A Canticle for Leibowitz - Synopsis and Introduction

A Canticle for Leibowitz is in three parts, or acts. The first takes place circa 2600 A.D., the second takes place about 3200 A.D., and the third act circa 3800 A.D. in other words, six hundred years from now, twelve hundred years from now, and eighteen hundred years from now. The setting of the story is North America, somewhere in the southwest desert wilderness between Utah and Texas, at the Catholic monastery of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz a fictional order of monks dedicated to recovering human learning and science after its loss in the great nuclear holocaust, that according to the book, took place sometime in the late twentieth century. Each act has its own set of characters, atmosphere, and plot line leading to its own climax. The first act is meant to resemble the Dark Ages, when the Church is the only civilized structure in the midst of a barbaric world; the second act is like the Renaissance, with thriving political powers, sly diplomacy, and a renewed secular quest for learning; the third resembles the Space Age, something like our own times but even more advanced, since interplanetary colonization by human beings is already off and running. The common thread tying the acts together is the monastery itself and the abbots who must deal with the circumstances of each age: Abbot Arkos in part one, Fiat Homo (Let there be man), Abbot Paulo in part two, Fiat Lux (Let there be light), and Abbot Zerchi in part three, Fiat Voluntas Tua (Let your will be done). There are also mutants who appear in each part, whose shocking genetic changes were caused by the radiation of the nuclear deluge. In each part, the reader is permitted to enter into the personal and inter-personal histories of the important characters involved (in one way or another) with the abbots. There is, first, the hapless but determined Brother Francis, who discovers the new relics of the Blessed Leibowitz. After finally being cleared of the suspicion of madness, Brother Francis devotes his life to making illuminated copies of ancient industrial blueprints found in the fallout shelter. At the end of part one he travels as a pilgrim to New Rome to see the Pope (first on a donkey, but then on foot, after being accosted by a mutant robber-band). In the second part we meet the Poet: the slightly mad court jester with his removable glass eye and utter lack of inhibition about speaking the truth at the abbots table. Then there is Thon Thaddeo, the high and mighty Renaissance scholar, who visits the abbey to investigate the monks daring scientific and technological achievements with a good deal of professional envy. Finally the third act introduces us to Mrs. Grales, who has (yes) a second head growing out of her shoulder; she lives in a hovel near the six-lane superrobotic GPS-equipped highway that swooshes past the monastery in the year 3781. Mrs. Grales may be poor and deformed, but her role in the story is most profound: she has a way of helping the people she meets see truth. Only one character appears in all three parts: a wandering, wise beggar dressed in a burlap sack, who appears to have a very long lifespan indeed Each part of the book is set in a particular social, political and economic context that fits the stage of civilization (or uncivilization) of humanity depicted in each part of the book. The political structures in the first part are very primitive, and nations do not exist as yet; in the second part, we experience international intrigue and rumors of warfare involving the American continental nations of Denver, Laredo, Texarkana and Chihuahua, while the monks, who have succeeded in generating light through electric-power once again, see the fruit of their preservative labors begin to be shared with a larger, secular world. But how will the growing world use this recovered knowledge and technology? The chilling answer is developed in the final third of the book, as nuclear firepower once again has spread around the globealong with the glimmer of hope reflected from a certain upward-thrusting starship, carrying a collection of monks and laypeople, and heading for Alpha Centauri

A Canticle for Leibowitz - Background Information

What was the Cold War? When A Canticle for Leibowitz was published in 1959, the world was in the grip of the Cold War, which lasted from about 1945 to about 1990. Although this conflict never reached the magnitude of an all-out worldwide conflict like World War I (1914-18) or World War II (1939-45), the Cold War consisted in a half-century-long climate of fear that the world would soon be engulfed in World War III an all-out nuclear war between the Communist Bloc (led by Russia) and the Free World (led by the USA). During the same period of time (the lifetimes of your parents and grandparents) there was a series of regional and civil wars around the globe (in Korea in the early fifties, in Cuba and Vietnam in the sixties and seventies, in Angola, Afghanistan, and El Salvador in the seventies and eighties). The two opposing belligerents were backed by Communist Soviet Russia and/or Mainland China, on the one side, and the USA on the other. (In these conflicts, generally speaking, an atheist/materalist Marxist revolution faced off against a free-market, democratic, and more or less Christianized society, except that in the case of Afghanistan, it was Marxism vs. an Islamic movement). Through those forty-five years, the fear of an all-out nuclear war was more or less intense, and the fear was not only of the blast, fires and radiation, but also of the after-effects: the chemicals released by an atomic explosion such as cesium, strontium and iodine would cause cancer and birth defects for a long time to come. In the fifties and sixties, many Americans built fallout shelters family-sized bomb shelters, stocked with non-perishables to survive the actual war and the radioactive fallout that would poison the air immediately afterwards. In the first chapter of Canticle for Leibowitz, a young novice monk, Brother Francis of Utah, stumbles into one of these by accident in about the year 2600. What were the political causes of the Cold War? The Cold War followed from a political shift that took place immediately after the end of World War II in 1945. The two sides in the First and Second World Wars had been mainly composed of the same countries, i.e., Germany and her allies vs. France, Britain, Russia and the USA. But the scene changed dramatically after 1945: once the Allies had conquered Nazi Germany, Joseph Stalin, the communist dictator of Russia (or USSR, as it was then called), traded on his war-time alliance with Britain and the USA to insist on keeping Eastern Europe (including East Germany) under communist control. While the Allies helped West Germany and the rest of Europe to rebuild as part of the post-war, free-market, democratic West (or Free World), Marxist-Leninist communism, as a political, quasi-religious doctrine with aspirations of world-conquest, now flourished in the form of Soviet totalitarian dictatorships planted in a dozen small satellite nations. An Iron Curtain had descended across Europe, as Winston Churchill (the war-time Prime Minister of England) declared in a famous 1946 speech. The world scene had changed profoundly. As Churchill said, the communists were not only strong in Europe and Asia; they also had fifth columns (spy-networks) operating in all the nations of the globe, working in complete obedience to the communist regime in Moscow; these movements, in Churchills words, posed a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization. In 1949, the takeover of China by communists under Mao Ze-Dong added the worlds most populous country to the Communist Bloc. How did the Cold War become associated with the threat of nuclear war? In World War II, the United States (in conjunction with the major Allied Powers of Britain and France) fought and defeated Hitlers Nazi Germany, Mussolinis Fascist Italy, and Emperor Hirohitos Japan. The war ended in 1945: in Europe first (May), and then in Japan (August). Unfortunately, there were ominous clouds on both horizons. The victory in Europe was won with the help of communist Soviet Russia, with the result that (as explained above), while the Allies supported a rebuilt Western Europe, Russia held onto its gains in East Germany and Eastern Europe, and set up puppet totalitarian regimes there. In the Pacific theatre, the victory over Japan was finally, and rapidly, accomplished by the first (and to this day the only) actual use of atomic bombs in the world, by the United

States developed, interestingly, with the help of some German scientists who had defected from the Nazis. When the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, a total of about 100,000 - 120,000 Japanese civilians lost their lives immediately, and another 100,000 - 120,000 died in the ensuing four months from the effects of radiation. At the time, no nation other than the USA possessed nuclear weapons, and no retaliation was possible. By 1949, however, Soviet Russia had begun to develop its own nuclear arsenal and so, with the new ideological division of the world between the growing Communist Bloc (by 1959 Castros Cuba in the Western Hemisphere was added) and the Free World (i.e. the non-communist Allies in World War II), the Cold War had begun. Competition in weapons technology soon brought the more efficient hydrogen bomb and the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), designed to be launched at the push of a button from submarines or underground silos. Paradoxically, the Arms Race became a means to keeping the peace, as both sides were convinced that if they had approximately the same number of weapons, neither side could attack without mutually assured destruction (MAD) of the other. This strategy was also accompanied by the Space Race between Russia and the USA, and by the terrible regional and civil wars (mentioned above) fought with conventional weapons from the fifties through the eighties. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis took place when the USA forced the USSR to back down and remove a stockpile of nuclear missiles from Cuba within ninety miles striking distance of the USA mainland. In the third part of Canticle for Leibowitz, the world is once again (in the year 3781) on the brink of an apocalyptic situation. The expression, Lucifer is Fallen is a code phrase used to indicate that one of the new world-empires at the time has actually employed a nuclear weapon to start a nuclear war (see page 245). Is the Cold War really over? Or the threat of nuclear war? The Cold War as described above does seem to be over now, mainly because of the economic and political collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist Bloc in 1991, a process that began with the spontaneous popular destruction of the Berlin Wall by the East Germans in November, 1989. (The Berlin Wall, built in 1961, was built to prevent East Germans trying to escape to West Berlin and to shelter the Marxist collective economic system from the effects of the Western economy. Many East Germans who tried to escape were shot by communist guards. The Berlin Wall had become a symbol of the divide between the two sides of the Cold War.) But the end of the Cold War has, unfortunately, not taken away the threat of a nuclear war. First, there are still many nuclear weapons in the world according to some accounts, 22,000 quite a few, but not as many as the 65,000 recorded in 1985 at the height of the Cold War. Eight or nine countries in the world possess them. To date, South Africa is the only country that has completely dismantled its own nuclear program. Secondly, as we all know, there are new (or re-emerging) political and religious divisions in various parts of the world, some of them dating back far longer than the Cold War. The thematic background of Canticle for Leibowitz, in other words, can easily be applied to new situations and that includes the theme of the spiritual refuge the Church offers to those who seek true human values and a peaceful use of learning and science. So, what is the connection of the story of Canticle for Leibowitz with the Cold War nuclear threat? You can get acquainted rapidly with the dramatic setting of the novel by turning to pages 61 to 65, and reading the story of the Flame Deluge and the convert Christian, Isaac Leibowitz, a physicist-engineer who had lived through it. This story is deliberately told in Biblical style, and the main idea is that, after the world had gone through the destruction of World War III sometime in the nineteen- sixties, human survivors have turned in anger upon any person of learning, scientific or otherwise, in the mistaken idea that learning and science had caused the destruction of the world, and not the choices people make in how to use their learning and science. Isaac Leibowitz responded to the Great Simplification the campaign to burn all books and kill all scholars and scientists by founding a new Catholic monastic Order of Albert, named after Albert the Great (the medieval philosopher who taught Thomas Aquinas) and following the Rule of Benedict. St. Leibowitz dedicated himself to preserving the learning and truth acquired in the past, in the hope that later generations would come to appreciate it again.

Were the real Benedictine Monks interested in science in the Middle Ages? Yes. Of course, modern science had not really developed yet, but one of the most important achievements of the Benedictine Order was the careful preservation of all the learning, Christian or pagan, that had been acquired or developed during the time of the Roman Empire. Since that empire had disappeared from Western Europe by the year 500, and the new nations of Europe would not arise until about 1100, the Benedictine monks (and nuns) of Europe kept alive the study of the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy) for about 600 years, when the universities began to appear in the major cities of Paris, Bologna and Oxford. The university (an institution invented by medieval Christian churchmen and scholars), in its turn, developed the organized study of logic, our current system of academic degrees, and the new Aristotelian sciences that would provide the basis for the empirical-mathematical discoveries of the clerics and laymen of Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe that is, modern science.

A Canticle for Leibowitz - A glossary of Latin phrases and obscure references

Many Latin sentences occur throughout the book most of them are translated or paraphrased by the author, but some are not. This helps to evoke the deep monastic culture of the Benedictine Order, after which the fictional Leibowitzian Order has been modeled. The words in Latin are for the most part prayers or quotations from the Bible, in some cases official documents of communication with the Papacy in New Rome. Here are the translations of some of these. (Note: it is not necessary to know the meaning of all the Latin to understand and enjoy the book.)

Fiat Homo = Let there be man (human being) p. 6 sport is a biological term for a mutant. See also p. 96 on the Popes Children p. 13 the Hebrew letters (=L Z) are explained on pp. 43 - 44. This can stand for Leibowitz or Lazarus. (see p. 276) p. 38 Brother Fingo (whose name means, I create in Latin) was re-assigned to the kitchen because he showed some vanity about his art. See Rule of Benedict, Chapter 57. p. 54 ornithophagy -- eating of birds p. 106 dulia -- veneration (for a Saint -- not the same as worship (=latreia)

Fiat Lux = Let there be light p. 134 the end of Marcus Apollos letter was written in Latin so Hannegan wouldnt understand it. It says, in summary: I must drink a chalice [of suffering], which I am afraid will not go away. We will later learn what becomes of Marcus Apollo p. 166-67 The Hebrew on p. 166 is translated in the book. The quotation on 167 means, Hear, O Israel, the Lord is One. pp. 182-84 this is a fictional take-off of the Book of Job, applied to the twentieth century nuclear holocaust. Notice the word holocaust ( = burnt sacrifice of a whole [animal]) is actually used.

Fiat Voluntas Tua = Let your will be done (Gods will) p. 253 Ab hac planeta etc. This means: We understand that some members of the Church have already departed from this planet of their birth to travel to planets of other suns, and that they will never return This is the official Papal document authorizing the sending out of a Catholic space mission. p. 281 Grex peregrinus erit The flock will travel Ive talked it over with them, and they will be put on the first plane to Rome p. 332 the preternatural gifts of Eden i.e. not having original sin, not needing to be baptized

A Canticle for Leibowitz - a few questions to assist in your understanding and class discussion

Part One: Fiat Homo (Chapters 1 11) 1. What was the Age of Simplification? It is mentioned on pp. 21 and 22, and explained in more detail in Chapter Six. It is important to understand this, because it provides the background concerning Leibowitz and the Order he founded. What is the pun implicit in the term Bookleggers p. 22? To whom did the skull with the gold tooth belong (pp. 23-4)? The book will make that clear later and why is the skeleton not inside the shelter? 2. The monks of Leibowitz do not understand ancient science, but they have faith that it makes sense. In fact, they treat it as a religious artifact. Look for the connection between this and the scientific description of the Abbots frown (from Brother Francis point of view) on p. 66 and the discussion of the electron on pages 76-77. 3. The Abbot Arkos seems rather negative toward Brother Francis, and even disciplines him (a form of spanking) for talking about the mysterious figure some monks believed to be the long-dead Saint Leibowitz himself, walking around the earth. Abbot Arkos also prohibits the making of a printing press (p. 93). Does this show the Abbots wisdom? Why does Brother Francis faint several times after talking with the Abbot? (pp. 80, 94) 4. The ending of the first story, in chapter eleven, is rather surprising even shocking. Do you think that Brother Francis dies a happy death? Part Two: Fiat Lux (Chapters 12 23) 5. On pp. 124-128 we are introduced to the character and personal interests of Thon Taddeo. Connect this with the description (in the first part, page 65) of an Integrator that the monks were waiting for. What is Thon Thaddeos attitude to the knowledge and documents possessed by the monks? Is he their friend or their enemy? 6. On page 145, there is conversation between Abbot Paulo and the scientist-monk Brother Kornhoer. Is it vanity to put to good use what has been learned? What do you think? 7. The visit of the Abbot Paulo to the hermit Benjamin Eleazar (Chapter 16) is full of mysterious conversation. The heart of the conversation, and perhaps of the chapters meaning, can be found on page 170, with the two-sided description of humanity as courageous and noble but also as guilty and outcast. 8. The suspicious activity of the Thon Taddeos officers in studying the exact layout of the monastery is explained on page 191-2 and page 204, bottom of page. Connect this with the author Walter M. Miller Jr.s experience in World War II (see the last page of the book for a sketch of his life). 9. The argument between the Abbot and the Thon on pp. 220-222 is important. On p. 217, the Emperor Hannegan makes Christianity a legal requirement in his domains, and on page 227 declares the Pope an outlaw with no power over his clergy. How can those two actions be reconciled? Part Three: Fiat Voluntas Tua (Chapters 24 30) 10. From the very beginning to the end of this part, the phrase Lucifer is fallen is employed as a code phrase to signify the detonation of a nuclear weapon. (see, in the Bible, Isaiah 14, 12 and Luke 10, 18). This is ironic, as that event (the Fall of Satan) is supposed to be one of rejoicing for Christians.

11. In this section of the book, the world is divided between two superpowers and their allies: the Asian Coalition vs. the Atlantic Confederacy. They are on the brink of war, and on the island of Guam there is a ten-day delay for last-minute diplomatic attempts to forestall Armageddon. What are Abbot Zerchi and some of the other monks concerned with during this time period? 12. On pp. 314-15, the Abbot tells a little story about the death of his cat. In the story he makes an anti-euthanasia argument that draws an analogy between animals and human beings. What is the essential idea of the argument? What does it really mean to die with dignity?