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Reflectionson
on
the
Thomas Merton
25th
Anniversaryof
Death
His
Frank
J. Macchiarola
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ways from which they have yet to emerge. The success of the political
system which we expected in triumphal books like Daniel Bell's End
of Ideology was on the brink of arriving but never came. And in the
search for meaning in life, which began to intensify in the 70's and
beyond, the course of study at Columbia University has become even
less important to addressing the needs of the world and of its
students.
As time has passed since Merton's death it seems more and
more understood that universities are less and less effective in giving
students a sense of real meaning for their lives. Tragically, studies
have become so diluted that it is probably more usual for university
students to speculate about the future than to study about the past.
There is even less that feeds the soul, for the practical arts have
displaced liberal arts in so many ways. We seem hard pressed to
explain to young people that a job is less important than doing the
job well. A line in that wonderful movie Mame seems to sum it up
best. While extolling life in terms I am sure would amuse Merton,
Auntie Mame tells her nephew, "Life is a banquet, and most poor
suckers are starving to death."4
As we approach this 25th anniversary of Thomas Merton's
I
death, am writing from a Trappist Monastery at Spencer, Massachusetts where, in a week of reflection, I have tried to relate the
monk's world to the world in which I live. And as the University and
its message seems to fade, Merton's message remains even louder
today, and I know that he has much to offer to the modern soul. In
this essay, I will try to explain Thomas Merton's influence on me as
I have traveled along my own path, participating often in public life,
and retreating just as often to life in the University. At the same time
I have tried to define myself not by the positions I have held, but
rather by the work I have done and the beliefs by which I have tried
to live. In helping me to understand and to be reconciled with that,
I have relied on Thomas Merton's advice. I say this knowing fully
that I could never hope to grasp what Thomas Merton says. I have
only the capacity to talk and write about what I have heard him say.
And indeed, very often, one hears a much more friendly word than
that which is spoken, particularly when there is such a fondness for
the speaker, and the desire for his approval. In this way, Merton's
words are deeply personal and also particular.
The first lesson has been one that has influenced my ap-
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the scholar. The work is seen as less important than the work of the
"expert." The more a work is appreciated by many, the greater the
risk that it is seen as "not serious." In the academic world we rarely,
if ever, speak with one another, and so the interdisciplinarian is given
less prominence than deserved. As a result of this, important questions are relegated to places behind trivial questions. Students within
the University community are taught not to question the circumstance and as a result see the University as the place where esoteric
or abstract matters predominate.
I remember that during my tenure as President of the Acadof
Political
Science, a scholarly organization consisting of about
emy
9,000 members which publishes the Political Science Quarterly, I had
a difficult time with a professor of economics who was editing an
edition of the Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science for us.
Economic models, which often prize efficiency as the ultimate value,
are tilted toward privatization of most production of goods and
services. Experience with public sector delivery systems has convinced them that - in the main - private enterprise works more
efficiently. While economists might be prone to one camp, political
scientists are hardly in agreement. To them efficiency values are not
all that persuasive. It took a great deal of effort to convince our editor
that a more inclusive approach, one which challenged his reality, was
a responsibility of the Academy. It was a revealing exchange for me,
since it brought home the incompleteness of any discipline to lay
claim to the truth. Indeed, it is impossible to surrender truth to the
training and education in a particular academic discipline. An aspect
of truth - sometimes a most important aspect - rests in the one
person who lives with the consequence of anyone else's understanding of what that truth means. It is so very clear to one who has
a vision of the importance of a person's soul - something critical to
Merton. It is so hidden to one who feels that the importance rests in
the hands of those who claim care for that soul.
In terms of theology, an academic discipline important to
him, many of Merton's insights were not drawn from his formal
study of theology in the seminary. He found seminary training
boring and it apparently did not significantly influence the theological system that Merton developed. In his "Introduction" to Thomas
Merton: SpiritualMaster,5 Lawrence Cunningham sees Merton as an
important theologian, notwithstanding the fact that his works reflect
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I know the subject matter. I also have a disposition to teach and have
acted on that disposition to assume a professorship. My role is not
just to teach. I am obliged to help students acquire learning, and that
learning is not bound by subject matter. And when I teach my
students the law, I do not simply instruct in the science of law. I
teach them that they must develop their own sense of law - that the
law must live in them. The power of the law is beautifully expressed
in Psalm 118. A portion of it, relevant for this precise point, reads:
Lord, how I love your law!
It is ever in my mind.
Your command makes me wiser than my foes;
for it is mine for ever.
I have more insight than all who teach me
for I ponder your will
I have more understanding than the old
for I keep your precepts.
I turn my feet from evil paths
to obey your word
I have not turned from your decrees;
you yourself have taught me8
And the discovery of what that law is all about requires that
we live our life by experiencing and by heeding that experience. As
Merton tells us in Thoughts in Solitude: "The solution of the problem
of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis, but
first of all by living. For until we have begun to live our prudence
has no material to work on. And until we have begun to fail we have
no way of working out our success."' This is an enormously human
and basically spiritual exercise that Merton challenges us to undertake. In his own life, as he grew in his understanding of himself and
of his faith, Merton exhausted possibilities in seeking to enjoy and perhaps overcome - life. His autobiographical works are powerful expositions of a man in search and the reader is drawn into the
exercise with all senses involved. His writing displays enormous
courage as he explains himself in the tradition of St. Augustine.
Indeed, he joins Cardinal Newman as an important Catholic thinker
engaged with his reader, trying to grasp meaning in life. No one can
read him seriously without wishing to share him with others. And if
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challenge them to consider what they themselves are about. After all,
the course of study we offer is more than the sum total of all of the
courses a student takes.
This has been especially important for me at Cardozo, where
the mission of the University really invites this kind of perspective.
Here, we offer students the community sense of our faculty and our
University, which while officially sponsoring a non-sectarian law
school, is also deeply committed to the traditions of Jewish Orthodoxy. Their degrees attest to the knowledge common to the law
degree, and we are joined to them forever in the process of our
educating new lawyers, and their practice of law with our degree.
We have a right to expect that our graduates will continue
to practice law with us in mind. For Merton, and I must confess for
myself as well, there is the expectation that graduates and students
will be virtuous women and men. In The Seven Storey Mountain,
Merton says that: "Everybody makes fun of virtue, which now has,
as its primary meaning, an affectation of prudery practiced by hypocrites and the impotent."'o
We seem to expect our civic leaders to mislead us, and to
practice the kind of politics that has them principled in whimsy
alone. We expect our lawyers to win, not just to represent us capably.
But Merton refuses to concede on the necessity of virtue, "without
which there can be no happiness, because virtues are precisely the
powers by which we can come to acquire happiness: without them
there can be no joy, because they are the habits which coordinate and
canalize our natural energies and direct them to the harmony and
perfection and balance, the unity of our nature with itself and with
God, which must, in the end, constitute our everlasting peace.""
The order of the universe, through which so many see the
basis for their belief in God, is given a personal meaning by Merton.
He sees the individual as needing the virtue and the harmony that
come with the order of the universe. Further, man must live a life of
virtue and harmony within the confines of the community. Again,
in The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton speaks of a community theme
that he will later define in more political terms: "God has willed that
we should all depend on one another for our salvation, and all strive
together for our own mutual good and our own common salvation."12
In later years, he would develop the beliefs so that his message would
make him a more controversial figure. In Lawrence Cunningham's
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Merton writes: "The first thing that you have to do, before you start
thinking about such a thing as contemplation, is to try to recover
your basic natural unity, to reintegrate your compartmentalized
being into a coordinated and simple whole, and learn to live as a
unified human person.""
The challenge of deciding who you are, before setting down
a path, is to see the way in which your life can continue in harmony,
so that your actions are consistent and proceed around your own
sense of things. Merton offers a very important approach, that of
thinking hard about what you are about, and using that understanding to inform your action; the lessons for teachers and students
are clear from that. Such an understanding of self prepares others for
what you are about. Values then proceed from action, values can be
appreciated and understood by those who are attentive. In any
situation involving the interaction of students and teachers, predictable behavior is a treasured commodity. The way the teacher prepares
lessons, engages students, respects their work and deals with both
success and failure in the classroom should be predictable. Students
should know what to expect from their teachers. And the exchange
is often reciprocal - students know how to trust teachers who deal
forthrightly with them. The matter is not accidental, and in classes
where harmony is at work, the class as an entity has a life of its own.
It is more than the sum total of the enrolled members of the class.
But the process is not just one of interaction. For the
products of the lessons are better ones because they reflect the
creative force and power of many. The most powerful aspect of all
of this is that there is a process at work that leads beyond consideration of the subject matter. In the teaching of law, if an understanding
of justice permeates the way in which the subject is taught, it must
affect the analysis as well. If students know not just from reading law,
but from learning in a setting that respects the subject and the
participants, the product of that enterprise is a better one. Simply
put, if all students are respected - and issues of race or gender, for
example, do not diminish total respect - then the study of law will
be respectful of the subjects of law as well. If students acquire that
sense of respect by being encouraged to think about who they are to reflect and meditate not as a project, but as an essential aspect of
their own development - the results will be better justice in the law.
This is not the place to discuss in depth the structure of legal
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education and how the kind of teaching found in law schools has
helped foster the low esteem within which the law is held in modern
society. Suffice to say, a great deal of our difficulty stems from how
we teach, and what we encourage students to seek from the law. The
product of so much of what we produce under the current system is
a large number of very wealthy, but very unhappy, lawyers.
There is a selection from Merton that reminds me of how
much we are away from values that we ought to better respect. In
Seeds of Contemplation he says: "the ritual that surrounds money
transactions, the whole liturgy of marketing and of profit is basically
void of reality and meaning. Yet we treat it as the final reality, the
absolute meaning, in the light of which everything else is to be
judged."'6
There is one further aspect of Merton that continues to
intrigue me. It is the matter of how effectively he contained himself
even after coming to certain understandings. In the matters of both
state and church he held himself in check, notwithstanding some
strong feelings. In terms of the state and the citizenship role of the
religious person, Merton is quite emphatic in urging political activity. In his work on Mahatma Gandhi, whom he admired greatly,
Merton wrote: "I could not be leading a religious life unless I
identified myself with the whole of mankind, and that I could not
do unless I took part in politics. The whole gamut of man's activities
today constitutes an indivisible whole. You cannot divide social,
economic, political and purely religious work into watertight compartments."17
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and which so often has the capacity to inflict pain at almost every
level of its activity. Anthony Padovano's beautiful treatment of
Merton's life, The Human Journey," shows how a man who loved his
faith could be so understanding of its faults in the face of personal
agony, and still remain so committed to its work. He cites Merton's
interview with Thomas P. McDowell in which Merton says, "There
can be no question that the great crisis in the Church today is the
crisis of authority brought on by the fact that the Church, as institution and organization, has in fact usurped the place of the Church
as a community of persons united in love and in Christ... Love is
equated with obedience and conformity within the framework of an
impersonal corporation. The Church is preached as a communion,
but is seen in fact as a collectivity, and even as a totalitarian
collectivity. "20
The crisis Merton refers to in 1967 continues as the crisis
of 1993, and 25 years after Merton's death the issue remains for the
many faithful bearing the cross that is Church. And yet, to focus on
this is also a distraction. For those who desire to exert control from
positions of authority are not just common to Church. As Padovano
noted: "In parenting, or political life, in academic or ecclesiastical
circles, there emerges a personality that identifies truth with discomfort, grace with suffering, loyalty with submission. Such personalities
are threatened by people who live life with relative ease and a degree
of freedom, with success won not from effort, but from a serenity
and creativity that transcend all systems."21
At first blush, it should seem ironic that with the fall of the
Soviet Union and the Communist Party, so many political operatives
have reemerged to occupy leadership positions in the new governments that followed the overthrow. But it is not really so ironic. For
as Merton reminds us, the human being remains a critical unit of
society, not only with political alliances or social attachments but
with a soul that informs action. And all too often it is an incomplete
soul who rises to power, one who needs to exert force upon others,
and who is unwilling to trust in the basic decency of others to manage
their own important affairs. They are there whether the nation is
called the Soviet Union or Russia. They are there with respected
titles. And in the hierarchy of the Church, there are still too many
in positions of authority who are unable to manifest faith in the
people to define Church - to be Church - in ways that satisfy
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them.
It is fitting that 25 years after Merton's death, a struggle goes
on so that change will come by seeking truth with questions of larger
meaning, by seeking faith in searching one's soul, and by being
hopeful in the face of so much evidence for despair. It is a struggle
that many wage in Merton's way. It is reassuring to know that on the
25th Anniversary we can commemorate his death with an affirmation
of life.
Thomas Merton (1915-1968), a convert to Catholicism, was a Trappist monk from 1941
until his accidental death in Asia in 1968. A prolific writer and self-described Christian
existentialist, his work continues to have aprofound effect upon thoseseekingprophetic insight
into worldly values. His contemplative life in the monastery would seem to have taken him
out of the world,yet his writings show a deep understanding of the world and of the difficulties
faced by those who live in it. His writings have become increasinglypopular since his death
25 years ago.
1. Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948), p.
177.
2. Id., at 191.
3. Daniel Bell, The End of deology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
4. Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee, Auntie Mame, Acting Edition (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1990).
5. Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton: The Spiritual Master: The Essential Writings,
Lawrence Cunningham, ed. (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), p. 30.
6. Id.
7. Abbot John Eudes Bamberger, "Desert Calm: Evagrius Ponticus, The Theologian as
Spritual Guide," 27 Cistercian Studies Quarterly 185, 187 (1992).
8. See Psalm 118:97-102, in The Psalms:A New Translationfrom the Hebrew Arrangedfor
Singing to the Psalmody ofJoseph Gelineau (New York: Paulist Press, 1966), p. 213.
9. Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Noonday Press, 1956), p. 78.
10. See Merton, Mountain, supra note 1 at 204.
11. Id., at 204.
12. Id., at 177-178
13. See Cunningham, "Introduction" to SpiritualMaster, supra note 5 at 19-20.
14. Thomas Merton, Contemplation in A World ofAction (New York: Doubleday, 1971),
p.164.
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15. Thomas Merton, "The Inner Experience," as found in Spiritual Master, supra note 5
at 295.
16. See Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1949), p.
24, as found in Anthony T. Padovano, The Human Journey: ThomasMerton: Symbol of a
Century (New York: Doubleday, 1984), p. 126.
17. Thomas Merton, ed., Gandhi on Non Violence (New York: New Directions, 1965),
p. 64.
18. The 1989 Democratic Party primary for New York City Comptroller.
19. See Padovano, supra note 16.
20. SeeThomas P. McDowell, "An Interview with Thomas Merton," 28 Motive41 (1967),
cited in Padovano, supra note 16 at 48.
21. Padovano, supra note 16 at 89.
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