41 pages • 1 hour read
A Canticle For Leibowitz
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Themes
Differing Perspectives on the Endless Cycle of Destruction
When the novel begins, Francis holds his vigil centuries after a nuclear war devastated the population and the landscape. In response, society punished the scientific and intellectual communities, created a new world in which few people were literate, and let the world slide back into a period of ignorance. The monks at the abbey preserved (and memorized) enough documents to make scientific discoveries (or rediscoveries) possible again. By the novel’s end, not only has the Dark Age of Francis’s time ended, but humanity finds itself in the most advanced cycle yet: a world advanced enough for manned starships.
However, as Zerchi sees the political tension in the world and the threat of a new nuclear war, he asks himself:
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? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion (298).
He compares humanity’s trajectory to that of a Phoenix, the mythical bird who always rose from its own ashes after being burned. However, it is not in the Phoenix’s nature to destroy itself each time through its own nature.
Zerchi and other characters worry that as long as humans exist, they will always find ways to destroy themselves. When Zerchi says, “The trouble with the world is me” (369), he speaks as a composite of the human race. Nuclear weapons are humanity’s best chance at achieving the extinction of the species. Ironically, nuclear weapons could not exist without the ingenuity and dedication of human minds. If the end of the world is inevitable, then the secularists and the religious people view the periodic devastation of the planet in different ways. For the secularist, the cycles of violence will repeat as long as humanity makes the same mistakes. For an abbot like Zerchi, the cycles of violence will only repeat until the second coming of Jesus Christ, which will begin the new, final stage of humanity’s journey.
The Nature of Mercy
While discussing the need for the Mercy Camps—the makeshift facilities providing euthanasia for those afflicted with radiation poisoning or other irreparable damage—Doctor Cors tell Zerchi: “They look at you. Some scream. Some cry. Some just sit there. All of them say, ‘Doctor, what can I do?’ And what am I supposed to answer? Say nothing? Say, ‘You can die, that’s all.” (333). Cors believes that giving the people an end to their suffering is his merciful duty. Zerchi, however, believes that it is for God alone to grant mercy to suffering people, even if it is only by welcoming them into the next world once their suffering on earth ends.
Doctor Cors cannot understand this viewpoint and asks how God could find pleasure in a child’s suffering. Zerchi responds, “It is not the pain that is pleasing to God, child. It is the soul’s endurance in faith and hope and love in spite of bodily afflictions that pleases Heaven” (353). The Mercy Camps are a secular solution to suffering. Enduring until the end of mortal life is the religious solution. This is little comfort to the woman with the suffering child, and she tells Zerchi that “the baby doesn’t understand your sermon. She can hurt, though. She can hurt, but she can’t understand” (353).
Zerchi responds with the story about his cat, Zeke. Zeke’s spine was crushed by a car. Zerchi shot him with a pistol to end his suffering, but Zeke did not die until Zerchi killed him with the shovel. He tells the suffering mother that he regretted what he did and wished he had let Zeke die “the way a cat would if you just let it alone—with dignity” (355). In his view, if a cat’s natural instinct prods it towards a dignified, accepting death, then a human with a rational mind should be able to take the same view of its offspring. Zerchi takes a view of human suffering similar to that of God, who was willing to allow his son, Jesus, to suffer for the salvation of humanity. Like Doctor Cors, the mother simply wishes for an end to her child’s suffering.
When Zerchi commands the mother “not to offer her life in sacrifice to a false god of expedient mercy” (355), he believes that he issues his command as an act of mercy for their souls. However, for those who do not—or cannot—believe in the Christian afterlife, this type of mercy appears as brutal, hostile, and unnecessary.
Church, State, and the Value of Knowledge
After the Flame Deluge, mobs arise to punish anyone who shared responsibility for the destruction:
Nothing had been so hateful in the sight of these mobs as the man of learning, at first because they had served the princes, but then later because they refused to join in the bloodletting and tried to oppose the mobs, calling the crowds ‘bloody simpletons’ (73).
The mobs ushered in the era of the Simpletons, an honorific denoting someone without learning and, therefore, someone with fewer ways to cause a problem for humanity. People use the Church as an excuse to blame the secular scientists for the Flame Deluge. Secularists like Taddeo will later blame those who suppressed and forgot scientific knowledge for limiting humanity’s progress and wellbeing.
The value—and permanence—of knowledge have different meanings to different characters. Miller writes of the age before the Flame Deluge: “Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible—that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense […] and not superficially true at all” (163). The new Dark Age proves that knowledge can be lost. Scientific knowledge could have been lost if not for the bookleggers who memorized the texts and the monks who worked in preserving and restoring the archives and relics. It is only the tenacity of scholars like Taddeo that returns knowledge to the world.
When Taddeo witnesses the successful testing of the dynamo, he is impressed that it works but enraged that he had no idea that anyone at the abbey was exploring a theory of electricity. He asks, “How have you managed to keep it hidden for all these centuries? After all these years of trying to arrive at a theory of—” (215). The abbot later reflects that the demonstration put Taddeo “in the position of a mountaineer who has scaled an ‘unconquered’ height only to find a rival’s initials carved into the summit rock—and the rival hadn’t told him in advance” (216). But it is not only Taddeo’s professional ambition and pride that are hurt—he is aggrieved that such a delay in progress has been kept from scientific scholars like himself. Scientists who could build on the work of the dynamo could have already been working on it for years, had they known about Kornhoer’s progress. Ironically, the efforts of the most religious-minded characters—the monks—preserve and protect the scientific knowledge and texts that men like Taddeo desire.
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