A Canticle for Leibowitz

by Walter M. Miller Jr.

"Repugnans tibi, ausus sum quaerere quid quid doctius mihi fide, certius spe, aut dulcius caritate visum esset. Quis itaque stultior me. . ."

He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter?

Nerd

press the wrong button or twist the wrong knob, thereby ending the matter without benefit of clergy.

the Dominicans holding that the Immaculate Conception implied not only indwelling grace, but also that the Blessed Mother had had the preternatural powers which were Eve's before the Fall;

My execrable vanity is like that of the fabled cat who studied ornithology, m'Lord.

His desire to profess his final and perpetual vows--was it not akin to the motive of the cat who became an ornithologist?--so that he might glorify his own ornithophagy,

For, as the cat was called by Nature to be an ornithophage, so was Francis called by his own nature hungrily to devour such knowledge as could be taught in those days, and, because there were no schools but the monastic schools, he...

How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely?" "Perhaps," said Apollo, "by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else."

"Because a doubt is not a denial. Doubt is a powerful tool, and it should be applied to history."

Time seeps slowly on the desert and there is little change to mark its passage.

Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible--that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all.

Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.

To survive the Church's slow sifting of the arts, you have to have a surface that can please a righteous simpleton; and yet you need a depth beneath that surface to please a discerning sage.

certainly it was more satisfying and more manly to tell an enemy what one intended to do to him before doing it; and yet, the more he brooded on it, the more he saw its wisdom. Either the grass-eater king was a craven coward, or else he was almost as wise as a man: Mad Bear had not decided which--but he judged the thought itself as wise. Secrecy was essential, even if it seemed womanly for a time.

The children of the world are consistent too--so I say they will soak up everything you can offer, take your job away from you, and then denounce you as a decrepit wreck.

It put the thon in the position of a mountaineer who has scaled an "unconquered" height only to find a rival's initials carved in the summit rock-and the rival hadn't told him in advance.

More communication, not less, was probably the best therapy for easing any tension. And the cloudy veil of doubt and mistrusting hesitancy would be parted, would it not?

the Lord God had suffered the wise men to know the means by which the world itself might be destroyed.

Whatever your nationality, your common humanity makes you welcome."

"But you promise to begin restoring Man's control over Nature. But who will govern the use of the power to control natural forces? Who will use it? To what end? How will you hold him in check?

"That is not what you meant to say, but it is what your saying means.

If you try to save wisdom until the world is wise, Father, the world will never have it."

But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well.

Now Lucifer again. Is the species congenitally insane, Brother? If we're born mad, where's the hope of Heaven? Through Faith alone? Or isn't there any?

I feel like saying words I've never even heard. Toad's dung. Hag pus. Gangrene of the soul. Immortal brain-rot. Do you understand me, Brother?

How strange of God to speak from a burning bush, and of Man to make a symbol of Heaven into a symbol of Hell.

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.

if a man is ignorant of the fact that something is wrong, and acts in ignorance, he incurs no guilt, provided natural reason was not enough to show him that it was wrong. But while ignorance may excuse the man, it does not excuse the act, which is wrong in itself. If I permitted the act simply because the man is ignorant that it is wrong, then I would incur guilt, because I do know it to be wrong. It is really that painfully simple."

"Lucifer's no sandman, that's true."

The trouble with being a priest was that you eventually had to take the advice you gave to others. Nature imposes nothing that Nature hasn't prepared you to bear. That's what I get for telling her what the Stoic said before I told her what God said, he thought.

the evil to which even you should have referred was not suffering, but the unreasoning fear of suffering.

To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law--a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.