Thomas Merton has always occupied a special place in the American Catholic Church, though for different reasons at different times. His first acclaim came with his conversion, recorded in The Seven Storey Mountain. At that time, before ecumenism was much heard of, the convert was a special kind of hero, celebrated, publicized, and taken as living proof that Catholicism need not just be a matter of birth and tribal origin, but could persuade even the outsider. As a catch, Merton was something special. One had heard of the high Anglican who took the final step or of the Presbyterian who “came over,” but converts from Merton's pre-Catholic world were (and still are) rare: the world of the high-level New York intellectual, the kind who went to Columbia, knew Mark Van Doren, read D. H. Lawrence and whose poetry could get published by New Directions.

Merton's second distinction lay in his acceptance of the monastic life as a Trappist monk in Gethsemane, Kentucky. After World War II, the monastic orders went through a period of sudden rejuvenation, stimulated no doubt by the horrors of that war, by the postwar chaos, and by the desire of many to find a radically different way of life. By his vast output of spiritual guidebooks, his lyrical praise of a life of prayer, and by the patently sharp contrast of his Trappist existence with his earlier student life, Merton became a symbol of the American monastic revival. At that time, too, it seemed altogether fitting that, if a monk was going to write at all, he should limit himself to the higher reaches of mysticism and the profundities of inner renewal. Poetry, though perhaps just a bit surprising, was after all known to be a mystical art.

So it went for some years and some twenty-five books, both of prose and poetry. Merton always had something of value to say, said it in a compelling way, and, no less importantly, seemed to sense well the mood of the Church. His books, to judge from the paperback reprints, the enthusiastic reviews, and the general currency of his name, sold well; there was every evidence that the Catholic public could not get enough of them.

_____________

Yet nothing goes on forever, especially revivals. The monastic boom and the thirst for the higher reaches of spiritual ardor began to show signs of waning toward the end of the 50's. They gave way to a newfound interest in social problems: race, nuclear warfare, man's life on earth among other men, poverty, the underdeveloped nations. This was the era of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, with its stress on the Church's responsibility toward human problems, religious unity, and the needs of the secular societies of the 20th century. Oddly enough (so far as I know) Merton has not written directly of this shift in mood within the Church. But if one wants to see it exemplified, Seeds of Destruction is as good an indication as any. For the Merton we see here is a different, and perhaps new, Merton. There is practically no mention of the ascetical life, of prayer, or of contemplation (with the exception of one short essay dealing directly with the role of the monk in the contemporary world). Instead, there are some more characteristic notes of our day: the white liberal railing at the white liberal for being a secret enemy of the Negro (in “Letters to a White Liberal”); the engaged Christian struggling with his conscience over “the bomb”; the troubled Catholic trying to make some sense of the Church's place in a post-Christian world (in “The Christian in the Diaspora”); and the man of prayer giving hard-headed advice to people who live in the world (in “Letters in a Time of Crisis”). As these assorted subjects will suggest, Seeds of Destruction is not a unified book, but mainly a collection of previously published essays and unpublished letters. That does not much help the book as a whole but does at any rate give one a clue to Merton's present interests.

Merton is aware of the apparent paradox of a monk attempting to speak to problems which exist outside of the monastery walls. He does not travel; what he knows he knows only through reading, correspondence, and visitors from the outside. Yet he argues that “No man can withdraw completely from the society of his fellow men, and the monastic community is deeply implicated, for better or for worse, in the economic, political, and social structure of the contemporary world. . . . The mere fact of ‘ignoring’ what goes on can become a political decision.” As he points out, some contemplative communities in Europe “have officially and publicly given support to totalitarian movements,” however much the individual members of those communities were “absorbed in otherworldly recollections.” These are perceptive comments, placing monastic life in a context whose implications will seem wholly novel, even to most Catholics.

Unfortunately, what immediately follows these words is not as easy to praise. Merton speaks of the monastic life as “a definitive refusal to participate in those activities which have no other fruit than to prolong the reign of greed, cruelty and arrogance in the world of men.” Just what the expression “those activities” means is not clear, but at any rate it is hard to imagine any moral, civilized person not wanting to do precisely the same thing. Heaven help us if we have to enter a monastery to prove our good intentions in this respect; yet this is what Merton comes close to saying. What does not come through is a sharp awareness that good and evil rarely come in clearly labeled packages. With the exception of genocide, arbitrary cruelty to children, and a few other textbook cases of wholly unjustifiable evil, it is extremely difficult to find activities about which one could say that they had “no fruit other than to prolong the reign of greed, cruelty and arrogance. . . .” The terrible thing about living in the world rather than in a monastery is that one can't just opt out of evil and let it go at that. Even in the case of nuclear warfare, which every sane man along with Merton will agree is wicked, there still remains the matter of weighing, as President Truman, say, had to do, the evil of destroying two cities over against the good of ending a war and thus saving many lives. I happen to think his decision was wrong, disastrously so, but that is because I think the evil far outweighed the possible good. Yet to say as much is not to deny that the situation demanded a weighing of values. Any decision would have involved some evil, and doubtless some good.

For one who lives in the world, this will seem an obvious, not to say trivial point. But calculations of this kind have an inconspicuous place in Merton's scheme of values. Though he writes movingly about the abuses of political authority, about the Negro's plight, about disarmament, he is a radically a-political thinker, restless with the intricate subtleties of morality within a political and diplomatic context. He moves easily only in the rarefied air of ultimate goods: love, justice, perfect peace among nations. More than that, he appears to be positively skeptical of an excessive concern with anything else, especially with those worldly processes which work with material far removed from human or cosmic perfection. “Where there is no love of man,” he writes, “no love of life, then make all the laws you want, all the edicts and treaties, issue all the anathemas; set up all the safeguards and inspections, fill the air with spying satellites, and land cameras on the moon. As long as you see your fellow man as a being essentially to be feared, mistrusted, hated and destroyed, there cannot be peace on earth.” Perhaps Merton means the word “essentially” to be pivotal in this passage; if so, one could agree.

But what is rather frustrating about Merton's essays is that they abound in such quintessential incarnations of evil and stupidity. One can never be sure whether he thinks all men who are in some form or other suspicious and distrustful (an attitude not wholly unrealistic at times) can, ultimately, be fitted into the reprobate category, or whether he sees that even good men can on occasion possess some of the moral characteristics of the totally depraved. In his “Letters to a White Liberal,” he skillfully lays bare the kinds of rationalizations even a purportedly well-in-tentioned white can use to evade the harder demands the Negro places before him. By now, we are all fairly used to having these (our) rationalizations exposed. But Merton is not satisfied with doing that: his imagined “liberal” (each of us?), a man who would resort to repression should Negro protests get out of hand, can finally be visualized “goose-stepping down Massachusetts Avenue in the uniform of an American Totalitarian Party in a mass rally where nothing but the most uproarious approval is manifest, except, by implication, on the part of silent and strangely scented clouds of smoke drifting over from the new ‘camps’ where the ‘Negroes are living in retirement.’” The picture is vivid, appalling, plausible; but is it very helpful to have such a picture painted? Does it really tell us very much about ourselves? No one could deny that resistance to the Negro is deep, nor could one deny that some people at least could be driven to seek a “final solution.” But as a matter of fact, excluding a number of murders and the systematic violence in some Southern states, the remarkable thing is that whites have given way before Negro pressure: slowly, yes; reluctantly, to be sure, but still they have given way. As time goes on the Negro's problem with the white liberal is likely to be the quieter, more cutting forms of discrimination: no “final solution” but the steady heaping of indignities upon the Negro, mixed in with some genuine efforts to help him. By talking in terms of the worst possible eventualities Merton misses the gray reality, which favors neither the prophet and radical reformer nor the racist and repressive segregationist. Something similar could be said of the prospects for disarmament: neither the proponent of an aggressive nuclear weapons policy nor the proponent of unilateral disarmament will gain much of a following.

_____________

The trouble with reading prophets, and Merton seems almost consciously to adopt that stance, is that they can be both moving and irrelevant at the same time. This is Merton's problem. An articulate monk, and surely Merton is that, can recall us to those values which must sustain all we do. But then we sit down with the messy details of life, our charts, our statistics, our conflicting political demands, our social complexities, and the vision fades. But that is our problem, and it is a good thing we have the Mertons around: from time to time someone had better set squarely before us the point of what we are about. Otherwise those rich and hard details, which we who live in the world are prone to caress, will become the only values we know much about.