War, Self, and Peace in Thomas Merton

Professor McCarthy

Literature of Peace

Due: 21/4/04

War is hell: a ‘hackneyed’, ‘dull’, and ‘ponderous’ statement, which any person will nod in agreement, saying, ‘sure is.’ These words have become meaningless and evoke about as much emotional response as batting a fly with a rolled up newspaper, but this expression is not entirely lost to the graveyard of unsalvageable cliché’s. Thomas Merton’s book New Seeds of Contemplation sheds light on these words. Merton not only explains the true hell that war is, but also he accurately captures the general misconception of peace, by exploring the definitions of self, hell, war, and peace, and clarifying these grossly distorted concepts. He is able to challenge the standard definition of peace, and despite the books copyright date of 1961, Merton’s words have not lost an ounce of truth.

To truly understand the ‘Mertonian’ approach to peace, one must first understand the ‘self.’ Merton draws a distinction between the superficial self and the genuine self. “There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.” (7) The true self is discovered only through the realization that the ego and autonomy of ‘I’ is a faulty concept, and one must become aware of the connection between the self, God, and every other individual to be liberated from the false self, which subsists entirely on selfishness and the notion that ‘I am separate.’

This definition of the self is key to understanding hell. Merton describes hell as ‘a perpetual alienation from our true being, our true self, which is in God,’ (7) Thus, a person who fails to realize his true self lies in what the false self would call the sacrifice of autonomy, will experience hell. A person’s alienation from God results in the worship of the false self, which is the worship of nothing. “To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell.” (26)

Merton transforms the mainstream version of hell with fire and brimstone into something plausible and understandable, something realistic. Hell exists on earth. In fact, hell is cancerous manifesting itself within the body and mind. Merton continues to describes hell not only as alienation from God, but also alienation from one’s fellow man. “Hell is where no one has anything left in common with anybody else except the fact that they all hate one another and cannot get away from one another and from themselves.” Thus, the separation from God, the paradigm of love, creates a world of hatred and subsequently hell.

Merton does not explicitly explain war as hell rather he pinpoints the source of war. “At the root of war is fear: not so much the fear men have of one another as the fear they have of everything.” Fear stems from the individual’s failure to accept responsibility for wrongs he commits. This inability to assume responsibility causes him to become obsessed with evils within him and others, leaving a scapegoat as the only viable solution to alleviating his obsession. “We have created for ourselves a suitable enemy, a scapegoat in whom we have invested all the evil in the world. He is the cause of everything wrong. He is the fomenter of all conflict. If he can only be destroyed, conflict will cease, evil will be done with, there will be no more war.” (114) By transforming the evil within oneself into a non-existent super evil, which is called the ‘enemy,’ war is necessitated as a means of exterminating this evil.

The projection of one’s own evil onto an enemy is the denial of one’s true self and idolization of the false self. One who cannot accept his own imperfections and wrongs believes himself to be flawless. By worshiping his own perfection, this individual falls prey to worship of nothing, which as Merton explains is hell. The rejection of one’s true self and the projection of evil onto an enemy create a perpetual need for violence, thus a perpetual hell. Once the enemy is exterminated, the false self remains inside the individual, and therefore the evil remains, so another scapegoat must designated. It is not until each individual is able to come to terms with his own evil and his true self that this cycle can be broken. “’Being wrong’ is something we have not yet learned to face with equanimity and understanding. We either condemn it with god-like disdain or forgive it with god-like condescension. We do not manage to accept it with human compassion, humility, and identification. Thus we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more of less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed.” (116)

Merton is not condemning everyone with ‘god-like’ disdain or condescension, rather he is indicating where everyone’s (including his own) attentions should be focused, the search for the true self. Only through self-realization and rejection of the false self are war and hell in danger of disappearing. “So instead of loving what you think is peace, love other men and love God above all. And instead of hating the people you think are warmakers, hate the appetites and the disorder in you own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed—but hate these things in yourself, not in another.” (122) True peace comes from within, and the cessation of violence is only possible by defeating faults within oneself that foster greed and tyranny not ignoring them.

Peace cannot be achieved while the false self remains in place. Merton points out, “I am born in selfishness and therefore my natural efforts to make myself more myself more real and more myself, make me less real and less myself, because they revolve around a lie.” (47) The individual who does not escape the stranglehold of the false self inevitably, despite good intentions, goes astray. Therefore, those who seek peace, seek a false peace for a false self. “The peace the world pretends to desire is really no peace at all. To some men peace merely means the liberty to exploit other people without fear of retaliation or interference. To others peace means the freedom to rob others without interruption. To still others it means the leisure to devour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed those whom their greed is starving. And to practically everybody peace simply means the absence of physical violence that might cast a shadow over lives devoted to the satisfaction of their animal appetites for comfort and pleasure.” (122) These faulty definitions of peace are derived from a self that is ‘born in selfishness’ and never challenged but coddled and praised.

All those who fight to preserve their individuality with which their sense of peace depends upon do not realize the inherent paradox that lies within their hyperactive need for ‘individualism.’ The meaning of the word individual means inseparable stemming from the Latin individuus ‘indivisible.’ Thus the quest to become an individual means recognizing the self as a part of whole, existing in every other man and in God. Only then will hell, war, and violence be eliminated and true peace achieved. Yes, ‘war is hell,’ but so is life, so is peace, unless the false selves become true selves and true individuals.