Peter Dale Scott
The Many-Gated City:
.
(4944 words, 7495 with notes)
I want to praise Thomas Merton today as a poet and as a contemplative. Yet my favorite books by Merton are neither his Collected Poems nor his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain. In saying this, I am not disparaging those works, only saying that I am not the right reader for them; they are too confidently assertive for me. The works of Merton I most appreciate are those of his later years as his mind opened to new influences: in particular Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, The Way of Chuang Tzu, New Seeds of Contemplation, and the whole arc of his development into a seeker, as traced in his journals and their summary The Intimate Merton, especially from the mid-fifties on. I find that over and over, the later Merton thinks and speaks for me; and I have used him to speak for me in my poetry.
Merton and the
Reconciliation of East and West
Merton absorbs and advances upon the concern in
the great
poets of an earlier generation, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Rilke, that
western
civilization risks losing its spiritual center, which the East can help
restore. One sees this concern also in prewar novelists from Kipling
and
Michener to Aldous Huxley and Hermann Hesse, and again in the large
numbers of
westerners who have traveled to
I see this not just as a trend in the world today, but as a necessary complement on the spiritual level to the secular processes of globalization going on at a materialist level. The secular process, unimpeded, threatens to homogenize and eradicate local cultures; the spiritual process, of revivifying their core values, is vital for their preservation. Late in my life, I have come to think of this as one of the most necessary tasks in today’s search for peace – both inner and outer.
Thus I agree with Merton:
I think that we have
now reached a
stage of (long overdue) religious maturity at which it may be possible
for
someone to remain perfectly faithful to a Christian and Western
monastic
commitment, and yet learn in depth from, say, a Buddhist or Hindu
discipline or
experience. I believe that some of us need to do this in order to
improve the
quality of our own monastic life and even to help in the task of
monastic
renewal which has been undertaken in the
I want to take this famous remark, written for a
talk in
I see this new development as central to, not as a
digression from, the continuing evolution of our religion and indeed of
our
entire culture. It is only the latest stage, and not the last, of a
process
going back to Alexander the Great. Asoka sent Buddhist emissaries to
the West
who may have influenced both the Essenes and Egyptian monasticism.[2]
St. Francis searched for peace and understanding in his dialogue with
Sultan
Malik-al-Kamil of
But the evolution I am talking about, towards Merton’s stage of religious maturity, is not confined to such external contacts. At the very center of our culture is the Socratic awareness that wisdom consists in knowing the extent of one’s own ignorance; and this so-called aporesis has been compared to Buddhism’s (and thus Merton’s) search to search for insight beyond words.[5]
I apologize for this brief whirlwind gust of name-dropping, but it is my way of stressing the cultural and historical importance of Merton’s trip to the east, and above all of his three meetings with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Many besides Merton have engaged in this pursuit of convergence, towards which we would be tending even without him. But the meeting between Merton and the Dalai Lama was a kind of spiritual summit, whose consequences are still being felt in such manifestations as the Gethsemani Encounters, and the movement for engaged spirituality.
The Dalai Lama himself has confirmed how important Merton was for him: “for the rest of my life, the impact of meeting him will remain until my last breath."[6]
A western Tibetan monk has confirmed to me that until meeting Merton the Dalai Lama had been unimpressed by contacts with other religious leaders at religious congresses, which seemed excessively verbal and mired in doctrinal differences. What the Dalai Lama and Merton talked about was not doctrine but practice, their shared practice of meditation. Since then the Dalai Lama has been a leader in continuing the Mertonian project of reconciliation, refining the search for inner peace, and finding new ways, including scientific research, to bring that inner peace into the world.[7]
I also agree with Merton that this process of religious convergence is not just an opportunity, but a necessity for human survival:
If the West continues to underestimate
and neglect
the spiritual heritage of the East, it may hasten the tragedy that
threatens
man and his civilizations. If the West can recognize that contact with
Eastern
thought can renew our appreciation for our own cultural heritage,..then
it will
be easier to defend that heritage, not only in
For Merton in his late years the goal was to work towards a condition of simplicity and emptiness, in contemplative experience liberated from doctrinal particularities. How this convergence becomes possible as a result of practice is explained by Merton himself in New Seeds of Contemplation (265):
"[A] mature contemplative is far more simple than any child or any novice, because theirs is a more or less negative simplicity-the simplicity of those in whom potential complications have not yet had a chance to develop. But in the contemplative, all complexities have begun to straighten themselves out and dissolve into unity and emptiness and interior peace.[9]
An eloquent witness to this need for spiritual emptiness in peace work and nonviolence is the evolution of Mohandas Gandhi. Although his settled task was political, to achieve Indian self-rule through nonviolence, Gandhi, who began as a British barrister, eventually pledged himself to spiritual poverty, even celibacy, to achieve the concentration necessary for his goal.[10]
Merton and the Great
Poets of the Last Century
I said at the beginning that I would speak about Merton as a poet. Even though I do not particularly care for most of his published poems, Merton is for me a true poet, as defined in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:
The
true philosopher and the true poet become what they are when they `go
beyond’
philosophy and poetry, and cease to be `philosopher’ or to `be poets.’
It is at
that point that their whole lives become philosophy and poetry – in
other
words, there is no longer any philosophy or any poetry separable from
the unity
of their existence. Philosophy and poetry have disappeared….From such
unified
existence come the aphorisms of great Asian contemplatives or Christian
saints
– and the poems of Zen masters.[11]
I find this applicable to Merton in two senses. The first is that Merton, like Gandhi, committed himself totally to the search for pure emptiness by his vows of renunciation. The second is that his unified existence empowered him to draw upon energy from the peace of his inner being when writing about the need for peace in the world.
Returning to the greatest poets of the last century – Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Rilke – I find all of them characterized by search for unity in their existence.[12] Significantly, all four sought an alternative to the materialist civilization of the west in the spirituality of the East.
If this were a literary lecture I would read from
Yeats’
“Second Coming” (“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”) and his
sonnet
“Meru”, where he turns from the ravening thought of
Eliot, Huxley, and
Merton on Reunification in Self and Society
When I
wrote my
political science dissertation on The Social and Political Ideas of
T.S. Eliot,
I was particularly struck by a passage in one of his shorter
uncollected
essays:
I believe that at the present time the problem of the unification of the world and the problem of the unification of the individual, are in the end one and the same problem, and the solution of one is the solution of the other. Analytical psychology (even if accepted far more enthusiastically than I can accept it) can do little except produce monsters, for it is attempting to produce unified individuals in a world without unity; the social, political, and economic sciences can do little, for they are attempting to produce the great society with an aggregation of human beings who are not units but merely bundles of incoherent impulses and beliefs. The problem of nationalism and the problem of dissociated personalities may turn out to be the same.[13]
I took this linking of inner to external unification as a leitmotif for my own intellectual life, including my transition from the externalities of social science to the internal explorations of teaching literature.[14] In the course of years I have come to think of this interdependence between inner and outer unity – both as a problem and as a potential solution -- as obvious. Yet I believe that I have never found it expressed so clearly by another author, until reading Merton.
Eliot’s life story is the reverse of Merton’s:
beginning as
an American, he migrated to mature culture of
Merton crossed borders in the other direction.
After
becoming American, he not only envisaged the same problems, but took
steps to
do something about them.[15]
While in
Then in New York he read in Huxley’s Ends and Means that there was the possibility of liberation from this condition, for self and society alike, but only by a “change of heart,” and specifically by returning to that ascetic ideal of non-attached enlightenment to be found in a Cistercian monastery or Zen meditation hall.[17] To the end of his life, Merton would offer as an alternative to Marxism this assertion of the transformation of consciousness as the key to both personal and social change, an insight that he had found in Huxley and also in Blake.[18]
In his 1938 review of Huxley’s book, Merton also stressed the non-violent historical impact on society of eastern contemplative values, in contrast to the self-defeating violence of western politics.
But over against the
values
emphasized by Gautama, Confucius, Tsze-Sze, and Lao-Tsu, which combined
to
shelter most of
A decade later, though more suspicious of Huxley’s possible heterodoxy from a Catholic viewpoint, Merton was still grateful for the “conversion” wrought in him by Ends and Means: “My hatred of war and my own personal misery in my particular situation and the general crisis of the world made me accept with my whole heart this revelation of the need for a spiritual life, an interior life, including some kind of mortification.”[20]
Huxley’s emphasis on reconciliation in the heart, as the key to peace in the world, is echoed by Merton three decades later, in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:
If I do not have unity in myself, how can I ever think, let alone speak, of unity among Christians? Yet, of course, in seeking unity for all Christians, I also attain unity within myself. The heresy of individualism: thinking oneself a completely self-sufficient unit and asserting this imaginary "unity" against all others....
The true way is just the opposite: the more I am able to affirm others, to say "yes" to them in myself, by discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am. I am fully real if my own heart says yes to everyone.[21]
Merton had
expressed a similar thought prospectively about himself and
Christianity in his
journal on April 28, 1957, at the end of an interesting and subtle
engagement
with the Christian universalism of the Russian Orthodox writer Nicolas
Berdyaev:
If I can unite in myself, in my own spiritual life, the
thought of the East
and the West, of the Greek and Latin fathers, I will create in myself a
reunion
of the divided Church, and from that unity in myself can come the
exterior and
visible unity of the Church. For, if we want to bring together East and
West,
we cannot do it by imposing one upon the other. We must contain both in
ourselves and transcend them both in Christ.”[22]
In the previous paragraph, Merton had just faulted Berdyaev’s expansive search for the Spirit beyond the witness of the New Testament. But in Conjectures, Merton has come to sound very much like a universalist himself:
“So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking of nothing. There is much that one cannot ‘affirm’ and ‘accept,’ but first one must say ‘yes’ where one really can.
“If I affirm myself as Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.”[23]
Merton’s Gradual
Ascent Towards Apophatic Convergence
It is no longer the unity of Christianity that concerns Merton, but a global unity of spirit.
He both reaffirms Christianity as his gateway to that heavenly city, and also acknowledges that it is a many-gated city, to which other religions have access through their own specific paths. This opening of his mind is reflected in what is for me the more gracious open style of his later writings, where he has advanced from the didactic affirmations of The Seven Storey Mountain to a questioning awareness in the presence of the Unknown.
My preference for the later Merton was shared by Merton himself. As he
wrote in
1967 to a fellow monk, “When I first became a monk, yes, I was more
sure of
‘answers.’ But as I grow old in the monastic life and advance further
into
solitude, I become aware that I have only begun to seek the questions.”[24]
The commonality he sees in the solitude shared by religions has been called apophatic insight, an insight achieved through negation and emptying. (The normal meaning given to “apophatic” in our dictionaries -- from the Greek for “without appearance” -- is “pertaining to a knowledge of God obtained through negation,” as in St. John of the Cross.[25] But Merton sees a commonality embracing also Buddhists, and Buddhists see that commonality as well.)
Merton began to explore this commonality with
non-Christians
in the 1950s, when, according to Br. David Steindl Rast, Merton
corresponded
with Hindu scholars about the similarities between the Yoga Sutras of
Patanjali
and
Merton also explored this higher level of convergence in his communications with Muslim Sufis, with whom he was put in contact by the Christian Arabist Louis Massignon. From one Sufi he accepted approvingly the phrase “What is best is what is not said.”[27] To another he wrote
Strictly speaking I have a very simple way of prayer. It is centered entirely on attention to the presence of God and to His will and His love. That is to say that it is centered on faiths by which alone we can know the presence of God.”[28]
This personal remark in a private letter has helped inspire the subsequent practice of “centering prayer,” developed as a “response to the Vatican II invitation to revive the contemplative teachings of early Christianity.”[29] As someone who has listened to many vipassana dharma talks during Buddhist retreats, I am amazed at their similarity to Basil Pennington’s description of centering prayer -- except that in vipassana we focus on our breath, instead of on a sacred word such as “God.” The aim in both cases is to become detached from the train of one’s thoughts (or what American meditators call our monkey-mind), and enter into a liberated state of “unknowing..”[30]
That this commonality is meaningful, and finding embodiment in various communities, is corroborated by the extensive references to Merton and use of his texts on websites that are variously Christian, Jewish, Sufi, Hindu, Theravadan, Mahayana, Tibetan, or Zen.[31] One learns also from Google searches how Merton’s writings have aroused the suspicions of some Catholics, who fear that the essence of Christian doctrine is being lost.[32]
Thomas Merton Seen
from a Practical Buddhist Perspective
Merton learned a great deal, in one sense perhaps even too much, about Buddhism. It is a shame that his life was cut off before he had a chance to experience much practice of it. He read difficult books, and had complex discussions with Tibetan teachers in the esoteric Red Hat tradition. In his French-trained manner, he continued to write about and analyze Buddhism, like everything else he encountered.
But it is striking to a practicing meditator how little chance he ever had to actually sit on a cushion in a Buddhist sangha.
This might have added to what he already knew about the “blessing of a quiet, alert, concentrated, fully `present’ meditation.”[33] One wonders whether, if Merton had had the chance to sit more, in the shikantaza tradition of “just sit,” he might not gradually have become less involved in his strenuous self-debate and self-rebuke, the difficulties of becoming a saint. It is true that Buddhists also are supposed to focus on attaining nirvana, but Buddhist practice offers many points of accessible equanimity along the way.
Suzuki Roshi (not to be confused with Merton’s D.T. Suzuki) expressed this succinctly in his book title, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. The goals Merton writes about, detachment, compassion, equanimity, are also developmental processes, processes quickly experienced in the very course of opening one’s mind to them. Speaking as a lay person, and avoiding technical distinctions, one can say that early results of Buddhist practice are experiences, however fleeting, of calm and detachment, leading in time to a feeling of metta, usually translated as loving-kindness, a sense of a benevolence toward all beings, without selfish attachment. The more one practices, the stronger this experience becomes, along with other related experiences of the kind explored by Merton.
I originally presented this talk at a conference entitled “Peace – A Transforming Vision.” It was a title I could have chosen myself. But we should avoid the usual connotations of the word “vision” – because visions are often conceived of in western tradition as something received from outside – such as the vision of Christ’s nativity received by Saint Bridget.
The focus of Merton’s practice is to see what is already within us. In his words, “At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusions, a point of pure truth ... This little point ...is the pure glory of God in us. It is in everybody."[34]
The object of meditation practice is not only to see but to come to peace with what is already within us. By a cultivation of detachment, compassion, and equanimity, meditation can also help us not just to envision but to experience it and to be changed, in a gradual clarification of what we already are.
Visionary Spiritual
Awareness and Nonviolence
Let us dwell for a moment on Merton’s vision of “point of pure truth,” because it is the key, even if only glimpsed from outside our center, to recognizing that we are only truly fulfilled in ahimsa or nonviolence. To quote Merton again (who in turn is paraphrasing Gandhi):
Ahimsa (non-violence) is for Gandhi the basic law of our being. That is why it can be used as the most effective principle for social action, since it is in deep accord with the truth of man’s nature and corresponds to his inner desire for peace, justice, order, freedom, and personal dignity.[35]
Merton’s statement about the “pure glory of God”
which “is
in everybody,” is a visionary, not an empirical assessment of humanity.
He
himself made this point when describing his very Blakean epiphany of
compassion
in the city of
I wondered how I would react at meeting once again, face to face, the wicked world. I met the world and found it no longer so wicked after all. Perhaps the things I resented about the world when I left it were defects of my own that I had projected upon it. Now, on the contrary, I found that everything stirred me with a deep and mute sense of compassion . . . I seemed to have lost an eye for merely exterior detail and to have discovered, instead, a deep sense of respect and love and pity for the souls that such details never fully reveal. I went through the city, realizing for the first time in my life how good are all the people in the world and how much value they have in the sight of God.[36]
It is also a very old vision, dating back to the axial age writings of the Buddha, Mencius, and the Psalms.[37] We find a philosophical expression of it in Plato’s explanation of how committing violence harms the healthy soul, even though most souls may not recognize this until they have turned (i.e. converted) from contemplating the shadows before us in the cave to the light behind us, the ideas already in our mind..
But Merton was of two minds about the wickedness
of the
world. Rejection of the world underlay his description of Gethsemani,
on his first
to visit to it, as “the center
of
For Merton in 1941 the counterpart to seeing
Gethsemani as
the center was to see
It is because of this inhumanity, according to
Merton, that "All
men should be willing to engage in the risk and wager of ahimsa because
violent
policies have not only proved bankrupt but threaten man with
extinction.”[41]
Merton became obsessed in particular with the threat facing the world
of
nuclear annihilation, and above all by
One sees a dialectic in Merton’s writings between radical alienation from the earthly city and radical engagement with it, that was still being worked out when he died. In my opinion this inner conflict was not a weakness but to his credit, an appropriate response to the conflicted world around him.[43] It explains why he is still a prophet and a guide for so many different kinds of people today, from devout monastics to atheist activists. Paradoxically, his inner dividedness has helped make him a major leader, indeed a prophet, guiding diverse movements towards global reunification.[44]
The Relevance of
Thomas Merton Today
There is a special timeliness today to his message – and Gandhi’s message – that a successful nonviolence movement, even if it includes large numbers of those called “non-believers,” needs to have leaders who are grounded in an other-worldly spirituality. The American nonviolent movements of the 1960s were experiments in what might be called Gandhism-lite, a kind of well-intended comfortable benignness with little emphasis on inner bhavana or self-development. The prevailing slogan was “make love not war,” – with its focus on making love rather than embodying love. But it is much easier to make love than be love, and some of the movement’s leaders were interested only in the former.
It is no secret that the antiwar movement of the 1960s, much as I was proud to be part of it, suffered limitations which left a dubious legacy. Gradually in the 1960s its truly nonviolent and loving spokespersons, such as Merton’s friends A.J. Muste and Joan Baez, were edged to one side by social manipulators and Weathermen. All power corrupts, even power in the streets.[45] In the absence of emphasis on inner peace the 1960s anti-war movement eventually withered, despite its initial visions of working for a radically changed society.
I am not at all pessimistic about nonviolent
power, which
has continued to grow and diversify immensely since the 1960s. But I
have
argued in The Road to 9/11 that the
greatest protest success stories – the civil rights movement in the
south,
Solidarity in
I believe we do not see enough of that
spirituality in the
visibly enfeebled anti-war movement of today. There are of course many
reasons
why only about 1000 people gathered in
I am not saying this to be a red-baiter: I want to
be a
uniter, not a splitter. I happen to know some of the RCP leaders and
can enjoy
talking to them. My objection to them is indeed that they espouse
violence in a
way that I do not. Because of this I think they are false prophets,
false not in
the sense that they are dangerous (which they aren’t) but in the sense
that they
are irrelevant – relics from a past era with the old failed recipe of
“revolution first.” I am confident that if there ever is a successful
revolution in
The nonviolence of Thomas Merton, in contrast, may never dominate a mass movement. But the inspirational examples of activists like Jim Forest, Father John Dear and Jim Douglass is I think the true path forward for consolidating peace, in ourselves and in the world.
As Merton once wrote to Dan Berrigan. "The real job is to lay the groundwork for a deep change of heart on the part of the whole nation so that one day it can really go through the metanoia we need for a peaceful world.”[49]
And to prepare for it we must work on the world as well as on ourselves.
[1] Thomas Merton, “Monastic Experience and East-West Dialogue” (Notes for a Paper to have been delivered at Calcutta, October 1968),” Asian Journal, 313.
[2] Francis Legge, Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity From 330 BC to 330 AD (1915).
[3]
Maria
Rosa Menocal ,The Ornament of the World:
How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in
Medieval
[4] Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake (Shambhala Publications, 1981).
[5] Robert Ellis “How Buddhist was Plato?” http://www.purifymind.com/BuddhistPlato.htm;
Edward,Conze, 'Buddhist Philosophy and its European Parallels,' in Bruno Cassirer, Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies, 1967. [I believe with T.S. Eliot that true cultures are inherently spiritual, a truth neglected in today’s global mass society. And I believe with Merton that true cultures tend to open their horizons in this way. In other words, I cannot believe in or fear the prospect raised by Samuel Huntington, of a “clash of civilizations.” True civilizations never clash – only barbarisms clash.
And I hope to make sense of Merton’s claim that this focus on a spiritual convergence is a necessary response to the secular threats besetting our world.]
[6] Dalai Lama, in A dialogue on the Spiritual Life by Buddhist and Christian Monastics, Spring 1996, http://unanswerables.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html. Cf. Alan Altany, “The Thomas Merton Connection: What Was the Christian Monk Looking to Find in His Dialogue with Buddhism?”
http://www.thomasmertonsociety.org/altany2.htm: “The Dalai Lama would later say about Merton that `more striking than his outward appearance which was memorable in itself, was the inner life which he manifested. I could see that he was a truly humble and deeply spiritual man. This was the first time I had been struck by such a feeling of spirituality by anyone who professed Christianity.’ The Franciscan priest and author Murray Bodo relates that `the Dalai Lama credits Merton with opening his eyes to the truth that Tibetan Buddhism does not hold the world’s only truth. “As a result of meeting with him, my attitude toward Christianity was much changed… Thomas Merton is someone we can look up to. He had the qualities of being learned, disciplined and having a good heart’’”
[7] “I feel that we Buddhists have much to learn from our Christian brothers and sisters. We are all aware of the inner peace that can be found in prayer and meditation, but our Christian friends may have a richer experience of bringing that inner peace to bear in practical ways in the generous service of others…. I hope that Christians, Buddhists, people of all faiths and people without faith will approach . . . the Gethsemani Encounter with the same rigorous curiosity and courage for which Thomas Merton was renowned” (HH the Dalai Lama, “Reflection,” Gethsemani Encounter #1, http://www.monasticdialog..com/a.php?id=628.
[8] "Mystics and Zen Masters," p. 46.
[9]
New Seeds of
Contemplation, 265.
Significantly,
this quotation can also be found on line on a Zen discussion site. The
two
words “emptiness” and “concentration,” which occur so often in the
later pages
of New Seeds of Contemplation, from
which this quotation was taken, remind me powerfully of the dharma
talks I
would listen to on my silent Buddhist retreats.
I believe that this convergence towards
unity and emptiness is a task for the times, and that it can only be,
as Merton
and others have discovered, a spiritual task. I myself have
participated in
non-spiritual efforts, such a various peace movements, all of which
failed
because of the noticeable, indeed the striking, lack of inner peace in
the participants..
There was also an instructive effort at a special conference to meld a
global
resistance movement among poets, on the theory that poets, with
faithful access
to inner truth, would not succumb to the divisions created by political
struggles. Two of the participants at the conference almost came to
blows. As
soon as a woman from
[10]
Jonathan Schell, The
Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
(NewYork: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2003), 114-15. It was a monk
from
[11] Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 267. I do not know whether or not Merton was conscious of Emerson’s aphorism: “The true philosopher and the true poet are one; and a truth which is beauty, and a beauty which is truth, is the aim of both” (National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 416).
[12] Yeats was of course heavily influenced, as was Merton, by the life and writings of Blake.
[13]
T.S.
Eliot, `Religion Without Humanism,' in Norman Foerster (ed.)
Humanism and
[14] My own version of the right quest for unity, expressed in both my poetry and prose, is: “The social sciences without the humanities are not scientific; the humanities without the social sciences are not humane” (Minding the Darkness, 67).
[15]
“This
afternoon I suddenly saw the meaning of my American destiny – one of
those
moments when many unrelated pieces of one’s life and thought fall into
place in
a great unity toward which one has been growing. My destiny is indeed
to be an
American -- not just an American of the
[16]
Thomas
Merton , The
[17]
Aldous Huxley, Ends
and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods
employed
for their Realization (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1937), 1-5.
Huxley,
an immigrant to America like Merton, saw ascetic non-attachment not
just
traditionally as an end in itself, but as a means to achieve the ideal goal generally desired, from Isaiah to
Marx, of “liberty, peace, justice and
brotherly love” for all. Cf.. James Harford, Merton and
Friends (New York: Continuum, 2006), 18-19; Bernfried
Nugel, Uwe Rasch, Gerhard Wagner (eds.), Aldous
Huxley, Man of Letters: Thinker, Critic and Artist – Proceedings of the
Third
International Huxley Symposium Riga 2004 (Münster: LIT, 2007), 48.
[18] Merton, Asian Journal, 116, 330-33.
[19] Thomas Merton, “Huxley and the Ethics of Peace,” The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New York: New Directions, 1981), 460
[20]
Merton
, The
[21] Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 128-29.
[22] Intimate Merton, April 28, 1957, 116.
[23] Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 129; cf. Asian Journal, 316.. Earlier Merton wrote to Czeslaw Milosz on January 18, 1962: “I cannot be a Catholic unless it made quite clear to the world that I am a Jew and a Moslem, unless I am execrated as a Buddhist and denounced for having undermined all that this comfortable and social Catholicism stands for: this lining up of cassocks, this regimenting of birettas” (Merton, Striving Towards Being, 137)
[24]
Quoted
in Robert Reilly, “Two Sides of the Same Coin,”
[25] Cf. Thomas Merton. A Search for Solitude. Journals, volume 4, ed. Lawrence S. Cunningham (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 46-47; Intimate Merton, 114: “Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names. Teach me to pray on this side of the frontier, here where these woods are..”
[26] David F.K. Steindl-Rast, O.S.B., “Destination: East; Destiny: Fire – Thomas Merton’s Real Journey,” in Thomas Merton: Prophet in the Belly of a Paradox, ed. Gerald Twomey (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 149.
[27] Letter from Sidi Abdesalam, http://fav.or.it/post/910231/thomas-mertons-letter-to-sufis-and-views-on-sufism.
[28] Final note in the correspondence with Abdul Aziz:
[29] “History of Centering Prayer,” Contemplative Outreach, http://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_history_prayer
[30] M. Basil Pennington (1986), "Centering Prayer: Refining the Rules," "Review for Religious," 46:3, 386-393. Cf. Gustave Reininger , The Diversity of Centering Prayer, 15.
[31]
E.g. “The Spirituality of the Future by
Rabbi Zalman
Schachter-Shalomi,”
[32] E.g. Jackie Alnor, The Contemplative Dark Thread,”
http://www.apostasyalert.org/Merton.htm:
“He held to the belief that all
religions
had the same basic truth and Christianity could not lay claim to the
whole
counsel of God. This put him on shaky ground in his own religion that
professes
to be the `one true church.’”; cf. Anthony E. Clark, “Can You Trust Thomas Merton?
http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/2008/0805fea1.asp.
[33] Intimate Merton, 256.
[34] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1989), 157-58. Cf. Merton in Patrick Hart, Thomas Merton, Monk, 81: “We have what we seek. We don’t have to rush after it. It is there all the time, and if we give it time it will make itself known to us.”
[35] Thomas Merton, Gandhi on Non-violence, 23; cf. 6: "Gandhi's non-violence was not simply a political tactic which was supremely useful and efficacious in liberating his people. On the contrary, the spirit of non-violence sprang from an inner realization of spiritual unity in himself. The whole Gandhian concept of non-violent action and satyagraha is incomprehensible if it is thought to be a means of achieving unity rather than as the fruit of inner unity already achieved" (emphases in original).
[36] Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas, 91-92. Cf. Blake's argument in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (45) that "everything that lives is Holy."
[37] “Axial age“ is an English rendering of the German term Achsenzeit ("axis-era") used by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers to describe the era (roughly 800 BC to 200 BC) when thinkers like Lao Tzu, the Buddha, and Plato delineated a new and more refined spirituality liberated from tribal practices.
[38]
Journal, April 7, 1941, Eastertime; Run to the Mountain, 333; Intimate
Merton, 28. A few lines down this evocation of Eliot’s “Ash
Wednesday,” written by Merton at Eastertime, becomes even more
explicit: “This
is the only real city in
[39]
Journal, April 7, 1941, Eastertime; Run to the Mountain, 333; Intimate
Merton, 28. In 1960 Merton again complained about our “idiot
civilization
that is going down to ruin and dragging everything down with it” (Intimate Merton, 165).
[40] Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable, 5-6.
[41] Thomas Merton, Gandhi on Non-violence, 23.
[42]
Merton,
Cold War Letters, ed. Christine M.
Bochen and William H. Shannon. (
http://www.americamagazine..org/content/article.cfm?article_id=5405.
[43] Reading T.V. Murti on the “middle path” of Madhyamika Buddhism moved Merton to reflect both on the “inner contradiction of my own drama” and “the inner contradictions of the system” (Asian Journal, 116, 118). Cf. Merton, The Sign of Jonas, 11: “Like Jonas himself I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox.”
[44] Googling for Thomas Merton In February 2009, I found 896,000 hits, including 6,150 in Chinese, 5250 in Japanese, 2,720 in Korean, 3,600 in Hungarian, and 770 in Russian.
[45] Cf. Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1989, 86: “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone with everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
[46] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11, 250-54.
[47]
[48] The influence in the anti-war movement of the RCP and WWP – much publicized by the right -- was both conceded and discounted in 2002 by Steven Mikulan, a movement supporter: “International ANSWER (Act Now To Stop War and End Racism), … is the creation of a Trotskyite sect called the Workers World Party, which noisily supports such pleasure domes as North Korea and Yugoslavia under Milosevic. Similarly, the Not in My Name project, which sponsored a celebrity anti-war petition campaign, can be traced back to the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, who, like the WWP, has nary a discouraging word to say about Saddam Hussein — or any anti-American tyrant and guerrilla movement.
While these concerns, expressed by people
like Todd
Gitlin and Christopher Hitchens, are legitimate reservations, they miss
the
point. For 40 years nearly every movement either for labor unions or
against
war and institutional racism in this country was spearheaded by the
Communist
Party,
The dominant role of such groups didn’t, contrary to what people are telling themselves today, destroy the peace movement” (Steven Mikulan, “Following the Flags in San Francisco,” LA Weekly, November 1-7, 2002, http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1104-06.htm). I disagree with Mikulan’s complacent last sentence, and I believe my dissent is corroborated by the anti-war movement’s subsequent collapse.
[49] Quoted by Father John Dear, “Thomas Merton and the Wisdom of Nonviolence,” http://www.fatherjohndear.org/speeches/thomas_merton_wisdom.htm.