Thomas Merton: Monk and Poet

...He remained there for the rest of his life, until he emerged in 1968 to undertake a tour of spiritual investigation in Asia, and died in an accident in Bangkok...

...Merton spoke in one way to the '40s, at the beginning of his life as a contemplative and religious teacher...

...Woodcock is himself knowledgeable about Zen and the Tao and the varieties of Buddhism that Merton became interested in, arid he can assess Merton's writings on them in an informed way...

...Commonweal: 24...

...Yet, by the mid-sixties he was, like many liberal Catholics, adopting political attitudes on such matters as Vietnam and racial justice, engaging at times in some injudicious rhetoric, as when he accused a white liberal friend of heading for totalitarianism and acquiescing in the liquidation of the blacks...

...Woodcock comments, "He does not seem to have understood how much of this was the kind of routine pietism he would have dismissed among Christians...

...Time will tell what he has to say to the future...

...Merton became famous with The Seven Storey Mountain, which was a religious bestseller in 1948...

...Interesting questions emerge at such points...

...Bernard Bergonzi George woodcock says of himself, "I am not a Catholic...

...Woodcock's generally excellent book...

...and in another way to the '60s, towards the premature end of it...

...it would take a different kind of study to enlarge upon them...

...Woodcock abandons biography when Merton becomes a monk...

...At Columbia Merton took his B. A. and went on to write an M.A...

...Throughout his life his concern was with what was contemplative, mystical and profoundly individual, as opposed to the merely social and inauthentic...

...But one doesn't get much sense in this book of how far Merton was aware of conflicts and gaps and self-contradictions in his thinking...

...He could go a certain way along the Eastern road, a long way perhaps, but only so far...

...Woodcock quotes an apt description of the book as ' 'that swan-song of the nineteenth-century monastic revival...

...One does get a sense from Mr...

...A practitioner of contemplation on a high spiritual plane, living in detachment from the world, was he also a little inclined to an uncommitted contemplativeness on the lower plane of ideas...

...Occasionally he convicts Merton of a certain naivete and over-eagerness to welcome signs of an alien spirituality, like the Tibetan refugees he observed in India, spinning prayer wheels and muttering mantras...

...These are hints and implications that I picked up from Mr...

...Merton was the son of a fairly successful and prosperous New Zealand artist and an American mother, his early education in England 18 January 1980: 23 Cambridge...

...In 1934 he returned to America at the age of nineteen and in the manner of the times became for a brief period a card-carrying Communist...

...I am not even a practicing Christian, and though I acknowledge the unknowable God, I suspect that my personal kind of deism might come nearer to what Merton thought of as atheism...

...By the '60s Merton had moved a long way from exclusive pre-conciliar orthodoxy...

...Woodcock's book is devoted to Merton's ideas and his literary work...

...In 1938 he became a Catholic and in 1941 he entered the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky...

...Again, he suggests that Merton tried too hard to see resemblances between Christian belief and Zen or Taoist insights...

...his cast of mind was naturally wide-ranging in its interests and sympathies, and he was expressing ecumenist sentiments slightly before Vatican II made them customary...

...Increasingly, Merton observed the global unity of mystical insights, despite differences of culture, whilst insisting on the uniqueness of the Incarnation...

...And though he is not a Catholic he writes in a well-informed and sensitive way about the profound changes in the Catholic Church in the '50s and '60s...

...He recognizes, though, that there is common ground between Merton and himself, "some shared stretch of the desert," as he calls it, and his book is remarkable for the sympathy and insight with which he discusses the developing ideas of the Cistercian writer...

...Throughout his monastic life Merton wrote copiously, poetry and devotional or contemplative prose, and most of Mr...

...He turned too with increasing curiosity and sympathy to Eastern religious experience, although his fundamental commitment as Catholic, monk and priest remained completely firm...

...He entered Columbia to read social sciences, but soon switched to literature, under the persuasion of Mark Van Doren...

...Woodcock is surely rightrwhen he says,' 'But it seems to me that in all this Merton is dealing in analogies too remote to be meaningful...

...Woodcock's sympathetic but informed and occasionally critical account that Merton's intellectual generosity made him try as far as possible to adopt attitudes that seem, on the face of it, mutually irreconcilable...

...Woodcock disposes of Merton's life in a few pages at the beginning of the book...

...Reasonably, Mr...

...By the end of his life, he had come to acknowledge that its intense but narrow spirituality had dated...

...Ideas change, and it is a sign of a living thinker when they do change...

...thesis on Blake, who was a crucial early influence on his spiritual development...

...Merton found in the Zen doctrine of the interchangeability and synonymity of Being, Seeing and Acting, "a surprising Trinitarian structure that reminds us of all that is most characteristic in the highest forms of Christian contemplation...

...there cannot be a great deal to say about the day-to-day life of a man who spends twenty-seven years in a monastery, although some events were important, as when Merton gave up living in the community to embark on an eremitical life in a cottage in the grounds, though still taking his midday meal with the other monks...