Thinking through Thomas Merton

Contemplation for Contemporary Times

Robert Inchausti

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438449470
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Mysticism

With the publication of The Seven Storey Mountain in 1948, Thomas Merton became a bestselling author, writing about spiritual contemplation in a modern context. Although Merton (1915–1968) lived as a Trappist monk, he advocated a spiritual life that was not a retreat from the world, but an alternative to it, particularly to the deadening materialism and spiritual vacuity of the postwar West. Over the next twenty years, Merton wrote for a wide audience, bringing the wisdom of Christianity, Buddhism, and Sufism into dialogue with the period's contemporary thought. In Thinking through Thomas Merton, Robert Inchausti introduces readers to Merton and evaluates his continuing relevance for our time. Inchausti shows how Merton broke the high modernist trance so that we might become the change we wish to see in the world by refiguring the lost virtues of silence, contemplation, and community in a world enamored by the will to power, virtuoso performance, radical skepticism, and materialist metaphysics. Merton's defense of contemplative culture is considered in light of the postmodern thought of recent years and emerges as a compelling alternative.

1

An Experimental Life

“To be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and discovering my true self.”

—Thomas Merton¹

Thomas Merton’s mother died in 1921 when he was only six years old, and his father died in 1931 when he was only seventeen. This left him and his younger brother, John Paul, virtually alone in the world. As a consequence, Merton lived a rather wild youth—flunking out of Cambridge in his freshman year after fathering a child out of wedlock and participating in a drunken fraternity stunt in which he played the victim in a mock crucifixion.

After being kicked out of Cambridge, he moved to Long Island in 1934 to live with his mother’s family. In New York, he attended Columbia University, briefly joined the Communist Party, and eventually discovered his calling as a writer through contact with a series of influential teachers and friends that included Robert Giroux, Joseph Wood Krutch, Mark Van Doren, Robert Lax, and the avant-garde painter Ad Reinhart.

It was at Columbia that Merton first grasped the need to move beyond modernism and his literary hero, James Joyce. He discovered William Blake and the Christian critical romanticism that would influence him for the rest of his life.²

By Christian critical romanticism, I am referring to that set of writers who first translated the spiritual traditions of the West into secular terms—figures like Blake, Coleridge, Emerson, Whitman, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky—writers who celebrated the interior life yet also emphasized the need for a prophetic public witness over and against the powers that be. Blake’s claim that it was possible to attain a second innocence on the far side of worldly experience appealed to Merton so much that he wrote his thesis on Blake’s vision of art and nature.

Merton’s interest in Blake prefigured his ultimate transition from an aspiring novelist to full-fledged Christian contemplative. And it also helps to explain the perpetual tension throughout his life between his calling as a writer and his calling as a monk. Merton was, like Blake, forever of two minds, always thinking in terms of antipathies, contrasts, dialectical tensions, and reconfigurations.

Moreover, Blake gave Merton another way to understand his terrible first year at Cambridge. Education is always a move into experience—and, as such, a fall from innocence. It is, by its very nature, tainted with corruption—that is, unless one acquires a second innocence on the far side of worldly experience. In Merton’s case, this worldliness was a heady stew of Marxism, Bohemianism, and literary ambition. But his mature works, written after his conversion, express his second innocence (or rebirth in Christ), with Blakean reflections on overcoming life’s antitheses through the transcendent experience of a higher Self.

At the time of his conversion to Christianity, Merton’s college friend Robert Lax confronted him with a question: “What do you want to be?”

Merton answered that he wanted to be “a good Catholic.”

Lax replied that if he wanted to be a good Catholic, then he should say that he wanted to become a saint, for hadn’t Augustine himself said that we must be emptied of all with which we are full so that we may be filled with that of which we are empty? Merton demurred, telling Lax he couldn’t be a saint, but immediately realized that in denying that aspiration, he was indulging in “the false humility which makes people say they cannot do the things they must.”³ This was the turning point in Merton’s life, for in that moment he recognized that even Christian converts could deny their our own true selves—their souls’ true destiny—in the name of their own personal, lesser conception of the faith. But to truly be a “good Catholic” meant more than that. It meant living in accord with the Christ within, the saint within, your own true Self that knows you better than you know yourself.

Saints know that their concepts of God get in the way of their own souls’ truth, and so conversion of manners, that is to say, of behavior and belief, has no simple pattern. Each of us has to take on the difficult, individualized task of seeing through ourself and even beyond the petty pride that fuels our first nascent ambitions to become a “good” Christian. A greater love calls.

And so from that very moment forward, Catholicism became for Merton a pathway to sainthood—not merely the acceptance of a particular religious dogma. To be a “good Catholic,” one could just follow the rules of canon law, but to aspire to sainthood meant dedicating oneself to living out the highest values, meaning, and witness of Christ. It meant embarking on a voyage.

Saints are men and women of faith who embark on that voyage and by so doing become transparent vehicles of the Holy Spirit. Their creative acts of love and gratitude challenge the values of empire and push the envelope of conventional spirituality. Saints redefine the norms of moral behavior within the Church and sometimes even redefine the Church’s own understanding of itself. As such, they help us all overcome the false separations between theory and practice, theology and personal life, will and conscience. They accomplish this by personalizing God’s providence through moment-by-moment spiritual discoveries. Their “present,” it turns out, is as mysterious as the Trinity itself—not self-evident, not even actually present, and by no means ordinary. To be constantly praying is to be constantly awakening—not just to the moment, but beyond it into the moment’s hitherto unknown significance. As a result, saints are often charged with heresy because their acts of love and service challenge the old paradigms of religiosity. That is, they are charged with heresy until the Church catches up with their inspired visions and changes itself to accommodate their greater spiritual reach.

Unlike Joyce’s modernist literary epigone Stephen Daedalus or Joseph Campbell’s hero “with a thousand faces,” Christian saints do not “return to their communities with a boon”; rather, they implode within themselves into God—transforming their communities from the inside out by taking the community’s own ideals even more seriously than the community itself takes them. Saints reinstate the lost newness of a faith tradition by living it more deeply and authentically than those who merely conform to its rules and conventions. Thus, Merton converted to an inspired faith, not an institutional religion, moved by the creativity of those odd, passionate religious innovators such as Saint Francis, who gave sermons to the birds, and Theresa of Lisieux, who, as a young tourist, ran past the guards and threw herself onto the floor of the Coliseum so as to mingle with the dust of the martyrs.

Robert Lax’s advice to Merton was later echoed by, of all people, the post-Beat writer Charles Bukowski when he wrote:

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.⁴

Of course, the hard-drinking Bukowski was not counseling the young to seek Christ, but rather to embrace a brave Nietzschean solitude. Lax, on the other hand, was telling Merton that his desire to be “a good Catholic” required more courage and risk than he had yet to imagine. But Merton was to move away from the Gods of “a proud isolation” toward solidarity with the innocent and downtrodden of this world: away from the egotistical sublime toward the second innocence and exalted humility of the Christian disciple.

Lax understood the communion of saints as a wonderful corrective to a narrow, metaphysically determined conception of Catholicism, for not only did it prove that there were many different ways to follow Christ, but the communion of saints historicized and concretized the Church’s theology. The saints existentially embody the values that sustain community: diversity, plurality, and tolerance of imperfection. And their lives represent the most radical virtues of the Christian life: moral imagination, social dissent, and devotional innovation.

Saints remind the Church hierarchy of Christ’s humble origins and love for the people, whereas institutions too often value individuals for their place in the hierarchy and their adherence to rules and authority. This is why the organized Church has always had problems with the ingenuity and audacity of its saints—even leading it to employ a “devil’s advocate” to smoke out the personal failures and unconscious heresies of its most controversial disciples. Christopher Hitchens, for example, author of The Missionary Position and God is Not Great, was asked to testify against Mother Teresa’s beatification. This was done not only to ensure an objective examination of her life and work, but also to ensure that her values and practices were consistent with Catholic orthodoxy.

In this sense, the communion of the saints functions within the Church much like Kant’s notion of “public reason” functions within philosophy: as a court of appeal through which the “private reason” of Catholic doctrine can be thought through with reference to public ideas, premises, and practices. Public reason does not proceed from precise definitions or predetermined ends, but rather seeks to think through the public meaning of concepts originating within otherwise closed systems. Catholic theology insofar as it remains confined to the definitions and ends of the Church can be seen as a form of private reasoning. Its sectarian job is to fix false thinking and articulate doctrine, whereas, the community of the saints celebrates the redemption of the fallible and the wisdom of the people living out the faith in the world. Indeed, the lives of the saints represent a public theology coming into being that is often initially at odds with old ideas but orthodox in its values, thereby serving as a court of appeal for the larger universal Church coming into being. In this way, saints recontextualize doctrinal truths by demonstrating what they include and exclude within the emerging sociohistorical reality. They are often exemplars of energetic, transformative, populist religious values where human relatedness and love triumph over rules and regulations.

Oscar Wilde described this plurality of the practical theologies bequeathed by the experimental lives of the saints this way:

And so he who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his nets into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realizes the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation in morals and in life is wrong. Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation. Father Damien was Christ-like when he went out to live with the lepers, because in such service he realized fully what was best in him. But he was not more Christ-like than Wagner, when he realized his soul in music; or than Shelley, when he realized his soul in song. There is no one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men.⁵

The saints weaken theology proper while empowering the faith in general. That is to say, they undermine the assertion that there is only one metaphysically true way to be a Christian. This does not, however, lead to moral relativism but to a perpetually self-redefining tradition—as adaptable as process theology but more existentially grounded in the lives of actual individuals. Theology becomes the unfolding, flexible revelation of a God who transcends any and all systems, a God who sides with the poor, the just, the obscure, the innovative, and the personally authentic. This was the kind of “good Catholic” Robert Lax was urging Thomas Merton to become when he advised him to become a saint.

A saint may start from the same point of view as an iconoclastic poet, going against convention and comfort for the sake of an abundant, truthful, and self-sacrificing life, but he eventually arrives at a very different place. Like the hero and the artist, saints live beyond life. But saints are unique among this triumvirate because they do not advance any specific worldly agenda or immanent teleology; rather, they embrace spiritual solitude as part of the price one must pay for a creative dependence upon God. They die to the values of this world in order to live in the life of the spirit. Or, as G. K. Chesterton described it, the Christian must seek his or her “life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.”⁶ The hero and the artist, by contrast, drink life like wine and death like water—that is to say, their indifference to the world is stoic, not religious, and so their hope is placed on the future immortality of their work, whereas the Christian lives content within the ordinary graces of anonymity, truth, and love in the eternal presence of God.

Another way to put this is that saints are those who exercise inner balance within the shifting sands of existence. They don’t dissolve the chaos but master it by mastering themselves. The hero and the artist have a different calling. Outraged by the chaos they encounter, they seek to set matters right—if only in their work. Saints, by contrast, transform the dangerous and finite pains of personal isolation into spiritual revelations through contact with the energy of love. When Teresa of Avila remarked that all the way to paradise is paradise, she was speaking as someone for whom everything in this world had become a blessing, someone who was no longer in the grip of illusory images, things, or ideas. Because saints do not lay any conditions upon the world, its dark realities do not diminish their hope, but rather inspire them to even greater acts of love, surrender, and sympathy. Twenty-five years after his conversion, Merton would write: “[T]he saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everybody else.”⁷

The saint, like the child, pours out love in the moment without ulterior motive—undiluted by any hope of changing the world or him- or herself. A saint’s charity is an absolute sacrifice, which to him or her is no sacrifice at all, but an end in itself, free from expectations. To the degree that we are all compelled by our desires to control the situations in our lives, the saint stands over and against us as a reminder that there are other, better ways to live—free from pettiness and scorn, so filled with love that pity itself dissolves into an absolute identification with everyone and everything alive—extending one’s vitality and empathetic reach virtually to infinity.

In The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton quotes Augustine’s claim that human nature is ordered to an end that it is not equipped by nature to attain. And so when Merton visited the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1941 and found a spiritual community organized around this very paradox, he felt he had discovered the center of America—the hidden vortex around which the basic truth of the human condition spun. This community of contemplatives—free from the rush toward economic development—proved by its mere existence that it was still possible to live a life in accord with conscience without being crippled by either Bohemian isolation or middle-class conformity. Merton found in monasticism a way to be, not merely to seem to be, a Christian. It was a way of embracing the absurdity of the human condition without succumbing to the false solace of superstition or the false pride of an untethered Nietzschean bravado. The monastic life provided a way to admit that his life had hitherto been compromised by all that he had done and had failed to do.

Historically, monasticism was a movement both within and against the Church, a movement within a movement. Its doctrines were orthodox but its suspicion of empire subversive, and as such, it served as a model for building the new world within t...