Bede, History of the Abbots, 16 (on Abbot Ceolfrith; tr. Christopher Grocock):
Now he saw that, being old and full of days, he could no longer prove to be an appropriate model of spiritual exercise for those under him either by teaching or by example because he was so aged and infirm. He thought over the matter long and hard, and decided that it would be more appropriate for an instruction to be given to the brothers that they should choose a more suitable father-abbot for themselves from among their own number, following the statutes of their privilege and the rule of the holy abbot Benedict.
uidit se iam senior et plenus dierum non ultra posse subditis, ob impedimentum supremae aetatis, debitam spiritalis exercitii, uel docendo uel uiuendo, praefigere formam; multa diu secum mente uersans, utilius decreuit, dato fratribus praecepto, ut iuxta sui statuta priuilegii iuxtaque regulam sancti abbatis Benedicti, de suis sibi ipsi patrem, qui aptior esset, eligerent.
I study everything, join nothing. He studied everything, but joined the Trappists. Therein one root of one of his inner conflicts. His natural bent was to range freely over the cartography of the mind, but he voluntarily accepted intramural enclosure physically, intellectually, and spiritually. He took vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability. My impression from study of the seven volumes of his magnificent Journal, wherein one meets the man himself as opposed to the 'organization man,' is that the first and second vows were easy for Merton to keep. You might wonder about the second, but there is only one lapsus carnis known to us, so well known in fact that it needs no commentary from me. But he chafed under the vow of obedience which demanded of him that he submit to his intellectually inferior superiors. Stability, too, he found difficult given his gyrovagal and maverickian tendencies. The temper of the times, the fabulous and far-off 'sixties, did nothing to tame the gyrovagus in him.
One of the underlying questions is whether the truth, absolute and eternal, can be captured and owned by any one temporal institution and any one system of dogmas. Well, why not? If God can become man, a particular man, why can't the absolute and eternal truth be correspondingly 'incarnated' in a particular church with its particular and exclusive set of rites, rituals, and dogmas? If the God-Man established a church, what more could you want by way of ecclesiological validation?
But which church did he establish? The RCC?
Would it be in keeping with Protestant principles that some Protestant denomination lay claim to being the one, true, holy, catholic, and apostolic church? I'm just asking! In this blog I conduct my education in public and try to seduce people into helping me do so.
The other morning I recalled the passage in Alain where he recorded his boyhood visit to the abbey at La Trappe and his visceral revulsion at the life of the monks. So I pulled his On Happiness from the shelf and to my surprise opened right to the passage in question. Coincidence, or synchronicity? I'll leave that question for later. Here is the passage:
Pasta Puttanesca is a good Lenten meal for a Friday night despite its being 'in the style of the whore.' Italian la puttana means whore, harlot, slut. Didn't Jesus suffer all to come unto him, even the ladies of the evening?
Make it with sardines: 'meatier' than anchovies. Pour some extra virgin olive oil into a pan. Don't ask how much. Eyeball it like a man. Dump some chopped-up garlic onto the olio d'oliva lube job. Set the heat to moderate. Crack open the can of sardines and dump the contents, oil, water, and all into the pan. Break the formerly-sentient sea critters into small pieces. Add a can of diced tomatoes. Throw in your Italian spices and fresh-ground pepper. Chop up some olives and add to the mix. Stir. Simmer.
You knew without my telling you to get a righteous quantity of water boiling. Dump the pasta into the boiling water. Capellini cooks quickly thus comporting well with the celerity with which this dish is supposed to be thrown together at the end of a long day. Cook the pasta a little shy of al dente. It will cook further when you add it to the sauce. Eat it topped with freshly-grated Parmigiana Reggiano or Pecorino Romano. Wash it down with a glass or two of Dago Red. Think with compassion of the ladies of the evening. But do not avail yourself of their services.
To the scholarly among you I recommend Benedicta Ward, SLG, Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources, Cistercian Publications, 1987. With chapters on Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt, Pelagia, Thais, and Maria the Niece of Abraham.
The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, Volume Two, The Quest, p. 130, #242:
Detachment from the world is an absolute necessity for the man who seeks authentic inner peace, and not its imagined counterfeit. But renouncement of the world is not necessary to any except those who have an inborn natural vocation for the monkish life.
It is not easy, but one can be in the world but not of the world. Paradoxically, however, the monastic life is an easier way to detachment. To live a life of monkish virtue in a monastery is relatively easy; to do so in the world, hard. This is why monasteries were established in the first place.
The sign reads, 'Peace.' It neglects to say that the desert is a place of unseen warfare.
The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in what Lorenzo Scupoli called il combattimento spirituale. They felt thwarted in their practices by opponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone. They prefer deserts to flesh pots when it comes to hunting. Those who luxuriate in the latter have already been captured.
Moderns who enter the desert for spiritual purposes need to be aware that they may get more than they bargained for.
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.
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.
The bliss of the bios theoretikos as described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is the model for the Beatific Vision as described by Thomas Aquinas. The ultimate salvific state is a contemplative state. Monasticism is an institutional expression of this root commitment. The monk's life is decidedly biased toward the intellectual and the theoretical. As opposed to what? As opposed to a life in which praxis is paramount.
Question: Is the life of the monk the highest life for the Christian? Is the monastic life the highest form of imitatio Christi? Christ was no anchorite. He did not flee from the agitation of the cities and from the people except for relatively short periods. He associated with the canaille, with publicans and prostitutes. His ministry was among them where he risked everything and in human terms lost everything.
Despite their drastic differences, Socrates too moved among the people and met a predictable fate. He lived in no ivory tower where he could think and write in peace and in leisurely retirement. He wrote nothing. His academy was the agora. His was the dialectic of the streets, not that of the learned essay. A battle-hardened soldier, he knew how to translate military valor into civil courage. Among his interlocutors were powerful and vicious men. He took risks, offended them, and was executed by the State. But back to Christ. Let us hear St. Neilos the Ascetic. This is from his Ascetic Discourse in the Philokalia, that marvellous compendium of Patristic teachings.
For philosophy is a state of moral integrity combined with a doctrine of true knowledge concerning reality. Both Jews and Greeks fell short of this, for they rejected the Wisdom that is from heaven and tried to philosophize without Christ, who alone has revealed the true philosophy in both His life and His teaching. For by the purity of His life He was the first to establish the way of true philosophy. He always held His soul above the passions of the body, and in the end, when His death was required by His design for man's salvation. He laid down even His soul. In this He taught us that the true philosopher must renounce all life's pleasures, mastering pains and passions, and paying scant attention to the body: he must not overvalue even his soul, but must readily lay it down when holiness demands.
The apostles received this way of life from Christ and made it their own, renouncing the world in response to His call, disregarding fatherland, relatives and possessions. At once they adopted a harsh and strenuous way of life, facing every kind of adversity, afflicted, tormented, harassed, naked, lacking even necessities; and finally they met death boldly, imitating their Teacher faithfully in all things. Thus through their actions they left behind a true image of the highest way of life.
Although all Christians should have modeled their own life on this image, most of them either lacked the will to do so or else made only feeble efforts. There were, however, a few who had the Strength to rise above the turmoil of the world and to flee from the agitation of cities. Having escaped from this turbulence, they embraced the monastic life and reproduced in themselves the pattern of apostolic virtue. They preferred voluntary poverty to possessions, because this freed them from distraction, and so as to control the passions, they satisfied their bodily needs with food that was readily available and simply prepared, rather than with richly dressed dishes. Soft and unnecessary clothing they rejected as an invention of human luxury, and they wore only such plain garments as are required for the body. It seemed to them a betrayal of philosophy to turn their attention from heavenly things to earthly concerns more appropriate to animals. They ignored the world, being above human passions.
I draw your attention to the third paragraph. Christ did not flee from the agitation of the cities. He did not ignore the world and its turmoil. He was not above human passions. The God-Man was fully human. He did not die like a Stoic sage. He experienced to the full the brutality of the brutal Romans, dying like a man in utter agony of body and in despair of spirit, abandoned.
So the question is: Is the monastic way a way to evade true imitation of Christ? I myself am of the monkish disposition and not at all inclined to go into the agora like Socrates or into the temple with its moneychangers like Christ. Luther I find repellent; the anti-rational but also anti-mystical Kierkegaard fascinating but wrongheaded; the Roman church wishy-washy despite its deep depths of mysticism; it is the East and the mystical depths of Orthodox Christianity that attract me. Athens is closer to Constantinople than to Rome.
And so I ask my question in the spirit of Socratic self-examination. I do not have an answer. The unexamined life is not worth living, and the highest examination is the examination of one's own life.
The control of the one aids in the control of the other, and the control of the other in the control of the one. The Desert Fathers knew this, and enjoined the control of both.
One Christian friend worries that his meditation practice might lead him in a Buddhist direction, in particular toward an acceptance of the three marks of phenomenal existence: anicca, anatta, dukkha. He shouldn't worry. Those doctrines in their full-strength Pali form are dubious if not demonstrably untenable. As such, they cannot be veridical deliverances of any meditation practice.
For example, the doctrine of anicca, impermanence, is not a mere recording of the Moorean fact that there is change; it is a radical theory of change along Heraclitean lines. As a theory it is dialectically driven and not a summary of phenomenology. One could read it into the phenomenology of meditational experience, but one cannot derive it from the phenomenology. The claim I just made is highly contentious; I will leave it to the first friend to see if he can verify it to his own satisfaction.
Since he is a Christian I recommend to him an approach to meditation more in consonance with Christianity, an approach as inner listening. In one sentence: Quiet the mind, then listen and wait. Open yourself to intimations and vouchsafings from the Unseen Order. Psalm 46:10: "Be still and know that I am God . . . ." But be aware that the requisite receptivity exposes one to attack from demonic agents whose power exceeds our own. So discernment is needed.
This brings me to a second Christian friend who asks, "Do you think the mind clearing function of meditation might be akin to the person Jesus taught us of, the person with a clean and emptied soul that was attractive to the demons as a place to occupy?"
Yes, there is that danger. A mind cluttered and distracted by petty thoughts and concerns is, from the point of view of the demons, safe against any irruption of divine light. This is why demons are more likely to be encountered in monasteries than in fleshpots. But once the mind is cleared of mundane detritus, once it returns from the diaspora of the sense world and rests quietly in it itself in its quest for the Unchanging Light, the demons have an opening. But these facts of the spiritual life are no argument against meditation; they are an argument for caution. One would be well-advised to preface every meditation session with a discursive prayer along these lines: "Lord, I confess my spiritual infirmity and humbly ask to be protected from any and all demonic agents. Lord help me, guardians guard me." Sancti Angeli, custodes nostri, defendite nos in proelio, ut non pereamus in tremendo iudicio.
My second friend is a Protestant, and among other faults, they fail to appreciate the mystical element in Christianity.
Finally:
The East no more owns meditation than the Left owns dissent. Here is a quick little bloggity-blog schema.
Buddhist Nihilism: the ultimate goal is nibbana, cessation, and the final defeat of the 'self' illusion.
Hindu Monism: the ultimate goal is for the little self (jivatman) to merge with the Big Self, Atman = Brahman.
Christian Dualism: the ultimate goal is neither extinction nor merger but a participation in the divine life in which the participant, transfigured and transformed as he undoubtedly would have to be, nevertheless maintains his identity as a unique self. Dualism is retained in a sublimated form.
I warned you that my schema would be quick. But I think it is worth ruminating on and filling in. The true philosopher tacks between close analysis and overview, analytic squinting and syn-opsis and pan-opsis.
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.
Monk: The world you love cannot last and betrays its vanity thereby. Its impermanence argues its unreality. It is unworthy of your love, noble soul!
Worldling: The God you love is worthy of your love should he exist, but he does not, or at least you have no proof that he does; no proof sufficient to render reasonable your rejection of this passing world and its finite satisfactions for a possibility merely believed in.
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.
We are too open to social suggestions. We uncritically imbibe dubious and outright wrong views and attitudes and valuations and habits of speech from our environment. They don't appear wrong because they are in step with what most believe and say. 'Normal' beliefs and patterns of speech become normative for people. This is the way of the world. We are too suggestible.
Thus nowadays people cannot see that lust and gluttony are deadly vices. The weight of suggestion is too onerous. The counter-suggestions from a religious upbringing are no match for the relentless stuff emanating from the mass media of a sex-saturated, hedonistic society. For spiritual health a partial withdrawal from society is advisable. It needn't be physical: one can be in the world but not of it.
A partial withdrawal can take the form of a holding free of the early morning hours from any contamination by media dreck. Thus no reading of newspapers, no checking of e-mail, no electronics of any sort. Electricity is fine: you don't have to sit in the dark or burn candles. No talking or other socializing. Instead: prayer, meditation, spiritual reading and writing, in silence, and alone.
So for a few pre-dawn hours each day you are a part-time monk.
But society and technology are in conspiracy against you. Have you noticed that the newer modems are not equipped with on/off switches? A bad omen for the life of the soul and the care thereof. I cannot abide a wi-fi signal during my sleeping and monkish hours. So I bought an extra power strip and put it in series with the modem and the main power strip. Wife is instructed to turn it off before she goes to bed. And of course all computers and cell phones are off during the night and during the hours of monkishness.
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?
*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.
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.
The trick is to maintain one's equanimity in the face of the samsaric storm. It's easy to be a monk in a monastery, but difficult ex claustro. The trick is to be in the world, and active in it, but not of it. Not easy, and perhaps impossible. Withdrawal and Weltflucht are perhaps all that some of us can ever achieve.
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.
The other morning I recalled the passage in Alain where he recorded his boyhood visit to the abbey at La Trappe and his visceral revulsion at the life of the monks. So I pulled his On Happiness from the shelf and to my surprise opened right to the passage in question. Coincidence, or synchronicity? I'll leave that question for later. Here is the passage:
If perchance I had to write a treatise on ethics, I would rank good humor as the first of our duties. I do not know what ferocious religion has taught us that sadness is great and beautiful, and that the wise man must meditate on death by digging his own grave. When I was ten years old, I visited the Abbey of La Trappe; I saw the graves the monks were digging a little each day, and the mortuary chapel where the dead were laid out for an entire week, for the edification of the living.
These lugubrious images and the cadaveric odor haunted me for a long time; but the monks had tried to prove too much. I cannot say exactly when and for what reasons I left the Catholic Church because I have forgotten. But from that moment on, I said to myself: "It is not possible that they have the true secret of life." My whole being rebelled against those mournful monks. And I freed myself from their religion as from an illness.
("Good Humor" in Alain on Happiness, tr. Cottrell, New York: Frederick Unger, 1973, p. 198. Paragraph break and italics added. Propos sur le bonheur was originally published in 1928 by Gallimard.)
The Attitude of the Worldling
Alain above frankly expresses his sense of life or sense of reality. I don't share it, but can I argue against it? Does it even make sense to try to argue against it? Probably not. In a matter such as this argument comes too late. Alain feels it in his guts and with his "whole being" that the religion of the mournful monks, the religion Alain himself was raised in, is world-flight and a life-denying sickness.
For a worldling such as Alain, the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility. The worldling doesn't take them as indices of unreality as a Platonist would. If you point out the brevity of life to a worldling he might give a speech like the following:
Precisely because life is short, one must not waste it. Brevity does not show lack of reality or value, pace Plato and his latter-day acolytes such as Simone Weil, but how real and valuable life is. This life is as real as it gets. It is precious precisely because it is short. Make the most of it because there is not much of it, but what there is of it is enough for those who are fortunate, who live well, and who do not die too soon. Don't waste your life on religious illusions! Don't spend your life digging your grave and preparing for death. Live!
The attitude here is that life is short but long enough and valuable enough, at least for some of us. One should make friends with finitude, enjoying what one has and not looking beyond to what is merely imagined. Near the beginning of the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus quotes Pindar, "O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." (Pythian, iii)
A frat boy might put it like this:
Ashes to ashes Dust to dust Life is short So party we must.
You only go around once in life So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.
This attitude of the worldling is possible because it is actual and indeed widespread more so now than ever before in history, in good measure because of our technology that extends life and makes it vastly more endurable than in previous centuries. Our 24-7, 365(6) connectivity also practically insures that we will remain trapped within the sphere of immanence and human chatter and be unable to 'pick up any signals' from beyond the human horizon. Our communications technology is like a Faraday cage that blocks all irruptions from the Unseen Order.
The worldling's attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult and probably impossible to argue with anyone's sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that. In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills.
Is the worldling ignorant?
I would say he is. But how prove it either to him or to myself? Can one PROVE that God and the soul are real? That this life is a vanishing quantity unworthy of wholehearted devotion? That what really matters is beyond matter and beyond mind in its presently paltry and darkened state? No. At best one can give a number of plausible arguments for these 'objects' and a number of plausible arguments against metaphysical naturalism. But at the end of the day one is going to have to invoke certain mystical vouchsafings, intimations from Elsewhere, glimpses, revelations, teachings of some magisterium deemed finally authoritative, all of which are easily hauled before the bench of reason to have their veridicality questioned, and, I should add, in good faith. In the end, a leap of faith is needed. You will have to decide what to believe and how to live. You will have to decide whether to live in accordance with your sense of life, whether it be of the worldly sort or the otherworldly.
Suppose I take the 'bite of conscience' as pointing to the existence of a Supreme Moral Authority of a personal nature. I could make a very strong case. But would it be rationally compelling? No. Could I ever be objectively certain that no naturalistic explanation could account adequately for the deliverances of conscience? No. So the will comes into it.
Is the worldling morally culpable for his ignorance?
Some might be, but in general, he is not. Pace St. Paul at Romans 1: 18-20, I don't find unbelief to be morally culpable. It is neither evident that God exists nor evident that he does not exist. One can of course dogmatize and one can of course be a 'presuppositionalist' of one sort or another. But those are not respectable positions.
Emile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. Were he alive and active today he would most likely be a blogger.
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.
It is quite a moral challenge these days to maintain one's equanimity while doing one's quotidian bit to battle the lunacy of the destructive Left. It's easy to be a monk in a monastery. It is rather more difficult to be one in the world.
The monk takes a vow of poverty, but he lives well, comfortably, securely, often amidst great natural beauty. The typical monk in the West is not poor materially but poor in a spiritual sense. Or at least he aspires to be such. The monastery's wealth is his usufruct -- he has the usus et fructus, the use and enjoyment, of it. The poverty vow is a vow of non-attachment. The monk strives to live without attachment to the wealth necessary for his health and well-being. But couldn't one both own things and be non-attached? It is possible, but out of reach for most of us. Ownership breeds attachment.
Might the life of the monk be too easy to count as genuinely Christian?
Protestants, in the main, have not been friendly to monasticism, although I believe there are some Protestant monasteries. Anti-monastic hostility is perhaps given its most extreme expression in the writings of S. Kierkegaard. Here is a an excerpt from an entry in which I quote the Danish Socrates as sending the Pope to hell:
No, it is certainly not the highest to seek a solitary hiding place in order if possible to seek God alone there. It is not the highest -- this we indeed see in the prototype [Christ]. But although it is not the highest it is nevertheless possible . . . that not a single one of us is this coddled and secularized generation would be able to do it. But it is not the highest. The highest is: unconditionally heterogeneous with the world by serving God alone, to remain in the world and in the middle of actuality before the eyes of all, to direct all attention to oneself -- for then persecution is unavoidable. This is Christian piety: renouncing everything to serve God alone, to deny oneself in order to serve God alone -- and then to have to suffer for it -- to do good and then to have to suffer for it. It is this that the prototype expresses; it is also this, to mention a mere man, that Luther, the superb teacher of our Church, continually points out as belonging to true Christianity: to suffer for the doctrine, to do good and suffer for it, and that suffering in this world is inseparable from being a Christian in this world. (Judge for Yourself!,169)
S. K. here sounds his recurrent theme of Christianity as heterogeneity to the world. The heterogeneity to the world of the monastic life, however, does not go far enough. A more radical heterogeneity is lived by one who remains in the world, not only living the doctrine, but suffering for it. No doubt that is how the Prototype lived, but he was and is God. How is such a thing possible for any mere mortal?
If true Christianity requires suffering for the doctrine, if it requires persecution and martyrdom, then true Christianity is out of reach except for those who, like present-day Christians in the Middle East, are even as we speak having their throats cut for the doctrine by radical Muslim savages as the rest of the world, and the Pope, look on and do nothing. In the Denmark of Kierkegaard's day (1813-1855), when Christianity was the state religion and the object of universal lip-service, true Christianity was out of reach for S. K. himself by his own teaching. The true Christian must be prepared for persecution and martyrdom, but it is difficult to see how they can be "inseparable from being a Christian in this world."
So add this persecution extremism to the off-putting factors already listed: the anti-mysticism, the anti-rationalism, and the extreme fideism.
But what a prodigiously prolific writer he was! What a genius, and what a fascinating specimen of humanity.
The sign reads, 'Peace.' It neglects to say that the desert is a place of unseen warfare.
The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in il combattimento spirituale. They felt as if thwarted in their practices by opponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone. They prefer deserts to flesh pots when it comes to hunting. Those who luxuriate in the latter have already been captured.
Moderns who enter the desert for spiritual purposes need to be aware that they may get more than they bargained for, phenomenologically, if not really.
My man Hanson with another fascinating column. Excerpts:
Monasteries of the mind are an effort to reconnect with the past and disengage psychologically from the present. For millions of Americans, their music, their movies, their sports, and their media are not current fare. Instead, they have mentally moved to mountaintops or inaccessible valleys, where they can live in the past or dream of the future, but certainly not dwell in the here and now.
Count me in. (I have also been known to hole up physically in inaccessible valleys for weeks at a time.) But why? Several reasons, one of them being the lamestream media:
Monastics are tuning out the media. Listening to Brian Williams warn of fake news would be like paying attention to Miley Cyrus’s reminder about the need for abstinence. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is often said to be the ethical conscience of the paper’s op-ed page, recently begged the IRS to commit a felony by sending him Trump’s tax returns. He went so far as to provide his own address to facilitate the crime: “But if you’re in IRS and have a certain president’s tax return that you’d like to leak, my address is: NYT, 620 Eighth Ave., NY NY 10018.”
Someone belatedly might have gotten the message. Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow got a hold of two pages from Trump’s 2005 tax return. On MSNBC she went the full Roswell-UFO mode in hyping the scoop until she finally grasped that a twelve-year-old-tax return revealed that her Trump-as-Snidely-Whiplash had paid a greater tax (percentage-wise and absolutely) than “you didn’t build that” Barack Obama paid. Such an inadvertent demonstration is not the purpose for which a Rachel Maddow was hired.
If Paul Krugman can win the Nobel prize, and Bill Clinton and Rachel 'Mad Dog' Maddow are Rhodes Scholars, then those awards have become well-nigh meaningless.
Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that marvellous admonition of Goethe in Faust:
Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!
What from your fathers you received as heir,
Acquire if you would possess it. (tr. W. Kaufmann)
So now you are out in the desert or the forest or in some isolated place free of the toxic influences of a society in collapse. The problem is that you are now a very easy target for the fascists of the Left. You and yours are all in one place, far away from the rest of society and its infrastructure. All the fascists have to do is trump up some charges, of child-abuse, of gun violations, whatever. The rest of society considers you kooks and benighted bigots and religious fanatics and won't be bothered if you are wiped off the face of the earth. You might go the way of the Branch Davidians.
Is this an alarmist scenario? I hope it is. But the way things are going, one ought to give careful thought to one's various withdrawal options.
Monks come in two kinds, the cenobites and the eremites or hermits. The cenobites live in community whereas the hermits go off on their own. Eremos in Greek means desert, and there are many different motives for moving into the desert either literally or figuratively. There are those whose serious psychological conditions make it impossible for them to function in modern society. Chris Knight is such a one, who, when asked about Thoreau, replied in one word, "dilettante." That's saying something inasmuch as Henry David was one monkish and solitary dude even when he wasn't hanging out at Walden Pond. Somewhere in his fascinating journal he writes, "I have no walks to throw away on company."
Others of a monkish bent are wholly sane, unlike Knight, so sane in fact that they perceive and reject the less-than-sane hustle of Big City life. Some are motivated religiously, some philosophically, and some share both motivations. I have always held that a sane religiosity has to be deeply philosophical and vice versa. I think most of the Desert Fathers would agree. Athens and Jerusalem need each other for complementation and mutual correction. Some of the monkish are members of monastic religious orders, some attach themselves as oblates to such orders, and some go it alone. Call the latter the Maverick Variation.
And of course there are degrees of withdrawal from society and its illusions. I have been called a recluse, but on most days I engage in a bit of socializing usually early in the morning in the weight room or at the pool or spa where a certain amount of banter & bullshit is de rigueur. I thereby satisfy my exiguous social needs for the rest of the day. Other mornings, sick of such idle talk and the corrrosive effect it can have on one's seriousness and spiritual focus, I head for the hills to traipse alone with my thoughts as company. But I am not as severe as old Henry David: I will share my walk with you and show you some trails if you are serious, fit, and don't talk too much.
I am a Myers-Briggs INTP introvert. Must one be an introvert to be a hermit? No. The most interesting hermit I know is an extrovert who in his younger days was a BMOC, excellent at sports, successful at 'the chase,' who ended up on Wall Street, became very wealthy, indulged his every appetite, but then had a series of profound religious experiences that inspired him to sell all he owned and follow Christ, first into a cenobium, then into a hermitage.
A tip of the hat and a Merry Christmas to Karl White of London for sending me to this Guardian piece which profiles some contemporary monkish specimens.
In April of 2011, 60 Minutes had a segment on the monks of Mt. Athos. It was surprisingly sympathetic for such a left-leaning program. What one expects and usually gets from liberals and leftists and the lamestream media is religion-bashing -- unless of course the religion is Islam, the religion of peace -- but the segment in question was refreshingly objective. It was actually too sympathetic for my taste and not critical enough. It didn't raise the underlying questions. Which is why you need my blog.
We know that this world is no dream and is to that extent real. For all we know it may be as real as it gets, though philosophers and sages over the centuries, East and West, have assembled plenty of considerations that speak against its plenary reality. We don't know that there is any world other than this one. We also don't know that there isn't. Now here is an existential question for you: Will you sacrifice life in this world, with its manifold pleasures and satisfactions, for the chance of transcendent happiness in a merely believed-in hinter world? The Here is clear; the Hereafter is not. It is not clear that is is, or that it isn't, or what it is if it is. When I say that the world beyond is merely believed-in, I mean that it is merely believed-in from the point of view of the here and now where knowledge is impossible; I am not saying that there is no world beyond.
Let us be clear what the existential option is. It is not between being a dissolute hedonist or an ascetic, a Bukowski or a Simon of Sylites. It is between being one who lives in an upright and productive way but in such a way as to assign plenary reality and importance to this world, this life, VERSUS one who sees this world as a vanishing quantity that cannot be taken with full seriousness but who takes it as preparatory for what comes after death. (Of course, most adherents of a religion live like ordinary worldlings for the most part but hedge their bets by tacking on some religious observances on the weekend. I am not concerned with these wishy-washy types here.)
The monks of Mount Athos spend their lives preparing for death, writing their ticket to the Beyond, engaging in unseen warfare against Satan and his legions. They pray the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly; they do not surf the Web or engage in competitive eating contests or consort with females -- there are no distaff elements on the Holy Mountain.
Is theirs the highest life possible for a human being? Or is the quest to determine what is the highest life the highest life? The monks think they have the truth, the final truth, the essential and saving truth. Thinking they possess it, their task is not to seek it but to implement it in their lives, to 'existentially appropriate it' as Kierkegaard might say, to knit it into the fabric of their Existenz. There is a definite logic to their position. If you have the truth, then there is no point in wasting time seeking it, or talking about it, or debating scoffers and doubters. The point is to do what is necessary to achieve the transcendent Good the existence of which one does not question.
This logic is of course common to other 'true believers.' Karl Marx in the 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach wrote that "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." Marx and the commies he spawned thought they had the truth, and so the only thing left was to implement it at whatever cost, the glorious end justifying the bloody means. Millions of eggs were broken, though, and no omelet materialized.
Buddha, too, was famously opposed to speculation. If you have been shot with a poisoned arrow, there is no point in speculating as to the trajectory of the arrow, the social class of the archer, or the chemical composition of the poison; the one thing necessary is to extract the arrow. The logic is the same, though the point is different. The point for Buddha was not theosis (deification) as in Eastern Orthodoxy, or the classless society as in Marxism, but Nirvana, the extinguishing of the ego-illusion and final release from the wheel of Samsara.
If you have the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then by all means live in accordance with it. Put it into practice. But do you in fact have the truth? For the philosopher this is the question that comes first and cannot be evaded. If the monks of Mt. Athos are right about God and the soul and that the ultimate human goal is theosis, then they are absolutely right to renounce this world of shadows and seemings and ignorance and evil for the sake of true reality and true happiness.
But do they have the truth or does one throw one's life away when one flees to a monastery? Does one toss aside the only reality there is for a bunch of illusions? There is of course a secular analog. I would say that all the earnest and idealistic and highly talented individuals who served the cause of Communism in the 20th century sacrificed their lives on the altar of illusions. They threw their lives away pursuing the impossible. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example, who went to the electric chair as atomic spies. Such true believers wasted their lives and ended up enablers of great evil. In the end they were played for fools by an evil ideology.
So isn't the philosopher's life the highest possible life for a human being? For only the philosopher pursues the ultimate questions without dogmatism, without blind belief, in freedom, critically, autonomously. I am not saying that the ultimate good for a human being is endless inquiry. The highest goal cannot be endless inquiry into truth, but a resting in it. But that can't come this side of the Great Divide. Here and now is not the place or time to dogmatize. We can rest in dogma on the far side, although there we won't need it, seeing having replaced believing.
My Athenian thesis -- that the life of the philosopher is the highest life possible for a human being -- won't play very well in Jerusalem. And I myself have serious doubts about it. But all such doubts are themselves part and parcel of the philosophical enterprise. For if nothing is immune from being hauled before the bench of Reason, there to be rudely interrogated, then fair Philosophia herself must also answer to that tribunal.
Philosophy is reason's search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. But reason is not reason unless it strives mightily beyond itself to sources of truth that transcend it. So the true philosopher must be open to divine revelation. If it is the truth the philosopher seeks, then he cannot confine himself to the truth accessible to discursive reason.
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.'
Apropos of my last entry, a warning to those may be thinking of heading for the desert. The following observation from a November 2009 post, "Demons of the Desert."
The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in unseen warfare. They felt as if thwarted in their practices by opponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone.
Distracted from your distractions, you may get more than you bargained for, phenomenologically, if not really.
A reader sent the following about half-way through my digital fast and blogging hiatus.
. . . I was hoping that when you emerge from it you might have some practical wisdom on how you went about it. What has your daily schedule been like? Have you struggled with the nagging urge to check everything all the time? I have been thinking a lot about the issues you raised both in The Big Unplug post and in your post on Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration . . . . Thanks for reading this and for the writing you have contributed over the years - it has truly been signal amidst a great deal of noise.
How did I go about it? I got as far away as practicable from the hype and hustle and hyperkineticism of the modern world.
From July 26th to August 30th I lived in a hermitage on the grounds of the most remote monastery in the Western hemisphere in a place of great natural beauty. I have decided not to post any photographs or reveal the identities of any interlocutors in keeping with the monastic spirit of silence, solitude and seclusion.
An average day went something like this. Up at my usual time of 2:00 AM. (The monks arise at 3:30.) Instant coffee. I drank no good coffee for five weeks as part of the self-imposed discipline. Spiritual-philosophical reading until 3:00: Bible, Garrigou-Lagrange, Edith Stein, Theresa of Avila, et al. Formal, seated meditation until 3:30 in the hermitage. Then a 10-15 minute hike through a dark and spooky canyon to the oratory for Vigils at 4:00. This is the first hour of the liturgia horarum, the liturgy of the hours. It lasts one hour weekdays, one hour, twenty minutes on Sundays. Some of the 'little hours' are as short as ten minutes. The liturgy, chanted by the monks, is essentially psalmody with Christian elements interspersed. After Vigils, a light breakfast outside the monks' refectory. Then back to the hermitage for study and writing. I usually attended three of the seven hours per day and meditated on a 'regulation' Zen cushion and mat three times per day. I gave myself the rule, "No pray, no eat." So I attended Vigils before breakfast, Sext before the main meal, taken with the monks in the refectory, in silence of course, with one of the monk doing a reading, and Vespers before supper.
Did I struggle with the urge to check my 'devices' all the time? Not at all. I brought only a laptop computer for writing, but there was no wi-fi at the hermitage. For that I had to hike to the monastery proper where I could tap into a weak wi-fi signal. I did that a grand total of four times in five weeks, and only to check e-mail. The only other device I had with me was a primitive cell phone which was useless to me in the remote location.
From my journal:
Here in the hermitage I stand naked before my own conscience. Its penetrating power is enhanced by the exterior and interior silence.
No Escape. And now it is night. Alone in the hermitage which is itself alone and off by itself under stars undiminished by light pollution. Dead silence. No distractions of the usual sort: other people, pets, television, radio, Internet. Just me, my books, and my past -- and the spiritual dimension that the silence and solitude allow to approach. The hour glass of my existence is running out, which is why I am here to repent of my sins and prepare for death. The hour of death is the hour of truth when the masks fall, and evasions evaporate.
Modern man, distracted and diverted by endless self-referential yammering, firmly entrapped within the human horizon, is so deluded and lost as to be incapable of even raising the question, seriously, of whether anything lies beyond that stifling horizon.
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.
It is delightful to be able to traverse an outdoor or indoor space without feeling obliged to greet or even acknowledge the passersby. This one can do at a monastery without fear of being taken as anti-social or unfriendly. For silence is the 'default setting' at the monastery whereas noise and idle talk are the 'default settings' in society.
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.
The suggestion was made that I give a little talk to the monks of Christ in the Desert, a Benedictine monastery outside of Abiqui, New Mexico. I thought I would offer a few words in defense of the monastic life, not that such an ancient and venerable tradition needs any defense from me, but just to clarify my own thoughts and perhaps help others clarify theirs either by way of agreement or disagreement with mine. I will attempt three things. I will first list some convictions I hold to be of the essence of religion. Then I will suggest that the monastic path is an excellent way to implement these convictions. Finally I will ask myself why I am not a monk.
The Essence of Religion
There is much more to a religion than its beliefs and doctrines; there are also its practices. The practices, however, are informed and guided by certain central convictions whose importance cannot be denied. Religion is not practice alone. Now it is not easy to define religion, and it may be impossible. (Religion may be a family-resemblance concept in Wittgenstein's sense.) In any case I will not attempt to define religion by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions of the concept's application. But as I see it, most of the following are essential (necessary) to anything that deserves to be called a religion, and all of them are essential to Christianity. What I offer is a characterization, not a definition.
1. In first place, and not just in the order of exposition, is the belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53) This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions. It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection. It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents. So it lies beyond the discursive intellect, as it does beyond the senses. One can reason about it, and reason to it, but one cannot access it directly via the discursive intellect. It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience. An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.
Compare the first item in Simone Weil's Profession of Faith: "There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties."
2. The belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53) The Unseen Order is thus not merely a realm of absolute reality, but also one of absolute value and an object of our highest and purest desire.
Compare the second item in Weil's profession: "Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world."
3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the Unseen Order. Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the Order which alone is the source of his ultimate happiness and final good. His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences. That is, our ability to know the saving truth has been impaired by our moral deficiency.
4. The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready, or perhaps any, access to the Unseen Order. Proximately, we need the help of others; ultimately, we need help from the Unseen Order.
5. The conviction that adjustment to the Unseen Order requires moral purification/transformation.
6. The conviction that help from the side of the Unseen Order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.
7. The conviction that the sensible order, while not unreal, is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative, and as derivative defective. It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the Unseen Order.
Each of these seven convictions is an element in my personal credo. Can I prove them? Of course not. But then nothing of a substantive nature in philosophy, theology, or any controversial field, can be proven. But each of the above convictions is rationally defensible. So while not provable, they are not matters of mere faith either. They can be argued for, their negations are rationally rejectable, and there are experiences that vouch for them. (See Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It.)
The Monastic Path
I will now suggest that the monastic life is perhaps the best way to realize existentially the above convictions, but also to have the sorts of experiences that tend to provide evidence for the convictions. One lives the convictions, and by living them is granted experiences and intimations that validate the convictions.
Let us suppose that you accept all or most of the above seven propositions, in their spirit if not in their letter, and that you also share with me the meta-conviction that these first-order convictions are to be lived (existentially realized, realized in one's Existenz) and not merely thought about or talked about or argued over.
Then it makes sense to go into the desert. The negative reason is to escape the manifold distractions of the world which keep one scattered and enslaved to the ephemeral, while the positive reason is to live a life focused on the the absolute and unchanging Source of all reality and value. The entrance into the monastery signals that one is truly convinced of the reality of the unseen (#1), it supreme value for us and our happiness (#2) and the relative unreality and insignificance of this world of time and change and vain ambition (#7).
To live such a focused existence, however, requires discipline. We have a fallen nature in at least two senses. First, we are as if fallen from a higher state. Second, we are ever falling against the objects of our world and losing ourselves in them, becoming absorbed in them. (Compare Heidegger's Verfallenheit, fallingness.) Here we find the ontological root of such sins of the flesh as avarice, gluttony, and lust. Given our fallen and falling nature, a monastic institution can provide the moral discipline and guidance that might be difficult if not impossible to secure on the outside, especially in a secularized and sex-saturated society such as ours has become. The weight of concupiscence is heavy and it drags us down. We are sexual beings naturally, and oversexualized beings socially, and so we are largely unable to control our drives to the extent necessary to develop spiritual sight. The thrust of desire confers final reality upon the sensuous while occluding one's spiritual sight. Sensuous desire, especially inordinate sensuous desire, realizes the things of the senses while de-realizing the things of the spirit.
Here, as I see it, is the main reason for sexual continence. We are not continent because we are undersexed, or prudes, or anti-natalists, or despisers of matter. (Certainly no Christian could despise the material world, and a Christian such as Kierkegaard who at the end of his life waxed anti-natalist veered off into a personal idiosyncrasy.) The continence of the loins subserves the continence of the mind and heart which in turn are probably necessary, though certainly not sufficient, for a Glimpse of spiritual realities. (I say 'probably necessary' because divine grace may grant sight to the committed worldling nolens volens.)
And then there is the great problem of suggestibility. We are highly sensitive and responsive to social suggestions as to what is real and important and what is not. In a society awash with secular suggestions, people find it hard to take religion seriously. Here is another reason why a community of the like-minded may be necessary for most spiritual seekers. They provide reinforcement and the requisite counter-suggestions. (It is worth noting that if cults can 'brainwash' their members, whole societies can go off the rails and brainwash their members.)
Why Am I not a Monk?
"If you think so highly of the monastic life, what are you doing on the outside?"
A fair question deserving a straight answer. I didn't come to religion; I was brought up Roman Catholic by a pious Italian mother and pre-Vatican II nuns and priests. But I had a religious nature, so the training 'took.' But I also had a strong intellectual bent and was inclined philosophically from an early age. So I couldn't avoid asking, and not just intellectually, but existentially as well: how much of this is true and how do I know? The ferment of the 1960s only intensified my cognitive dissonance as the religious upbringing clashed on the one side with my philosophical questioning, and on the other with the secular and counter-cultural suggestions of the 'sixties. I remember in 1965 listening intently to the words of Bob Dylan's Gates of Eden and trying to discern its compatibility, if any, with Catholic teaching. (By the way, attending a Dylan concert in those days was like going to church: the audience remained dead quiet, hanging on every word.)
So philosophy took over the role in the pious youth's life that religion had played. That kept me away from any conventional religious vocation. And so it kept me out of the monastery. For one cannot join a monastery in general; it must be either Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Buddhist or whatever, and to do that in good faith and with a clear intellectual conscience one must accept the central doctrinal content of those religions. But that content was exactly what to my mind needed examination. Athens at that point got the upper hand over Jerusalem. So why am I not a monk? Because of Athens.
But now, as I approach the end of the trail, I see ever more clearly the vanity of any philosophy that does not complete itself in something beyond it. But what? The empty discursivity of reason needs to be filled and completed by a direct spiritual seeing. Concepts without intuitions are empty. (Kant) So philosophy needs completion by mystical intuition, but this is rare and sporadic and fragmentary here below, mere Glimpses; to sustain us in the between times we need faith grounded in revelation.
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