There's no Escaping Them, Part II

So, as the last posting recounted, Thomas Merton the young Trappist had just become a sub-deacon, was undergoing troubles in his writing, and had come across an issue of La Vie Intellectuelle, which happens to have been written by a Dominican, a thinky Frenchman by the name of Sertillanges.

At this time Merton was struggling with something I, too, have always intermittently struggled with: essentially a distrust of la vie intellectuelle. It's not like Merton didn't read, and it's not as though I don't. But in certain people inclined that way there is a very real awareness of the aridity that can arise by being given overmuch to cerebration. Intellect can give rise to intellectualism. Philosophy can lead to sophism. One can know all there is to know about the first three years of the first plastics-manufacturing plant in Guangdong -- and know nothing about love, or living, or laughter. One can be esteemed by one's peers as the most brilliant and erudite exponent of ____, and yet remain a cripple in all other areas. In life, that is.

Merton seems always to have been terribly uneasy with his vocation as writer. He realized how many he touched, he realized it was a gift, and that he was thus obliged to exercise it - and yet his particular spirituality made the intellectual aspects of his writing hard for him to reconcile with his faith, his desires, his ideal of the man of God:

'Every book I write is a mirror of my own character and conscience. I always open the final, printed job, with a faint hope of finding myself agreeable, and I never do.

There is nothing to be proud of in this one (speaking of his Seeds of Contemplation), either. It is clever and difficult to follow, not so much because I am deep as because I don't know how to punctuate, and my line of thought is clumsy and tortuous. It lacks warmth and human affection. I find in myself an underlying pride that I had thought was all gone, but it is still there, as bad as ever. I don't see how the book will ever do any good. It will antagonize people, or else make them go around acting superior and stepping on everybody.

Laughlin tells me a book club is taking it and advertising it as a "streamlined Imitation of Christ." God forgive me. It is more like Swift than Thomas a Kempis.

...the book is cold and cerebral.'

Now, some of that can read to modern ears unfamiliar with the larger picture of Merton, as reminiscent of the self-flagellation in print of medieval saints, whose 'autobiographies' were constrained by social and ecclesiastical realities as much as by the lack of modern psychological perspective. Merton's auto-critique here is, taken in the broader context, about his fear of excessive intellectualism and its effects on others. He is trying to lead others into contemplation, a union with God in the heart, and he is scared his vital message will be obscured by 'cleverness' and rhetoric, which will have the opposite effect from that intended. He is humble, yes: no one in his right mind would wish to be called the 'new Aquinas' or 'this century's Aristotle,' but it's far, far from pathological insecurity. It is only recently that humility has come to be perceived as a vice.

Anyway, Merton finds much of sound value in the little book. It is in many ways a handbook; it's not, despite the similarity of titles, something like Hannah Arendt's A Life of the Mind. And, being by a Dominican/Catholic/Christian/believer, it views thinkiness and writing, for those thus endowed, as vocations, as a means of and responsibility toward using one's (God-given) gifts in service to God and man.

Which is something Dominicans and Jesuits are not just good at, but comfortable with and schooled in. Other orders, other faiths, people with different histories -- well, it can be a tricky road. Most ethical traditions teach the importance of giving, whether as corporal acts of mercy, or standing up in the face of injustice, or giving materially, as with traditions of philanthropy, alms, tzedekah, and zakat. Compared with, say, the extraordinary giving of Miep and Jan Gies or Mother Teresa or Dorothy Day, it can be difficult for some people to believe a philosopher, a thinker - or, for that matter, a Carmelite or Tibetan Buddhist monastic pray-er, might be as worthy as these individuals. In rigidly secular circles, the latter groups are dismissed altogether, as either charmingly benighted or possibly obscenely self-indulgent.

Which brings us back to Thomas Merton, who didn't want to be self-indulgent but feared that the nature of his work might always be thus. In his handbook, Sertillanges advises that the body is not inseparable from the mind, and insists (sounding rather Benedictine, I might add) that work, sleep, silence, and proper eating all play a part in cultivating the whole person necessary to such a pursuit. If one is properly to exercise this gift, one must exercise also other disciplines: detachment, simplicity, ample reflection, note-taking, etc. In Sertillanges' schema, right ordering of the whole of one's life and one's mind results in an intellectual life which is neither all-consuming, nor shallow, nor sterile, nor incompatible with spirituality or the contemplative life.

Merton, however, while seeing the great practical wisdom of the book, recoiled and wondered what John of the Cross would have to say about all this. He felt he could never reconcile the two -- but perhaps someone like Maritain (une vie intellectuelle, bien sûr!) might be able to. When Sertillanges decrees that the man who has just come from physical labor is like a wounded man, should be respected and cared for, Merton demands to know What about John of the Cross, and his 'labor' in prison in Toledo? Surely he emerged from his cell 'comme un blessé' - and with the Canticle and the Dark Night stuffed in his clothes!

His concern is largely, as I interpret it, the same as mine: a fear of losing humility in some sort of elegant proportion to using the intellect. Merton relents and admits the two paths may not be irreconcilable - but it seems that he still feels he would in some way be choosing to 'be' Jacques Maritain in a sense when what his heart really seeks is the direct mystical union between 'God in His Oneness and not broken up into all His shadows' of St. John of the Cross. He doesn't really feel he can have it both ways, but he confesses, 'the truth is, there is room for both. In what proportions is there room for them in my life? That'll work itself out in practice.'

The truth is, I love Merton. And ask ten different Catholics, ten different Buddhists, and ten different 'Buddhist' Whole Foods customers, what they believe about Thomas Merton, and you'll get thirty different answers, possibly. He can no doubt express it best:

"I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further. So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking of nothing. There is much that one cannot 'affirm' and 'accept,' but first one must say 'yes' where one really can. If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it."

And I think it is this effervescent, radiant, expansive 'Yes' that is at the core of any true religious, and any true vocation. Merton was afraid of losing that Yes if he wandered too far into the cerebral, while at the same time he felt no risk to it by embracing the genuine beauty he could see elsewhere.

I still didn't get to the Dominicans and their intimidating 'balance' (which is my perspective, not their expression), but I'm sure they'll follow me again, if not to the next posting, then the one after the bit about vicious Australian reds that destroy the esophagus in one swallow...