The hidden ground of love: the letters of Thomas Merton.

The Hidden Ground of Love

HERE is the first of a projected four volumes that will share with us the inner thoughts of the befudding, and at times somewhat befuddled, great American Catholic thinker of the twentieth century. William Shannon has done an outstanding job of selecting and editing the correspondence of the famous convert to Catholicism Thomas Merton, known in the Trappist Order as Father Louis. The archives of the Merton Center house more than 3,500 letters from Merton to more than a thousand people: No wonder that a year before his strange death in 1968, he could declare that he found himself "under an avalanche of mail."

The present volume contains letters on matters of religious experience and social concerns. The list of correspondents is impressive, including popes and cardinals, government officials and theologians, psychologists and political activists. At times the roll call sounds like an assembly of the Radical Chic of the Sixties: Ernesto Cardenal, Corita Kent, William DuBay, Rosemary Ruether, Joan Baez, Malcolm Boyd, Bernard Haring, Ivan Illich, Gordon Zahn, Daniel Berrigan, Lewis Mumford; it is interesting to note that most of these who then claimed Catholicism as their faith have since apostatized, while those in the priesthood and religious life have generally returned to the lay state. From the correspondence, one gets little indication that Merton did anything to forestall such defections; in point of fact, it seems that Dorothy Day had her work cut out for her, trying to make Merton himself less negative toward the Church.

The letters reveal a brilliant man with wide-ranging interests and abilities: war and peace; ecumenical dialogue with individuals and groups as diverse as the Shakers, Buddhists, and Moslems; psychology; the Chinese language. One also meets a man given to overstatement and hasty conclusions, rather judgmental and uncharitable at times, holding seemingly contradictory opinions of persons and events. Thus out of left field comes the pronouncement that "Stokely Carmichael is the incarnation of Satan," similar to his feelings toward Lyndon Johnson. As early as 1958, Merton needed barbiturates to get to sleep, and by his own admission, caused scandal on occasion by his attachment to champagne and gin, which he apparently could not handle, even prescinding from his monastic vocation, which would seem to call for moderation if not abstention. Although wittingly or unwittingly a prime mover in efforst to secularize the Trappists, he frequently expressed concern about the galloping secularization of the United States and frowned on post-Conciliar liberal Catholics who were so taken up with their agenda that they reserved no place for monasticism in their revised ecclesiology.

Merton's style could tend to the vulgar at times and is characterized by a bizarre and alm ost obsessive apocalypticism. While castigating notables in private conversations with friends, his letters to dignitaries show him gushing and groveling when dealing with them directly. He was more than a little manipulative in getting Roman friends to try and exert pressure from above to bring local superiors to do his bidding (usually without success). In addition to the thousands of letters, the reader receives the distinct impression that Merton was besieged (quite willingly) by a constant flow of visitors, not exactly in keeping with a life given over to contemplation.

Nevertheless, Shannon says these letters "tell the sotry of the maturing of a contemplative." I must sadly dissent from such an evaluation, at least from a Catholic perspective.

The letters are arranged in chronological order, according to recipient. In this way the reader can trace the growth of Merton's relationship with an individual, as well as the development of his thought. This is not as simple as might appear at first glance, however, because Merton is not at all consistent in what he says to one correspondent and another. Extreme vacillation is evident in the later years, as well as a strongly anti-institutional attitude toward both church and state. Let a few examples suffice.

In 1941 Merton wrote to Catherine de Hueck Doherty that the Vatican is the "only free and just state in the world," and further that "when you live under the same roof as the Blessed Sacrament there is no need to go outside looking for anything." By 1958, he had begun to speak of a desire for a "new kind" of monastery in which contemplation would be but one of many activities, among which would be the conducting of seminars of an ecumenical nature and leading programs of political protest or social activism. During Vatican II, he condemned monasticism for its "rigid and legalistic set of rules." In 1966 he declared: "I no longer profit much by [the Order's] teachings and its programs." A year later, to Rosemary Ruether, he admitted to thoughts of "abandoning the Church" because "I understand Zen Buddhists better than I do [Catholics] and the Zens understand me better." Already in 1959 he had said: "If I could not breathe Zen I would probably die of spiritual asphyxiation." It was undoubtedly sentiments like these that caused Merton's abbot in 1964 to accuse him of manifesting a "dual personality.c

At the same time, he accurately predicted to a nun in 1965 that "we will absolutely not see any real peace and perfection in religious life in the next ten or 15 years." In the early Sixties, he still had an excellent sense of good ecumenical dialogue; he was also an early proponent of the seamless-garment approach to the issues of abortion, contraception, and nuclear war. In 1967 he wisely observed that Roman Catholics "are getting themselves into the same sort of confusion as the Protestants, with an yone and everyone rushing about in all directions." Ironically, he could not see that often his superiors were trying to keep him from falling into the very same trap. As the years went by, Merton's traditional devotion to the Eucharist and the Blessed Virgin gradually faded; they were no longer mentioned, positively or negatively, except that in 1968 he wanted to reserve the Blessed Sacrament in his hermitage. Again, the recurring spiritual schizophrenia.

At a personal level, Merton emerges as a man of great restlessness, always wanting to be where he could not go and generally dissatisfied once there. Not surprising, then, that he should write to Daniel Berrigan in 1964 that he was a "burnt-out case," and in 1968 that he had a "churned-up gut."

The reader of The Seven-Storey Mountain may find it hard to recognize that Merton in these letters. However, it might be well to consider a few points. First, his books and articles underwent extensive revision by the Order's censors, a process he increasingly and bitterly resented. Second, in many ways Merton may have been the textbook case of the American religious who thought rebellion in the Fifties but waited until the Sixties to embark upon a program of action. After all, some time before Vatican II Merton told a Jewish woman, "You must understand by now that I do not entertain formally conventional notions of the Church."

Shannon opens this well-ordered volume of letters, with its helpful comments and notes, by quoting Vulliamy: "Of all documents, [letters] are the most essentially human." And the most revealing.