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

by Walter M. Miller Jr.

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...