Fiat Lux/Fiat Lex: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Reason and Law

Abstract

Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) is an enigmatic text. It is a depressing tale of the evitability of technoscientific civilization ending in apocalypse, a comedic story of ignorant monks producing gold-embellished illuminated copies of electronic circuit blueprints and an ambiguous examination of the tensions between faith and science. This paper reads A Canticle for Leibowitz as an examination of legality. Drawing inspiration from Carl Schmitt’s observation that Catholicism has a “juridical logic,” this paper identifies that A Canticle for Leibowitz brings to life, and questions, the Thomist worldview of reason, reasonability and layered orders. It is a novel that brings to life, but also interrogates, Catholic intellectualism. It is tempting to conclude that Miller argues for a Thomist ethic of responsibility to temper technoscientific self-destruction. However, that is not where the novel ends. Its endings are hopeful, notwithstanding the nuclear holocaust in the final pages. There are suggestions of new nomoi: In the diasporic human extra-terrestrial colonies, ministered to by a nomadic Church, and a radiated Eden inherited by humanity’s prelapsarian successors anticipated in the coming to life of Rachel.

Keywords:

• Post-apocalyptic science fiction
• A Canticle for Leibowitz
• law
• Catholic Church
• Thomism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Erik Grayson, Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Great Year, and the Ages of Man, ed. Brett M. Rogers and Stevens, Benjamin Eldon, Classical Traditions in Science Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 145.

2 The characterization of Science and Religion as “non-overlapping magisteria” was originally coined by Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999) and Stephen Jay Gould, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 269–83. Other notable scientists to engage with the nature of this relationship have included Charles H. Townes, The Convergence of Science and Religion (IBM, 1966); Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (New York: Basic Books, 1977) and R. Feynmann, The Meaning of It All (Perseus, 1999). There are, however, views which do not see these domains as mutually exclusive, see e.g. Charles H. Lineweaver, “Increasingly Overlapping Magisteria of Science and Religion,” Divine Action and Natural Selection: Science, Faith and Evolution, ed. Joseph Seckbach and Richard Gordon (New Jersey: World Scientific, 2009), 154–81.

3 Mitchell Travis and Kieran Tranter, “Interrogating Absence: The Lawyer in Science Fiction,” International Journal of the Legal Profession 21, no. 1 (2014): 23–37, 25.

4 Frederic Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia Or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9 (1982), 147–58.

5 On the intellectual orientation and methodology practices of popular jurisprudence see Kieran Tranter “Prohibition, Contract and Nomoi for the Future in Star Trek: Picard,” in Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies, ed. Timothy D. Peters, Thomas Giddens, and Karen Crawley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023), forthcoming.

6 William P. MacNeil, Lex Populi:The Jurisprudence of Popular Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 156.

7 James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 19.

8 Ji Hyun Lee, “(An) Archiving after the Apocalypse: The Death Drive, Representation, and the Rise and Fall and Rise of Civilization in Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz,” Strategies of Critique 1, no. 2 (2010): 6. https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-7210.30979.

9 Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz 1959 (New York: Eros, 2006), 99.

10 Ibid., 26.

11 Ibid., 105–7.

12 Ibid., 114.

13 Ibid., 115–6.

14 Ibid., 155.

15 Ibid., 238–9.

16 Ibid., 280; Pope Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge : Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on the Church and the German Reich to the Venerable Brethren the Archbishops and Bishops of Germany and Other Ordinaries in Peace and Communion with the Apostolic, (1937), 8. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_14031937_mit-brennender-sorge.html.

17 Ibid., 8.

18 Rose Secrest, Glorificemus: A Study of the Fiction of Walter M. Miller, Jr. (Lanham: University Press of America, 2002).

19 Kriston R. Rennie, The Destruction and Recovery of Monte Cassino, 529-1964 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 54.

20 Nigel De Lee, “Moral Ambiguities in the Bombing of Monte Cassino,” Journal of Military Ethics 4, no. 2 (2005): 137.

21 Major John G. Clement, The Necessity for the Destruction of the Abbey of Monte Cassino (Pickle Partners Publishing, 2015).

22 Andrei-Cristian Neguţ, “Exploring the Possibility of a ‘Fourthspace’ in American Post-Apocalyptic Narratives,” Romanian Journal of Artistic Creativity 9, no. 2 (2021): 90–91.

23 Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 87; Neguţ, “Exploring the Possibility of a ‘Fourthspace’ in American Post-Apocalyptic Narratives,” 90–94.

24 John Wyndham, The Chrysalids (London: Penguin, 2018).

25 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 114.

26 Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes, Litany of the Saints: Graduale Romanum (Paraclete Press, 1979), 831; Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 18; Claire Sponsler, “Beyond the Ruins: The Geopolitics of Urban Decay and Cybernetic Play,” Science-Fiction Studies 20, no. 2 (1993): 254.

27 Mick Broderick, “Heroic Apocalypse: Mad Max, Mythology and the Millennium,” Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film, ed. Christopher Sharrett (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1993).

28 Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

29 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 182–5.

30 David Seed, “Recycling the Texts of the Culture: Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz,” Extrapolation 37, no. 3 (1996): 257; Thomas P. Dunn, “To Play the Phoenix: Medieval Images and Cycles of Rebuilding in Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz,” in Phoenix from the Ashes: The Literature of the Remade World, ed. Carl B. Yoke (Praeger, 1987).

31 Josef Čapek and Karel Čapek, R.U.R. and the Insect Play, trans. P. Selver (London: Oxford University Press, 1961).

32 Seed, “Recycling the Texts of the Culture: Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz,” 265.

33 Grayson, Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Great Year, and the Ages of Man, 150.

34 David N. Samuelson, "The Lost Canticles of Walter M. Miller, Jr.," Science-Fiction Studies 3, no. 1 (1976): 4; Daniel Born, "Character as Perception: Science Fiction and the Christian Man of Faith," Extrapolation 24, no. 3 (1983): 263.

35 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 248–52.

36 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 316–7.

37 Samuelson, “The Lost Canticles of Walter M. Miller, Jr.”

38 Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G L Ulmen (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996), 12.

39 Ibid., 2–6, 14–16.

40 Ibid., 21.

41 John P. McCormick, “From Roman Catholicism to Mechanized Oppression: On Political‐Theological Disjunctures in Schmitt’s Weimar Thought,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 13, no. 2–3 (2010): 391–3.

42 Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 29.

43 Ibid., 32.

44 Alessandro Mulieri, "Representation as a Political-Theological Concept: A Critique of Carl Schmitt," Philosophy and Social Criticism 44, no. 5 (2018).

45 Joshua Neoh, “Value Pluralism in the Political Form of Roman Catholicism,” Political Theology (2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2021.1920222.

46 Seed, “Recycling the Texts of the Culture: Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz”; Walker Percy, "Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz: A Rediscovery,” Southern Review 7, no. 3 (1971).

47 Percy, “Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz: A Rediscovery,” 573–4.

48 John Stoler, “Christian Lore and Characters’ Names in A Canticle for Leibowitz,” Literary Onomastics Studies 11 (1984): 77.

49 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction; On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 4.

50 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 324.

51 Ibid., 32–36, 321, 323.

52 On the “strangeness” of saints as distinctively Catholic in North America see Julie Byrne, "Roman Catholics and Immigration in Nineteenth-Century America." Duke University, Department of Religion, Teacher Serve National Humanities Center (2006).

53 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 3.

54 Ibid., 209.

55 Ibid., 191.

56 Ibid., 291.

57 David Lyon, Pandemic Surveillance (Cambridge, Polity, 2021).

58 Ibid., 318–20.

59 George Duke, “Carl Schmitt’s Political Romanticism and the Foundations of Law,” Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 9, no. 3 (2020): 419.

60 Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Theologiae,” in Saint Thomas Aquinas on Law, Morality and Politics, ed. William Baumgarth and Richard Regan (Cambridge: Avatar Books, 1988), Q95.2.

61 Jack Donnelly “Natural Law and Right in Aquinas' Political Thought,” The Western Political Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1980): 525.

62 Brian Davies, Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae: A Guide and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 213.

63 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 295.

64 Ibid., 296.

65 Davies, Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae: A Guide and Commentary, 217.

66 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 296.

67 Ibid., 319.

68 Ibid., 320.

69 Ibid., 293.

70 John Milton, Paradise Lost (Penguin Books, 2000), 96–99.

71 Christopher Ketcham, “Towards a Biological Explanation of Sin in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz,” Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy 3 (2020), 4.

72 Pope John Paul II, “Evangelium Vitae” (evangelium vitae, Rome, Saint Peter’s, 25 March 1995), [40], https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html.

73 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 115.

74 Ibid., 164–5.

75 Ibid., 168, 276.

76 Israel Idalovichi, “Creating National Identity through a Legend The Case of the Wandering Jew,” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 4, no. 12 (2010).

77 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 170.

78 Ibid., 170–1.

79 Ibid., 172.

80 Ibid., 234.

81 Ibid., 211.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid., 221–2.

84 Ibid., 222.

85 Ibid., 296–7.

86 Ibid., 305.

87 Ibid., 298.

88 Ibid., 296.

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid., 306.

91 Pope John Paul II, On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering, Salvifici Doloris (Apostolic letter, Rome, Saint Peter’s, 11 February 1984), https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1984/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_11021984_salvifici-doloris.html.

92 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 314.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid., 315.

95 Ibid., 317–8.

96 Secrest, Glorificemus: A Study of the Fiction of Walter M. Miller, Jr., 58.

97 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. J Strachey (New York: WW Norton, 1961), 154.

98 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 275.

99 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 275: cf “But the princes, putting the words of their wise men to naught, thought each to himself: If I but strike quickly enough, and in secret, I shall destroy those others in their sleep, and there will be none to fight back; the earth shall be mine. Such was the folly of princes, and there followed the Flame Deluge,” 61.

100 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 61.

101 Carl Schmitt, Dialogues on Power and Space (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 28.

102 Lee, “(An)Archiving after the Apocalypse: The Death Drive, Representation, and the Rise and Fall and Rise of Civilization in Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz,” 2.

103 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 155.

104 Ibid., 118.

105 Christopher Daley, “The Not So Cozy Catastrophe: Re-imagining the British Disaster Novel in J G Ballard’s The Drowned World and Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head,” in Apocalyptic Discourse in Contemporary Culture: Post-Millennial Perspectives on the End of the World, ed. Monica Germanà and Aris Mousoutzanis (New York: Routledge, 2014), 135.

106 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

107 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 284.

108 Ibid., 290.

109 Frederic Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2020), 167.

110 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 273.

111 Ibid., 260.

112 Ibid., 272.

113 Ibid., 328.

114 Ibid., 331.

115 Ibid., 276.

116 Ibid., 31.

117 Ibid., 322.

118 Donnelly, “Natural Law and Right in Aquinas' Political Thought,” 523.

119 Luke 2:31 (Douay-Rheims Bible).

120 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 323.

121 Georges Bataille, “Sacrifices,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, trans. A. Stoell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 69.

122 Thomas Steams Eliot and William Edwin Rudge, Journey of the Magi (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1927).

123 Tim Lenoir, “Makeover: Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape. Part One: Embracing the Posthuman,” Configurations 10, no. 2 (2002): 211.

124 Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz, 334.

125 Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Thomas

Mark Thomas is a practising barrister as well as an academic. His work focusses on literary representations of law and the judicial project in science fiction (such as J G Ballard’s Crash and the Judge Dredd comic series), informed by interrogations of both traditional and radical theories of law, legal processes and adjudication.

Kieran Tranter

Kieran Tranter, Chair of Law, Technology and Future. Kieran’s work draws upon legal studies, the humanities and the social sciences. It charts how humans legislate, live with, and are changed by technology. In researching law, technology and the future his research often engages with cultural narratives that connect humans, law and technology and past configurations of humans, law and technology. The goal of his research is to guide and shape humanity’s technological future to be better than its technological past.