Maverick Philosopher

Thomas Merton and the Beat Generation

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The Beauty of the Solitary Life

Thomas Merton, The Journals, vol. 6, 24 June 1966, p. 344: "The beauty of the solitary life . . . is that you can throw away all the masks and forget them until you return among people."

For, as one of my aphorisms has it, "The step into the social is by dissimulation."

Before I quit my cell, I put on my face, don my mask, go gray, and try not to appear too intense.

'Nuclear' Thoughts on Dylan's Birthday

We've gotten used to living under the Sword of Damocles:

One of its more famous [invocations] came in 1961 during the Cold War, when President John F. Kennedy gave a speech before the United Nations in which he said that “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”

We seem not too worried these days. If anything, the threat of nuclear war is greater now than it was in '61 and this, in no small measure, because we now have a doofus for POTUS. I shudder to think what would have become of us had Joey B. been president in October of 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. People were worried back then, but now we have worse threats to worry about such as white supremacy and climate change.  In those days  people were so worried that they built fallout shelters. There was much discussion of their efficacy and of the mentality of their builders. Rod Serling provided memorable commentary in the Twilight Zone episode, The Shelter, that aired on 29 September, 1961.  

Thomas Merton, in his journal entry of 16 August 1961, his former contemptus mundi on the wane and his new-found amor mundi on the rise, writes  

The absurdity of American civil defense propaganda -- for a shelter in the cellar --  "come out in two weeks and resume the American way of life."

. . . I see no reason why I should go out of my way to survive a thermonuclear attack on the U. S. A. It seems to me nobler and simpler to share, with all consent and love, in what is bound to be the lot of the majority . . . . (Vol. 4, 152)

In the entry of 31 May 1962 (Ascension Day), Merton reports that a friend

Sent a clipping about the Fallout shelter the Trappists at O. L. [Our Lady] of the Genesee have built for themselves. It is sickening to to think that my writing against nuclear war is regarded as scandalous, and this folly of building a shelter  for monks is accepted without question as quite fitting. We no longer know what a monk is. (Italics in original. Vol. 4, 222)

Now today is Bob Dylan's birthday. Born in 1941, he turns 82.  As you know, Merton, though born in 1915, was by the mid-'60s a big Dylan fan.  And so in honor of both of these acolytes of the '60s Zeitgeist, I introduce to you young guys  Dylan's Let Me Die in My Footsteps which evokes that far-off and fabulous time with as much authority as do Rod Serling and Tom Merton. A Joan Baez rendition. The Steep Canyon Rangers do an impressive job with it.

Dylan hails from Hibbing, Minnesota hard by the Canadian border near the Mesabi Iron Range. The young Dylan, old beyond his years, tells a tale from a woman's point of view in North Country Blues.

I have often wondered why there are so many Minnesotans where I live. Minnesota, gone 'woke,' is bleeding population. High taxes is one reason. Another is crime:

The second, and even more important reason I'm leaving Minnesota is that crime has destroyed much of what I used to enjoy in the Twin Cities. Up until a few years ago, I thought to avoid being a victim of violent crime all I needed to do was avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But today in the metro area, every place could be the wrong place at any time of every day.

A few weeks ago, a resident of bucolic St. Anthony Park was shot dead outside his home at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday. Car thefts are up 95% this year in Minneapolis, and carjackings, a crime seldom heard of before 2020, occur every week throughout the metro. At the recent Art-A-Whirl studio tour in northeast Minneapolis, a 70-year-old woman was sent to the hospital when she was randomly punched in the face as she crossed the street to go to a restaurant on a Friday evening.

Because of high crime, the downtown Minneapolis restaurants I used to enjoy are closing early or permanently. The Basilica Block Party is gone, and you couldn't pay me to attend the new Taste of Minnesota July 4th block party on Nicollet Mall after last year's July 4th mass shooting and private fireworks anarchy. Even the State Fair at night has become a risky proposition.

As Rep. Ilhan Omar asked recently, "What happens if I am killed?" But unlike her, I don't have armed security — instead, I have to rely on the police for protection. Yet Minneapolis remains more than 100 officers short of the minimum required by its charter, and the too-few applicants who do apply should be automatically rejected for bad judgment in wanting the job.

Again, contrast this with Southwest Florida, where the police ranks are full, the restaurants are open, and violent crime is still a rarity. It's a pretty easy decision to live in an area where I don't have to plan my exit from a concert as if I were leaving a Philadelphia Eagles home game wearing a Vikings jersey.

The last reason I'm leaving Minnesota is because of a lack of hope. I'm a realist, and realism tells me there's nothing more I can do to help prevent Minnesota's decline. Not only its declining public safety, but also its declining public schools, its hopelessly irrational light-rail transit system and its eroding future.

I know our current leaders won't solve these problems because they won't even acknowledge they exist. Minneapolis recently unveiled a new multimillion-dollar ad campaign to draw visitors into the city to "see what all the fuss is about" because "negative perceptions" have "overshadowed" the positive. Unfortunately for that campaign's credibility, the "fuss" on the day it was announced was about six people under the age of 18 shot in Brooklyn Center.

Do you like crime? Then vote Democrat early and often.

Lifestyle Rightism

Sohrab Ahmari is against it. Clean living and self-improvement are no substitute for political action. One form of Lifestyle Rightism is Rod Dreher's Benedict Option which Ahmari dubs "the New Frontierism" and criticizes for its ahistoricity.

Ahmari's article rehearses  one aspect of the old problem of activism versus quietism. Can one productively blend the two? I am pulled in both directions. I expose my inner conflict over at Substack.  

And that brings me to the topic of inner conflict. One of the reasons I am so fascinated by Tom Merton is because he was one conflicted hombre caught between contemptus mundi and love of the world and its blandishments. He couldn't keep quiet about The Silent Life (the title of one of his better books) and was quite obviously driven by a desire for literary fame. The guy is lovable because so human unlike, perhaps, the man referred to in The Sacred Monster of Thomism, which details the life and legacy of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, that most paleo of the neo-Thomists. (Richard Peddicord, O. P., St. Augustine's Press, 2005) But when it comes to intellectual penetration, Garrigou-Lagrange far surpasses the loose, literary, and liberal Merton. I read both, respect both, and am grateful for both.

Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Substack latest. Excerpt:

One of the worst features of some New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions and prohibitions. But what often happens in practice is that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Tom Merton, Baez, Dylan, and Ry Cooder

Thomas Merton, though 51 years old in 1966, was wide open to the '60s Zeitgeist -- all of it.  The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Six, p. 93, entry of 10 July 1966:

Borrowed  a record player and  played Joan Baez over again -- and now really know "Silver Dagger" (before I had the melody confused with "East Virginia"). One record I like more and more is Bob Dylan's Highway 61 [Revisited].  

On p. 324, Merton references Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man. YouTuber comment:

One of the greatest songs ever written. I just love it. It describes so accurately the feelings we had back in the 60s. Everything was strange and new and brilliant. Music was everywhere, all with different sounds and lyrics. Dylan was right in the middle of it. There are so many good songs on his albums. If you aren't familiar with him you should listen to some of his stuff.

In the same volume of Merton's journal we find "A Midsummer Diary for M" and on p. 305:

All the love and death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez's song, "Silver Dagger." I can't get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself -- and yourself for me, in a way.

Ry Cooder, He'll Have to Go. The old 1960 Jim Reeves country crossover hit.

Ry Cooder, Good Night Irene.  Leadbelly.  Eric Clapton's rendition at a 1982 English Christmas party. 

Ry Cooder, Yellow Roses. The old Hank Snow tune.

Ry Cooder, Maria Elena. An old standard from circa 1932.

Ry Cooder, Paris, Texas. Excellent evocative video.  Great YouTuber comment:

Man I have been gone way too long. I miss America, the open road, the wild west. I remember staying in hotels with just a dozen rooms or so, and only maybe four of them in operation. Twenty seven bucks and bed springs so squeaky we had to make love on the floor. Walking out to the pay phone, a billion stars in the sky, I need to try and find my way back again.

A Contemplative Nun on Thomas Merton

This just over the transom from Karl White:

Hope you're well. May be of interest.

‘I have never met a real contemplative who found Merton useful’: Letters reveal Sister Wendy’s ambivalence about Gethsemani’s famous monk | America Magazine July 30, 2018 Dearest Robert, I feel about [Henri Nouwen] as I do about Thomas Merton. There is much self-deception and muddle in their lives; and yet there is an unwavering concentration on God. www.americamagazine.org

Hi Karl,

Your message arrives at an opportune moment. The day before yesterday I received Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Christian Perfection and Contemplation: According to St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross. Garrigou-Lagrange's work is the real deal from perhaps the hardest of the hard-core paleo-Thomists.

 

While reading the chapter on infused contemplation, I thought of Thomas Merton. Merton's sense of the reality of the Unseen Order was weak and underdeveloped because of the strong lure of the secular -- to which, however, he never entirely succumbed, pace the thesis of David D. Cooper's excellent but mistaken Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist (University of Georgia Press, 1989, 2008).  Cooper attributed the evolution (devolution?) to Merton's failure to achieve infused contemplation. As I read him, however, Merton never lost his faith. He did, however, remain to the end deeply conflicted. All the Merton commentators that I have read agree that he came to question the contemptus mundi he expressed in The Seven Storey Mountain.  As for whether or not Merton attained infused contemplation, if he had why are there no references to it in his journal? There is a paucity of spiritual disclosure in those private pages of a monk who one would think would reveal the most intimate secrets of his inner life. I have read all seven volumes of his journal several times over. He is one of those key figures without whom you cannot understand the 'Sixties.

 

Thanks for the link.  I read the Ellsberg-Sr. Wendy correspondence with interest.

 

Regards,

 

Bill

And Then Along Came the 'Sixties

I can easily see
How Merton lost his way
By exposing himself
To events of the day.

St. Valentine's Day at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry, a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them -- like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

Three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addenda:

1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day.  Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements.  Recalling past inamorata while listening to sentimental songs  -- is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism?  But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life.  A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.

All men are false, says my mother,
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
The very next evening, they'll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.

Go court another tender maiden,
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.

Jack Kerouac: Religious Writer?

Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again, but I can't let her slip away without one more substantial Kerouac entry. So raise your glass with me on this eve of All Saint's Day as I say a prayer for Jack's soul which, I fear, is still in need of purgation before it is ready for the ultimate beat vision, the visio beata. We rest at the end  of the road, but don't assume that the road ends with death.

..........................

The Kerouac and Friends industry churns on, a recent product being Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats by Robert Inchausti, Shambhala (January 30, 2018), 208 pages.

From Scott Beauchamp's review:

The real tragedy of Kerouac’s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that’s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It’s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti’s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac’s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.

I'm a Kerouac aficionado from way back. I love the guy and the rush and gush of his hyper-romantic and heart-felt wordage.* He brings tears to my eyes every October. His tapes and CDs accompany me on every road trip. He was a writer who was religious, but a "religious writer"? It's an exaggeration, like calling Thomas Merton, who was a religious writer,  a spiritual master. I love him too, especially the Merton of the journals, all seven of which I have read and re-read, but he was no more a spiritual master than I am.  And then there is Bob Dylan, the greatest American writer of popular songs, who added so much to our lives, but deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature?  We live in an age of exaggeration. I submit that Flannery O'Connor is closer to the truth about Kerouac & Co.

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:

I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves.  That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do -- read them.  But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.  Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue.  They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline.  They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing.  It's true that grace is the free gift of God  but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial.  I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost.  As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything  but false mystics.  A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.

You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets.  The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)

Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors  she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such.  But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life. See Resolutions Made and Broken, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac. 

And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough  to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993)  Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful  title, apt, witty, and pithy!  

Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).

Lucky me, to have been both in and of the '60s. And to have survived.

_____________________

*'Wordage' to my ear embodies a sense between the pejorative 'verbiage'  and the commendatory 'writing.' I am reminded of Truman Capote's anti-Kerouac jab, "That's not writing; it's typewriting!" 

Addendum.  Vito Caiati writes,

I read with interest your post “Jack Kerouac, Religious Writer?” and it struck me that, with a bit of editing, Flannery O’Connor’s remark on “the true poet” might be applied to the too worldly Merton:  “The true monk is anonymous, as to his habits, but this boy has to look, act, and apparently smell like a monk” I feel that Merton’s superiors, who failed to check his wanderings of one kind or another, harmed his rich spiritual potential, which is most evident in the early journals. As the protagonist of Georges Bernanos’ Journal de un cure de la campagne observes,  when speaking of monks extra muros,  “Les moines sont d’incomparables maitres de la vie intérieur, . . . mais il en est de la plupart of ces fameux ‘traits’ comme des vins de terroir, qui doivent se consommer sur place. Ils ne supportent pas le voyage. ” Monks are incomparable masters of the interior life, . . . but most of these famous ‘traits’ [that they possess] like the terroir wines, must be consumed in place,  They do not support the trip.”

 

Vito,

 

Very good observation.

 

While deeply appreciative of monasticism with its contemptus mundi, Merton, desirous of name and fame, was wide open to the siren song of the world, which became irresistibly loud when the '60s came along. Had he been our age, would he have become a monk at all?  Had he lived beyond the age of 53, would he have remained a monk? 

 

I love his Journals. That is where you will find the real Merton.  As in Kerouac, a deep sincerity of the heart to break the heart.

 

I am familiar with Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest, which is both theologically penetrating and of high literary value. (I would not say that Kerouac's novels are of high literary value, but on the other hand, they are not trash like those of Bukowski.)

 

There are superb passages on prayer, sin, lust, and confession in Bernanos which I may post. 

 

But I haven't found the passage you cite. Where is it roughly? Near the beginning, middle, end?  I don't imagine you have an English trans.

 

It is always good to hear from you.

Jack Kerouac on Robert Lax

During his years of unsuccess, when he was actually at his purest and best, an "unpublished freak," as he describes himself in a late summer 1954 letter to Robert Giroux, living for his art alone, Kerouac contemplated entering a monastery: "I've become extremely religious and may go to a monastery before even before you do." [. . .] "I've recently made friends in a way with Bob Lax and I find him sweet -- tho I think his metaphysics are pure faith. Okay, that's what it's supposed to be." (Selected Letters 1940-1956, ed. Charters, Penguin 1995, p. 444.)

And then on pp. 446-448 we find an amazing 26 October [sic!] 1954 letter to Robert Lax packed with etymology and scholarly detail which ends:

I'm no saint, I'm sensual, I cant resist wine, am liable to sneers & secret wraths & attachment to imaginary lures before my eyes -- but I intend to ascend by stages & self-control to the Vow to help all sentient beings find enlightenment and holy escape from sin and stain of life-body itself [. . .] but thank God I'm a lazy bum because of that repose will come, in repose the secret, and in the secret: Ceaseless Ecstasy.

"Nirvana, as when the rain puts out a little fire."

See you in the world,

Jack K.

For information on the enigmatic hermit Robert Lax (1915-2000) , see here

Robert Lax: A Life Slowly Lived is especially good. Excerpts:

One of the touchstone words in Lax’s spiritual vocabulary was “waiting”. By this he meant being still, standing one’s ground, knowing one’s ground, but never quite knowing the reality of what was awaited, longed for. In his volume 33 Poems, recently reissued by New Directions, he puts it this way:

Wake up & wait. Lie down & wait. Sit up again & wait. All in the dark now. No way of telling day from night. Do I expect to hear a voice? See a light? A dim one? A bright one? See a face? I sit up. I’m alert. Do I know what to expect? [2]

“What you see,” said Paul Spaeth, keeper of the Lax archive at St Bonaventure, “is the opposite of what can be called social action. What you see is a slowing down and waiting on God. Very much in keeping with the monastic tradition. Also very similar to the Buddhist tradition of moment to moment mindfulness.”

Robert Lax with his two close friends: Thomas Merton (middle) and the abstract painter, Ad Reinhardt (left). Photograph courtesy of the Thomas Merton Center © Bellarmine University

Unlike his friend Thomas Merton, the Trappist poet and author who shared Lax’s interest in Buddhism and brought his name to the world in The Seven Storey Mountain, [3] Lax never lived a life of structured monasticism. A Jewish convert to Catholicism, he built for himself an interior monastery, within which he wrote, prayed, contemplated, and received many visitors: poets, painters, writers (he’d been friends with the legendary abstract artist, Ad Reinhardt, and with Jack Kerouac), and spiritual seekers.  “Lax can be thought of as a mystic,” said his biographer Michael N. McGregor, who nevertheless refrained from using that word in his book Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. [4] He shared his subject’s aversion to the superficiality of labels. He wanted readers to come to their own conclusions about who he was, what he was.

Steve Georgiou, a seeker from California and author of The Way of the Dreamcatcher, a book of dialogues with Lax, remembers their walks down to Skala, the Patmos harbour. “He would walk with a slow roll like the roll of a boat. He would take his meditative steps, encouraging you to slow down yourself and feel the actual experience of walking”. [5]

For Lax, there was no seam between walking, praying, writing. All experiences were to be fully absorbed, integrated into a life fully lived. Once Georgiou saw his friend writing a single word – “river” – over and over. He asked him why. “I want to live with the word for a while,” Lax said.

one word at a time.
I believe
I believe
that all people
should stop their fight;
I believe that one should
blow a whistle or
sing or play
on the
lute [6]

Visions of Tom: Jack Kerouac's Monastic Elder Brother

Thomas Merton's "spontaneous prose" is to be found in the seven volumes of his journals. That's where you will find the real Merton in all his depth and complexity, his faith, his doubts, his inner (and outer) conflicts, and his endless self-examination. I never tire of re-reading them.

 

This essay by Angus Stuart delineates some Kerouac-Merton parallels.

 

"Even the timing of their own deaths is remarkably close: Merton on December 10, 1968 and Kerouac less than a year later on October 21, 1969." Kerouac died of drink at age 47, Merton of electrocution at age 53.

On the 'Inconceivability' of Death

Or is death just a natural event like any other? Merton the monk triggers a Maverick meditatio mori. 

A Monk and his Political Silence

Substack latest

Somebody Else's Faith

Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. III, p. 251, from the entry of 25 January 1959:

He entered the monastery on somebody else's faith and lived there on somebody else's faith and when finally he had to face the fact that what was required was his own faith he collapsed.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thomas Merton

An activist judge wants to play the legislator. An activist monk wants to play the worldling.  Neither quite understands the nature of his 'job.'

Thomas Merton and Walker Percy

I have long been fascinated by the conflicted man revealed in Thomas Merton's Journals, all seven volumes of which I have read and regularly re-read.  He was a spiritual seeker uncomfortably perched between the contemptus mundi of old-time monasticism and 1960's social engagement and 'relevance,' to use one of the buzz words of the day.  He was hip to the '60s, its music and its politics, surprisingly appreciative of Dylan and Baez, and this despite being 50 years old in '65 when Dylan was 24. 

I recently came across a journal entry in which Merton praises Walker Percy's 1962 novel, The Moviegoer. Then I recalled that the philosopher and surfer Tim Mosteller who visited me a year or so ago, and acquitted himself well on a memorable hike in the Superstitions, had mentioned some work by Percy, whom I have never read, but will. A search turns up he following articles of interest to Merton aficionados:

An Interview with Walker Percy about Thomas Merton

Pilgrim in the Ruins

Merton's 'True Spirit'

Existentialism, Semiotics and Iced Tea   (Roger Kimball)

The Myth of the Fall from Paradise: Thomas Merton and Walker Percy

ADDENDUM (5/25)

Tim Mosteller writes,

I haven't read all of Percy's work, but I have enjoyed a lot of what I have read of him.

 

I simply can't recall which work of his I mentioned when I last saw you.

 

Here's his fiction that I have read:

 

The Moviegoer

The Last Gentleman

Love in the Ruins

Lancelot

The Thanatos Syndrome

 

I think that I looked over, but didn't really study his collection of philosophical essays, some of them quite good on C. S. Peirce and semiotics which were published in top-ranked philosophy journals.

 

Those essays are collected in The Message in the Bottle.  

 

Peter Kreeft is quite fond of Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book.  I think I've looked this one over too, but haven't read it.  Kreeft has an essay on this book in his C. S. Lewis for the Third Millenium, and I recall enjoying the essay.  In fact, I think that was how I got introduced to Percy.

 

I've enjoyed everything I've read by Percy.  It's rare to have a Christian writer who is a first rate philosopher (who was also a medical man) and a first rate novelist.  Some of his novels are quite graphic and disturbing, which as a rule I don't enjoy reading, but they are not gratuitous. 

 

Percy is too heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and C. S. Peirce, but his story-telling makes of for some of the things I disagree with from these thinkers. 

 

Here is a great video lecture which Percy gave which captures a lot of his views:  "Walker Percy The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind"  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve1f83mxE7k

 

Hope this helps!

Thomas Merton on Henry Thoreau

Journals, vol. 4, p. 235, 8 August 1962:

Thoreau's idleness was an incomparable gift and its fruits were blessings that America has unfortunately never learned to appreciate. Yet he made his gift, though it was not asked for. And he went his way. If he had followed the advice of his neighbors in Concord, America would have been much poorer, even though he might have sweated a good deal. He took the fork in the road.

Old Henry David has meant a lot to me too. My mind drifts back to Wayne Monroe, high school history teacher, a grotesquely obese and superficial man who mocked Thoreau as  a hippy who didn't want to work.  "Freight Train Wayne," as we called him, drove a 1964 Pontiac Catalina. When he got in the vehicle it would list pronouncedly to the port side.  We observing wits would typically make a crack about his Monro-matic schock absorbers.

That Merton was drawn to Thoreau has something to do with my being drawn to both of them.  Thank you, gentlemen, for living your lives in your way and writing it all down for men like me to savor.  Hats off, glasses raised, your memory will be preserved by the like-minded and discerning.

Thoreau was a great aphorist. My favorite: "A man sits as many risks as he runs."  In those ten syllables, the sage of Walden Pond achieves aphoristic perfection. Study it if you would learn the art.

America may not have appreciated him, but the greatness of America is that it allows his like to flourish.

Success is living your own life in your own way.

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Spiritual Mountebanks

The world is full of hustlers and charlatans who prey upon spiritual seekers. One ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment or special powers. The acid test, perhaps, is whether they demand money or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. 'Bhagwan Shree' Rajneesh  is a good example from the '80s. 

Recoiling from the mountebanks, some go to the opposite extreme, holding as fraudulent all spiritual teachers.

Some people are gullible and credulous, without a skeptical bone in their bodies. Others are skepticism incarnate, unable to believe anything or admire anything. A strange case of the latter is U. G. Krishnamurti, the anti-guru and 'anti-charlatan.' Please don't confuse him with the much better known J. Krishnamurti.

An obsessive doubter and debunker, U. G. Krishnamurti is a bit like the atheist who can't leave God alone, but must constantly be disproving him. U.G. can't leave the enlightenment quest and 'spirituality' alone. It's all buncombe, he thinks, but he can't be done with it.

Buddha, Jesus, and the rest were all just kidding themselves and misleading others. But U. G. can't just arrive at this conclusion and move on to something he deems worthwhile. For he is an 'anti-quester' tied to what he opposes by his self-defining opposition to it. Curiously perverse, but fascinating. He is a little like the later Wittgenstein who, though convinced that the problems of philosophy arose from linguistic bewitchment, couldn't move on to something worth doing, but instead obsessively scribbled on in any attempt to show a nonexistent fly the way out of a nonexistent fly-bottle.

U. G. can't seem to take seriously any experience. Each is just an experience. None is revelatory or finally veridical. Religious and mystical experiences are no different than sexual or drug experiences. Before any experience can put him in contact with any reality, his skepticism dissolves it.

"Just an experience! What do I need more experiences for!"

Related: 

Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

The gullible Merton appears to have been taken in by Trungpa.

What is the Opposite of 'Desuetude'?

Consuetude. Disuse versus usages and customs.  

Conseuetudines Camaldulenses: Customs of the Camaldolese. Cf. Thomas Merton, Journal, vol. 5, p. 349.

Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment

Thomas Merton and Jean van Heijenoort were both studies in youthful idealism. Both made drastic life decisions early on, and both sacrificed much for their respective ideals. Van joined Leon Trotsky to save the world rather than attend the prestigious Ecole Normale in pursuit of a bourgeois career. While Van was motivated by a desire to save the world, Tom was driven by contemptus mundi to flee the world and retreat to a monastery, which is what he did in 1941 at the age of 26 when he joined the Trappists. A convert to Catholicism, with the zeal of the convert, he took it to the limit the old-time doctrine implied: if the temporal order is but a vanishing quantity, then one should live with eternity ever before one's mind.

Both became disillusioned,* but in different ways. Van lost his secular faith, broke with Marxism, and went back to the serene but lifeless precincts of mathematics to become a distinguished bourgeois professor of the subject.  Tom remained a monk but dropped the contemptus mundi. Van abandoned activism for mathematical logic and romantic affairs. Tom dropped his quietism -- not entirely, however -- and became active in human affairs, the peace movement in particular, during that heady period of ferment inside and outside of the Church, the 1960s.

Both met their ends in foreign venues by unusual means. Unable to stay put like a good monk in Gethsemani, Tom flew to Bangkok for a theological conference where he died of accidental electrocution in December of 1968 at the relatively young age of 53. Van's addiction to sexual love and 'romance' led to his destruction, and in the same Mexico City where the long arm of Stalin, extended by Ramon Mercader's ice axe,  finally slew his erstwhile mentor, Trotsky. Van couldn't stay away from Anne-Marie Zamora even though he believed she would kill him. Drawn like a moth to the flame he flew from Boston to Mexico City.  And kill him she did. While he was asleep, Zamora pumped a couple of rounds from her .38 Special into his head.  Trotsky was done in by the madness of politics; Van by the madness of love. 

What is the moral of this comparison?

Superior individuals feel the lure of the Higher. They seek something more from human existence than a jejune bourgeois life in pursuit of property, pelf, and social status.  They seek transcendence, and sometimes, like Marxist activists, in the wrong places.  No secular eschaton is "right around the corner" to borrow from the prevalent lingo of the 1950s CPUSA.  Man cannot save himself by social praxis. The question as to how we should live remains live. Tom chose a better and nobler path than Van. But can any church be the final repository of all truth? 

For sources, see articles below.

Related:

Like a Moth to the Flame

Trotsky's Faith in Man

A Monk and his Political Silence

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*Is 'disillusioned' a  predicate adjective of success? If a person becomes disillusioned about X, does it follow that X really is an illusion? Or can one be wrongly disillusioned about X, i.e. come to believe falsely that X is an illusion?  I would say that 'disillusioned' is not a predicate adjective of success.  

ADDENDUM (11/13): WAS THOMAS MERTON ASSASSINATED? 

This just over the transom from Hugh Turley:

Dear Mr. Vallicella,

In your article “Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment” you repeated a popular error when you wrote that Thomas Merton "died of accidental electrocution.”

 

It is understandable that you could repeat this mistake because there was deliberate deception to conceal the truth about Merton’s death and the falsehoods have been repeated for over 50 years.  In 2018 I co-authored The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation with David Martin.

 

There is absolutely no evidence to support the accidental electrocution story.

 

I invite you to visit our website and look at the official documents from Thailand concerning Merton’s death and find more information.  http://www.themartyrdomofthomasmerton.com

 

There is also a video of a presentation that I gave in New York City in September.

https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=9O1A7KHOUY2X

 

Yours for the truth,

 

Hugh Turley

I confess to not having considered, until now, the possibility that Merton was assassinated. So this is news to me and I take no position on the matter. The reviews of Turley's book I have so far located are all positive. If there has been an attempt to rebut his (and his co-author's) claims, I would like someone to let me know.  

 

Here is one of the favorable reviews. And here is a June 2019 article by the authors on the ongoing cover-up of what they take to be the truth.

Merton on the Monastic Journey

Thomas Merton, The Monastic Journey, p. 155:

If a solitary should one day find his way, by the grace and mercy of God, into a desert place in which he is not known, and if it is permitted to him by the divine pity to live there, and to remain unknown, he may perhaps do more good to the human race by being a solitary than he ever could have done by remaining the prisoner of the society where he was living.

Merton's life suggested that he wasn't really sold on the above idea. Merton the restless, Merton the conflicted. Human, all-too-human. See my Merton category for rich substantiation.

A Monk and His Political Silence

Mary Gordon, On Thomas Merton (Boulder: Shambala, 2018, 118):

By the late fifties Merton was deeply disturbed about his political silence.

Should he have been? This world is a passing scene. The temporal order is next to nothing compared to eternity. That is the old-time Roman Catholic teaching that justifies the world-flight of monks and nuns. From The Seven Storey Mountain we know that Merton understood and deeply felt the contemptus mundi enjoined by the monastic tradition. His sense of the vanity and indeed nullity of the life lived by the worldly, and the super-eminent reality of the "Unseen Order," a phrase I borrow from William James, is what drove Merton to renounce the world and enter the monastic enclosure. Despite his increasing critical distance from the enthusiasms and exaggerations of the book that brought him instant fame, he never lost his faith in the reality of the Unseen Order. He never became a full-on secularist pace David D. Cooper, Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist, University of Georgia Press, 1989, 2008. Although Cooper is wrong in his main thesis, his book is essential reading for Merton enthusiasts.

To repeat, the conflicted monk never lost faith in the Unseen Order. But the reality of said Order is not like that of a ham sandwich. To the world-bound natural man, the 'reality' of such a sensible item cannot be doubted despite its unreality and insignificance under the aspect of eternity. But the Reality of the Unseen Order can. It is given to those to whom it is given fitfully and by intimations and glimpses. Their intensity does not compensate for their rarity. They are easily doubted. The monastic disciplines are insufficient to bring them on. Meanwhile the clamorous world won't shut up, and the world of the 'sixties was clamorous indeed. The world's noisy messages and suggestions are unrelenting.  No surprise, then, that Merton wobbled and wavered. Cooper describes him as a failed mystic (Chapter 6) who never reached infused contemplation.  I agree with that.  This is why it is foolishly hyperbolic when his fans describe him as a 'spiritual master.' But I don't agree with Cooper that Merton resolved his conflict by becoming a radical humanist. He remained conflicted. 

Merton came to realize that the monkish ideal of a life of infused or passive or mystical contemplation was unattainable by him.  That, together with his literary ambition and his need for name and fame, threw him back toward the world and drove the doubts that made him disturbed over his political silence.

It's a hard nut to crack. If you really believe in God and soul, then why are you not a monk? And if you are not, do you really believe in God and the soul?  

I enjoyed Mary Gordon's book very much and will be returning to it.  The lovely feminine virtue of sympathetic understanding is on full display.

Review of Mary Gordon, On Thomas Merton

The review is by Gary WILLS, not Willis. It is well worth reading. But, as someone who has read all seven volumes of Merton's Journals, I find this unfair:

In 1965, to keep him [Merton] on the vast grounds of the abbey, the abbot approved a state of virtual secession within the monastery. Merton could live in his own hermitage, distant from the main house, where he asked that other monks not visit him. He said that he wanted more solitude, but he told the truth in his journal, that he wanted “all the liberty and leeway I have in the hermitage.” It gave admiring outsiders easier access to him and let him slip off the grounds to make unmonitored phone calls to them.

Merton was conflicted, no doubt, but his commitment to the eremitic life was genuine.

 

[Reviews] Shallow Calls to Shallow by Garry Willis | Harper's Magazine

Discussed in this essay: On Thomas Merton, by Mary Gordon. Shambhala. 160 pages. $22.95. 

On Keeping a Journal

Thomas Merton, Journals, Volume Two, p. 333, entry of 10 July 1949:

Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in the interior life as one sometimes thinks. When you re-read your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.

Merton the Conflicted

Thomas Merton's sense of the reality of the Unseen Order was weak and underdeveloped because of the strong lure of the secular -- to which, however, he never entirely succumbed, pace the thesis of David D. Cooper's excellent but mistaken Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist (University of Georgia Press, 1989, 2008).

Merton never lost his faith. He did, however, remain to the end deeply conflicted, so much so that some view his death by electrocution in Bangkok in December 1968 as a case of suicide. There is some plausibility to that conjecture, but I don't share the view.

If God Created the World, Who Created the Creator? A Good Koan?

Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. 5, p. 183, entry of 25 December 1964:

St Maximus [the Confessor] says that he who "has sanctified his senses by looking with purity at all things" becomes like God. This is, I think, what the Zen masters tried to do. A letter from John Wu spoke of running into [D. T.] Suzuki at Honolulu last summer. They talked of my meeting with him in New York. Suzuki was going to ask me a question but didn't. "If God created the world, who created the Creator?' A good koan.

Nice try, Tom, but surely that old chestnut, sophomoric as it is, is not a good koan. Or at least it is not a good koan for one who is intellectually sophisticated. And this for the reason that it is easily 'solved.'  A koan is an intellectual knot that cannot be untied by discursive means, by remaining on the plane of ordinary mind; a koan is a sort of mental bind or cramp the resolute wrangling with which is supposed, on an auspicious occasion, to precipitate a break-through to non-dual awareness.

God is the Absolute. The Absolute, by its very nature, is not possibly such as to be relativized by anything external to it. In particular, qua absolute, God does not depend on anything else for his existence or nature or modal status.  It follows straightaway that he cannot have a cause. If to create is to cause to exist, then God quite obviously cannot have a creator.  Since God cannot have a creator, one cannot sensibly ask: Who or what created God? Or at least one cannot ask this question in expectation of an answer that cites some entity other than God.

Classically, God is said to be causa sui.  This is is to be read privatively, not positively.  Or so I maintain. It means that God is not caused by another. It does not mean that God causes himself to exist. Nothing can cause itself to exist. If something could cause itself to exist, then it would have already (logically speaking) to exist in order to bring itself into existence. Which is absurd.

Equivalently, God is ens necessarium. In my book, that means that he is THE, not A, necessary being.  He enjoys a unique mode of necessity unlike 'ordinary' necessary beings such as the set of natural numbers. Arguably, there is a nondenumerable infinity of necessary beings; but there is only one necessary being that has its necessity from itself (i.e., not from another) and this all men call God.

Accordingly, to ask who created God is to presuppose that God is a contingent being.  Given that the presupposition is false, the question can be dismissed as predicated on misunderstanding.  This is why the question is not a good koan. It is easily solved or dissolved on the discursive plane. Nothing counts as a koan unless it is insoluble on the discursive plane.

"But if God doesn't need a cause, why does the world need a cause?" The short answer is: because the world is contingent. We must regress from the world to God, but then that at God we must stop.  No vicious infinite regress.

A Much Better Christian Koan: The Riddle of Divine Simplicity

I have just demonstrated to my own satisfaction that the old chestnut from John Stuart Mill is no good as a koan. But suppose we dig deeper. It is not wrong to unpack the divine necessity by saying that God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds. But it is superficial.  For this is true of all necessary beings. What is the ground of the divine necessity?

I would argue that the divine necessity rests on the divine simplicity according to which there are no real distinctions in God. See my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for details. This implies, among other things, that God does not instantiate his attributes; rather he is (identical to) them. God has omniscience by being omniscience, for example. As St Augustine says, "God is what he has."  The same goes for the other attributes as well. If you think about it you will soon realize that the logical upshot is that every attribute is identical to every other one.

God's being the Absolute implies that he is unique, but uniquely so. God is uniquely unique: he is not one of a kind, but so radically One that he transcends the distinction between kind and instance. God is not the unique instance of the divine kind: he is (identically!) his kind.  That is why I say that God is uniquely unique: he is unique in his mode of uniqueness. 

But surely, or rather arguably, this makes no discursive sense which is why very astute philosophical theologians such as A. Plantinga reject the simplicity doctrine. although he doesn't put it quite like that. (See his animadversions in Does God Have a Nature?) Almost all evangelical Christians follow him (or at least agree with him) on this. (Dolezal is an exception.) How could anything be identical to its attributes? To put it negatively, how could anything be such that there is no distinction between it and its attributes? 

We are beginning to bite into a real koan: a problem that arises and its formulable on the discursive place, but is insoluble on the discursive plane.

On the one hand, God as absolute must be ontologically simple. No God worth his salt could be a being among beings, pace my evangelical friends such as Dale Tuggy. On the other hand, we cannot understand how anything could be ontologically simple.  There are no good solutions to this within the discursive framework. There are solutions, of course, and dogmatic heads will plump for this one or that one all the while contradicting each other. But I claim that there is no ultimately satisfactory solution to the problem.  Note that this is also a problem for the divine necessity since it rest on the divine simplicity.

My suggestion, then, is that here we have a candidate for a good koan within Christian metaphysics.

The Ultimate Christian Koan

This, I have long held, is the crucified God-Man. It is arguably absurd (logically contradictory) as Kiekegaard held that God become a man while remaining God.  It is the height of absurdity that this God-Man, the most perfect of all men, should die the worst death the brutal Romans could devise, crucifixion.

If to accept this is to accept the crucifixion of the intellect, then here we have the ultimate Christian koan. 

On the 'Inconceivability' of Death

Thomas Merton poses the problem in his Journals, vol. 6, pp. 260-261, entry of 8 July 1967:

Victor Hammer is critically ill . . . . Death is shocking in anyone, but most shocking in the case of someone of real genius and quality and someone you know and love well. The blunt fact is that it is just not conceivable that Victor Hammer should cease to exist. This is a basic absurdity which [Albert] Camus confronted, and which religious explanations may perhaps help us only to evade. [. . .] Yet what is man that his life instinct should translate itself into a conviction that he cannot really altogether die? Where is it illusory and where not? To my mind this is a great and pertinent question and one worthwhile exploring metaphysically -- not by abstractions but by contemplative discipline and by a kind of mystical "pragmatism" if you like . . . . (italics added)

I agree with Merton that the problem needs to be attacked via "contemplative discipline," i.e., in a non-discursive way by meditation. But I disagree with the "not by abstractions" bit whereby Merton advertises his poetic and literary and anti-philosophical bias. The problem has to be addressed both discursively via the discursive intellect and also by meditative Versenkung. (A great German word that suggests sinking below the storm-tossed surface of ordinary mind into its quiet depths.)

But what exactly is the problem?

Some will say that there is no problem at all. Death is perfectly natural and easily conceivable. We know that we are animals and we know that animals die. (And stay dead!) A loved one's death may be shocking, especially if it is sudden, but it is certainly not inconceivable. It is no more inconceivable than the death of a cat or a dog or a flea or a flower.  

Yet when we think concretely and personally about death, our own death, and the deaths of those we love, we find ourselves agreeing with Merton and with Schopenhauer: "The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true." ("The Vanity of Existence" in The Will to Live, ed. R. Taylor, p. 229)  Let us assume that you love and cherish your wife. Your loving her has conferred upon her uniqueness, at least relative to you. (Josiah Royce) Now imagine her lovable and loving unique personality blotted out of existence forever.  Or consider your own case. You have devoted a lifetime to becoming who you are. You have worked steadily at the task of self-individuation. Only to become nothing? Could things be arranged so badly for us? But then the whole thing would be a bad joke.

Of course, what I have written does not show that it is not a bad joke. Maybe it is! (That's an epistemic use of 'maybe.') But then are you prepared to appropriate existentially this putative truth? In plain English: Are you prepared to live as if your life is a bad joke, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?" Or will you live in denial of what you take to be true?

The problem in its sharpest formulation is that it is both conceivable and inconceivable that one should cease to exist.  Assuming that no contradiction  is true, the task is to remove it. The task, in other words, is to show that the apparent contradiction is merely apparent.  Expressed as an aporetic dyad:

A. It is conceivable that one cease to exist utterly.
B. It is not conceivable that one cease to exist utterly.

The problem arises in the collision of two points of view, one objective and external, the other subjective and internal. Objectively viewed, we cease to exist utterly. Subjectively viewed, we don't. The problem is genuine and worth pondering because it is not easy to see how either point of view could displace the other in a fair and rational accounting. For this reason it is not plausible simply to deny one of the limbs of the contradiction. The facile answers of the naive religionist -- one has an immortal soul -- and the naturalist -- one is just a clever land mammal -- won't cut it. There is evasion of the problem on both sides. I will now try to argue this out. One needs to 'marinate' oneself in the problem and not reach for a quick 'solution.' That is the way of philosophy. The other is the way of ideology.

An Objectivist Way Out via Naturalism?

Consider naturalism, which is the dominant form of objectivism. Naturalism, for present purposes, is the metaphysical view according to which  causal reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.  (On this latitudinarian understanding of the term one can be a naturalist while admitting so-called 'abstract objects.') A naturalist in this sense maintains that (1) all causes are natural causes involving only natural entities; (2) "the distribution of minds in the universe is late and local" in a sense that implies that minds are necessarily tied to highly evolved organisms; (3) "there is nothing that is divine, or sacred, or worthy of worship." (Quotations from the Graham Oppy essay in Christianity and Philosophy, pp. 29-30) In other words: there is nothing concrete apart from the causal nexus of nature as understood by current physics; there is no God; there are minds (minded organisms) but they enjoy no higher (divine) origin but are merely products of evolution.

A naturalist would presumably just deny (B). The problem with this objectifying 'solution' is that it leaves out the first-person point of view and with it subjectivity. Or rather it either leaves it out, or, attempting to understand it in objective terms, fails to understand it adequately.

True, I am an object in the natural world. But I am also a subject for whom there is a natural world.  I am a measly bit of the yeast of life, but I am also a "spectator of all time and existence." Subjectivity or mind in the broadest sense includes all of the following: consciousness in the sense of sentience; consciousness in the sense of intentionality; self-consciousness as evidenced in the thoughtful deployment of the first-person singular pronoun; conscience or moral sense; the sense of being a free agent; sensitivity to reasons as opposed to causes, and to the difference between good and bad reasons, in a word, rationality; sensitivity to norms in ethics and in axiology; concern for objective truth and for subjective-existential truthfulness.

Can each of the items on this (incomplete) list be adequately understood in an objectifying, naturalistic way?  No, not even the first rather paltry item.  It is widely recognized that it is a very hard problem indeed to fit so-called qualia into the naturalist picture. It is so hard that it is 'popularly' known among the learned as -- wait for it -- the Hard Problem. We've been over this many times before, so I won't go over it again. See the categories Qualia and Consciousness and Qualia.

For present purposes, suffice it to say that a blisteringly strong case can be made against the conceit that everything can be adequately and exhaustively understood in naturalistic terms.

Naturalism is involved in a vicious abstraction: it abstracts away from the necessary conditions of anything's being cognized or thought about in the first place.  In trying to understand the whole of concrete Being, the naturalist must of course try to understand minds as well.  But what does he have to work with? Only more objects. For example, the functioning brain of a particular animal.  Could a brain be in an intentional state? No, it makes no sense. No physical state is an intentional state. No such state has semantic properties. No physical state can be either true or false. And so on. See the categories Intentionality and Mind.

Long story short, subjectivity or mind in the broad sense sketched above is not just real, but irreducibly real. It can't be eliminated and it can't be reduced.  Obviously, an adequate case for this cannot be made in a single blog post. Besides, as my metaphilosophy teaches, no substantive philosophical thesis can be proven strictly speaking. (And if you are not speaking strictly in philosophy, then you are just fooling around.) But the irreducible reality of mind and truth are reasonably believed.

This goes some way towards showing that our aporetic dyad cannot be easily solved. No doubt we are animals in nature. If that is all we are, then our ceasing to exist utterly at death is easily conceivable. But that is not all we are. We are also subjects with all that that entails: sentience, intentionality, self-awareness, moral sense, reason, etc.  We are not merely animals in a physical environment (Umwelt); we are also subjects for whom there is a meaningful world (Welt). (I am using 'world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense one finds in Husserl and Heidegger and their spiritual descendants.) A mere animal has an environment, but no animal has a world.   (This is not self-evident: perhaps in some low-level sense my cat inhabits a world of meanings meager and mousy as it must be: the dude is, after all, sentient, pace Renatus Cartesius, and it seems we share a sort of emotional bond.) 

We can sum this up by saying that man is a spiritual animal.  Neither angel nor beast, he is a riddle to himself. He asks himself: Could I be just a monstrous fluke of evolution?  But in asking this question he is spiritually outside of and above the horror chamber of nature red in tooth and claw.

But do I have any positive reason to think that my nonexistence as a subject or spirit is inconceivable? Well, everything objective about myself can be conceived not to exist include my body and its brain.  But the I in its ultimate inwardness as pure subject is not objectifiable. The ultimate condition of all objectification cannot itself be objectified. As transcendentally other than every object it is not itself an actual or possible object.  Only what I can think of as an object can I think of as nonexistent. But I cannot think of the transcendental I as an object among objects. Therefore, I cannot conceive of it as nonexistent.  I cannot think my own nonexistence as thinker. 

In short, there is something non-objective and non-objectifiable about me and it is inconceivable that it not exist.

But I hear an objection coming. 

"Granted, you cannot doubt the existence of thinking while it is occurring. But surely you and your thinking might never have existed! After all you have written about modal fallacies, I hope you are not confusing the necessity of the consequence with the necessity of the consequent! Surely you can't infer from 'Necessarily, if I think, then I exist' that 'Necessarily I exist.'"

I plead innocent of that particular fallacy. Both valid and fallacious inferences presuppose what I have called the Discursive Framework. The point I am trying to make lies deeper than the framework in question. The non-objectifiable is transcendentally prior to the Discursive Framework.

My claim is not that I necessarily exist as an object among objects, but that I -- in my inmost egoity if you will -- cannot be conceived by me not to exist. For to do that, I would have to think of myself as an object, either physical or meta-physical -- when that is precisely what I am not, but the transcendental I for whom there are objects.

So there is some sense in which there is something necessary about me that cannot be conceived not to exist.

An Objectivist Way Out Via Metaphysics?

We are in the conceptual vicinity of the Cartesian cogito. Does it follow that I am a res cogitans, a thinking  thing, a soul substance?  Not that either. For wouldn't that just be another object whose existence I could doubt? Not a physical object, of course, but a meta-physical object.  Husserl grapples with this problem but fails to solve it.

One cannot think without objectifying. If I try to think the I behind my thoughts I objectify it and make of it a meta-physical object, a thinking substance. This is what Descartes does.  But then it seems I can conceive its nonexistence.  Buddhists and Humeans have no trouble conceiving the nonexistence of a substantial self behind thoughts.

I cannot be identical to the (live) animal sitting in my chair and wearing my clothes. Let 'A' denote the animal in my chair wearing my clothes. 'I = A' is not a formal identity statement of the form 'x = x.' The latter is a truth of logic.  'I = A' is not a truth of logic. It is in some sense contingent, although not in a sense explicable by ordinary modal means within the Discursive Framework. The thought is not that there are possible worlds in which I exist, but A does not exist, or possible worlds in which A exists but I do not exist. On the other hand, the thought is of course not that in every world in which A exists, I = A.  The logic of objects breaks down at the transcendental boundary of the logical.

I get a sense of this strange contingency when I look into a mirror.  It seems in some sense contingent that I should be this particular man, with these particular features, and this particular ancestry and history and so on.  Again, 'I = A' is not a tautology; it seems to give some sort of information, namely, that this man in the mirror, and no other, is the man that I am.  You might think to make a Fregean move: 'I' and 'A' differ in sense but agree in referent. I can show that this does not work. But not now.

So one might be tempted to make an objectifying meta-physical move: 'I' refers to my soul; 'A' refers to my body.

But if I cannot be identical to a chunk of the physical world, how could I be identical to a meta-physical soul substance?  Doesn't the same problem arise again? Suppose I have such a soul, denote it by 'S.'  'I = S' is not a tautology of the form 'x = x.'  It asserts an identity between me and a metaphysical object, an identity that is 'contingent' in the boundary sense above alluded to.  But then my subjectivity is reduced to an object, and in being reduced, eliminated!  This object, in addition, could cease to exist or be annihilated by God.  So we cannot secure the inconceivability of death by identifying the ego with the soul substance.

A Dialectic Tapering Off into Mystery

Following out the dialectic we arrive at a Grenzbegiff, a boundary notion of transcendental subjectivity that cannot be objectively articulated in a manner to satisfy the discursive intellect. 

So is death inconceivable or not? Objectively, whether physically or meta-physically, death as utter annihilation is conceivable. But I cannot be reduced to anything objective. So there remains an element of inconceivability in the death of any person qua person.  

But this cannot be made clear in the objectifying terms of the Discursive Framework. One cannot have a 'theory' about it. Our aporetic dyad above is insoluble. It is a sort of marker, this side of the Boundary, of the mystery of death and of spirit. We cannot speak of it, and so we must enter into silence, or, like, a positivist, deny the reality of the Transcendent entirely.

Any further understanding will not be discursive in nature. And so Merton is in one sense right: "contemplative discipline" is needed. All philosophy can do is show the way to the Boundary. Crossing it is not in her power. And to make up objectifying theories about the Far Side is arguably profanation. 

Aquinas Falls from the Pedestal

Thomas Merton, Journals, vol.  5 (1963-1965), p. 295:

In the refectory the other day articles on the Council [Vatican II, 1962-1965] were being read and a lot was said about St. Thomas [Aquinas] -- he is no longer on an official pedestal -- he is no longer the one to be followed as chief authority in seminary teaching. This is the best thing that could happen to St. Thomas and to Catholic Truth, if we consider that he himself would never have consented to be the kind of authority the textbooks have made of him (and as a matter of fact the Church did not really constitute him an authority -- but rather a model.)

It would be interesting to hear Ed Feser's take on this.

Related articles

Thomas Merton's Hostility to Scholastic Manualism and the Forgotten Fr. Hickie

Thomas Merton's Hostility to Scholastic Manualism and the Forgotten Fr. Hickey

As much of a flaky liberal as Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968) is, both politically and theologically, I love the guy I meet in the pages of the seven volumes of The Journals of Thomas Merton.  I am presently savoring Volume Six, 1966-1967.  This morning I came upon the entry of May 21, 1967, Trinity Sunday, in which he reports being "dazzled and baffled" by a new book on quantum physics by George Gamow.

The 52-year-old gushes excitedly  over the accomplishments of "Niels Bohr and Co." and "this magnificent instrument of thought they developed to understand what is happening in matter, what energy really is about  -- with their confirmation of the kind of thing Herakleitos was reaching for by intuition." (237) Now comes the passage the vitriol of which caught my attention:

What a crime it was -- that utterly stupid course on "cosmology" that I had to take here [at the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in the 1940s] (along with the other so-called philosophy in Hickey's texts!). Really criminal absurdity! And at the time when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima! Surely there were people in the order who knew better than [to] allow such a thing! Dom Frederic, no. He couldn't help it. The whole Church still demanded this, and God knows, maybe some congregation still does. (237-238)

Now I have read my fair share of scholastic manuals, including Klubertanz, Vaske, van Steenberghen, Garrigou-Lagrange, Smith & Kendzierski, and a some others, but I was unfamiliar with this Hickey. Curious to see how bad his manuals could have been, I did some poking around but came up with very little. But I did glean some information from Benjamin Clark, O.C.S.O., Thomas Merton's Gethsemani:

We used as text the three-volume series by J.S. Hickey, abbot of Mount Melleray in Ireland 1932-1934, a text quite widely used in seminaries in the United States at the time. The text was in Latin, but English was spoken in class, unlike some seminaries in the United States at the time where the philosophy lectures were still given in Latin. Most of our students did not have enough Latin background for that, and some found even reading the text rough going at times.

Does anybody have volumes from the Hickey series? Is he willing to part with them?  What about scholastic cosmology as presented by Hickey got Merton so worked up?

My desultory research also led me to a quotation from a guy I know quite well:

At any rate, a recent blog post by Bill Vallicella got me thinking about it again. The post is ostensibly about the origins of political correctness. In reflecting on that, Vallicella also had this to say:

By the time I began as a freshman at Loyola University of Los Angeles in 1968, the old Thomism that had been taught out of scholastic manuals was long gone to be replaced by a hodge-podge of existentialism, phenomenology, and critical theory.  The only analytic fellow in the department at the time was an adjunct with an M. A. from Glasgow. I pay tribute to him in In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct. The scholasticism taught by sleepy Jesuits before the ferment of the ‘60s was in many ways moribund, but at least it was systematic and presented a coherent worldview. The manuals, besides being systematic, also introduced the greats: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, et al. By contrast, we were assigned stuff like Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. The abdication of authority on the part of Catholic universities has been going on for a long time.

So, how bad was scholastic manualism?

Edward Feser counts as a latter day manualist.  See his Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014). Here is an article by Ed in which he lays into David Bentley Hart to repel the latter's charge of scholastic manualism. Excerpt:

Menacing references to the threat of “manualism” and “baroque neoscholasticism” have long been a favored tactic in theologically liberal Catholic circles. Given Aquinas’s enormous prestige and influence within the Catholic Church, attacking some position he took has always been a tricky business. The solution was to invent a bogeyman variously called “manualism,” “sawdust Thomism,” etc. This allows the critic to identify the hated position with that and proceed as if it has nothing to do with Thomas himself. Such epithets generate something like a Pavlovian response in many readers, subverting rational thought and poisoning the reader’s mind against anything a Thomist opponent might have to say. Though neither a theological liberal nor a Catholic, Hart knows what buttons to push in order to win over the less-discriminating members of his audience. 

The Point of Solitude

Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. 7, p. 276:

The point of solitude is to preserve myself from a certain sort of contagion.

I would add that being alone is not enough if you are feeding on media dreck 'in solitude.' For then you are exposed to the contagion of 'discourse' that agitates but does not enlighten.

Why am I fascinated by the oftentimes flaky Merton? Because he is not just a flaky fellow. And he has 'Sixties' written all over him. Attention to his work and his shift in views is necessary for a deep understanding of that pivotal decade.

His journals are a delight. There is where the man himself dwells.

The Ever-Increasing Frenzy, Tension, and Explosiveness of This Country

Try to guess when the following was written, and by whom.  Answer below the fold:

Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country. You feel it in the monastery with people like Raymond. In the priesthood with so many upset, one way or another, and so many leaving.  So many just cracking up, falling apart. People in Detroit buying guns. Groups of vigilantes being formed to shoot Negroes. Louisville is a violent place, too. Letters in U. S. Catholic about the war article. -- some of the shrillest came from Louisville. This is a really mad country, and an explosion of the madness is inevitable. The only question -- can it somehow be less bad than one anticipates?  Total chaos is quite possible, though I don't anticipate that. But the fears, frustrations, hatreds, irrationalities, hysterias, are all there and all powerful enough to blow everything wide open. One feels that they want violence.  It is preferable to the uncertainty of 'waiting.' 

Why Evelyn Waugh Wanted Thomas Merton to Shut Up

Worth reading and the same goes for some of the comments.  Here is an overly harsh comment that yet makes an important point:

A. I. Reeves Sonya Roberts • a year ago

According to Sonya Roberts on Merton, "we can readily identify with his journey of faith."

Oh can we just? Well, I, for one, most certainly do not identify with anyone displaying Merton's level of mental confusion and sheer erotomania.

This is a bozo who, at the age of 51 and sworn to monastic vows, got the blathering hots for a nurse half his age (with whom he almost certainly had full sexual relations: why else did he destroy the correspondence that passed between him and her?). He'd already fathered an illegitimate child. And perhaps worst of all: by the time he had his Close Encounter of The Electric Fan Kind, he seems to have had only the vaguest awareness that Catholicism might differ from Buddhism.

There'll probably always be a market for Merton, just as there's notoriously always a market for Che Guevara T-shirts. But Holy Church in 2015 needs Merton (and Che) about as much as She needs the proverbial hole in the head.

As nasty and uncharitable as this comment is, Reeves is right that Merton often in his writings displays very little understanding of Catholic doctrine and how it differs from that of Buddhism and other religions.

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The Several-Storied Thomas Merton: Contemplative, Writer, Bohemian, Activist

Is Catholicism a Religion?

St. Valentine's Eve at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them -- like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

Three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addenda:

1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day.  Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements.  Recalling past inamorata of a Saturday night while listening to sentimental songs  -- is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism?  But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life.  A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.

All men are false, says my mother,
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
The very next evening, they'll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.

Go court another tender maiden,
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.

Neologism: A Merton

A merton is a person who doesn't distinguish between studying a subject and writing a book about it.

 

Cf. The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. III, 136:  "Thought of writing a book on Columbia under Spain . . ..")  In his short life Merton published some 60 books, some of them good, some of them but attempts to work his way into a subject.

The Tragedy of Thomas Merton

A conservative critique by Michael Baker.  It is well worth reading. 

Part I

The discussion of self-absorption gave me serious pause.  What is the typical blogger if not self-absorbed?

Part II

Some other Merton materials

The Several-Storied Thomas Merton: Contemplative, Writer, Bohemian, Activist

An outstanding essay by Robert Royal on the many Mertons and their uneasy unity in one fleshly vehicle. There is of course Merton the Contemplative, the convert to Catholicism who, with the typical zeal of the convert, took it all the way to the austerities of Trappist monasticism, and that at a time (1941) when it was a more demanding and rigorous affair than today.  In serious tension with the Contemplative, the Scribbler:

It did not help that Merton the Contemplative confronted Merton the Writer. Even for a man not vowed to silence, Merton's several dozen books would have been an extraordinary output. But adding the journals -- four volumes have now appeared and the whole will run to seven volumes totaling about 3,500 large pages -- we begin to glimpse a serious conflict. Can a man committed to the wordless apophatic way and a forgetting of self be preoccupied with recording-and publishing-every thought and act?

I live that tension myself very morning.  For me it takes the form of a conflict between Athens and Benares, as I like to call it. Denk, denk, denk, scribble scribble, scribble from 2 AM on.  But then at 4 AM, no later! I must tear myself away from the discursive desk and mount the black mat of meditation, going into reverse, as it were, moving from disciplined thinking to disciplined non-thinking.

Also in tension with the Contemplative, the Bohemian:

There were also other Mertons, among the more troublesome: the Bohemian. This Merton felt a constant need to be an outsider. When Merton lived in the world, it took the usual forms. He had aspirations to being an experimental writer and poet (his Collected Poems, which show real innovation but great unevenness, run to almost 1,000 pages). He listened to jazz, dabbled in leftist politics, hit the bottle pretty hard, smoked heavily, had his share of girlfriends, and did a bit of drawing. All relatively harmless, but some incongruous holdover bedeviled Merton the monk. Should a Trappist be interested in Henry Miller? Or follow Joan Baez? Or Bob Dylan? As late as 1959 (after eighteen years in the abbey), Merton was reading books like James Thurber's The Years with Ross, an account of life under Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker. The New Yorker of the fifties was more staid than its current incarnation, and Merton often claimed the chic ads reminded him of everything in the world he had fled. But there was something odd in a monk even being interested in a magazine like the New Yorker.

Also battling with the Contemplative and Quietist (in a broad sense of this term), a fourth Merton, the Social Activist who aligned easily with the Writer and the Bohemian:

In the 1960s that world [the world outside the monastic enclosure, the 'real'  world in the parlance of the worldly] came to the fore in his work. The Contemplative who fled the world, however, was not always a good advisor for the Activist. The Contemplative had not fared well in European or American society, and had taken this as proof that those societies were not doing well either. This led him to a number of mistaken or exaggerated judgments. During the fifties he accepted a theory of the moral equivalence of the United States and the Soviet Union. The Vietnam War abroad and the civil rights struggle at home, he came to believe, revealed a totalitarian impulse in America and he wrote of the possible emergence of a Nazi-like racial regime in the United States. (Emphasis added)

Royal has it exactly right.

The frequent tendency of Merton the Activist to overstatement is telling. Merton was by background mostly a European. And lacking any experience of the moral realism and decency of most Americans, he tended to judge all of American society through the lens of heated political controversies and the usual intellectual complaints about the bourgeoisie. His essays on civil rights, for example, are heartfelt and penetrating, but are not even a very good description of the predicament of the American liberal. The kind of moderation Merton showed in spiritual and moral questions rarely appears in his social commentary. He was angry about political issues in the early 1960s. (Emphasis added)

Spot on, once again.  Merton was in many ways a typical leftist intellectual alienated from and unappreciative of the country that allowed him to live his kind of life in his kind of way, as opposed to, say, being forced into a concentration camp and then put to death.  The Commies were not all that kind to religion and religionists.  You may recall that Edith Stein, another Catholic convert, became a Carmelite nun, but  was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz.  She was, by the way, a much better thinker than Merton. 

Merton the Man is the uneasy unity of these four personae.  His edifice is four-storied rather than seven, and I suppose 'story' could also be read as 'narrative' or 'script,' the Contemplative, the Writer, the Bohemian, and the Activist being as much multiply exemplifiable life-scripts  as  the competing personae of one particular man. 

Intimately interwoven with these four Mertons is someone we are forced to call Merton the Man. This Fifth Business never entirely settled down. The Contemplative, as may be seen in painful detail in the journals, is constantly vacillating, though in his public work Merton displays spiritual mastery. The Writer is gifted, but so much so that he has a tendency toward glibness. The Bohemian Merton got the others into any number of scrapes, and the Activist Merton often got carried away by currents in the sixties that-in retrospect-were not entirely fair to American society. Yet when all is said and done, Merton remains one of the great contemplative spirits of the century.

Merton died young in Bangkok in 1968, at the age of 53.  He was there for a conference.  Those of us who have attended and contributed to academic conferences know how dubious they are, and how destabilizing to a centered life.  I tend to think that it was the Writer, The Bohemian, and the Activist who, in the synergy of an unholy trinity, swamped the Contemplative and caused him to be lured away from his circumscribed but true monastic orbit. 

If he had lived on into the '70s would Merton have remained a monk?  Who knows?  So many men and women of the cloth abandoned their vocations and vows at that time.*  In his Asian journal he writes that he intended to return to Gethsemani.  It is nevertheless reasonable to speculate that he would not have lasted as a monk much longer.  The Zeitgeist would have got to him, and the synergy of the unholy trinity just mentioned.  Not to mention the transports of earthly love:

The mid-1960s brought him to the brink of disaster. Merton had a back problem requiring an operation at a Catholic hospital in Louisville. When he recovered from the anesthesia, he was anxious that he had missed daily communion. He began making notes on Meister Eckhart. His long- desired hermitage awaited him back at Gethsemani. To the eye, it was business as usual.

But a pretty young student nurse came in. A Catholic, she knew of Merton from a book her father had given her. Something erupted between them- even though she had a fiance in Chicago. On leaving the hospital, he wrote her about needing friendship. She wrote back, instructed by him to mark the envelope "conscience matter" (lest the superiors read the correspondence). Under "conscience matter," Merton sent a declaration of love. Thus began a series of deceptions, and Merton only narrowly avoided the shipwreck of his monastic vows because of the impossibility of the whole situation.

 ______________

*I think of the Jesuits and others who had jobs in philosophy because they were assigned to teach it at Catholic colleges back in the day when such colleges were more than nominally Catholic, and how they left their religious orders -- but kept their jobs!  Nice work if you can get it.

An Old Entry on Thomas Merton

I wrote this on 4 July 1997:

I'm reading volume 5 of T. Merton's journal.  He's a flabby liberal both politically and theologically, but there is a good line here and there.  "When will I learn to go without leaving footprints?  Along way from that: I still love recognition . . . ." (p. 33)

Those who crave recognition would do well to consider the moral and intellectual quality of those destined to do the recognizing.

Merton Quotes Evdokimov

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 308:

Evdokimov demands a virile ascesis, not simply gentlemanly retirement into leisure.  The monk does not build his monastic city 'on the margin' of the world, but instead of it.

[. . .]

He frankly regards monastic chastity as a refusal to procreate and to continue the existence of a society that has reached its term . . . .

These quotations are relevant to the theme of Christian anti-natalism, a topic to which I hope to return.  But first I need to lay my hands on Evdokimov's books.

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A Pope, an Orthodox Writer and a President Walk Into a Bar...:

Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Tongue and Pen

Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

I  read the seventh and final volume of Thomas Merton's journals, The Other Side of the Mountain, in 1998 when it first appeared.  I am currently re-reading it. It is once again proving to be page turner for one who has both a nostalgic and a scholarly interest in the far-off and fabulous '60s.    But what a gushing liberal and naive romantic Merton was!  Here is but one example:

Yesterday, quite by chance, I met Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and his secretary . . . . Chogyam Trungpa is a completely marvelous person.  Young, natural, without front or artifice, deep, awake, wise. [. . .] He is also a genuine spiritual master. (October 20, 1968, p. 219, emphasis added)

Unfortunately, the 'spirituality' of many 'spiritual masters' is of the New Age type, a type of spirituality that fancies itself beyond morality with its dualism of good and evil. One of the worst features of some New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions and prohibitions. But what often happens in practice is that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it. One may recall the famous case of Rajneesh. Chogyam Trungpa appears to have been cut from the same cloth. According to one report,

. . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma.

With apologies to the shade of Jack Kerouac, you could say that this gives new meaning to 'dharma bum.'

That Merton could be taken in by the fellow says something about Merton.  A phrase such as 'genuine spiritual master' ought not be bandied about lightly. But perhaps Trungpa's excesses were not in evidence at the time.

Herewith yet another indication of why philosophy is essential to balanced thinking and living.  Jerusalem and Benares are both in need of chastening, and Athens wields the rod.  Although I maintain that philosophy needs completion by what is beyond philosophy, that maintenance is not a license to abandon rational critique.  Every sector of life requires critique, including Philosophy herself, and Philosophy is the Critic.

As for putative 'spiritual masters,' run as fast as you can from any such 'master' or 'guru' who has something to sell you or is not in control of his lower self.

Related articles

Jack Kerouac on How to Meditate

Tongue and Pen

A Partial Philosophical Defense of the Monastic Life

Thomas Merton on Plato's Phaedo

Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. 4, p. 57 (10 October 1960):

The superb moral and positive beauty of the Phaedo.  One does not have to agree with Plato, but one must hear him.  Not to listen to such a voice is unpardonable, it is like not listening to conscience or nature.

Absolutely right.