[A Canticle for Leibowitz has] a special dreadfulness: the idea that the insanity of war is chronic, that man will return to ashes what he raises up from past ashes, until he is no more. Beginning six hundred years after the "Flame Deluge," Miller's episodic narrative carries the reader through twelve centuries of recovery to the beginning of another Deluge, one which, if not the last, will teach men nothing, but will only rewind the clockwork of futility. (pp. 151-52)

No doubt Miller's novel would have seemed most illiberal in less troubled times. Not only does he despair of man (not an exceptional attitude in any age), but he displays a strongly proclerical feeling vis-a-vis science…. Yet if one accepts the premise about man's incorrigibility with dangerous toys, Miller's gentle static clericalism has its virtues. The clerical mentality and temperament is hardly disposed towards inventing world-blasting armaments. In...