Thinking through Thomas Merton

Robert Inchausti

Description

With the publication of The Seven Storey Mountain in 1948, Thomas Merton became a bestselling author, writing about spiritual contemplation in a modern context. Although Merton (1915–1968) lived as a Trappist monk, he advocated a spiritual life that was not a retreat from the world, but an alternative to it, particularly to the deadening materialism and spiritual vacuity of the postwar West. Over the next twenty years, Merton wrote for a wide audience, bringing the wisdom of Christianity, Buddhism, and Sufism into dialogue with the period's contemporary thought.

In Thinking through Thomas Merton, Robert Inchausti introduces readers to Merton and evaluates his continuing relevance for our time. Inchausti shows how Merton broke the high modernist trance so that we might become the change we wish to see in the world by refiguring the lost virtues of silence, contemplation, and community in a world enamored by the will to power, virtuoso performance, radical skepticism, and materialist metaphysics. Merton's defense of contemplative culture is considered in light of the postmodern thought of recent years and emerges as a compelling alternative.
Introduction: Everything Old Is New Again

1. An Experimental Life

2. Contemplation as Critique

3. Poetry as Natural Theology

4. A Monasticism of the Last Man

5. Merton’s Most Dangerous Idea

Conclusion: Refiguring the Faith

Appendix: Some Milestones of Merton Scholarship

Notes
Index

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Mysticism
• Catholic Church

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 10 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438449470
• Langue: English

Extrait

Thinking through Thomas Merton
Thinking through Thomas Merton
Contemplation for Contemporary Times
ROBERT INCHAUSTI
Cover art: Drawing by Thomas Merton. Used with permission of the Merton Legacy Trust and the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
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Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Inchausti, Robert.
Thinking through Thomas Merton : contemplation for contemporary times / Robert Inchausti.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4945-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-4946-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Merton, Thomas, 1915–1968. 2. Contemplation. I. Title.
BX4705.M542I527 2014
271 .12502—dc23
2013004184
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
“The rediscovery of Christianity is made possible by the dissolution of metaphysics, that is, by the end of objectivistic-dogmatic philosophies as well as of European culture’s claim to have discovered and realized the ‘true’ nature of humanity.” 1
—Gianni Vattimo
“There is, however, another world—it is this world properly received.” 2
—Mark Johnston
Contents
Introduction: Everything Old Is New Again
Chapter 1: An Experimental Life
Chapter 2: Contemplation as Critique
Chapter 3: Poetry as Natural Theology
Chapter 4: A Monasticism of the Last Man
Chapter 5: Merton’s Most Dangerous Idea
Conclusion: Refiguring the Faith
Appendix: Some Milestones of Merton Scholarship
Notes
Index
Introduction
Everything Old Is New Again
Upon first reading the works of Thomas Merton, many Christians (especially Catholics) felt that religious thinking had finally come to life again. The cultural treasures of the Christian past were at last being made to speak more powerfully than the trite, pious bromides they were commonly thought to express. Here at last was someone who could reanimate the sacred tradition, interpret its value, and bring it into dialogue with the problems of our time. 1
Merton’s best-selling memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), was a compelling, first-person description of the clash between the imperatives of the inner life and the demands of modern social existence. But Merton added a surprising and unexpected final chapter to his account in which the soul triumphed over its circumstances through a return to contemplative living.
At the heart of this return was Merton’s reaffirmation of the fourfold biblical hermeneutic articulated in the Patristic Age. This approach to reading scripture was refined during the high Medieval Synthesis and corrected to meet modern epistemological concerns by powerful twentieth-century Catholic theologians such as Henri de Lubac, 2 Jean Danielou, Hans Von Balthasar, 3 and Etienne Gilson. These thinkers—arguing against both biblical fundamentalism and the so-called “higher criticism”—argue that the Bible makes sense only when read devotionally . That is to say, when Jesus is quoted as saying “I and the Father are one,” he is not making a logical metaphysical assertion or a historical claim open to archeological correction, but rather a prophetic pronouncement more in line with the epistemology of modernist poetics and its nondualistic perspective on existence. The same can be said for the multivalent, overdetermined content of the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Old and New Testaments.
By reading Holy Scripture in this way, a contemplative Christian is inoculated against the heresies of literalism, “cheap grace,” 4 and “cheap supernaturalism,” which substitute magical thinking for a sincere transcendental reflection. 5 Merton understood, as did his patristic and monastic precursors, that the interpretive problems raised by ambiguous stories and changing circumstances, problems involving persons and purposes, cannot be solved (if by “solved” you mean explained away) by any simple procedure. They can only be understood through multiple shifts in perspective, where the antinomies that generated them in the first place are brought in dialogue with our own evolving categories of self-understanding—categories that are themselves constantly changing as we deepen and grow as persons. Thus, reading scripture, if done with integrity, raises as many questions as it solves, and by so doing generates many more meanings, paradoxes, and ironies than any single ideology can decipher or decode.
In this sense, biblical interpretation is not a normal science but a spiritual practice requiring self-knowledge, piety, discernment, and humility—not indoctrination. It does not yield its secrets to ideologues or fanatics. And so by adopting this ancient, devotional approach, Merton was able to reanimate the Great Chain of Being—once so central to Western philosophy and theology—by incorporating its assumptions within his own interpretive practice. But he didn’t do this by reasserting its value as an antique metaphysical absolute—but rather as an interpretive heuristic necessary for the comprehension of biblical images and tropes. This merging of the sociohistorical horizon of the present with the unique existential assumptions built into the biblical text was an achievement largely lost on post-Enlightenment thinkers—atheists and believers alike—who were so deeply entrenched in their Cartesian notions of the self that they could only read the Bible as pseudo-history or as the proof text for various religious doctrines.
Merton’s application of the fourfold hermeneutic made it possible for him to employ a conscience driven version of what Roland Barthes once described as “the structuralist activity” 6 to his reading of the Bible and tradition. This imaginative act of finding new meanings in old forms ends up transforming the reader in the process of reading. 7 Another way of putting this is that the contemplative meaning of scripture, its existential challenges and inspirations, like the challenges and inspirations we experience in our everyday lives, takes on its true value only after we see through the niggling, ideologically ridden content of our binary codes and historical moment so that we may fathom our place within a larger, yet to be discerned ontological mystery. It is only then that new, more important questions arise for us, and the larger literary and final messianic challenge can emerge.
By writing out of and through this eschatological point of view, Merton revealed a depth to religious thought previously lost on his more literal-minded contemporaries—both secular and religious. He showed that what they thought they knew about religion, Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, had been fatally compromised by materialism and reductionist metaphysics. And yet The Seven Storey Mountain was no simple call for a return to the old-time religion. Merton brought the monastic contemplative tradition forward into the twentieth century, freeing it from its ethnocentric prejudices and antique cosmological assumptions to reveal its constructionist and communitarian roots in the practices of the early Church. He took the notion of Christian self-forgetting (kenosis) and rendered it concrete by bringing it into dialogue with the social and existential realities of modernity (not the least of which was the struggle for human rights and the search for personal meaning in an increasingly politicized, militarized, and commercialized world). 8
Unfortunately, the deep theological underpinnings of Merton’s thought were often overshadowed by his controversial stands on issues of the moment—such as his criticisms of the Vietnam War and his defense of the civil rights movement. As a result, he was more popularly seen as a social critic, as opposed to an Orthodox contemplative diagnosing the spiritual crises of the age. And though it is true that he was an admirer and friend of Dorothy Day and Dan and Phil Berrigan, he was not an active participant in their protests and remained both inside and outside the Catholic Peace Fellowship during the Vietnam War—joining it briefly, then quitting over the self-immolation of former Cistercian novice Roger Laporte, only to rejoin it again several months later. 9
Merton’s relationship to Catholic social thought actually follows more closely the work of Charles Peguy, who argued for a new, more socially engaged Catholicism, 10 and the work of Jacques Maritain, 11 who intellectualized that vision in his philosophical teachings. Henri de Lubac along with Urs Von Balthasar then welded those progressive social views to patristic scholarship, providing the Orthodox theological foundation for the reforms of Vatican II. Merton then translated this emerging perspective into psychologically compelling, first-person poetry and prose—authenticating its contemporary existential significance, extending its influence, and bringing it into dialogue with contemporary culture.
This more general project of a return to spirituality is something very different from Christian apologetics per se or even theology per se, for it can be seen in the works of secular as well as religious figures. Modern writers as diverse as Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Martin Heidegger, Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, Soren Kierkegaard, and even Jack Kerouac 12 all start from the same basic premise that the integrity and freedom of the human person need to be defended