has a certain reverence for knowledge, a fact made most obvious by the self-appointed task of the monks. The bookleggers of the order “smuggled books to the southwest desert and buried them there in kegs,” only later constructing the monastery that would shelter these books for the next few thousand years. The order’s memorizers “committed to rote memory entire volumes of history, sacred writings, literature and science.” Leibowitz himself, who had entered a Cistercian monastery after becoming convinced of his wife’s death in the first Flame Deluge, was hung and roasted by a “simpleton” mob that had discovered smuggled books in his possession.

Various characters in the novel question the value of preserving knowledge, which, after the Flame Deluge, is no longer understood. Nevertheless, the Memorabilia “was given to them [the monks] by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years.” In Book 2, Thon Taddeo, who visits the abbey to scrutinize the Memorabilia, considers knowledge a main ingredient of the dialectic of history. With glowing eyes, he sermonizes the monks: “There will be buildings of thirty stories, ships that go under the sea, machines to perform all works.” And in the process of these changes, a certain predetermination is at work. They will be accompanied, he prophesies, “by violence and upheaval, by flame and by fury…. It will be so. We do not will it so.”

Bitterly, Thon Taddeo turns on Dom Paulo, accusing him and the monks of having “sat on” the Memorabilia, doing nothing with it. The order, however, preserves the knowledge of the past not for its power or for what it can do but for what it is: a reflection of its source and end, the divine Logos. Under the stones of the abbey, the light of God, not the light of man, is preserved. So it is that after Thon Taddeo departs, the electric bulb that had illuminated the library alcove is removed and the Cross of Christ put in its place. Dom Paulo decrees, “Who reads in this alcove henceforth, let him read Ad Luminem Christi.”

The third rubble pile is the Lady Chapel, where Abbot Zerchi had been hearing the confession of Mrs. Grales when the nuclear missile hit the city. After the impact, Zerchi ran for the tabernacle to remove the ciborium, at which point “the building fell in on him.” With five tons of rock on top of him, he lies in the dirt with the scattered Hosts. Between losses of consciousness, he gathers what he can and replaces the lid of the ciborium. He sees that the blast has opened the crypts, and a few bones lie among the rocks, including a skull with a hole and a bit of wood in the forehead. This, then, is Brother Francis, killed with an arrow for food by “Sports” upon his return from Rome and the canonization of Isaac Leibowitz.

Zerchi has good company under the five tons. The more astonishing divine visitation, however, is the reappearance of two-headed mutant Mrs. Grales, who wanders “into sight around a heap of rubble.” The one who addresses Zerchi, though, is not Mrs. Grales but the second head, called Rachel. Throughout Book 3, Rachel has lain dormant on the shoulder of Mrs. Grales. Prior to the second Flame Deluge, Mrs. Grales asked Zerchi to baptize Rachel, but he skirted the issue, insisting that Mrs. Grales should see her parish priest about the matter. Yet now it is Mrs. Grales who sleeps and Rachel who kneels by the abbot, listens to him talk, and smiles. Noticing a little water on a nearby rock, Zerchi moistens his fingertip, motions her closer, and begins the formula of baptism. Rachel recoils, rejecting the offered gift (the Immaculate Conception of a new world, Zerchi realizes, and thereby unstained with the original sin which baptism would cleanse). Instead, she takes the ciborium and offers Zerchi a Host; after he receives it, she places the ciborium in a protected spot: “She used no conventional gestures, but the reverence with which she handled it convinced him of one thing: she could sense the Presence under the veils.”

There is a Presence under the veils, the novel affirms. The Presence is divine, and the Presence is life. Isaac Leibowitz, at the moment of his martyrdom, blessed and drank a cup of the fuel oil in which he was about to be drenched. Legends say the cup of oil became wine, which is to say, in the madness of his death, Leibowitz tasted life. Zerchi, too, crushed by the results of man’s quest for godhood, receives from Rachel’s hand “this Sacrament of Life.” And before she leaves his side, she places a fingertip on his forehead and says one word: “Live.”

As mentioned above, if only Miller had considered the lessons of his own book. His sufferings from the memories of war were not so different from the sufferings of Zerchi under the rubble — or the sufferings, as narrated in Book 3, of the mother and child headed to the euthanasia camp after lethal radiation exposure. In a scene reminiscent of present-day sidewalk counseling outside an abortion facility, Zerchi has to persuade her that her legal right to kill herself is a moral wrong. He uses the only argument he’s got: that suffering itself can be a path to life. “It is the soul’s endurance in faith and hope and love in spite of bodily afflictions that pleases heaven,” he tells her.

No doubt, history will continue to move in cycles. No doubt, man has repeated and will continue to repeat the same errors. Our own age is a nightmare of jargon phrases, devoid of grounding in either God or nature. Perhaps, in the lonely hours before he pulled the trigger on his own life, Miller could not find consolation in the idea of a Presence under the veils. Perhaps he was too far under the rubble to remember what he had written about “this Sacrament of life.” His novel is correct, though, in that this is what we have been given to free us from the blind revolutions of history, revolutions that each day suffer further degradations according to the law of entropy. Saint Leibowitz knew that this is not man’s proper end; instead, he affirmed man’s dignity as a co-creator with God, someone who would do as God had done, someone who would act as an “Integrator…and things would be fitted together again.”

Brother Francis, too, in his simple way, affirms that the mundane and even the obscure find their realization in a divine structure. Accordingly, the blueprint of “Transistorized Control System for Unit Six-B” becomes, after 15 years of labor, a glorious, illuminated document. And in the final sacrament received from Rachel’s hand, Abbot Zerchi has complete connection with — as Rachel said — Life.

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