According to one prominent science fiction writer, science and technology together constitute the “dominant” object of worship of the modern world. “To put it simply,” he remarks, “science is a god-thing: omniscient, omnipotent, master of that terrible trinity of hope, fear, and power” (Sturgeon, 99, 100). This portentous utterance adds a certain gravity to the familiar quip, “Science fiction is the religion of atheists.” There is something surprising, then, in the realization that science fiction can be the mode for novels of profound Christian vision, not only in a work that is expressly and unblushingly a product of the usual science fiction publishing channels, but also in a work which seems purely “mainstream” in its literary credentials. Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz has long been recognized as one of the major accomplishments of science fiction—a book that is regularly cited as evidence for the literary respectability of the science fiction mode. Yet, although Canticle has enjoyed an enormous popular and critical success that transcends the usual science fiction readership, a work of science fiction it indisputably is, having appeared originally as three self-contained stories in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, to the contrary, is the third of his six novels, and before it there was no basis for labeling him a science fiction writer. Love in the Ruins, a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection that appeared on the New York Times Best-Seller list, was not marketed or generally received as science fiction. Yet, in its own way, Love in the Ruins, too, is indisputably a work of science fiction. If the term science fiction means what it implies—a work of fiction dealing with science, or more properly, with the effects of the scientific revolution on the human condition, moral and spiritual as well as physical—then Percy's novel cannot escape the designation.

The evidence suggests that Percy's foray into science fiction (however covert) was inspired, at least in part, by an enduring preoccupation with A Canticle for Leibowitz. In 1971, the year of the publication of Love in the Ruins, Percy also published a brief “rediscovery” essay on Canticle; and the Miller novel figures even more prominently as the basis for a futuristic scenario in the closing pages of Lost in the Cosmos, Percy's second volume of nonfiction prose, which came out fourteen years later. This is a rather remarkable tribute by a writer of Percy's stature and literary sophistication to the author of a single novel that first appeared in a magazine described by Percy himself as “a high-class sci-fi pulp” (“Rediscovery,” 572). What is more, the science fiction element in Percy's most recent novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, is quite as prononced as in Love in the Ruins, with the hero of this earlier novel, Dr. Thomas More, brought back to confront a scientific conspiracy bent on altering human behavior through covert chemical experimentation with the water supply. This is, of course, a staple theme of the “sci-fi pulp,” and the pastor of my parish, introducing The Thanatos Syndrome into a sermon for purposes of illustration, unhestitatingly called it “a science fiction novel.”

Percy's affinity for Walter Miller and the apocalyptic mode of science fiction has a basis in the parallels between the lives of the two men. Both were educated technically and scientifically, Miller as an engineer and Percy as a medical doctor (with plans to become a psychiatrist); both were adult converts to the Catholic Faith. Hence the confrontation between science and religion is for them more immediate and acute than for most of us. Each has a personal stake in reconciling the demands of doctrine with the rigorous objectivity of scientific method. The result is that both have produced novels uniquely informed about and sympathetic to both science and Christianity. Apocalypse, of course, popularly carries the suggestion of cataclysmic destruction—the end of the world, in some sense at least. Here again both writers draw on a familiar science fiction theme: Miller depicts the earth in the wake of one civilization-ending nuclear war and on the brink of another. Percy writes of the not-too-distant future, “at a Time Near the End of the World,” when industrial society seems to be collapsing under its own weight. Yet the more significant sense of apocalypse is revelation, and the end-of-the-world novel can thus be revelatory in a fashion analogous to the final book of the New Testament. Percy himself suggests the prophetic character of such fiction in “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World”: “Is it too much to say that the novelist, unlike the new theologian, is one of the few remaining witnesses to the doctrine of original sin, the imminence of catastrophe in paradise?” (Message, 106).

An additional important similarity between Miller and Percy is the comedy of their work. Although the substance of their speculations is rather grim, A Canticle for Leibowitz and Love in the Ruins are both very funny books; and in neither instance are the comic features merely superficial. The comedy is, rather, thematically significant. If Miller and Percy are both aware of the limits and dangers of science in a way made peculiarly vivid by the insights of Christianity into the human condition, there is still nothing in them of the anti-technology bias so common among Christian writers of the twentieth century. Perhaps it was Miller's remarkable achievement in dealing knowledgeably and sympathetically with both science and Christianity that first recommended him to Percy, and it may well be the example of A Canticle for Leibowitz which inspired Percy's first venture in the science fiction mode. One of the great accomplishments of Love in the Ruins is, likewise, the provision of a Christian framework for thinking about modern science and technology in relation to the human predicament rather than merely warning about the dangers of their abuse. This apocalypse—what is revealed—is necessarily comic in the way of irony, because the hopes and hazards of man's science are equally embedded in his nature as rational creature, as knower.

One need only consider the science fiction of other expressly Christian writers to appreciate the difference of the perspective shared by Miller and Percy. C.S. Lewis' Ransom trilogy, comprising Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, is a classic of science fiction and Christian fiction alike. In developing its principal theme, however, that scientific technology unbridled by Christian faith and traditional morality threatens human decency and survival, it consistently casts science and scientists in a negative light. To be sure, Lewis himself maintains that his fiction is not “anti-science” but “anti-scientism”—“scientism” being a “certain outlook on the world which is causally connected with the popularization of the sciences, though it is much less common among real scientists than among their readers” (Of Other Worlds, 76). This qualification cannot be simply dismissed, and the three novels constitute an engaging (if uneven) work of literature and a compelling protest against the misapplication of the prestige of science by utopian social engineers.

Still, what is missing from Lewis' trilogy is any sympathy for, or even real interest in, the enterprise of science itself as a way of understanding the world. Weston, who is presented as a brilliantly innovative physicist and engineer of great technical skill, who has designed and built a vessel capable of transporting men to Mars and Venus, is depicted as a pompous buffoon in Out of the Silent Planet, spouting the absurdities of C.H. WadDington's “philosophy” to the angelic intelligence who governs Mars. In Perelandra he has become a mere walking cadaver possessed by an evil spirit. As Lewis himself observes, although it deals with what is ostensibly a scientific undertaking on a grand scale, That Hideous Strength has little to do with science, which is less a target than bureaucracy (Of Other Worlds, 78). But if the book includes a “good scientist,” it includes no good science. Only two scientific experiments associated with the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) are mentioned. “Pragmatometry”—a kind of crudely computerized method of committee-coordinated research—is an object of scorn to all but the book's dullest characters. The keeping alive of the severed head of a condemned Algerian murderer, conducted by a physiologist of international renown (who is also an obese Italian pervert), seems a remarkable if ghastly feat of applied science; but in the end it turns out that life is maintained in “the Head” not by science, but (again) by demonic possession.

But it is not just that the particular scientists depicted in the trilogy are, for the most part fools and knaves, the science itself sinister and vain; Lewis makes his critique of science and its effects from a vantage wholly outside and utterly unsympathetic to the empirical interpretation of nature developed by modern science. The Ransom trilogy opposes to the scientific model of the physical universe a mythic vision. In Out of the Silent Planet Ransom is startled and delighted to find that “Space” is not “the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness,” which popular science had led him to expect (36); and of course the existence of tutelary angelic spirits for each planet—earth's unfortunately is Satan—is a primary element of the entire trilogy. In Perelandra the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden is poetically realized and re-enacted on Venus; and in That Hideous Strength the Arthurian legend, especially insofar as it involves Merlin, is given mythic substance. Lewis is not interested in the prosaic factuality of his mythology: rather he is providing a concrete literary embodiment for mythic themes with the aim of showing their relevance for modern man. Lewis cannot be faulted for what he has not done in creating a beautiful modern romance, but it must not be supposed that he has engaged science on its own terms. In fact, his procedure is virtually the antithesis of conventional science fiction, which extrapolates a theoretically or provisionally possible scientific future. Although serious science fiction does not pretend that the future thus depicted is in any sense a literal prophecy, its basis, however superficial, in currently established fact and respectable scientific speculation plainly differentiates it from Lewis' mythic fiction.

Even less sympathy or interest is accorded science in Evelyn Waugh's Love Among the Ruins, which has, nonetheless, been accepted as science fiction by its inclusion in a paperback anthology Neutron Stars (Fitzgerald, 383-413) along with stories by such writers as Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, and Frederick Poul. Waugh's novella differs from Lewis' trilogy in that it is pure dystopian satire, imagining a world from which every vestige of the mythic has been obliterated by a totalitarian socialist state. What Waugh shares with Lewis is a healthy urge to warn the reader about the danger of scientific technology in the hands of an omnicompetent bureaucracy. Lewis' horror of the ultimate result of the social application of science, summed up in the title of his short treatise, The Abolition of Man, is fully realized in Waugh's central character, Miles Plastic:

The State had made him. No clean-living, God-fearing Victorian gentleman, he; no complete man of the Renaissance; no gentil knight nor dutiful pagan nor, even, noble savage. All that succession of past worthies had gone its way, content to play a prelude to Miles. He was the Modern Man.

(Tactical Exercise, 256)

This “Modern Man” is, in fact, the “first complete case of rehabilitation” produced by the new nonpenal prison system (261). Miles's rehabilitation, however, does not take. He has a brief fling with a dancer whose botched “Klugman operation,” intended to make her sterile, has instead given her “a long, silken, corngold beard” (268). But the girl gets pregnant, and the State's response is to abort the child and surgically replace her bearded face with “a wonderful new substance, a sort of synthetic rubber that takes grease-paint perfectly” (280). The girl, with her new stage-face, goes back to the dance, and Miles goes back to his old crimes of homicidal arson. As in the Ransom trilogy, scientific technology in Waugh's novella is only a tool of state planning, bent on the dehumanization of mankind. The creature of science—“Modern Man”—is expressly set in opposition to the various ideals of more humane traditional cultures.

Percy's protagonist, however, is himself a scientist—a psychiatrist and medical researcher who dreams of winning the Nobel Prize for his investigations of the cause and treatment of mental disorders involving heavy sodium radiation. To be sure, his invention does more mischief than good, and it is the occasion for demonic temptation reminiscent of what occurs in the Ransom trilogy. But these similarities only underscore the difference between Percy's treatment of science and Lewis'. Art Immelman, in Love in the Ruins, is as comical as Mephistopheles as he is sinister, and at times he seems little more than a projection of the ambivalent ambitions of Percy's bourbon-besotted Faustian physician. More important, for all its comedy, Love in the Ruins gives serious and sympathetic consideration to the scientific viewpoint even as it ironically explores the limitations of science.

For Percy, science is a dilemma, not simply the enemy, and its complex relation to Christianity is figuratively suggested by the equivocal name of the protagonist and his guilt regarding his illustrious ancestor:

As for me, I was a smart boy and at the age of twenty-six bade fair to add luster to the family name for the first time since Sir Thomas More himself, the great soul, the dearest best noblest merriest of Englishmen. My contribution, I hasten to add, was in the realm of science not sanctity. Why can't I follow More's example, love myself less, God and my fellowman more, and leave whiskey and women alone?

(23)

In his very name Dr. More thus embodies the conflict between science and sanctity, but also their possible reconciliation, a possibility which is, in a very modest way, realized at the novel's close. It is not science as such which is the antithesis of faith; More's departure from the ways of his great forebear is tangled up with other passions; “My life is a longing, longings for women, for the Nobel prize, for the hot bosky bite of bourbon whiskey, and other great heart-wrenching longings that have no name” (23). The danger of science lies not in itself but in its corruption—in confusing knowledge with the Nobel, in taking it as a means of satisfying the “heart-wrenching longings that have no name.”

Much the same view of science, skeptical but respectful, emerges in A Canticle for Leibowitz. The hero of Miller's novel is no individual but an entire order of monks as it develops through time—an order founded by a Jewish engineer, a convert to Catholicism, in the wake of the “Flame Deluge,” total nuclear war late in the twentieth century. Edward Isaac Leibowitz founded the order for the purpose of preserving from angry mobs of “simplifiers” science and learning. Edward was finally martyred for his efforts. The first section of the novel takes place during a new “dark age” several centuries after the war; the second section during a “renaissance” several centuries later than Part 1; and the third section in the Year of Our Lord 3781—a time even more technologically advanced than our own. Throughout the book the very science which the monks seek to preserve, much as the Benedictines preserved the learning of the classical period, is a source of tension and a threat. In the first and third sections, the shadow of past or imminent nuclear war hangs over the narrative; in the second section there is an ugly confrontation between the monks and one of the new scientists of the age of rediscovery. In this second section the theme that runs throughout the book—science is a worthy human activity but not an end in itself—is most plainly realized in the character of Brother Kornhoer and the lesson he learns.

Yet not only is science itself not condemned; even its most misguided practitioners are sometimes portrayed as well-intentioned and compassionate. In Part 3 of Canticle, “Fiat Voluntas Tua,” Abbot Zerchi reluctantly grants the physician in charge of treating victims of the radioactive fallout from a small nuclear strike (prelude to the total attack to come) permission to use Abbey grounds. Since among the physician's other duties is the recommendation of legal euthanasia for “hopeless cases,” the Abbot feels compelled to exact a written agreement that no euthanasia-counselling will take place on the Abbey's property. Although he is appalled by the man's attitudes “that the laws of society are what make something a crime or not a crime,” and that “pain is the only evil,” the Abbot concedes in his own mind that the Green Star agency performed “admirable” and “even heroic” relief work, and he finds himself admiring the physician's dedication:

He had looked underslept and overworked. He'd probably been living on benzedrine and doughnuts since the shot that killed the city. Seeing misery everywhere and detesting it, and sincere in wanting to do something about it. Sincere—that was the hell of it. From a distance one's adversaries seemed fiends, but with a closer view, one saw the sincerity and it was as great as one's own. Perhaps Satan was the sincerest of the lot.

(281-85)

Later on the Abbot is forced to realize that, in certain situations, even the conduct of one's adversaries can be superior to one's own. A court order forces him to withdraw a picket line of novices from a mobile “mercy camp” erected just outside the abbey walls, and he fails to dissuade a young Catholic mother, dying from burns and radiation sickness, from handing over herself and her equally afflicted child to the mercy-killing center. In the presence of a court official and two policemen, the frustrated Abbot actually punches the physician in the nose. Only the latter's generous refusal to press charges keeps the Abbot out of jail. To his sense of helplessness is added the humiliation of his own outburst of violent anger and indebtedness to the very adversary who is, at the same time, going about the devil's business.

Percy likewise takes euthanasia as a principal theme—an issue which typifies the rift between “science” and “religion”; and he likewise put those characters who are on the right side in awkward, humiliating situations and encumbers them with personal liabilities. At the time when the action of Love in the Ruins takes place, Fr. Rinaldo Smith is the last nonheretical, nonschismatic, nonmarried priest left in the area; but he is given to drink and despondency, and Thomas More recounts lying in the bed next to his in the psychiatric wing of More's own hospital. The doctor had ended up there as the result of a half-hearted suicide attempt; Fr. Smith had walked out in the middle of mass and lapsed into a nearly catatonic state. Hence both Christian priest and Christian physician lie helpless and despairing, ministered to by the positivistic pragmatism of benevolent behaviorists. The situation prompts an encomium from Fr. Smith that recalls Abbot Zerchi's appreciation of the Green Star physician's sincerity:

“I think it is you doctors who are doing the will of God, even though you do not believe in him. You stand for life. You are trying to help us in here, you are good fellows, God bless you all. Life is what—” begins the priest and, as suddenly as he laughed, now covers his face with his hands and bursts into tears.

(186)

Regrettably, the behavioral psychiatrists do not altogether “stand for life.” A central episode of the novel is the confrontation in the “Pit” (i.e., the hospital amphitheatre) between the behaviorist, Dr. Buddy Brown, and Dr. Thomas More over the diagnosis and treatment of the aged, apparently catatonic Mr. Ives. “A relic of medieval disputations and doctors' hankering for horseplay,” the “clinical pathological conference” held before an audience of students and colleagues is literally a matter of life and death for Mr. Ives. If Brown's behaviorist diagnosis prevails, then Mr. Ives will almost certainly be sent to “the Happy Isles Separation Center” in Georgia and almost certain death by gradual drug overdoses. As it turns out, More wins the confrontation and Mr. Ives is allowed to go home to Tennessee. It is not, however, an unqualified triumph. In the first place, unlike Buddy Brown, who is content with his student “fans” who are “mostly qualitarians (=euthanasists),” More is uncomfortable even with his allies: “It seems today in The Pit I am favored by the Christian Knothead [i.e., rightwing] antieuthanasic faction, but I'm not sure I like them any better than the Hesse-Skinner-Douglas qualitarians” (219). More's resistance to this kind of support is the healthy instinct of even a “bad Catholic” against mingling Christian morality with any kind of political fanaticism. The victory in the Pit, more significantly, is possible only because the devious Art Immelman, mysterious “funding expert”/demonic tempter, has modified the lapsometer to make it a tool of treatment as well as diagnosis. Not only does More use the modified lapsometer on Buddy Brown and Mr. Ives to gain the advantage, but Immelman indiscreetly hands out models to members of the audience, which leads to an orgy of sex and fighting. The Christian view thus triumphs only by the most dubious means, and science is less the corrupting agent than it is corrupted by the bumptious deviltry of Art Immelman.

Science is accepted as a means of interpreting the physical universe both by Thomas More and Walker Percy. The opposite of the Western scientific view is embodied in Love in the Ruins not by Christianity but by Alistair, the “heathen Englishman” who seduced More's first wife Doris (11). Alistair preaches a vague Hindu religiosity, a manifestation of the degenerate West's loss of its own principles and superficial fascination with the Orient. Alistair is typical of a certain kind of indiscriminant postmodern mentality in trying to convince More that they are really on the same side:

“We could be of incalculable service to each other, you know.”

“How's that?”

“You could help our work on mind-force with your scientific expertise in psychiatry. We're on the same side in the struggle against materialism. Together we could break the laws of materialism that straightjacket modern science.”

“I believe in such laws.”

“We could oppose the cult of objectivity that science breeds.”

“I favor such objectivity.”

“I have unending admiration for your Church.”

“I wish I could say the same for yours.”

(272)

Alistair's effort to displace the objectivity of science with a vague, subjective religiosity (“I accept the validity of all religions,” he blandly avers, 272) is scornfully rejected by More; and, despite the fact that he has become “a bad Catholic” and “stopped eating Christ in Communion, stopped going to mass” (6), he still believes the teaching of the Church while accepting the validity of science. Despite the tensions between them, science and Catholicism are not incompatible in More's view, as long as the two are not confused:

If the truth be known, scientists are neither more nor less vain than other people. It is rather that their vanity is the more striking as it appears side by side with their well-known objectivity. The layman is scandalized, but the scandal is not so much the fault of the scientist as it is the layman's canonization of scientists, which the latter never asked for.

(7)

Now it is true that Thomas More is not an altogether reliable narrator, but it is an oversimplification to suggest that he “cannot see that these two myths—the one of God's grace, the other of man's scientific control—are mutually exclusive” (Godshalk, 152). More effectively acknowledges the limitations of scientific control in comparison to grace when he desperately invokes his sainted ancestor to deprecate Art Immelman: “Sir Thomas More, kinsman, saint, best dearest merriest of Englishmen, pray for us and drive this son of a bitch hence” (376). That he has not given up tinkering with his invention, even in the epilogue “Five Years Later,” is merely evidence that he is a fallen man, striving but uncertain: “I still believe my lapsometer can save the world—if I can get it right” (382, emphasis added). After all, despite his happy marriage to Ellen, he still lusts after Mrs. Prouty and sneaks home a bottle of Early Times on Christmas Eve. Sir Thomas More is still the saint; Dr. Thomas More is not to be canonized.

More's insistence on the value of science, its limitations and dangers notwithstanding, plainly reflects Percy's own view; and, though it is one of the most valuable insights in his fiction, it is a source of scandal to many critics. Gerald Kennedy remarks that “More's contradictory attitude apparently mirrors Percy's own ambivalence toward scientific technology,” and finds the novelist's exoneration of “the scientist (the seducer)” over against the credulous laymen “a surprising position for a writer of Percy's theological inclinations” (121). Patricia Poteat constructs an entire monograph on the premise that virtually all of Percy's philosophical essays, in their use of the terms and theories of modern behavioral science and linguistics, betray the very insights embodied in the novels, thus revealing “the peculiar perils of seeking to construct a radical philosophical anthropology by using the conceptual tools of one's antagonists” (3).

Now this view, of which Poteat seems the most articulate spokesman, is a misconstruction not only of Percy's view of science, but, more important, of science itself. Poteat is horrified by Percy's admission that his “instincts … were on the side of the scientists in general and in particular on the side of the hardheaded empiricism of American behavioral scientists” as opposed to philosophical idealists (Message, 33-34; Poteat, 43). Poteat not only fails to acknowledge the severe qualifications which Percy adds to his behavioralist “instincts”; she further accuses him of not realizing that “both behaviorist and idealist schools are branches of the modern philosophical tree rooted in Descartes and the Enlightenment” (42) and sees him, as an essayist, in the rôle of “Cartesian philosopher” wedded to “the conceptual tools of a crypto-Cartesian science” (86). Similarly, Poteat attributes Percy's distinction between the “real” object of the sign and the “intentional” object of the symbol to “his inability … to think in terms other than ones governed by the Cartesian framework” (109). At the same time, however, she persists in treating Percy the philosophical essayist as a “closet behaviorist”; it is only as a story teller that he “is consistently successful … at sustaining an attack upon the philosophic tradition of the West” (59).

The proposition that Percy's fiction displays an “attack upon the philosophic tradition of the West” is only possible with the naïvely uncritical assumption, common among today's literary humanists, that Western philosophy—and especially modern Western science—are essentially Cartesian. This view does not hold up under scrutiny. The distinction between real and intentional being, for example, is not peculiarly Cartesian, but rather Scholastic; and its purpose is to subordinate the abstracting tendency of human knowledge to the real order of particular things, as in the formulation of St. Thomas Aquinas: “And since the intention of universality—namely, the relation had by one and the same to the many—proceeds from abstraction of the intellect, it is necessary that the universal according to this mode be posterior” (Summa Theol. I:85:3 ad 1: “Et cum intentio universalitatis, ut scilicet unum et idem habeat habitudinem ad multa, proveniat ex abstractione intellectus, oportet quod secundum hunc modum universale sit posterius”). As Stanley Jaki has shown, it was the moderate epistemological realism of Thomist Scholasticism that provided the philosophical basis for the establishment of a permanent, self-sustaining scientific enterprise in the Western world:

The contingency of the universe obviates an a priori discourse about it, while its rationality makes it accessible to the mind though only in an a posteriori manner. Hence the need for empirical investigations. The contingency of the universe as a whole serves in turn as a pointer to an ultimate in intelligibility which though outside the universe in a metaphysical sense, is within the inferential power of man's intellect.

(Road, 38)

By contrast the famous “method” of Descartes, a great mathematician, was for the most part scientifically sterile: “He had no eyes for the depths of the world's contingency, and as a result his science remained as shallow as any application of the a priori method in science is bound to be” (Road, 72).

Now Percy's highly qualified preference for the behavioral scientists over the philosophical idealists arises from his recognition that the former respect actual things. The scientists at least begin with reality rather than attempting to construct a world out of pure intentionality. In Lost in the Cosmos (85-126) Percy gives a brief but admirable summary of the way in which semiotics can be deployed to analyze the human predicament—man's fall into self-consciousness. He is acutely aware of “the troubles which have dogged solipsist philosophers from Descartes and Locke to the present day,” and maintains “that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language” (102n.). Semiotics is also an advance over behaviorism, which cannot go beyond “dyadic events”; that is, it can only explain cause/effect or stimulus/response interactions, as when B.F. Skinner's trained pigeons react to signals. There is, however, more difference between an animal (man) capable of true “triadic behavior” (speech or the use of other real signs) and an animal capable only of “dyadic behavior” (response to environmental stimulus) “than there is between the dyadic animal and the planet Saturn” (96, emphasis in original).

Percy is neither a “closet behaviorist” nor a closet Cartesian. What this means in principle is that Percy recognizes both the value of science and its limitations. Man is capable of genuine science, of real knowledge of his cosmic environment because he is able to transcend it, to see it as an object; but his science is limited by the fact that, as a sign-using creature, he is also part of a world which involves, indeed is constituted of, interactions with other, equally mysterious sign-using creatures: “Consciousness is that act of attention to something under the auspices of its sign, an act which is social in its origin. What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious” (Cosmos, 105). The limitation which Percy thus finds in human science is substantially the same as that formulated in the mind of Walter Miller's Abbot Paulo during the “renaissance” of the thirty-second century in A Canticle for Leibowitz:

There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God's and not Man's, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For 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.

(143-44)

Such is, fundamentally, the view of science which emerges more obliquely from Love in the Ruins. In the epilogue, “Five Years Later,” an exchange between More and the black electronics wizard Colley Wilkes about the former's continued work on his lapsometer illustrates both the insights and the shortcomings of science:

“Your device. I'm convinced you're on the right track in your stereotactic exploration of the motor and sensory areas of the cortex. This is where it's at.”

“That's not it at all,” I say, hunching forward between them. “I'm not interested in motor and sensory areas. What concerns me is angelism, bestialism, and other perturbations of the soul.”

“The soul. Hm, yes, well—”

(389-90)

Having already been put off by More's reference to “diabolic abuse” (389) of the lapsometer, Colley is made extremely uncomfortable by the notion of a “soul.” And of course he is right from his own perspective, tacitly recognizing the contradiction in the very name lapsometer: fall of spirit cannot be measured by strictly scientific means. More of course is also correct in perceiving that “the motor and sensory areas of the cortex”—important as they doubtless are—do not ultimately account for man's problems. But More, whom “everyone knows” to be “a marvelous diagnostician” (388), can do nothing in the way of a medical cure—only the “diabolical abuse” of Art Immelman ever gave his lapsometer a treatment capacity.

Like Miller's Canticle, Love in the Ruins is a comic apocalypse because its revelation is ironic and oblique. “Bantu” liberals like Colley Wilkes and his wife Fran have replaced the white liberals of “Paradise Estates” not only in their affluence and secular humanitarianism, but also in their obsessive bird-watching and the hope of a “verified sighting” of an ivory-billed woodpecker. As the novel closed during the season of “Longhu6,” the “Bantu god of the winter solstice” (388, 389), the Wilkes's are breathless with the hope of capturing an image of the bird with a “camera with massive telephoto lens” (387). Their quarry is trivial but not impossible; the lapsometer, however, will never produce a “verified sighting” of what Thomas More is looking for, the soul of man. Unlike the ivory-billed woodpecker, the soul cannot be targeted in the cross hairs of a lens or a mathematical network of scientific measurements.

Hence the significance of Percy's removal of the arrows from the triangular diagram by which he illustrates his “triadic theory of meaning” in “The Delta Factor” (Message, 38-39)—a significance completely missed by Poteat (46-48). The arrows stand for a chain of physical causality which can be determined by some kind of meter, and such a determination can lead to the prediction and control of physical events. Without the arrows the “delta factor,” like the lapsometer, can only reveal a scientific blank—a gap in the “cosmic environment” (see Cosmos, 99-103). Like Love in the Ruins, Percy's essays provide a genuine apocalypse, a true revelation in what is revealed about human nature; but it is also comic because it discloses man's inability to know himself. It is knowledge of the limits of human, scientific knowledge.

The final pages of Love in the Ruins remain the most satisfactory answer to this dilemma in the Percy canon. Man can finally know and possess himself only in God, in his Creator and Savior: “Father Smith says mass. I eat Christ, drink his blood” (400). Shriven and then sacramentally united with Christ for the first time in eleven years, Thomas More can go home and joyfully and innocently “know” another, his wife Ellen, “on her new $600 bed” (403). Still hoping, by means of the lapsometer, to cure a “ghost or beast or ghost-beast” who may walk into his office, More does not wholly realize that, by confession and communion, he has himself been cured: he is again “a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher” (383). Of course, as these paradoxical titles imply (and as More's condition in The Thanatos Syndrome confirms), this newly regained state of grace is not absolute and necessary, not in this life, but imperfect and contingent. By the same token, man's science—the “imperfect incarnation,” the “dark reflection” of God's design in man's mind—is important not as a permanent acquisition of power, but simply as an appropriate activity of the human intellect. In a passage notably reminiscent of Miller's Canticle, Percy suggests just this important distinction between science as a technique, a means of absolute control, and science—“knowing”—as what men do with their God-given minds in the world God has created:

Knowing, not women, said Sir Thomas, is man's happiness.

Learning and wisdom are receding nowadays. The young, who already know everything, hate science, bomb laboratories, kill professors, burn libraries.

Already the monks are beginning to collect books again. …

Poor as I am, I feel like God's spoiled child. I am Robinson Crusoe set down on the best possible island with a library, a laboratory, a lusty Presbyterian wife, a cozy tree house, an idea, and all the time in the world.

(383)

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