A Canticle for Leibowitz: Book Review

Walter M. Miller Jr. 1959

If you want a read that intelligently pushes Christian religiosity to its frayed edges in the context of sci-fi and demands, “Now what?” this is for you. 

Wow. I have not encountered a book like this in a long time. Revel as Miller artfully grinds idealist ethics into the dust and picks at millennia of scabs of the moments the Christian Church poorly handled science, all while portraying authentically earnest Catholics—refreshingly human priests and laity—in futuristic, post-apocalyptic settings. 

It’s flawed institutional religion, not its adherents, which Miller scrutinizes: I suspect he had Catholic friends and family he genuinely loved. 

Sometime in the future, a dark age follows an atomic apocalypse which had obliterated much of human society, including its scientific knowledge. We enter the story near a medieval-type monastery which acts as a repository for not just religious knowledge but also fragments of the old world’s science. But they don’t know what any of the science means (which throws into question whether they understand what the religious knowledge means). The resulting myths are humorous and the characters’ humanness grabs at the heart. 

Note throughout how the priests misquote Scriptures: we’re to get the sense that this is screwed-up religion that’s unable to handle real-world horrors, personal and political. Miller seems to ask, “Is religion even helpful in an apocalypse of its own imagination?” To do so, he pits against each other characters who are compliant, apathetic, irreverent, or rebellious, to contrast their consciences, each battling to either fearfully hold back, or accept and proceed with progress. 

The story is actually three, which initially made me sad because I didn’t want to part with the first protagonist. However, every section added satisfying layers which eventually assuaged my minor grief. Throughout, the Church’s fear of progress alternates with stewarding it, like a mathematically cyclical waveform sweeping above or below a centre but never resting on a middle line.

The reader has choices: despair, and despise impotent religion; or receive the critique in order to redouble the search for solid hope. Miller presents religion as distinct and distant from its God, and fatally flawed when wrongly interpreting its own Scriptures. This implies that real power lies in something opposite, i.e. the Jesus veiled behind the flawed Christianity, with his forceful critique of religion, liberating interpretation of God’s past activity, and power to do what religion can’t: heal.

Miller and his characters don’t quite manage to put a finger on that veiled hope. So beware: this book mirrors his own despair with the Catholic Church and, eventually, with life itself. It was as if Miller was begging for permission to throw off institutional Christian religion to get behind that veil and throw down the gauntlet of all his raw doubt. 

If you’re already despairing, go get yourself some hope in the book of John in the Bible or whatever anchors you, then come back for this one. 

Altogether, this book is a fantastic commentary on, critique of, and playground in the failures of Christian religiosity. A book studious people should read, sci-fi fan or not. 

Review written by: Jazmine Lawrence, Captain (Retired, RCAF), BSc Honours Physics, MA (Theology) student, future sci-fi author.