An Augustinian Wasteland: A Canticle for Leibowitz Fifty Years Later

An Augustinian Wasteland: A Canticle for Leibowitz Fifty Years Later | Dr. Bradley J. Birzer | Ignatius Insight | April 15, 2010

"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.


A Canticle for Leibowitz has been one of my favorite books for most of my adult life. I have read it and reread it many times. In fact, I have read it and perused it too many times to count. I find the work as compelling as the  best of T. S. Eliot. But, while Eliot always leavens, Miller always sobers. In Canticle, one discovers some of Eliot's thought, but also Christopher Dawson's and Jacques Maritain's thought and especially St. Augustine's thought. Much like his fifth-century forebear, Miller places a variety of anthropologies and humanisms before the reader, as well as competing visions of history. Unlike his North African counterpart, though, Miller never answers his own questions and puzzles definitively. The reader remains restless, for he never rests in Thee.

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Comments

[Sandra Miesel]

I read CANTICLE when it was new and have enormous respect for it. (I even defended it against a Jesuit's charge of nihilism in AMERICA, back in the day.) But it's worth noting that Miller was already out of the Church at the time this novel was published. His attempt to return was tragically repulsed by a harsh priest. (Details in an interview with NOTRE DAME magazine circa 1980.) His religious views seem to have gotten more heterodox the longer he lived.

If he hasn't already done so, Professor Birzer might benefit from talking to sf novelist Joe Haldeman, one of the few people in the field who knew Miller in old age.

Miller's short fiction, however, is also excellent and available in several collections.