The Woman and the Atom: Part 3 of A Canticle for Leibowitz

At last we’ve come to the final installment in our series exploring Walter M. Miller, Jr’s remarkable science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.

In part one and part two, we examined the complex relationship between faith and science, both in the real world and in the fictional future dystopia facing the monks of Saint Leibowitz Abbey.

Now, as we turn our attention to the climatic events of Walter M. Miller’s sci-fi saga, I’d like to direct our attention to the novel’s theory of history and how Miller forcefully deconstructs a pervasive philosophical assumption that undergirds many other popular stories in the science fiction genre. And finally, I want to end on a note of hope that no matter how the tides of history seem to be flowing, we always find safe harbor in Christ through his Blessed Mother. 

The so-called “Myth of Progress” dominates the paradigm of thought these last few centuries.

This myth is one of the fundamental assumptions of the Enlightenment. Thinkers at that time supposed that, having thrown off the shackles of religion and superstition, humankind would finally usher in an era of peace and prosperity fueled by the technological conquest of the natural world.

This idea perhaps reached its apotheosis during the Victorian age, when Charles Darwin published his theories about the mechanisms of biological evolution. Intellectuals and politicians seized upon Darwinism: Homo sapiens was the apex of an unbroken march of evolutionary progress. This evolution would continue into an elysian future; a time when the scourges of ignorance, war, poverty, and sickness would all be eliminated. 

The euphoric dream transforms into a nightmare…

The 20th century brought the senseless slaughter of the World Wars and the rise of genocidal fascism and communism. This broke the spell of the Myth of Progress and its utopian vision of a future heaven on earth.

Humanity’s moral development had obviously not kept pace with scientific and technological innovations.

Dystopian stories became more common in science fiction, with prominent examples such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 setting the tone. Yet many writers have still not given up on the Myth of Progress. The dream of an enlightened future continues to be influential in the sci-fi genre; Star Trek being perhaps the most popular example.

Published in the same decade that Star Trek first warped its way onto American TV screens, A Canticle for Leibowitz presents a more starkly pessimistic view of the future. Perhaps this is not surprising, as the prospect of thermonuclear was cast a long shadow at the time. Indeed, the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred almost exactly three years after the novel’s publication.

Miller’s Catholic faith undoubtedly played a prominent role in shaping the themes of the book. The orthodox Catholic understanding of the doctrine of original sin stands athwart Enlightenment pretensions of a utopian future without God. In fact, Adam and Eve damaged human nature by their very rejection of God at the beginning of human history.

Whenever sinful humanity tries to build a world without God, the project inevitably devolves into the chaos of Babel.

It is this tragic and seemingly cyclical reading of human history that Miller explores in A Canticle for Leibowitz.

In the final section of the book, entitled “Fiat Voluntas Tua,” humanity reaches a level of technological advancement that allows electronic communication, space travel… and nuclear weapons.

After spending arduous centuries of rebuilding after the atomic holocaust of the “Flame Deluge,” the human race stands on the brink of a final apocalypse from which it might never recover…

But unlike many dystopian novels, A Canticle for Leibowitz does not present us with a completely bleak future without hope or the possibility of redemption.

Here is where Miller’s Catholic faith shines through on the pages of his magnum opus. As the clouds of war gather on the horizon, the Vatican initiates a secret contingency protocol to ensure the survival of humanity and the Church.

The monks of Leibowitz Abbey ensure that a rocket ship full of surviving clergy and faithful is able to depart for the Alpha Centauri star system before the atomic bombs begin to fall. 

The Woman and the Atom

The spaceship launches just in time, and earth is seemingly left to its fate. But within the rubble, hope springs anew.

I don’t want to spoil the ending completely for those who haven’t read the book. Miller leaves many of the details up to the reader’s interpretation. For the purposes of our analysis it is enough to know that in the novel’s closing pages, God has seemingly decided to start over with humanity. Earth begins anew with a clean slate under the stewardship of a new unfallen Eve, apparently conceived without sin.

In the real world, fears of nuclear annihilation once again seem to be creeping over the world. There are wars and rumors of wars, and the superpowers seem to be marching towards a future confrontation of some kind.

And yet, as I recently wrote for the Word on Fire Blog, no matter what the future may hold, we can be assured of the ultimate victory of God, the Author and Lord of history, over the forces of sin and darkness. 

God has provided a beacon of hope to humanity in another unfallen Eve, not a fictional character, but a real woman whose Fiat voluntas tua (“Let it be done with me according to your word”) made our redemption possible. This Woman is Mary, the Mother of God.

The Woman and the Atom

The Woman and the Atom

In Ven. Fulton J. Sheen’s marvelous book The World’s First Love: Mary, Mother of God, there is a fascinating chapter entitled “The Woman and the Atom.” Like Walter M. Miller, Sheen recognized that the advent of nuclear war shattered the Enlightenment dream of an earthly immortality brought about by scientific progress. Sheen writes: 

“The atomic bomb has suddenly made all humanity fear that which the individual alone previously feared, namely, death. Death has unexpectedly become a phenomenon that not only the person must face but also society or civilization itself.

Those who denied personal immortality used to take refuge in collective immortality, saying that, although the individual perished, society would be preserved. The atomic bomb has made collective immortality a myth and restored personal immortality as the great problem of our age.”

Sheen reminds us that when we erect “Science” and “Progress” as idols in the place of God, they eventually become Molochs, which demand the sacrifice of innocent human life:

“It is not that God has abandoned the world but that the world has abandoned God and cast its lot with nature divorced from nature’s God. Man, throughout history has always become wicked when, turning his back on God, he identified himself with nature.

The new name for nature is science. Science rightly understood means reading the wisdom of God in nature. Science wrongly understood means reading the proofs of the book of nature while denying the book’s Author.

The Woman and the Atom

“Nature or science is a servant of man under God; but divorced from God, nature or science is a tyrant, and the atomic bomb is the symbol of that tyranny.”

Human beings have free will, which uses science for good or evil ends. To free or to enslave. To create or to destroy. To heal or to kill. Will man continue to use the idol of science as a tool to revolt against God or will we choose to repent?

Despite the fear that comes from uncertainty about future events, Fulton Sheen firmly believed that there is hope for the world:

• “The hope is ultimately in God, but people are so far away from God they cannot immediately take the leap. We have to start with the world as it is.

• The Divine seems far away. The start back to God must begin with nature. But is there anything unspoiled and unshattered in all nature with which we can start the way back? . . .

• That hope is the Woman. [The Blessed Virgin Mary] is not a goddess; she is not divine; she is entitled to no adoration.
• But she came out of our physical and cosmic nature so holy and so good that when God came to this earth He chose her to be His mother and the Woman of the world.”

I believe that Fulton Sheen and Walter Miller agree that we must place our hope in the Blessed Virgin, for Mary leads us to Christ, Our Lord and God.

In the face of war and terrorism and the arms race, in spite of all our fears we can cry out with confidence to our heavenly Mother in the words of the poet William Wordsworth:

Woman! above all women glorified,

Our tainted nature’s solitary boast.

The Woman and the Atom