Thomas Merton

Qu'est-ce que l'Absolu ? Dieu existe-t-il ?

God is not an object: he is the hidden ground of love who calls

Un Dieu personnelIl le dit expressément

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, confesses a personal, Trinitarian and incarnate God, but insists that he is not one object among others nor something that can be possessed by concepts. In New Seeds of Contemplation, contemplation is the living awareness that life and being proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source, known not as a thing but as a presence that calls the person by name. In his last years, in dialogue with Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, he stressed the apophatic character of this God and called him, in his letters, the hidden ground of love. For Merton the Absolute remains someone, but is found in the darkness of faith rather than in evidence.

Qui suis-je ? Existe-t-il un vrai soi ?

The false self is an illusion; the true self is hidden in God

L'ego est une construction de la penséeIl le dit expressément

The distinction between the false self and the true self runs through Thomas Merton's work. In New Seeds of Contemplation, the false self is the person we want to be and who cannot exist, because God knows nothing about him: a self made of desires, social image and the urge to assert oneself against others, living in the illusion of separation. The true self, by contrast, is not manufactured: it is hidden in God and discovered in discovering him. Hence his formula: for him, to be a saint means to be himself. In his last years he compared this doctrine with the Buddhist anatman and with Zen, without identifying them.

Pourquoi souffrons-nous ?

We suffer by living in a false self, cut off from our truth

L'ignorance de ce que nous sommesIl le dit expressément

Thomas Merton locates the root of human suffering in alienation: the human being builds a false self that lives by asserting itself against others, protects itself with possessions, prestige and violence, and therefore feels separated from God, from others and from itself. New Seeds of Contemplation identifies that false self with sin: it is to refuse the identity God gives. In his writings on peace and racism he extends the diagnosis to society, where collective illusion produces war. In Calcutta, in 1968, he put it this way: we are already one, but we imagine we are not. Awakening to what we are is the beginning of healing.

Que se passe-t-il après la mort ?

Christ is risen: the new life begins already

Vie éternelle et résurrectionIl le dit expressément

Thomas Merton professes the Christian faith in resurrection and eternal life, to which he devoted the short Easter meditation He Is Risen, published posthumously. In it he insists that the resurrection is not merely a future event or a consolation for later, but the presence of the living Christ who calls us to live already as new men, free from the fear of death. In The New Man he develops the same idea: life in Christ is a present participation in his victory. His journals also show a keen awareness of his own death, which overtook him in Bangkok in December 1968, during his journey to Asia.

Comment atteint-on la libération ou le salut ?

Contemplation is a gift: awakening to God's life in us

Par la grâce et l'amourIl le dit expressément

For Thomas Merton, liberation is discovering the true self hidden in God, and that discovery cannot be manufactured. New Seeds of Contemplation opens by affirming that contemplation is a gift: an awakening to the real in all that is real, a response to a call from the One who has no voice. The human being can dispose himself —with silence, solitude, prayer, asceticism and detachment from his false self— but cannot produce by technique what can only be received. In Contemplative Prayer he warns against turning prayer into a search for experiences. Freedom comes when the false self yields and the person allows himself to be found by mercy.

Faut-il un maître ?

The director helps one see; the true director is the Spirit

Utile mais pas indispensableIl le dit expressément

Thomas Merton wrote Spiritual Direction and Meditation (1960) and was for years master of novices at Gethsemani. For him, the spiritual director is neither a guru nor an administrator of techniques, but someone who helps recognise and follow the action of the Holy Spirit in the soul, who is the true director. Direction is especially valuable in monastic life and in moments of discernment, but it does not replace personal responsibility. In The Wisdom of the Desert he recovered the figure of the abba of the Desert Fathers, who guides with few words and by example, and in his last years he took a respectful interest in the master–disciple relationship in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism.

Le monde est-il réel ?

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree

Une création bonne et réelleIl le dit expressément

Thomas Merton defends the goodness and holiness of creation against a spirituality that despises the world. In New Seeds of Contemplation, in the chapter on things in their identity, he writes that a tree gives glory to God by being a tree, because in being what God wants it to be it obeys him; each creature is holy in its singularity. Hagia Sophia contemplates divine wisdom as a hidden fullness in all visible things. In The Asian Journal, before the Buddhas of Polonnaruwa, he notes that all matter and all life are charged with dharmakaya, and that everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. The world is real, good and transparent to God.

Qu'est-ce que l'amour ?

They were mine and I theirs: love discovers we are already one

L'amour de Dieu et du prochainIl le dit expressément

In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton recounts that in 1958, on a street corner in downtown Louisville, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the realisation that he loved all those strangers, that they were his and he theirs. That experience corrected the idea that the monk is a being apart. For Merton, Christian love is neither sentimentality nor philanthropy: it is sharing in God's love, which seeks the good of the other for the other's sake and recognises Christ in every person. No Man Is an Island develops that idea, and his writings on nonviolence, racism and war turn it into a political demand. Love reveals the hidden unity.

Sommes-nous libres ou tout est-il déterminé ?

We are free to be real or unreal

Un libre arbitre réelIl le dit expressément

Thomas Merton understands freedom as the possibility of becoming who one is. In New Seeds of Contemplation he writes that God leaves us free to be whatever we like: we can be real or unreal, true or false; the choice is ours, and our vocation is to work together with God in creating our own identity. Holiness is not a destiny fixed in advance, but a free response to a call. The famous prayer in Thoughts in Solitude —I have no idea where I am going, I do not see the road— expresses that freedom lived without guarantees, trusting that the desire to please God does in fact please him. In his social writings he extends responsibility to collective decisions.

Pourquoi méditer ou prier ?

Contemplation is not a technique: it is waking to the real

La méditation n'est pas une techniqueIl le dit expressément

Thomas Merton lived monastic prayer —choral office, lectio divina, the psalms— and explained it in Praying the Psalms. But he insists that contemplation is not the fruit of a method. In New Seeds of Contemplation he defines it as the highest expression of the human being's intellectual and spiritual life: a spontaneous and grateful awakening to reality and its Source, which cannot be taught or produced. In Contemplative Prayer he warns against turning prayer into a search for experiences or special states, and in his dialogue with Zen he stresses that it is a matter of seeing, not obtaining. Practice disposes, but what matters happens without technique.

La raison peut-elle connaître l'ultime ?

Contemplation goes beyond concepts, without despising them

L'ultime est au-delà du mentalIl le dit expressément

Thomas Merton studied Thomas Aquinas and John of the Cross and devoted The Ascent to Truth (1951) to them, arguing that reason and faith have their place and that Christian mysticism is not irrational. But his doctrine of contemplation places ultimate knowledge beyond concepts: in New Seeds of Contemplation, contemplation is not the vision of an object or clear knowledge, but a dark knowing that transcends reason and in which God is known as unknown. In his dialogue with Zen, in Zen and the Birds of Appetite, he valued the direct experience prior to the division between subject and object. Thought points; the ultimate is received.

Se retirer du monde ou le transformer ?

From monastery to world: contemplation turns prophetic

La contemplation dans l'actionIl le dit expressément

Thomas Merton's trajectory is a journey out and back. The Seven Storey Mountain recounts his flight from the world to the Trappist abbey of Gethsemani in 1941, presented as renunciation. But from the late fifties, after the Louisville experience, he understood that the monk is not separate from others, and wrote against nuclear war, racism and the Vietnam War in Seeds of Destruction, Faith and Violence and his Cold War Letters. In 1965 he withdrew to a hermitage within the monastery. Contemplation in a World of Action argues that solitude, far from distancing, makes presence in the world more lucid and its critique freer.