A “Lux” Shines in the Darkness: Part 2 of A Canticle for Leibowitz

In the first installment of this three-part essay series exploring Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s magnificent science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, we examined the book’s first novella, “Fiat Homo.” Here, the monks of Miller’s fictional Albertian Order of Leibowitz offer striking parallels to the history of the Catholic Church’s relationship with the natural sciences.

Turning our attention to the second novella, “Fiat Lux”, which picks up the tale around six centuries after the events of “Fiat Homo.” The monks of Leibowitz Abbey continue to preserve the remnants of human learning that survived the nuclear war known as “The Flame Deluge.” Indeed, the Order’s devoted stewardship of scientific knowledge is finally bearing fruit in the wider world. 

A new “Scientific Revolution” is taking shape as a growing community of secular scholars called the Collegium are rediscovering the foundations of physics. Meanwhile the monks of St. Leibowitz are on the verge of harnessing the power of electricity for the first time since the Deluge. Yet there grows a rift between Church and State fostering mutual suspicion, jealousy, and prejudice between the Order and the Collegium.  

Faith Vs. Reason?

Using the post-apocalyptic setting of Canticle as a backdrop, Miller addresses one of the common assumptions of modern times: the notion that religious faith and secular science must inevitably be in implacable opposition to one another. This view, which I like to call the paradigm of conflict, permeates most obviously in the “scientific revolution.” 

As author James Hannon writes in his excellent book The Genesis of Science: “Nowadays it is a commonplace to refer to the period between Copernicus and Newton as ‘the scientific revolution.’ Although this phrase was only invented in the mid-twentieth century, it has already become an unquestioned part of the language.” 

Indeed, this “revolution” is an origin story that many in the scientific community take for granted. According to the all-too-popular narrative of some contemporary “science communicators,” the emergence of the empirical scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dispelled forever the “ignorance” and “superstition” of the Catholic Middle Ages, leading to an era of enlightened progress. 

But, in fact, this persistent modern myth that “before Copernicus nothing of any significance to science took place at all” is being challenged by the latest scholarship.

The accomplishments of the Medieval natural philosophers (among whom were many Catholic priests and monks) are becoming more widely recognized and appreciated by historians. And yet, many scientists, especially in the secular West, continue to subscribe to scientism. 

This is a reductionist ideology of scientific supremacism hostile to religion and which judges the value of all knowledge by whether it can be understood using the empirical scientific method. The most extreme forms of scientism dismiss other domains of human knowledge (such as faith and philosophy) as irrational and “unscientific.” 

In one of the most memorable scenes in “Fiat Lux,” the Collegium savant Thon Taddeo preaches this kind of technocratic scientism to the astonished monks of Leibowitz abbey, saying: “A new prince shall rule. Men of understanding, men of science, shall stand behind his throne, and the universe will come to know his might. His name is Truth. His empire shall encompass the Earth. And the mastery of Man over the Earth shall be renewed.” 

A Revolution…A Revelation!

So might have the builders of the Tower of Babel once spoken! Indeed, the author of Genesis uses symbolic imagery and the language of parable to relate profound truths about sinful human nature.

In their arrogance and pride, the men of Babel set out to build a tower that would reach up to heaven, signaling their desire to make themselves equal to God, rather than submitting to their identity as dependent contingent creatures. 

Seeing their folly, God declares, “This is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” (Genesis 11:6) To disrupt this blasphemous project, God confuses the languages of the people of Babel, scattering them into confusion and disorder. 

It would be easy to misinterpret this passage as revealing a God who suppressed human progress because he feared man as a rival to his power. But nothing can be further from the orthodox Christian conception of God. 

God loves us and desires our happiness. But he knows that when humans embrace a disordered desire for power and control, it can only lead to our unhappiness. God is not in competition with us. God is the ground of our very being. He is the source of all that exists. He is existence itself — “I am who am.” (Exodus 3:14) 

This non-competitive understanding of God should help us to realize why, in the light of faith, there can never be a fundamental opposition between divine revelation and science. But sadly, many Christians, especially in Fundamentalist Protestants circles, also subscribe to the paradigm of conflict. They tend to reflexively reject modern scientific theories about the cosmos, the earth, and biology, fearing them as threats to Christianity that, if accepted, would displace the biblical worldview.

But this reactionary outlook couldn’t be further from the classic Catholic understanding of the relationship between faith and reason. The great arc of Church history and tradition does not point to an “either or” mentality. Rather Catholicism has always embraced a “both and” approach. 

As Pope St. John Paul II famously wrote in famous the opening paragraph of his encyclical Fides et Ratio (On the Relationship Between Faith and Reason): “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”

Dramatic examples of conflict between Church authorities and secular scientists, such as the infamous Galileo affair, are so notable because they are the exceptions across the vast panorama of Catholic history. 

It is worth noting that despite being persecution by prominent Churchmen and condemned to house arrest, Galileo Galilei remained a faithful Roman Catholic until the end of his days. Galileo did not subscribe to a paradigm of conflict between faith and science. Indeed, he longed to harmonize his Copernican astronomical theories with Sacred Scripture.

Like the best of science fiction, A Canticle for Leibowitz holds up a mirror to our own contemporary world and forces its readers to confront their own unchallenged biases and assumptions. Walter M. Miller’s magnum opus serves as an elegant parable for the dangers that follow when science and technological progress are divorced from a theocentric worldview. 

The tale of the monks of the Albertian Order should also inspire us to remain confident in our belief that faith and reason can help us to better know and love the God who says  “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

Stay tuned for the third installment of this series!