What I love most about the science fiction genre is that it doesn’t shy away from tackling big questions about the future, human nature, and potential misuse of advanced technologies. One of my favorite sci-fi novels of all time explores these big questions from an explicitly Catholic perspective by shining a light on the Christian faith’s long, sometimes contentious, but often fruitful dialogue with the natural sciences.
A classic of Catholic sci-fi
As the 1950s came to a close, the Cold War was reaching its height. The United States and the Soviet Union possessed the power and might to destroy one another (and a large part of the civilized world) with nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles. A technological Armageddon seemed closer than ever before.
It was at this time that science fiction author and World War II veteran Walter M. Miller, Jr. penned A Canticle for Leibowitz, an epic post-apocalyptic novel that deals with the life of the Catholic Church in the aftermath of a global thermonuclear war (known as the “Flame Deluge”).
Check out the conversation on Canticle for Leibowitz from The Voyage Podcast here:
Miller’s novel was partly influenced by his experiences as a bomber crewman in the US Army Air Force during World War II. He took part in the tragic bombing of Monte Cassino, the ancient abbey founded by St. Benedict himself. After the war, Miller converted to Catholicism and his newfound faith shines through on every page of his magnum opus. A Canticle for Leibowitz won the coveted Hugo Award in 1961 and remains to this day a masterpiece of science fiction literature.
The narrative of A Canticle for Leibowitz is complex and not easy to summarize, in part because Miller assembled the book from three loosely interconnected novellas. Each novella takes place during a different point in the far future, but they are connected by common themes and motifs.
One of the most prominent themes that runs like a thread throughout the entire book is the relationship between faith and science. Each of the novellas is like a mirror that reflects the Church’s relationship to science at different crucial periods of Western history.
“Fiat Homo” represents the Early Middle Ages, when the Church preserved much of the secular knowledge and wisdom of the Classical world following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. “Fiat Lux” explores the Church’s evolving relationship with the emerging community of secular scientists during the Renaissance, which set the stage for the so-called “Scientific Revolution.” Finally, “Fiat Voluntas Tua” is an unsettling pastiche of our own modern/post-modern world, in which the Church grapples with the ethical dilemmas created by the swiftly advancing technologies of an increasingly secular society.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is science fiction in its pure form. That is, it is a story about science itself, and about man’s relationship with science. What sets it apart from other works in the genre is that it is also a book that is deeply concerned about science’s relationship with faith and how this relationship has influenced society across the centuries. In this first installment in a three-part series of essays we shall examine each of the Leibowitz novellas individually and explore what each one has to teach us.
“Fiat Homo”
Set six hundred years after the horror of the Flame Deluge, “Fiat Homo” follows the story of Brother Francis Gerard of Utah, a young monk of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz. This monastic order, modeled on the Benedictines, was founded by Isaac Edward Leibowitz, one of the twentieth century scientists whose research made the nuclear arms race possible.
After the Deluge, Leibowitz he repented of his former life and converted to Christianity, founding this new religious community whose monks (both as “bookleggers” and “memorizers”) took on the task of preserving what little scientific and technical knowledge (called “Memorabilia”) happened to survived the upheaval.
Leibowitz was eventually betrayed and martyred for his work by an angry mob of luddites. But the order he founded lived on and “after six centuries of darkness, the monks still preserved this Memorabilia, studied it, copied and recopied it, and patiently waited.”
Seemingly by an act of providence, Brother Francis Gerard discovers a “relic” of the Blessed Leibowitz — a blueprint for circuit design that had once belonged to the martyr. Although the meaning of circuit design (and even the principles of electricity) were lost in the turmoil of the Deluge, Brother Francis decides to toil away for years unnoticed in the monastery’s scriptorium, diligently copying and embellishing the blueprint of the Blessed Leibowitz. Brother Francis hopes that perhaps it will be useful for future generations.
Dispelling modern myths
During the Middle Ages, Catholic priests and monks (many of them being the spiritual descendents of St. Benedict) made invaluable contributions to science, both by preserving Greco-Roman knowledge and by making crucial discoveries that advanced Medieval science beyond the accomplishments of the Classical age.
Sadly, these contributions remain largely unrecognized, obscured by anti-Catholic propaganda: You’ll often hear from atheist critics that the Church had scientists burned at the stake for their “heretical” theories. Or you will be told that the Church believed that the earth was flat, that it forbade human dissection, and even that the Church banned the number zero!
It seems incredible that such modern myths persist in the popular imagination despite mounting evidence from the scholarly community that utterly debunks these ideas.
In his excellent book The Genesis of Science, physicist and historian James Hannam writes, “It is simply untrue to say that there was no science before the ‘Renaissance.’ Once medieval scholars got their hands on the works of the classical Greeks, they developed systems of thought that allowed science to travel much farther than it had in the ancient world… Even Christian theology turned out to be uniquely suited to encouraging the study of the natural world, which was believed to be God’s creation.”
That last point about theology is key: Many of the philosophers of the ancient world believed that the universe itself was somehow divine, or a part of God. This doctrine is known as pantheism. The Church has always opposed pantheism, emphatically teaching the biblical doctrine that the natural world is not God but was created out of nothing by God.
Being designed and fashioned by a transcendent Creator, the universe is intelligible; it can be understood by reason and by scientific investigation. If the universe were divine, it would be beyond our ability to comprehend.
The Christian doctrine of Creation helped to propel modern science to heights it had not achieved during the previous centuries of pagan speculations. Christian theology was not hostile to science; indeed it was actually the perfect fertilizer to fuel the explosive growth that Western science experienced during the “Scientific Revolution” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We shall explore the dramatic fallout of that revolution in Part 2 of this series.
Thomas J. Salerno
Thomas Salerno is a Catholic author, freelance writer, and podcaster born and raised on Long Island, New York. Among his many passions are dinosaurs, Tolkien's Middle-earth, Star Wars, and superheroes. His writing has been featured in numerous publications including Word on Fire, Aleteia, Amendo, Busted Halo, Catholic World Report, Empty Tomb Project, and Missio Dei. Thomas is the creator and host of the Perilous Realms Podcast and is a contributor to the StarQuest Production Network (SQPN), where he serves as co-host on the Secrets of Movies and TV Shows and the Secrets of Middle-Earth podcasts. Thomas has a bachelor of arts in anthropology from Stony Brook University. You can follow his work on his Substack newsletter thomasjsalerno.substack.com or @Salerno_Thomas on Twitter.