Tag: Hope

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”

    You’re probably familiar with the quote above, a favorite of Pope St. John Paul II.  It’s author is Tertullian (c. A.D. 160 – c. A.D. 220), one of the foremost Christian writers and apologists of his age, who also gave us such essential terms as “Trinity” (Trinitas) and “Three Persons, One Substance” (Tres Personae, Una Substantia).  Despite his enormous achievements, however, and his lasting influence, Tertullian is not considered a Father of the Church; we don’t even call him “Saint” Tertullian:  he chose, sadly, to follow his own judgment rather than that of the Apostolic Church, and fell into heresy in the latter part of his life.

    I first wrote this post six years ago, as a follow-up to my essay “Merton’s Parable of the Trappists and Icarians”.  I had been reminded of Tertullian by several things I read at that time about the Trappist monk Thomas Merton who, if he had still been with us, would have been celebrating his 100^th birthday at the time (January 31^st 2015).  I don’t mean to suggest that Merton was a figure on a par with Tertullian: the late Trappist made no lasting contribution to the development of Catholic Doctrine, and added no new words to our vocabulary, although he was quite influential in his time (and still is, to a degree).  Like Tertullian, however, he didn’t stay the course: while he never considered himself to have left the Church, his growing involvement with Zen Buddhism in his last years appeared to be carrying him outside the bounds of Christian belief and practice.

     I resisted reading anything by Thomas Merton for a long time, largely, I confess, because I was put off by certain enthusiasts who were mostly interested in his Zen phase. When I first picked up The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography he wrote shortly after joining the Trappists, I wished that I hadn’t waited so long: the story of his conversion was beautiful and inspiring, as was much of his other writing from the 1940’s and 1950’s.
     Sadly, Merton didn’t stay that way.  He has always reminded me of an image from the English historian (and Catholic saint) the Venerable Bede (672-730 A.D), although not in quite the same way Bede used the image.  In Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, a retainer of King Edwin of Northumbria convinces him to embrace the new faith of Christianity by telling the king that his life is like a bird that passes through an open window into a well-lit hall, and then out again into the stormy night: his pagan worldview can only explain that brief moment in the light, but what comes before or after is dark.  The Christian Faith, on the other hand, can explain it all.  In Merton’s case, he is the bird in the image.  He flew out of the darkness of his early, unbelieving,  years into the light of the Faith, but appeared to be headed out the far window when he met his end in Thailand in 1968.

     As I mentioned above, this post was originally sparked by other articles I read marking the centennial of Merton’s birth.  On the Catholic World Report site, for instance, Karl Olsen had posted a piece (“More on Merton”), a spin-off from an earlier article published in This Rock in 2008 by Anthony E. Clark (“Can You Trust Thomas Merton?”) for which Olsen had been the illustrator.  The two pieces highlight the dilemma presented by this conflicted, contradictory monk: yes he was a good Catholic gone bad, but he was also a gifted writer who, in his orthodox period, wrote some insightful and uplifting things.  Clark’s This Rock article very helpfully includes a list of Merton works to avoid, but also enumerates recommended writings, which Clark introduces by saying: “These works represent the early era of Merton’s monastic life, and his views are still quite orthodox.  These books are beautifully written; they are what made Thomas Merton Thomas Merton.”

     It’s tempting to simply drop Merton altogether, given the potential bad influence of his later, heterodox books. I don’t think we should do that.  That’s not the way the Church dealt with Tertullian, or Origen, another almost-Father of the Church gone bad whose good writings are still read.  We should hold on to what what is good and beautiful. We haven’t thrown out the word “Trinity” because Tertullian became a Montanist, and we likewise should not forget The Seven Storey Mountain just because Thomas Merton seemed to lose his way later in life.

     Thomas Merton is a name that can provoke a reaction from all manner of Catholics . . . all manner of reactions as well, depending on whether you invoke the Merton of the 1940’s, a doctrinally orthodox convert to Catholicism who was enamored of his new life in a Trappist monastery, or the Merton of the 1960’s who, although still a monk, seemed more interested in anti-Vietnam politics and Buddhist mysticism.  This article, an update of a post I first published six years ago at the time of Merton’s hundredth birthday, is about an illuminating story in one of his early (i.e., orthodox) books.  I’ll publish a follow-up post about Merton himself next week.

     Although vowed to silence in his everyday life in the Trappist abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, Thomas Merton was a gifted writer whose literary work was first permitted, and then encouraged by his superiors.  His first and best book is The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography he published in 1948.  It’s a  beautifully written, compelling story of his conversion to Christ and to Catholicism.  He was not without his failings, however, some of them rather serious. Not only that, but toward the end of his life in the mid to late 1960’s he became increasingly drawn to Zen Buddhism.  It was not clear that he could still be truly considered a Catholic at the time of his unexpected death in Thailand in 1968.

The Founding   

 
      Prior to his later turn toward Buddhism, however, most of Merton’s writing was thoroughly Catholic and often inspirational.  One of my favorite pieces, from his 1949 book The Waters of Siloe, is his account of the founding of his monastery, Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, which had been established by French monks a century earlier.  The tale starts with the departure of the founding monks, in the dead of night in the pouring rain, from their original monastery in France; it details their many adventures in getting to, and then across, the Atlantic Ocean, and finally their arrival at their new home in the rolling Kentucky hills.

     I had at one time hoped to write a children’s book drawing on Merton’s story (which is itself based on a contemporary account in the monastery’s records).  My own kids liked the idea, but, sadly, the late monk’s literary trustees did not share our enthusiasm for the project, so it was not be.  Too bad.

     Nonetheless, it’s worth reading Merton’s version of the story.  He has a wonderful way with a narrative, and makes the most of some of the amusing twists in the story, as when the reclusive Trappists lose their luggage in the worldly sprawl of Paris, or when (again in the pouring rain) the “Silent Monks” need to find a way to wake up the Jesuits under whose roof they were planning to spend their first night on their arrival in Kentucky.

The Parable of the Icarians

   The most striking thing  in Merton’s story, however, is a little parable which he weaves into the larger narrative.  As it happens, among the other passengers on the ship that carries the Trappists to America  are members of a secular communal group called the Icarians.  Merton doesn’t miss an opportunity to contrast the peace and order of the Trappists, whose little society is founded on Jesus Christ, with the Icarians, who follow the ideas of the socialist utopian Etienne Cabet: the Trappists feed the other travelers, including the Icarians, from their mobile kitchen, while the Icarians prohibit their members from taking spiritual sustenance at the monks’ masses; the Trappists “owned all their property in common.  They were, in fact, vowed to the most uncompromising poverty, forbidden to possess anything as individuals,” whereas when the Icarians decide to divide up their wealth one member attempts to make off with all of it and another “wrote a letter of delirious invective against Cabet and then blew out his brains.”  The Trappist superior is shocked when one Icarian, who had fallen overboard, confided that he was prepared to stab himself to death rather than drown if nobody came to save him; later, the monk is bemused to discover that another Icarian, who is asking to join the Trappists, is in fact a married man.

     Merton himself explains the difference between the two groups as follows:

. . . the monks had Christ living and working in them by faith, by charity.  The monks were united by the Holy Spirit in the peace of God, which tames and dominates and sublimates man’s nature and ordains it to the highest possible ends.  But the Icarians were united only by the frail bonds of an “armed neutrality” of insatiable animal appetites.

     Merton’s thesis is a simple one (which I address from a somewhat different angle in my recent  post “What We Owe to Caesar“): Jesus Christ is the foundation of all truth, and a society built on Christ will be orderly and flourishing; a society that relies exclusively on human wisdom is doomed to futility and disintegration.  The Icarians (who were actually more successful than most such groups: their last community didn’t disband until 1898, fifty years after they began) are neither the first nor the last example history offers.  Merton saw it himself in his own history, in the contrast between the disorder and unhappiness of his early, worldly, life, and the joy that he found in the Christ-centered world of the monastery (and one hopes he found his way back to the Lord before the final end).  His tale of the Trappists and the Icarians is just one more illustration that only the house built on the Rock (see Matthew 7:25) will stand.

Featured image above: “The Fall of Icarus” by Bernard Picart (1731)