Striving Towards Being: The Letter of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz - Review

Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by Dominic Ording

Robert Faggen, ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. 178pp. $21.00 (cloth).

Robert Faggen's edition of these letters traces the spiritual journey and growing friendship of two writers as they struggle together with the deepest questions of the human condition. The relationship began in 1958 when Merton wrote Milosz to praise and inquire about his ambivalent, yet strident, analysis of Communism, The Captive Mind, and ended with Merton's death in 1968. Throughout the collection, the reader is made privy to the thoughts of both Merton and Milosz on topics ranging from contemporary culture and the history of the Church to their most personal literary and spiritual concerns. What emerges is a portrait of two men attempting to be as open and honest as possible as they communicate about what it means to be a Christian, a writer, and, indeed, a human being in the twentieth century.

As cultural critic, each offers a unique perspective based on his background and physical location. Milosz, who left Poland in self-exile to France in 1957, took a job teaching at the University of California at Berkeley in 1960. Merton entered the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky in 1941. Milosz writes with horror about his sons' watching television in California; Merton responds that he still had not seen any TV. Yet along with their relative distance from American mass-culture came a keen awareness of its influence. Merton laments the formation of "new men" in the American university and business "who are secretly in love with the concept of a vast managerial society" (42). Milosz asks "whether it is possible to preserve, to create if you prefer, a clear purpose of one's activity [in America, in this modern Western civilisation]" (90). This quest for authentic, spiritual experience and autonomous action in the modern world is a theme that underlies many of the letters. So much seems to work against the possibility of an authentic moral stance.

Their more explicit political exchanges revolved around mutual despair in the face of Cold War ideology on both the Western and the Soviet sides. Like many intellectuals, they sought a Third Way but were not optimistic that a satisfactory program would be forthcoming. They were also both concerned about the anti-war protests in the U.S., although Milosz was reluctant to become involved and was skeptical of Merton's activist writings. They agree that while they might have occasional differences of opinion, their fundamental positions were similar. It is a tribute to their mutual admiration and sensitivity, as well as their tremendous self-confidence, that they could afford to criticize each other (whether about politics or literature) without fear of damaging their relationship. But none of these social or political issues does justice to the heart of the letters. Much more important is their illuminating reflections upon literature and their vocations as writers, and their deep search for faith and the life of the spirit.

Not surprisingly, Merton and Milosz are most at home discussing literature, especially poetry. Besides their own and each other's work, they discuss the work of, among others, Albert Camus, Heraclitus, Robinson Jeffers, Boris Pasternak, and Simone Weil. Milosz admits that he does not like novels. Merton agrees that in poetry he finds a mode of expression more along the lines of his own vision. Both also agree on the importance of theology. Milosz confesses that he doesn't understand the notion of Providence, to which Merton replies that it is simple and even, at times, brutal: "Insofar as we are in Christ, we are our own Providence. The thing then is not to struggle to work out the 'laws' of a mysterious force alien to us and utterly outside us, but to come to terms with what is inmost in our own selves, the very depth of our own being" (39).

This is the sort of exchange that makes the correspondence between Merton and Milosz so rich for any reader interested in questions of faith in general, and the spiritual crisis of modernity in the 1960s in particular. How does one maintain a free and authentic inner life with God, while at the same time reaching out to cultivate meaningful human relationships during the time of such a crisis? These two men sought, moreover, to articulate their strategies and priorities in letters. Merton feels guilty for being "a bourgeois," while Milosz suggests that perhaps only monks can be sane in such a time. They struggle together through hope and despair.

Each resigns himself to being unable to control his destiny, but there is also a sense of relief. Not all is unhappiness. Near the end of the book, Merton reflects on the possibilities of his own happiness, as well as on the utmost importance of friendship: "If I stay with the Church it is out of a disillusioned love, and with a realization that I myself could not be happy outside, though I have no guarantee of being happy inside either. In effect, my 'happiness' does not depend on any institution or any establishment. As for you, you are part of my 'Church' of friends who are in many ways more important to me than the institution" (175).