The Unknown Thomas Merton

The Unknown Thomas Merton. In the late 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s, Thomas Merton was the most well-known and admired Catholic monk in North America. Seven Story Mountain, his autobiography written while he was still young, was one of the best-selling books of 1949, going on to sell over four million copies. It has never been out of print. During his lifetime he published over 70 books. He belonged to the Trappist order, remaining at the Abbey of Gethsemani, in Kentucky, United States, from 1941 until his sudden death in 1968 at 53 years. In his later years he became interested in Zen Buddhism. It was at an ecumenical conference in Bangkok that he was accidentally electrocuted. *

A lonely man

These facts tell us virtually nothing about who he was, nothing interesting anyway. Merton’s mother died when his was six, and his father died when he was sixteen, leaving him well provided for. Even before his father’s death he was raised by a series of relatives and at boarding schools. During his entire life Merton never worked for wages, but there are more important things in life than money, such as a stable home and loving parents. Merton had neither.

In a previous post I discussed Merton’s mystical version of Christianity. This post tries to figure out who he was as a man. The simplest and most important thing to say is that he was terribly lonely, longing for love. His solution, which never really worked, was to abandon himself to God, thus eliminating his needy self. One of his biographers writes that “when the Gethsemani gates closed behind him, Merton tasted freedom even though he was within four walls.” (Shaw, loc 925) If we can understand that, we can understand Merton.

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Thomas Merton is wrong: Christian mysticism is a bad idea

Thomas Merton is wrong: Christian mysticism is a bad idea.

Thomas Merton was a great proponent of ecumenism. For Merton, all religion, East and West, sought the same thing: unity with God. He was also a beautiful writer. Nevertheless, it seems to me that he got something fundamental wrong.

The goal of Christian mysticism is to find unity with God. Solitude, contemplation, self-denial and often silence all aim at the emptying of the self in order that we might be filled with God. But what if the goal of unity is the wrong goal? The proper Christian goal is faith in God and following the teachings of Jesus Christ. Chief among Christ’s teachings is loving and caring for other people.

Whatever unity with God that is necessary in order to feel fulfilled is achieved through the eucharist (communion). We partake of the blood and body of Christ, and so incorporate his body into ours, and our body into the membership in the church. What else is needed? What else is there? *

Contemplation is about the self, not God

If this is so, what purpose does the contemplative search for mystical unity with God serve? I think it serves solely the need of the individual, and little to do with a greater unity with God. What if instead of the word “unity,” I substituted “a feeling of belonging to God’s world because I am one of his creatures.” Putting it this way is more long winded, but it says all that need be said. The search for wholeness is a search for self, not God.

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Camus’ absurdism lacks imagination

Camus’ absurdism lacks imagination.

Camus insists that he is an absurdist, not an existentialist. OK, but it is important to figure out what he means. Camus thinks a Christian can be an absurdist. I don’t. I do think that absurdism is the leading alternative not only to Christianity, but religion.

Religion is said to be based on faith, as it is. Camus’ absurdism is based on a particular heroic ideal, a man who faces the truth head on, as if it were that simple. All quotations are from Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays unless otherwise noted.

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Did Camus want to be baptized?

First a discussion of the religious beliefs of Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Albert Camus’ novel, The Fall. Then a discussion of Camus’ request to be baptized according to Howard Mumma in Albert Camus and the Minister. There is a connection. It has to do with faith.

The Fall, Camus’ last novel, is set in Hell. Well, not exactly. It’s set in Amsterdam, where the canals are laid out in concentric circles. That and the foggy atmosphere are both intended to remind us of Dante’s circles of Hell. Mexico City, a bar in the inner-most circle of hell is where Jean-Baptiste Clamence holds forth. He is the novel’s only speaking character, and we must not take him literally. He would have us think he is in a type of Hell, but he may be playing games with the reader, and himself.

I won’t summarize the book. The only thing you need to know is that Clamence was a wealthy and successful Parisian lawyer and all-around good guy (lawyer and good guy are not automatically antonyms). After a series of minor mishaps, culminating in the not so minor mishap of ignoring a drowning woman’s cry, he exiles himself to one of the seedier bars in Amsterdam, where he tells his tale to any who will listen. His goal, it seems, is to justify his drinking and whoring by constantly pointing out how bad he is. An odd strategy, designed it seems to preempt judgment.

About Christ’s guilt

Clamence tells us that not only is he guilty, but even Jesus Christ was guilty, merely by being born in a certain time and place. Consider the massacre of the innocents, in which Herod orders all male children in Bethlehem under two to be killed in order to avoid a prophecy about the “King of the Jews,” who he believed threatened his throne (Matthew 2:16-18). Wasn’t that the sadness one sometimes sees in Jesus?

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Did Albert Camus believe in God?

Of all the existentialists, Camus came closest to believing in God, becoming closer in his later works. Camus would object to two parts of this statement. He objected to being labeled an existentialist, preferring the term absurdist. And he would say he was not close to God. He admired (and once said “loved”) Jesus Christ.*

Since Camus did not believe in an afterlife, what I mean by “close to God” and what most Christians believe is quite different. Yet, even with all these qualifications the statement stands. Certainly, he has been many Christians’ favorite atheist, primarily because he was comfortable with religious language and imagery. For Camus, “it is possible to be Christian and absurd.” (Sisyphus, p 112) All one has to do is disbelieve in an afterlife.

Most Christians, perhaps all, would reject this possibility, but in a time of militant atheism like our own, there is a vast difference between Camus and someone like Richard Dawkins. Camus had sympathy and respect for Christianity, above all for Christ. I think that is the best way of putting it.

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Simone Weil is not a Christian mystic. She’s not Christian period.

Simone Weil is not a Christian mystic. She’s not Christian period. Nor Jewish.

Often called a Christian mystic, nothing could be further from the truth. Wikipedia labels Weil’s “school” as “modern Platonism,” which is only slightly less misleading. Weil developed a post-Christian, post-Western theology in her later work. Lissa McCullough argues that Weil’s universalism can be characterized as religious pragmatism, and that seems about right

Religious conceptions prove their value by their effectiveness in bringing about an attitude of amor fati — perfect humility, obedience, longing for justice, and action that is consistent with the ineluctable truth of finitude and death. (p 236)

Weil was particularly interested in Buddhism.

Weil is a harsh critic of the institutionalized church, likening it to the Great Beast, a collection of egos bent on the sanctification of their satisfaction.

Not your ordinary Christian

The crucifixion of Christ is where force meets submission to force, and submission is made holy. Weil shares this view with several contemporary theologians. God wins by losing, Christ’s power made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). The incarnation and crucifixion are enough for Weil. Resurrection spoils it; sacrifice not salvation is what religion is all about.

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Simone Weil: The Need for Roots

Because she concentrates on the relationship between the individual and the universal, man and God, Weil generally regards the collectivity, society, as an idol. Whether we know it or not, most of us worship this idol, which means thinking and acting the way people in our position in society are supposed to think and act. The world begins and ends with the society in which we live.

The need for roots

It comes as a surprise, then, to see how important the community is to Weil. The Need for Roots, was written during the early months of 1943; she would be dead by the end of that summer. Weil argues that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” The damage that springs from rootlessness is the curse of contemporary life. “Whoever is uprooted, himself uproots others.”

Though she spent a lifetime arguing against “the collective,” the Great Beast that is society, she recognizes that the collectivity is “the sole agency for preserving these spiritual treasurers accumulated by the dead.” (Roots, 41, 45, 8).

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Paying Attention with Simone Weil

Paying Attention with Simone Weil.

Well known, at least among those who study Weil (perhaps a few thousand), is her concept of attention. Less well known is the way in which Iris Murdoch, Oxford don and novelist, adapted the term. The idea is a good one, but Weil gets it mixed up with self-denial, her desire to be nothing more than “a certain intersection of nature and God.” (Love of God, pp 462-463)

For Weil, attention (attention) means to suspend thinking, leaving one’s mind detached, empty, ready to be entered by the other. Attention means not always trying to know, not categorizing, but waiting, as though the other could participate in forming the idea we have of it. “Attention is the highest and purest form of generosity.” Attention is the opposite of a thought that has seized upon some idea too hastily, and thinks it knows (Weil, Reflections, pp 48-49). For Weil, attention requires self-emptying. In attention,

the soul empties itself of all its contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all its truth. (Reflections, p 51)

Weil is mistaken. I have no other way of knowing an other’s suffering (or joy) except by trying to find comparable experiences in myself. It’s the only way we can know: to be open but not empty. I know others not by knowing myself, but by feeling myself resonating with the experiences of others. The more in touch with my feelings, the better I can experience the feelings of others.

Iris Murdoch

The term “attention” was adapted and adopted by Iris Murdoch, who was deeply influenced by Weil, more so than by any other woman.

The enemies of art and of morals, that is the enemies of love, are the same: social convention and neurosis.

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