CONTEMPLATION IN A WORLD OF ACTION (MERTON)

A book with this title which includes “Is the World a Problem” was published by Doubleday in 1971 after Merton's death. The Image paperback edition published in 1973 has three sections including a section of five chapters on The Case for Eremitism which was sandwiched between the two sections of the currently available book of the same title published in 1998 by Notre Dame Press. In the 1973 paperback edition there is an editorial note by Naomi Burton who said that she had received the manuscript on September 10, 1968 a few months before Merton died. At the suggestion of Brother Patrick Hart the five chapters on the solitary life were included, however they are no longer in the Notre Dame edition.  

PART ONE: Renewal of Life in the Monastic Milieu

Merton wrote in the broad context of renewal at the time of not only monastic life, but also Catholicism, and even civic life here in American. Notre Dame reissued the book under a series title: Gethsemani Studies in Psychological and Religious Anthropology. In my comments below I will emphasize its broader context.  The articles below with an asterisk appeared in various journals, and therefore represent Merton’s thinking in the years before this death.

I. Problems and Prospects

“The monk is (at least ideally) a man who has responded to an authentic call of God to a life of freedom and detachment, a ‘desert life’ outside normal social structures. He is liberated from certain particular concerns in order that he might belong entirely to God. His life is one dedicated completely to love, and the love of God and man but a love that is not determined by the requirements of a special task. The monk is, or should be a Christian who is mature enough and decided enough to live without support and consolation of family, job, ambition, social position or even active mission in the apostolate. He is also mature enough and determined enough to use this freedom for on thing only: the love and praise of God and the love of other men.”

II. Vocation and Modern Thought

Merton maintaines that monks have to concern themselves with the failure of many apparently good vocations. He attributes this not to a failure of faith, or a deep religious crises, but a psychological incapacity to accept the climate of thought in which they think the monks are bound to live.

Merton views contemporary man as a consumer who exists in order to keep business going by consuming its products whether he wants them or needs them, or likes them. He claims this affluent marketing society generates at the same time unrealistic expectations and superficial optimism, an overlaying and undercurrent of suspicion, compounded by self- doubt, inferiority feelings, resentment, cynicism and despair.

Merton argues that just as Marx has made people question the ‘superstructures’ of bourgeois society so Freud has made people aware that all that appears ‘moral’ and ‘virtuous’ is not necessarily authentic.

III. The Identity Crises

Merton views the normal adolescent identity crises as a grave problem in America extending far beyond adolescence into young adulthood 

“What is meant by identity? For practical purposes we are talking about one’s own authentic and personal beliefs and convictions based on experience of one’s self as a person, experience of one’s ability to choose and reject even good things which are not relevant to one’s own life.

Merton says does mean merely the capacity to cling with conviction to official or external standards, to values which one does not personally experience as good but which one accepts in order to experience security, in order to please authority. Merton sees overcontrol of immature religious as not strengthening them, but suppressing questions they ought to be raising and  initiatives they ought to be taking.

“We must be quite clear about one thing above all: overcontrol is one the salient features of the secular world today. It is particularly related to godlessness and materialism..We will not here go into all the manifestations of overcontrol which are just as evident in our affluent consumer society as it is in the rigid totalitarian societies beyond the iron curtain..

IV. Dialogue and Renewal*

“The monk owes the world of his time an unworldliness proper to his time…He is in the world and not of it. He is both in his time and of it.. (He) takes into account with sympathy and understanding  the legitimate aims which ‘the contemporary  world’ feels itself called to obtain for man, such as peace, personal fulfillment, communion with other men in a warm and creative environment, etc. (He) regards these aspirations as real and relevant to everyone  and therefore to monks.”

V. Renewal and Discipline*

“In America (renewal) will mean more or less continuity with the nineteenth century of which we are, nevertheless, somewhat dubious and ashamed. It is after all a notable monument of religious camp. And it is at the same time all we have as ‘tradition.’ The tendency will be to modernize in the sense of ‘Americanize’ and tend more and more to ‘protestantize’ our life, to liberalize it with borrowings from sociology, psychotherapy, etc. in a word to suburbanize the monastic life.

In this connection I think we ought to be more conscious of and attentive to the kind of paramonasticism which is very alive in this country. I mean, frankly movements like the hippies, the beats before them, like all those interested in Yoga and Zen, like (in other respects) the peace movement, the civil rights movement. … they imply a very radical and critical ‘break’ with ordinary social patterns. They have their asceticism, their ‘discipline’ …those who burn their draft cards are certainly making a more radical ‘break from the world’ .. that the postulant  who walks into a monastery…”

VI. The Place of Obedience*

“Religious life is a sacrifice, and so is the Mass. But just as theology now stresses the Eucharist as a sign of fraternal unity and demands active and intelligent participation in a common act of worship, so the old theology of the religious life needs to be completed and filled out with a new perspective in which the obedience of love rooted in faith becomes at once becomes a sign and principle of the living union in Christ…”

VII. Openness and Cloister*

Merton says that monks of the Middle Ages were integrated into the secular life of their time. The Cistercians of northern England in the twelfth century played somewhat the same role as General Motors plays in American society today. The wool from the Cistercian granges was one of the most important factors in the economy of medieval England. The renunciation practiced by the Cistercians of the Middle Ages paradoxically gave them a key place in the world of their time..

VIII. Is the World a Problem*

IX Contemplation in a World of Action

“When I speak of contemplative life I do not mean the institutional cloistered life, the organized life of prayer.  Prescinding form any idea of an institution or even of a religious organization, I am talking about a special dimension of inner discipline and experience, a certain integrity and fullness of personal development which are not compatible with a purely, external, busy-busy existence.  This does not mean (the contemplative life is) incompatible with action, with creative work, and dedicated love. On the contrary they all go together. 

Though this inner ‘vision’ is a gift and is not directly produced by technique, still a certain discipline is necessary to prepare us for it. Meditation is one of the more important characteristic form of this discipline. Prayer is another.”

 X. The Contemplative and the Atheist*

“The Christian contemplative  is aware that in the mystical tradition both the of the Eastern and Western Churches there is a strong element of what has been called ‘apophatic theology’…the God who has revealed himself to us in his Word has revealed himself as unknown in his intimate essence, for he is beyond merely human vision… The heart of the Christian mystical experience is that it is experiences the ineffable reality of what is beyond experience.

We are persuaded that many who consider themselves atheists are in fact persons who are discontented with a naïve idea of God which makes him appear to be an ‘object’ or a ‘thing’, or a person in the merely finite and human sense.” 

XI. Ecumenism and Renewal*

Merton sees the problem of monastic renewal, at the deepest level, as theological. Monks are finally come face to face with Luther’s challenge. The very concept of a vowed and cloistered life, of a life devoted to prayer apart from the world, of silence and asceticism, has to be reexamined. The endemic disease of both monasteries and sects is that people in them do so much to save their souls that they lose them; they concentrate on such particular, limited aspects of good that they become perverse and singular themselves.

“The craftsmanship of the Shakers is the most authentic, tangible and impressive fruit of monastic and mystical spirit in America. It is also completely American, and remains a model of what the native American spirit can achieve in the monastic sphere.”

XII. The Need for a New Education

Merton finds the theological formation given to priests in the active apostolate is not entirely suitable for monks. Rather the monastery must have genuine men of prayer who can communicate something of their understanding and experience to others. However in order to understand prayer today we need to understand man in his present historical situation.  Monastic education should, without neglecting scientific theology, open the way to a truly sapiential  contemplation of the Christian mystery.

He recommends that the monk should learn something of anthropology, comparative religion and depth psychology, grasp the characteristic differences between Greek, Hebrew, Indian and Chinese-Japanese modes of thought. He  should be thoroughly familiar with the mystical literature of Christianity, both Eastern and Western.

Merton says that the monastic life is not only contemplative but prophetic. The monk should understand the crucial problems of our time: race, war, genocide, starvation, injustice, revolution.

XIII. Final Integration :Toward a “Monastic Therapy”  

Merton writes about Dr. Reza Arasteh, Final Integration in the Adult Personality, 1965 which combines Erick Fromm, Viktor Frankl, and the mystical tradition of Persian Sufism. Arasteh views existential anxiety as healthy energy that generates a psychic birth into a ‘new transcultural identity’ beyond work and reproduction.

Merton writes that the man who has attained final integration is no longer limited by the culture in which he has grown  up. Merton says he has integrated ordinary human existence, intellectual life, artistic creation, human love and religious life, and therefore accepts not only his own friends, society and culture but all of mankind.  Merton compares this to the rebirth of baptized Christian, especially as experienced in monastic life.