Thomas Merton -- A Contemplative Against War
Thomas Merton
By Colman McCarthy
Thirty years after his death in December 1968 and 50 years after the publication of his autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” Thomas Merton stands out as one of the 20th century’s towering thinkers—and one of its most enigmatic.
As a Trappist priest and monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky, Merton produced more than 50 books of prose and poetry. He wrote more than 4,000 letters to over 1,000 correspondents, many of them collected in five volumes that began appearing in 1985 with “The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters on Religious Experience and Social Concerns” and the last in 1990 “The School of Charity.” An ever widening shelf of biographies offers factual coverage and intimate probings of a life remarkable on one level for its breadth and depth and on another for its intellectual twists and turns. In Merton, something is there for everyone. He gave up the world but then couldn’t get enough of it. He vowed obedience to his religious superiors and then chafed at being reined in. He celebrated Western Christianity but spent his last days pursuing Zen Buddhism. He was addicted to writing but said, “Most of my own books I can’t stand.” He craved solitude by living in a cloistered monastery and then a hermitage but he was often as busy as a trainmaster routing visitors in and out of his doors.
Merton’s outward biographical details are easily recited. Born in France in 1915 to an artist father from New Zealand and an Ohio-born mother. Orphaned in adolescence. Earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Columbia University in the mid-1930s. Converted to Roman Catholicism in 1938. Entered the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, known as the Trappists, at 26. Died in Bangkok in December 1968 after addressing a gathering of monks and nuns, electrocuted when touching a faulty electric fan in his room. His body was flown home in a military plane that stopped in Vietnam to pick up the coffins of slain American soldiers.
The inward details are not so easily grasped. Merton’s life has all the markings of a classic conversion story, as he moved from a worldly life of godless hedonism to one of ascetic spirituality. In the 1940s, the Trappists, an international order that follows the Rule of St. Benedict and with origins in the French village of LaTrappe, combined the toughness of the Marine Corps with the rigors of the French Foreign Legion. They slept in their monastic habits, rose at 2 a.m. and went to bed at 7 p.m., communicated by sign language, at simple unspiced food, performed manual labor and at the end of their cloistered lives were buried in pine boxes.
The account of Merton’s embracing this no-frills religion is told in his autobiography, an acclaimed book that went into more than 20 printings after 600,000 copies were sold in the first year. In time, the work’s severest critic would be Merton himself: “Life is not so simple as it once looked in ‘Seven Storey Mountain.’ Unfortunately, the book was a best-seller and has become a kind of edifying legend or something. That is a dreadful fate. It is a youthful book, too simple, too crude. I’m doing my best to live it down. I rebel against it, and maintain my basic human right not to be turned into a Catholic myth for children in parochial schools.”
Part of that living down drew Merton into the social issues and upheavals of the 1960s roiling outside the gates of the monastery, helping him fulfill “my intention to make my entire life a rejection of, a protest against, the crimes and injustices of war and political tyranny.” In a searing essay, prompted by the assessment of a psychiatrist who examined Adolf Eichmann at his war crimes trial in Israel in the late 1940 and pronounced the Nazi mass killer totally sane, Merton wrote that “the sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous….Those who have invented and developed atomic bombs, thermonuclear bombs, missiles; who have planned the strategy for the next war, who have evaluated the various possibilities of using bacterial and chemical agents; these are not the crazy people, they are the sane people. The ones who coolly estimate how many victims can be considered expendable in a nuclear war, I presume they do all right with the Rorschach ink blots too. On the other hand, you will probably find that the pacifists and the ban-the-bomb people are, quite seriously, just as we read in Time magazine, a little crazy.”
Influenced by the writings of Gandhi, Merton embraced nonviolence. His thoughts on peace were collected in “The Nonviolent Alternative” and other works. “Nonviolence is regarded as somehow sinister, vicious and evil,” he wrote. “Violence is not only tolerated but approved by American society.” In November 1961 he wrote to Pope John XXIII, who was then ruminating on what to put into “Pacem in Terris,” the major encyclical of his brief papacy: “No one, of course, wants [nuclear]war. But lack of understanding, ignorance, and violence and subtle propaganda all conspire together to create a very unsettling mood in the United States. There are many who hate communist Russia with a hatred that implies the desire to destroy this nation (nation that admittedly poses a threat). But what is worse, the American economy depends more and more on these horrible preparatory measures that move us inevitably toward the greatest disaster. For this reason it is practically impossible to reverse the war machine and disarm. Disarmament could actually ruin many people here. That is why the situation is so grave. Sad to say, American Catholics are among the most war-like, intransigent and violent; indeed they believe that in acting this way they are being loyal to the Church.”
The fire from this smoldering talk sent up so much smoke from Merton’s monastery that the order’s superiors soon doused it with censorship. It was routine that all of Merton’s books had to be approved by Trappist censors—one of whom was Fr. Paul Bourne, a Yale graduate and the novice master at Holy Spirit monastery in Conyers, George—but in 1962 the abbot general in France went further and quashed his war and peace writings. Pundrity on either church or secular politics is not in a monk’s job description. The hairshirt of this silencing, however, never became a straightjacket. Merton merely put his thoughts on militarism and the rest into his correspondence.
Merton’s written convictions against war were stronger than his personal ones. In more than several letters, he repeated his stand: “I am no absolute pacifist.” To Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker, he wrote that “It is true that I am not theoretically a pacifist. That only means that I do not hold that a Christianity not fight and that a war cannot be just.” Merton never explained how he or anyone can be a non-absolute pacifist, unless you are a pacifist between wars which is akin to being a vegetarian between meals. With Dorothy Day, a pacifist with no asterisks, he tried to have it both ways: “In practice I am with you, except insofar, only, as a policy of totally compromising pacifism may tend in effect to defeat itself and yield to one of the other forms of injustice.” This was loose talk. Merton didn’t—and couldn’t--back it up with specifics. Where has pacifism defeated itself? What injustice? What wars have been just? The Just War Theory, which has contaminated Roman Catholicism since Thomas Aquinas foisted it on the Church, has never been embraced by the three peace churches: Quaker, Mennonites and Brethren. The children in those communities are not raised to kill other people’s children
In times of conflict.
If Merton as the writer in residence at his monastery was becoming a critic of the country’s political leaders on issues of war, race and poverty, he was also at odds with the authorities in his own order. His resentment of the censorship led to diatribes in his journal about Gethsemani’s abbot, Dom James Fox. Crafty and conservative, Fox knew that Merton’s image as a spiritual master who renounced the world and its secular ways
was as important to the monastery as its sales of cheese, jelly and fruitcake. Fox once leveled with an outsider that Merton “has worked himself into a great brain fever, and he is blaming everyone else and his surrounding for his lack of peace—which is common to neurotics.”
A measure of inner peace did come when in the spring of 1966 when Merton fell in love with a student nurse at a hospital in Louisville where Merton was recuperating from back surgery. His relationship with a young woman who was half his age, writes one biographer, “was neither an encounter with a dream figure nor an experience of ‘woman-ness’ in the abstract. [She] was real and unique and responsive. With her, Merton was able to share not only deep passion but also what was in his heart and mind, if only for a brief time.” He wrote 18 love poems for her, including “I Always Obey My Nurse.”
The affair cooled after a few months, leaving Merton to lament two years later on the “incredible stupidity of 1966.”
In the summer of 1967 I wrote to Merton asking for his thoughts on monasticism, as well as his own doings, explaining that I would be writing a piece on the Trappists and the state of American monasticism for The National Catholic Reporter. Generously, Merton replied at length with three typed pages: “Thanks for your letter. Sounds interesting. I gladly contribute what ideas I can, and here they are. Use what you like or can. Under separate cover, I’ll send a couple of recent papers that are not in print and you can draw on them if you like.
There is real hope for monasticism in the overall world picture. I find such hope in African monasticism, in things like the Indian ashram of Dom Bede Griffiths, in the Protestant monasticism of Taize, in the Little Brothers and the less known, more monastic Brothers of the Virgin of the Poor. But as to the established monastic institutions in America, I would not say that I was exactly ‘hopeful.’ Some of them seemed doomed to complete inertia. Others--like Gethsemani, Conyers, et.al—are trying to be progressive but are caught in a bind that makes real originality and creative solutions seemingly impossible. They are committed to the organizational approach, hence to building the institutional image before all else. They are not exactly bad or decadent, but in their decent prosperity, their commitment to permanent security, to their established position, their traditional place of dignity in the Church, they are bound to a certain inevitable rigidity and conservatism, no matter how hard they try to appear progressive. They thought that changes like a vernacular liturgy were revolutionary, and already in less than two years they have discovered that they were not even especially significant. Recent changes in observance will make the life more tolerable but not more meaningful. These monastic institutions have to a great extend failed in their promise to give their postulants deeply meaning and creative lives. People are now looking elsewhere. These big Cistercian and Benedictine monasteries may survive, but they have no real future unless they show themselves suddenly capable of really radical change.
The misfortune of established monasticism, in America as elsewhere, is that for over a thousand years it has been solidly and completely identified with what Carl Amery called ‘milieu Catholicism’ and which he analyzed in Germany. Milieu Catholicism is Catholicism which is so completely committed to a social and established milieu that when there arises a choice between the Gospel and the milieu, the choice is not even visible. The milieu wins every time, automatically. In such a situation there may perhaps be saints and even prophetic individuals. But the institution will strive in every way either to suppress them or to absorb them. Instead of exercising a prophetic or iconoclastic function in the world, instead of being a dynamic and eschatological sign, such monasticism is occupied entirely in constructing a respectable and venerable image of itself, and thus ensuring its own survival as a dignified and established institution.
3. Can the younger generation in these monasteries really make a dent in the
prevailing conservatism? Is the progressivism of the young really in accord with
the monastic charism? Or is it merely another version of secular apostolic witness?
These are questions I cannot answer. I know there is a real ferment going on in
monasteries. Unfortunately, there is a lot of ambiguity about basic values. For
instance the term ‘contemplative life,’ already in some ways suspect theologically
today, is used more and more negatively as the ‘non-active’ life. In other words,
‘contemplation’ is reduced to its juridical significance: cloister and attendance in
choir. The term ‘contemplative life’ is being used defensively as an excuse to
keep monks in the monastery, to keep them out of contact with the problems and
needs of the world, in short to keep them out of dialogue with the world. This is
disastrous. Such a use of the term will bring complete discredit on the real value of
contemplation. In a clumsy attempt to protect the monastic life, this negativism
will only sterilize it and guarantee its demise.
4. What am I doing personally? Without going into details, I can say I am to a
great extent living on the margin of life at Gethsemani and concentrating on my
own personal development and my contacts with people in my own fields, such
as poets and other writers and artists; Buddhists, Hindus, Sufis and people
interested in the mystical dimension of religion, whether Christian or other.
These contact remain however very limited. I had a very interesting invitation
to go to Japan and visit the chief Zen centers there but permission to go was
categorically refused. My superiors, in a state of almost catatonic shock, said:
‘But this would be absolutely contrary to the contemplative life.’ Comment on
this is not necessary. The invitation emanated incidentally from a Jesuit who is
is a consultor on the Commission for Non-Christian Religions, from a Japanese
Bishop and from a Superior of the Order in Japan.
I think that ought to cover the waterfront OK. Any further questions? Feel free
to ask. I’d be very interested in seeing the article, incidentally. God luck, best
wishes, God be with you.
P.S. Please for the love of God take care not to represent me in any way as a
spokesman for the Order; I am anything but. I think that ought to be obvious
enough, and surely you know it if you were in Georgia!!. Where is Fr. Charles
[Jack] English these days? Still in the Bahamas?
Merton’s letter was a gold mine, sparkling with candor and insights, and little dross. When the article ran, titled “Renewal Crisis Hits Trappists,” Merton, despite being given a fair amount of space for his views, was rankled. On December 23, 1967, he wrote to a nun: “Colman McCarthy’s article was extremely slanted, I thought, and I got slanted along with him by the way he quoted me. Actually, I agree with him to some extend about the failure of the contemplative orders up to a point. I don’t think they are really contemplative; they have emphasized externals more than anything; they have been rigid rather than disciplined, etc. They have not formed contemplatives. Yet there are contemplatives around, in spite of everything. But I don’t think Colman McCarthy has a clue as to what it is all about. He knows that the official Trappist life isn’t working, and that’s correct. But he has no idea of what a real contemplative life might possibly be.”
It isn’t altogether clear that Merton’s own notions of contemplation had the kind of precision he demanded from others. His 1949 work, “Seeds of Contemplation” was revised for a book in 1962 which was followed by “New Seeds of Contemplation,” leading to quips that the new seeds were needed because the old ones didn’t grow. How did Merton define contemplation? Take your pick. “Contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness, an awakening to the Real within all that is real.” Or : “The experience of contemplation is the experience of God’s life and presence within ourselves not as an object, but as the transcendent source of our own subjectivity.” Or: “Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself fully awake.” Or: “Contemplation, by which we know and love God as He is in Himself, apprehending Him in a deep and vital experience which is beyond the reach of any natural understanding, is the reason for our creation by God.”
Near the end of his life, Merton described himself in an essay in Commonweal: “This is simply the voice of a self-questioning human being who struggles to cope with a turbulent, mysterious, demanding, exciting, frustrating, confused existence.”
Merton was right about that. He was one of us, after all.