Poetry and Contemplation: The Inner War of Thomas Merton

Poetry And Contemplation: The Inner War Of Thomas Merton

Most modern Christian poets spend large portions of their creative lives engaged in an internal conflict that often rises to the level of civil war. That part of their personalities which seeks God often finds it difficult to lie down with that part which makes art. Probably no recent poet endured this conflict longer or suffered greater agonies from it than the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.

Something of a bohemian before, Merton after his conversion associated writing poems with the personal ambitions and worldliness from which he sought to be free. Consequently, when in December, 1941, he entered Our Lady of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, he assumed that along with his name he would leave his poetry behind. For a time he did. But in 1943 Robert Lax, an old friend from his undergraduate days at Columbia, visited him. When he left he took with him the manuscript of Thirty Poems, which New Directions issued in late 1944.

Merton responded with indifference; as far as he was concerned more poems were out of the question. Lax returned for a Christmas visit, urging him to write. Merton records his reaction to Lax’s enthusiasm in The Seven Storey Mountain and links it to an incident shortly after:

I did not argue about it. But in my own heart I did not think it was God’s will. And Dom Vital, my confessor, did not think so either.

Then one day—the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, 1945—I went to Father Abbot for direction, and without my ever thinking of the subject or mentioning it, he suddenly said to me:

“I want you to go on writing poems” [Harcourt, Brace, 1948, p. 402].

To adequately comprehend the force of this direction, which struck Merton almost like a blow, one must understand the import of the Cistercian life (the Trappists are a branch of the Cistercian order).

The Cistercians had their beginning in the eleventh century, in the monastic reforms that culminated in the founding of the abbey at Cîteaux in 1098. It remains a strict, contemplative order, one that allows an individual monk little interaction with the world. His day, beginning at 2 A.M., is spent in physical labor, meditation, and prayer. His goal is to lose his personal identity in the contemplation of God. His life is rooted in what the early church called the via negativa or the Way of Rejection. “It consists,” wrote Charles Williams in The Figure of Beatrice, “in the renunciation of all images except the final one of God himself.…”

Committed as he was, both by his personal inclination and by his vows, to the Way of Rejection, the order to continue writing poems meant to Merton the postponement of his deepest desire. In the essay “Poetry and Contemplation” he described that desire as “the voiding and emptying of the soul, cleansing it of all images, all likenesses of and attachments to created things so that it may be clean and pure to receive the obscure light of God’s own Presence.” Nevertheless Merton accepted the direction and continued to write poems. His vow of obedience left him no other choice. Unfortunately, while it ensured the production of poems, the vow could not resolve the tension Merton felt between his religious and poetic selves. He revealed the seriousness of the tension in The Seven Storey Mountain:

There was this shadow, this double, this writer who followed me into the cloister.

He is still on my track. He rides on my shoulders, sometimes like the old man of the sea. I cannot lose him. He still wears the name of Thomas Merton. Is it the name of an enemy?

He is supposed to be dead.

But he stands and meets me in the doorway of all my prayers, and follows me into church. He kneels with me behind the pillar, the Judas, and talks to me all the time in my ear.

And the worst of it is, he has my superiors on his side. They won’t kick him out. I can’t get rid of him.

Maybe in the end he will kill me, he will drink my blood.

Nobody seems to understand that one of us has to die [p. 400].

Merton’s conviction that writing would destroy his spiritual life, however, was a conviction that he eventually revised and then in practice rejected. How he came to recognize the opposition of the two as fundamentally false is directly related to his gradual grasp and appreciation of the via affirmativa or the Way of Affirmation.

The Way of Affirmation, like the Way of Negation, has as its end the loss of the believer in God. The means of achieving that end, however, involves looking closely at and then through the world, which, as the Psalms tell us, reveals the glory of God. While the methodology is essentially poetic, the Way is firmly established and made plain in the Incarnation. Writing of the Athanasian creed in Descent of the Dove, Charles Williams explains:

Thence it proceeds to the Incarnation: “it is necessary that he believe rightly.” It is in this connection that it produces a phrase which is the very maxim of the Affirmative Way: “Not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh but by taking of the manhood into God.” And not only of the particular religious Way, but of all progress of all affirmations: it is the actual manhood which is to be carried on and not the height which is to be brought down. All images are, in their degree, to be carried on; mind is never to put off matter; all experience is to be gathered in [Eerdmans, 1972, p. 59].

For most Christians the Way of Affirmation is the dominant Way. It is the way of marriage, the way of art, the way of politics, the way of economics. It is, in short, the way of doing all to the glory of God. It is also a dangerous way, for the things of this world can be interesting in themselves, and the wise Christian usually tempers his affirmation with selected rejections. The normal Christian way, then, can be viewed as a balancing of the two mystical ways.

But the life of Thomas Merton was not that of an ordinary Christian. Both his monastic vows and his priestly orders ruled out the simple balancing-act solution of the layman. And the common depreciation of the affirmative way delayed his recognition of the only possible resolution of his dilemma. Dorothy Sayers set forth the nature of this depreciation in her essay “The Beatrician Vision”:

From the fifteenth century on, Western mysticism has tended to conform itself to the Eastern pattern, which, rejecting all messages conveyed by the senses and all images derived from the outer world, contemplates in darkness, under the “cloud of unknowing,” the dweller in the innermost—the immanent God who is the ground of the soul. The other pattern, which affirms all the images and contemplates the immanence of God in the visible things of creation, is very generally assumed to be not mystical in any exact sense.… [The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement, Gollancz, 1963, p. 51].

Although this attitude contributed to Merton’s difficulty, he did not fully succumb to it. Speaking of the great contemplatives of the past in his early devotional work Seeds of Contemplation (1949), he wrote, “Do you think that their love of God was compatible with a hatred for things that reflected Him and spoke of Him on every side?… The saint knows that the world and everything made by God is good.…” We may conclude that intellectually Merton was not susceptible to this error. But where his emotions are concerned it is another matter.

The Seven Storey Mountain, as well as the numerous recollections published by his friends since his death, shows Merton to have been incapable of doing anything halfway. Edward Rice in The Man in the Sycamore Tree described him as “full of energy … unchanged from day to day, cracking jokes, denouncing the Fascists, squares, being violently active, writing, drawing, involved in everything.” Before his conversion this vigorous involvement included indulgence in many activities and substances not mentioned in the heavily censored autobiography. They were, however, sufficiently questionable to cause the Franciscans to turn down his application to enter a novitiate in 1940.

After his conversion, Merton channeled his enthusiasm in more profitable directions, but it remained a factor in everything he did and must be considered as an influence in his decision to enter a religious life. For at the same time he was considering joining the Trappists at Gethsemani, he was considering a position as a staff worker at Friendship House, a kind of mission in Harlem. His final reasoning, at least as it is recorded in the last entry of The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton, is curious and enlightening:

Going to live in Harlem does not seem to me to be anything special. It is a good and reasonable way to follow Christ. But going to the Trappists is exciting, it fills me with awe and desire. I return to the idea again and again: “give up everything, give up everythingl” [Dell, 1960, p. 222].

An appealing romanticism is involved. There was an excitement in going the whole route that his personality couldn’t resist. He saw the Way of Negation as a challenge worthy of his whole life.

But another factor entered his decision, one that is not nearly so attractive. In turning his back on his worldliness he contemptuously turned his back on the world. Even the Way of Negation does not allow this, for contempt, in the words of an ancient canon, “blasphemously inveighs against the creation.” The strongest expression of Merton’s contempt was the novel The Journal of My Escape From the Nazis, which, while written in 1940, was not published until after his death, when it appeared as My Argument With the Gestapo. His seclusion in the monastery apparently tempered his hatred, but it reappeared sporadically as late as 1948 in The Seven Storey Mountain and was the cause for his eventual repudiation of that work as unloving and narrow.

The romanticism and the improper rejection reached into nearly all of his early poetry, coloring not only what he wrote but also his attitude towards writing in general. To Figures For an Apocalypse, the collection of poetry written over the same time period as The Seven Storey Mountain, he appended the essay “Poetry and Contemplation.” In it he concluded:

That poetry can, indeed, help us rapidly through that part of the journey to contemplation that is called active: but when we are entering the realm of true contemplation, where eternal happiness begins, it may turn around and bar our way.

In such an event, there is only one course for the poet to take, for his own individual sanctification: the ruthless and complete sacrifice of his art [New Directions, 1948, p. 109].

Merton’s published journals covering these years (1946–52) are filled with references to giving up writing, and it is clear that, had his circumstances not been altered, Merton probably would have sacrificed his art. In 1948, however, Dom Frederic Dunne, his abbot, died, and Dom Gabriel Sortais, the Cistercian vicar general, traveled to Gethsemani for the funeral. He remained to oversee the election of a new abbot. During his stay, Merton was appointed to serve as his interpreter and secretary. Consequently, when Dom Gabriel was called to Louisville, Merton accompanied him, leaving the monastery for the first time in seven years. He recounts it in The Sign of Jonas:

We drove into town with Senator Dawson, a neighbor of the monastery, and all the while I wondered how I would react at meeting once again, face to face, the wicked world. I met the world and I found it no longer so wicked after all. Perhaps the things I had resented about the world when I left it were defects of my own that I had projected upon it. Now, on the contrary, I found that everything stirred me with a deep and mute sense of compassion. Perhaps some of the people we saw going about the streets were hard and tough … but I did not stop to observe it because I seemed to have lost an eye for the merely exterior detail and to have discovered, instead, a deep sense of respect and love and pity for the souls that such details never fully reveal. I went through the city, realizing for the first time in my life how good are all the people in the world and how much value they have in the sight of God [Harcourt, Brace, 1953, pp. 97, 98].

In the course of six hours, Merton’s life had been turned around. He had left the monastery committed to rejecting all images except the final one of God himself. He returned affirming, for the first time, the image called Man and seeing through that image the presence and grace of the Creator of all images. The possibility of a dual calling to poetry and to contemplation opened to him. He responded by going forward. A year later he wrote:

And yet it seems to me that writing, far from being an obstacle to spiritual perfection in my own life, has become one of the conditions on which my perfection will depend. If I am to be a saint—and there is nothing else that I can think of desiring to be—it seems that I must get there by writing books in a Trappist monastery. If I am to be a saint, I have not only to be a monk, which is what all monks must do to become saints, but I must also put down on paper what I have become. It may sound simple, but it is not an easy vocation [The Sign of Jonas, p. 228].

Merton’s evaluation of the difficulty of his vocation proved correct. He had, indeed, turned around, but the full acceptance of the new direction was not automatic. The conflict that had tormented him for seven years could not be laid to rest in one dramatic affirmation. His doubts recurred, but he continued to write, by choice. Finally he realized that his writing earned him what privacy and solitude he had.

He had other lessons to learn as well. Because of his increasing fame he was forced to answer voluminous piles of mail. And as he responded, sometimes with personal notes, sometimes with printed cards, he proved in his life that the purpose of solitude and contemplation was not a final withdrawal but an eventual return to the world, filled with the love and compassion of Christ. On March 3, 1953, he wrote in his journal:

Coming to the monastery has been for me exactly the right kind of withdrawal. It has given me perspective. It has taught me how to live. And now I owe everyone else in the world a share in that life. My first duty is to start, for the first time, to live as a member of a human race which is no more (and no less) ridiculous than I am myself. And my first human act is the recognition of how much I owe everybody else [The Sign of Jonas, p. 312].

For Thomas Merton, writing poems and writing books became a way of returning to the world he could not actually reenter. And as he gave up his largely selfish desire to be totally absorbed in the contemplation of God, as he willed instead God’s will, he found that the inner war of his religious and poetic vocations quieted. But he found that it was not because he had reconciled the two in theory. He found that just as God had willed them reconciled in practice for St. John of the Cross, God had willed them reconciled in practice for Thomas Merton.

John Leax is assistant professor of English at Houghton College, New York.

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