Doomed to Repeat the Same Mistake: The Canticle of Leibowitz
Note on the text: I used A Canticle of Leibowitz as written by Walter J Miller Jr and published in 2006 by Eos
The theme, or rather the question, of eternal recurrence, of whether mankind is forever doomed to repeat its mistakes over and over again for all eternity, is at the core of this thought provoking novel. And the answer, at least according to Miller, is yes. Perhaps not on an individual level, but when talking about mankind as a whole it appears that we are stuck in a state of eternal recurrence.
Knowledge is an incredibly interesting thing and is, in many ways, the central character of this story. Because if to know better is to do better it means that mankind has the ability to learn and make a different choice. But if eternal recurrence is true, than it means that learning is, at the very least, irrelevant because humanity is doomed to make the same choices it did before.
This takes place in the future, starting in the 26th century stretching all the way to the 36th. When the book starts we learn that there was a nuclear war in the mid 20th century (this book was originally published in 1959) which resulted in the complete breakdown of civilization and the death of some 90% of the population. Most of those who survived live in small communities that populate a planet that has essentially become a desert wasteland. The monastery of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz is the site of the most of the action. Their somewhat legendary founder, Saint Isaac Leibowitz, lived in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear war, called the “Flame Deluge”, and, in an attempt to preserve the culture and knowledge of the world that had just been destroyed, Saint Isaac wrote down all the scientific knowledge of the time and created what would become a series of religious texts called the Memorabilia. The order of monks which he founded is dedicated to preserving all that knowledge and passing it down.
Knowledge is a strange and powerful thing. It’s one thing to understand what something is theoretically. It’s another thing entirely to understand how that thing works in the real world, and to truly know what something is means that you not only know what it is theoretically but that you understand something of how it works in the real world. Saint Isaac has been dead for over 600 years by the time the book starts and a lot of legends have built up around him, the founding of the order, and the nuclear war which destroyed everything. It is said that because of man’s inflated ego, God commanded a certain sect of people to “devise great engines of war which had never been seen before on Earth” (61). Every prince upon receiving these weapons was warned not to use them because of the great calamity which would ensure. But each prince ignored the warning and thought: “If I strike but quickly enough, and in secret I shall destroy those other [princes] in their sleep and there will be none to fight back; the Earth shall be mine. Such was the folly of princes and then followed the great Flame Deluge” (61). This story, and it’s message of humanity’s ability to destroy itself because of its arrogance and greed, will rear up its ugly head time and time again throughout the course of this story.
It’s interesting that the first character we meet is Brother Francis. He is, in many ways, a really unassuming character. But it’s in his unassumingness, his humility, that he becomes a good foil for the characters who come later. When we meet him he is on a retreat in the desert and he has a mystical experience in which a mysterious man leads him to underground fallout shelter which houses a lot of “first class relics” pertaining to Saint Isaac, including a bunch of books that were written in his own hand. Now remember it has been 600 years since Saint Isaac died. 600 years since the founding of the Order which bears his name. In the mind of most of the monks there, it has been 600 years since the age of miracles. To say that the monks are skeptical when they hear about what happened to Brother Francis is an understatement. They think that all the stories of what happened in the past, all the miracles that supposedly occurred, are just that: stories. Most of them don’t even understand or care about what is actually in The Memorabilia. They don’t understand the science because it belongs to a world that died 600 years ago. It would be like us reading a science textbook from the 1400s. So they keep pushing Brother Francis to deny what happened and admit that he made it all up. However, Brother Francis, who isn’t an idiot and understands how ridiculous and unlikely it all sounds, keeps insisting that he “cannot deny what [he] saw with [his] own two eyes” (46). It’s likely that when he was growing up he assumed just like anyone else that these stories were just stories and that the knowledge inside the Memorabilia was antiquated at best and absolutely useless at worst. But he allows his experience in the desert to change him. He allows that experience to change the way that he looked at the Memorabilia and its contents. He all of a sudden starts to believe that the knowledge contained in those books might actually be worth something and he spends the next fifteen years creating beautiful copies of the books and doing everything he can to make sure that it is not forgotten. That ability to allow himself to change, to allow what he experiences in in the desert to challenge his preconceived notions about the world, is what sets him apart from other characters in this book. He refuses to ignore what is happening around him. Like I said, it’s his unassumingness and humility that makes him a good foil for the characters that come after.
Now we jump to the 38th century and, thanks in large part to the Memorabilia, people have rediscovered how to build nuclear weapons. Now humanity has the chance to see if it has learned from its mistakes and can make the right choice. Unlike those “princes” of the past, these people know from experience what it means to live through a nuclear war. The question is, will they use what they have learned to make a different choice or will they allow the same old evils of avarice and pride to push them to make the same mistake again. Can humanity resist the allure of nuclear power?:
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, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk. Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America- burned into the oblivion of centuries. And again and again and again (264).
There is a new abbot of the monastery named Jethro Zerchi who, reflecting on the story we heard in the beginning, certainly hopes that the “princes” of his time will be able to make different choices:
Back then, in the Saint Leibowitz time, maybe they didn’t know what would happen. Or perhaps they did know, but could not quite believe it until they tried it like a child who knows what a loaded pistol is supposed to do, but who has never pulled the trigger before. They had not seen a billion corpses. They had not seen the stillborn, the monstrous, the dehumanized, the blind. They had not seen the madness, the murder, and the blotting out of reason. Then they did it and then they saw it.
Now- now the princes, the presidents, the praesidiums they know- with dead certainty. They know it by the children they beget and send to the asylums for the deformed. . . . Now they have the bitter certainty. They cannot do it again. Only a race of madmen would do it again (275).
He prays and hopes that those in power will now have the ability to keep their pride and greed in check and not use nuclear weapons again. It says something about the depth of Miller’s level of pessimism regarding the human race as a whole that the people in his book choose to wage nuclear war on each other again. More than that humanity has decided to invade other planets, and Miller sees it as inevitable that the human race will “succumb again to the old maladies on new worlds, even as on Earth, in the litany of life and the special liturgy of man” (243). It is the theme of eternal recurrence writ large: humans will always be who they are, they will always do what they do. Individuals, like Brother Francis, may change, but because human nature cannot fundamentally change therefore the human race as a whole cannot change. Humanity is doomed to keep on doing what it has done before- to our detriment. God I hope he is wrong.
