A Canticle for Leibowitz (St. Leibowitz, #1)

by Walter M. Miller Jr.

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.

Speak up, destiny, speak up! Destiny always seems decades away, but suddenly it’s not decades away; it’s right now. But maybe destiny is always right now, right here, right this very instant, maybe.

The book was a satirical dialogue in verse between two agnostics who were attempting to establish by natural reason alone that the existence of God could not be established by natural reason alone. They managed only to demonstrate that the mathematical limit of an infinite sequence of ‘doubting the certainty with which something doubted is known to be unknowable when the “something doubted” is still a preceding statement of “unknowability” of something doubted,’ that the limit of this process at infinity can only be equivalent to a statement of absolute certainty, even though phrased as an infinite series of negations of certainty.

He glanced at the statue which the camp workers had erected near the gate. It caused a wince. He recognized it as one of the composite human images derived from mass psychological testing in which subjects were given sketches and photographs of unknown people and asked such questions as: ‘Which would you most like to meet?’ and ‘Which do you think would make the best parent?’ or ‘Which would you want to avoid?’ or ‘Which do you think is the criminal?’ From the photographs selected as the ‘most’ or the ‘least’ in terms of the questions, a series of ‘average faces,’ each to evoke a first-glance personality judgment had been constructed by computer from the mass test results. This statue, Zerchi was dismayed to notice, bore a marked similarity to some of the most effeminate images by which mediocre, or worse than mediocre, artists had traditionally misrepresented the personality of Christ. The sweet-sick face, blank eyes, simpering lips, and arms spread wide in a gesture of embrace. The hips were broad as a woman’s, and the chest hinted at breasts – unless those were only folds in the cloak. Dear Lord of Golgotha, Abbot Zerchi breathed, is that all the rabble imagine You to be? He could with effort imagine the statue saying: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ but he could not imagine it saying: ‘Depart from me into everlasting fire, accursed ones,’ or flogging the moneychangers out of the Temple. What question, he wondered, had they asked their subjects that conjur...

Pain is like negative temptation. God is not pleased by temptations that afflict the flesh; He is pleased when the soul rises above the temptation and says, “Go, Satan.” It’s the same with pain, which is often a temptation to despair, anger, loss of faith—’

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.