Today we Remember Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968) Thomas Merton - TopicsExpress



          

Today we Remember Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968) Thomas Merton was a wild young man and an artist, until one day he became a Trappist monk. Thus far goes most people’s recollection of him. The fact that this Trappist monk was far from silent, writing extensively on spirituality and also (more controversially) on what he saw as the correct application of spirituality to world affairs, is less often remembered; which, at least as far as the spiritual works are concerned (some may feel that the political aspects have dated somewhat) is a sad thing. Probably Merton’s greatest work was his spiritual autobiography, Seven Storey Mountain (called Elected Silence in early, abridged UK editions). Here is an appreciation of it: What people need is somebody who is capable of telling them of the love of God in language that will no longer sound hackneyed or crazy, but with authority and conviction: the conviction born of sanctity. To summarise the plot of Seven Storey Mountain in a sentence, it is the story of how a rather wild young man settled down to become a Trappist monk. This sounds a little like St Augustine’s Confessions but although they are of the same literary genre, the books couldn’t be more different. Augustine savours too much of Grand Opera to be readily assimilable. Thanks to an expensive rhetorical education, he spends half his time in bel canto arias to the Almighty and the other half beating his breast – starting with his confession of how wicked he was even in the cradle, where he used to yell when he wanted his parents to do things for him. Meanwhile, Merton, a poet rather than an orator, writes of himself that “Free by nature, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born... loving God and yet hating him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers” – altogether more likely in the modern world! Principally what makes the Mountain worth reading is that as he looks into his past Merton loves himself and forgives himself, and loves and forgives everyone else too. This doesn’t mean that he thinks that what he did was good, just that he looks on it dispassionately and sees its proper place in his life. He has drunk of Dante’s Lethe and Eunoë, and so remembers his sins “only as an historical fact and as the occasion of grace and blessedness” (Dorothy L. Sayers, introduction to the translation of Dante’s Purgatorio). Merton starts his narrative by seeing himself in relation to God, and that’s how it continues. Everything is seen in terms of its true context within his life and its true significance in the course of it and there are a few surprises, as when we see William Blake and James Joyce leading him towards baptism. If this sounds rather ponderous, it isn’t. It isn’t ponderous precisely because it is orthodox. The new man that he has become is like the New Law given by Christ: not a rejection of the old but a fulfilment; and so he loves his old self, like all the rest of God’s creation, but with clear eyes, distinguishing the good from the bad; seeing good in unexpected places and assessing its nature and usefulness. Merton’s prose style is deceptively relaxed. It looks so effortless that you think there’s nothing to it; until you try to reshape one of those laid-back sentences and realise that it’s a tautly efficient machine and that it says what it has to say in half the number of words that anyone else would need. One very different author with the same quality of writing is P.G. Wodehouse: again, you don’t notice how good Wodehouse’s writing is until you stop to examine it. That style is an important reason for the success of the form Merton adopts: straight autobiographical narrative, drawing morals, where it seems natural, in occasional brief digressions. The longest of these mini-sermons is three paragraphs long, and most are shorter; but his prose style, his poet’s command of ideas and feelings, and his sound knowledge of scholastic theology make them worth more than three pages of anyone else, and so interesting that you find yourself looking forward to the next one. Another contrast with Augustine is his sense of humour. No-one can be all bad who says of Michelangelo’s Moses that “I’m glad the thing couldn’t speak, for it would probably have given out some very heavy statements”; or of Platonic philosophy that “there is a considerable difference between Plato and Plotinus, but I am not enough of a philosopher to know what it is. Thank God I shall never again have to try and find out, either.” Even when he performs some meritorious action, he scrupulously points out his mixed motives. Here he is on the way to hospital to be treated for appendicitis: ‘In the Fourteenth Street subway there was a drunk. And he was really drunk. He was lying prostrate in the middle of the turnstiles, in everybody’s way. Several people pushed him and told him to get up and get out of there, but he could not even get himself up on his feet. ‘I thought to myself: “If I try to lift him out of there, my appendix will burst, and I too will be lying there in the turnstiles along with him.” With my nervousness tempered by a nice warm feeling of smugness and self-complacency, I took the drunk by the shoulders and laboriously hauled him backwards out of the turnstiles and propped him up against the wall. He groaned feebly in protest. ‘Then, mentally congratulating myself for my great solicitude and charity towards drunks, I entered the turnstile and went down to take the train to the hospital. As I looked back, over my shoulder, from the bottom of the stairs, I could see the drunk slowly and painfully crawling back towards the turnstile, where he once again flung himself down, prostrate, across the opening, and blocked the passage as he had done before.’ Thus he skilfully deflates the whole drama and convinces the reader that the act was at once infinitely unimportant and infinitely worth doing. This is, of course, true of everything we do; but the truth is easier to assimilate when you see it in action. Rational poets aren’t too thick on the ground, but Merton is one. He can convey emotion both subtle and intense – and also argue. In our supremely emotionalistic and anti-rational age this is rather refreshing. Even his anti-war activities show this clear-headedness, all the more noticeable because there wasn’t much of it on either side of that debate. In a letter to a draft board in support of a conscientious objector, he says that pacifism is an allowable Christian position, but that just wars can exist [and he gives the criteria]; that it’s up to an individual’s conscience to decide whether any particular war is just; and that he thinks that Vietnam can’t be [and he gives his reasons]. Compare the clerics from the anti-nuclear movement who seem determined to prove the absolute moral depravity of anyone who opposes them. And how many anti-nuclear clerics also write letters of spiritual support to soldiers serving in the very war to which they object? Obviously we ought to read the Mountain in order to be better Christians. If we hadn’t been brainwashed by the world’s rhetoric (and by the Church’s acquiescence in it) that would be reason enough, since becoming better Christians automatically means that whatever we do becomes better too. But if we need other reasons, we should read it for its insight into the spiritual plight of modern man, and, above all, so that we can apply his way of thinking in our own political thought. In a cogent passage towards the end of the book, Merton synthesizes both the active and contemplative lives: essentially, he says that the active life is valueless unless it is the result of an overflow of contemplation into action. That says something about the way we should approach things. And perhaps the ultimate lesson of Seven Storey Mountain is that if we think there is something that we’ve got to do, it may really be our vocation, and in any case we should throw ourselves into it as if it were.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 12:31:51 +0000

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