The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton/Thomas Merton's Dark Path/The Human Journey:
Kilcourse, George
Books: PILGRIMAGE TO COMPASSION THE LITERARY ESSAYS OF THOMAS MERTOH EDITED BY BROTHER PATRICK HART New Directions, $39.95, 549 pp. THOMAS MERTON'S DARK PATH THE INNER EXPERIENCE OF A...
...Two Faulkner lectures achieve this status because of previous transcriptions for Katallagete...
...THOMAS MERTON'S DARK PATH THE INNER EXPERIENCE OF A CONTEMPLATIVE William H. Shannon Farrar Straus & Giroux $12.95, 245 pp...
...Rather than the way of direct analogy, Merton preferred the negation and paradox of apophatic theology: the contemplative renounces the concepts, symbols of mind's activity for the "dark" way of ' 'knowing'' God as' 'unknown.'' Here is the chaste Catholic intellect of Merton qua mystic...
...My Argument with the Gestapo...
...Since few Catholic writers evidence so publicly the transformation from naive dogmatism to post-conciliar pluralism and the experiential as a locus for theology, this survey of Merton's developing thought on contemplation proves especially helpful...
...Without doctrines or forms, Zen confirmed Merton's dark way of contemplative knowing...
...Shannon has penetrated Merton's lexicon and bridges the chasm between devotional tracts and the finely tuned later Merton essays...
...Padovano does not spare the early works of Merton: "narrow...
...Mystagogy occupies Merton's attention...
...He was, undoubtedly, the essayist and not a sustained commentator...
...He ventures even more provocative analysis of the "convert syndrome" that initially seized Merton...
...He bears out my suspicions: The Ascent to Truth (1951) offered a hopeless rendition of John of the Cross in scholastic terms Merton abandoned thereafter...
...It will surely remain for a monastic writer to ferret out and communicate this dimension...
...The Climate of Monastic Prayer (1969) remains what it was originally intended, "a book for monks" and not a lay person's blueprint for sanctity...
...How revealing to read his first review of John Crowe Ransom's The World's Body with its protest against a "poetry of Ideas" and romanticism...
...Such a distortion of grace by appeals justifying a God of arbitrary tyranny Merton attributes to the embalming of Christian values and virtue by social institutions...
...In our age, guilt has replaced sin...
...The style of this book is engaging...
...An event subsequent to the publication of this book ought to send readers to its pages repeatedly...
...William H. Shannon ably serves readers with his guidebook to Thomas Merton's spirituality...
...arrogant...
...Nowhere will one find a better evidence than in the one hundred and twenty-one pages of his literary critical study of Albert Camus, collected for the first time in Hart's volume...
...The domesticated Merton of the 1940s and 1950s, nostalgically still venerated by Roman Catholic pietists and triumphalists, is definitively dismantled...
...Meditation is the discovery of "Who I am" and "God as He is...
...Here is the heart of the study...
...Admitting soberly that the Cistercian monk ' 'never seemed to abandon it," he reconstructs a sense of the communal ministry of the contemplative...
...Each of seven essays is independent...
...The existential chords begin to resonate...
...While he acknowledges the discipline monastic life contributed to the anarchic, indulgent young Merton, like biographer Monica Furlong he misses the positive effects of Cistercian communal life...
...the humanity affirmed by the Christ-event...
...Shannon likewise steers directly into the problematical subject of Merton's "elitist" view of contemplation...
...The illusory, false self, the legacy of the Cartesian ego, must be unmasked...
...The contemplative life transcended all philosophical and theological systems, all creedal statements...
...A concluding chapter on Zen and the Birds of Appetite and the Asian trip brings us to appreciate the growing influence of Zen on his life and study...
...Psychologizing about the guilt over his relationship with younger brother, John Paul, and the early death of parents proves helpful to a point...
...All the more reason to herald the advent of a hidden (indeed muted) but essential Merton, the litterateur...
...Better to sum up Merton's life in the sublime observation where Padovano begins: "The tentative steps led to few certainties...
...The familiar landmarks appear fresh from Shannon's guiding scrutiny and insight...
...There is so much presented in this collection of Merton's thought that one might be reluctant to quarrel over an omission...
...written a decade earlier...
...One finds vectors to approach the meaning of an enormous neglected poetry corpus...
...The mapping of his journey through the decade traces an extraordinary legacy of cultural transition...
...faith is' 'this dark loving knowledge" in the tradition of John of the Cross...
...Analyses of Merton's maturing poetic skills occupy a pivotal role...
...As in no previous Merton study, Shannon's book integrates themes of Merton's writings with the overarching quest for contemplation...
...But like the discussion of Merton's relationship with women ("He renounced marriage and regretted the surrender") it becomes tedious and arbitrary...
...The closest he comes to a definition is to coin a new term, the "sapiential" rather than "religious" which he is wary to tag on every profound work of art...
...In The Rebel Merton sees the choice between bourgeois Christianity and Marxism as equally alienating...
...His prose never registered the changes as radically as did his poetry," Padovano judges...
...Moreover, there is the convergence of the religious and literary in a mythic consciousness so dominant in a work like Merton's The Geography of Lograire which earns the ranking of "great" from Padovano...
...One major flaw in the book revolves around Padovano's insistence that Merton's abuse and manipulation by the monastic authorities should have occasioned his departure...
...Blind obedience as a motive for Merton's early embrace of institutional Catholicism would not survive his deeper inner convictions...
...The introductions to Latin American poets he translated converge with this declaration marking the secret solidarity of artists, removed from politics and other totalitarian threats...
...The definition of poetry Merton found there fit his own enterprise like a glove:' 'It is a kind of knowledge, and a knowledge that cannot be gained by any other means, for the poet is concerned with the aspects of experience that can never be well described but only reproduced or imitated...
...The man's mind was dialectical, not dogmatic...
...The 1960s were Merton's arena...
...The dominant New Criticism signaled the insurgency for Merton's own instincts for the aesthetic: form is a more profound communicator than message...
...While he finds no Christian "message" to distill in Pasternak, the work is essentially Christian without familiar orthodoxies...
...George Kileourse THE CONTEMPORARY SPATE of "spirituality" books which continue the vogue in booktrade houses seems to have unwittingly eclipsed the multi-faceted Merton talent...
...But since so many occasional Merton interests find a place in this volume, I wish that some of the taped lectures on Rainer Maria Rilke had been transcribed and included...
...No need to brace for the parade of familiar prose excerpts writers have been quilting into Merton "studies...
...One final note...
...Shannon profiles Merton as a pre-eminently mystical theologian...
...New Seeds of Contemplation (1962) incorporates the' 'new theology'' of person and existentialism, thereby leaving behind the definitions of the version thirteen years earlier in favor of a ' 'book on personal prayer...
...But let us go to the heart of the matter...
...Moreover, the failure of a bourgeois ethic is juxtaposed with Marxism...
...His refusal of institutional Christianity grows from the humiliating images of the human as a "caricature," which Merton contends cannot be blamed on Camus but on Christians themselves...
...Packaging and marketing of Merton re-editions witness his undeniable "staying-power...
...a public search, one that a convert was obliged to share with others...
...Merton's earliest book reviewing and theoretical essays from the thirties and forties are also represented here...
...So the contemplative's "mission" in the world is to "keep alive a sense of sin...
...There was always another side to the mountain...
...He serves readers with an equally engaging analysis of the biographically important, posthumously published novel...
...Merton insists that Doctor Zhivago is nowise a "political" undertaking...
...Dissolving the ego-self makes way for the real self's transcendent experience...
...Faith for Merton is not purely intellectual...
...THE HDMAN JOURNEY THOMAS MERTON, SYMBOL OF A CENTURY Anthony T. Padovano Doubleday, $13.95,193 pp...
...From cradle to coffin, it is chronicled...
...Merton's most intense panegyric on the freedom of the literary imagination comes in his 1964 "Message to Poets" gathered in Mexico City...
...The nucleus of Merton's mature mysticism, a 1959 manuscript entitled The Inner Experience, is being published serially in eight parts beginning with the 1983 numbers of Cistercian Studies...
...One closes the covers of Anthony Padovano's brisk story of Thomas Merton's "pilgrimage to compassion" with the conviction that here, finally, is an interpretive study of this enigmatic monk...
...The true revolutionary, Merton says, is not militant but the one who brings to light reality's most painful conflicts: de-humanization vs...
...Despite the subsequent abuse by practitioners of the new literary critical orthodoxy, Merton never overspent his inheritance of its currency...
...It would be redundant for reviewers of Merton to remark how unsystematic his writing remains...
...Padovano's gift for locating a context for Merton's self-discoveries is winning...
...Shannon has volunteered that he has a less than satisfactory grasp of the role of Merton's poetry in his corpus...
...What too many readers of Merton expect is a genre of theological reflection foreign to his intentions...
...The Abbey of Gethsemani's famous monk would surely find it immodest to dub him the symbol of a "decade," let alone symbol of a century...
...The analogy with John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century is strained...
...Merton's autobiographical bent is set within the tradition of Puritan conventions and American literature: "the search for a self...
...The unrelenting question Merton's reader ponders: what method generates these artful spiritual renderings...
...Here is an intelligent, stimulating attempt to measure Merton's stature...
...The latter provides an interpretive key...
...Merton's caveat is tracked through The Inner Experience...
...This happened, in part, because of the man's extraordinary but scattered enthusiasms...
...The embargoed text, heretofore available only to scholars,is not only generously quoted in a chapter of selected excerpts by Shannon...
...I sugest that he has laid the foundations for a deeper appreciation of irony and paradox as figures of speech under-girding Merton's apophatic metaphors...
...Padovano proffers a compelling study of the centrality of the man's poetic gifts for his spirituality...
...And yet cumulatively they build perhaps Merton's most penetrating critical exercise, at the same time both literary and spiritual...
...I find the earliest sustained study, Pasternak, pivotal...
...Hence, the themes of estrangement and alienation intersect the rhythm of solitude and solidarity to capture Merton's monastic attention...
...I would submit that the term 'religious' no longer conveys the idea of an imaginative awareness of basic meaning," Merton offers in one of several lucid essays on Faulkner...
...Merton hears sympathetically Camus's typically "post-Christian" voice...
...His explication of the themes of fraternity and loneliness at the heart of the poem are invaluable keys...
...In all, Anthony Padovano coaxes serious readers into a reverence for Merton's complexity: a vulnerable, unconventional man, distrusting the status quo of our institutions...
...And so the parade of kindred spirits, fellow monks: Pasternak, Blake, Joyce, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Simone Weil, William Melvin Kelly, Louis Zukofsky, Camus, and those newly discovered third world voices, all are embraced...
...Perhaps later editions will see the value of Merton's debt to Rilke and his important critical study of that poet's technique of "in-seeing...
...Sin connotes a sense of "ontological fault,'' not a matter of moral behavior...
...There are here some of the most intriguing literary-critical applications of a re-thought theology of grace readers will find...
...The protest of Doctor Zhivago is spiritual . . . religious, aesthetic and mystical...
...In the form of a narrative using the present tense, Padovano's retelling of Merton's life emerges as a critical biography...
...The only mountain that conquered him was the one that had no more faces, no new sides, no further summits...
...sentimental Christology...
...It is in this sense that we are all monks," Merton insists...
...his book offers a background and commentary the The Inner Experience, a "spinoff ' of the booklet, What Is Contemplation...
...And Padovano's gifts as literary critic and theologian equip him as an American cultural critic who rewards readers generously...
...It was, he suggests, "the barometer of his soul...
...With Camus the insight matures...
...A decade's accumulated literary criticism comprises the focus of Patrick Hart's book...
...He steers wide of the kataphatic tradition of theology that arrives at an understanding of God by way of affirmation...
Vol. 110 • November 1983 • No. 20
