CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE ROOTS OF PEACE IN THOMAS MERTON

Renascence, Summer 2007 by Labrie, Ross

A number of scholars, including Gordon Zahn, James Forest, William Shannon, Ronald Powaski, James Douglass, and, more recently, Patricia Burton and Christine Bochen have written productively about Merton's writings on war and peace.1 This essay is an attempt to contextualize Merton's thinking about war and peace in terms of his attachment to what he called Christian humanism. While, therefore, this essay will focus on salient aspects of Merton's thinking about war and peace, its chief purpose is to reveal the underlying way in which he thought about these issues. As a humanist Merton consistently affirmed the importance of reason, balance, and proportion. As a Christian humanist he inclusively added to these qualities of classical and traditional humanism the critical role of the love embodied by Christ, a love that could undercut the irrational and fragmenting forces that found their expression in war. As a humanist Merton affirmed the "authentic dignity" of human beings (Love 150). As a Christian humanist and as a contemplative he affirmed Christianity's distinctive compassion and ethic of collaboration in addressing human conflict.

As is generally understood and as Merton understood, Renaissance humanists, echoing the classical cultures of Greece and Rome, asserted the innate majesty of human beings and of human reason in particular. For Merton reason was a quintessential source of human dignity, one of the voices of God in the human mind. Merton's valuing of order and balance, which can be seen in the symmetrical terms and images which abound in his writings, corresponded to the view of the ancient Greek philosophers who saw the order of the world as parallel to the mind. Moreover, as had Plato, Merton tended to link closely the rational and the moral. "The man who is outside the orbit of God's grace," he suggested in Seasons of Celebration (1965) "is not normally governed by reason but by passion" (137).

While many readers correctly regard Merton as an intuitive writer, he was also in fact not only a very rational writer but also a frequent upholder of rationality and of knowledge. In an important essay entitled "Christian Humanism" written in 1962, for example, he praised Thomas Aquinas' inclusive "openness" to Aristotle, to Arab culture and civilization, and to the "claims of reason, nature, and man" (Love 137). Similarly, Merton recognized the capacity of science to enhance the dignity of human existence. In an essay entitled "The Universe as Epiphany," written in 1967, he praised the work of the controversial Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, for incorporating a "modern scientific world view" into an "authentically Christian" philosophy of life (Love 171). At the same time he confessed to being skeptical about the ability of science to satisfy our deepest human needs (Faith 224).

In addition, while acknowledging that secular humanists like Marx believed that scientific knowledge and a mastery of material reality would help in the process of humanizing the world, Meiton thought that Marx had little sympathy with the individual as opposed to human beings as a collective whole (Love 148). In this light, Marx, although committed, in Merton's eyes, to the dignity of human beings, overlooked the importance of concrete, individual life in securing that dignity because of an abstract and blinding focus on the many, which all too easily could lead to a sacrifice of the one. Merton consistently asserted the support by Christian humanism for the individual person in contrast to the mass or collective.

While Merton's attitude towards classical humanism was wary at times, as in The Seven Storey Mountain, in which he attacked the abstractionism of Plato, in fact he conceded in the autumn of 1960, that he had always been a Platonist (Turning 59). He had been introduced to the Greek and Roman classics at Oakham School in England where, for example, he read the Republic in the original Greek. His early poems teem with allusions from Greek and Roman literature and mythology and, more importantly, he saw Greek philosophers like Plato as concentrated, as he himself had been, on the pursuit of "ultimate truth," as he put it in his M.A. thesis on William Blake (Literary 440). In an essay on Albert Camus entitled "Terror and the Absurd," written in the late 1960s, Merton noted with qualified approval Camus' adherence to a classical humanism that upheld not only "measure, beauty, harmony, and natural limits," but that also affirmed the "Greek idea" of "eternal and essential values" that were "ontological and natural" and that provided a norm for "rational conduct" (Literary 233).

A focus on ultimate truth, Merton concluded, would help to forestall the spurious use of reason such as the advocating of means that are justified by their ends. In his essays on war and peace especially, such as the well-known essay "A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann," which appeared in Raids on the Unspeakable in 1966, he outlined the dangers, especially in a time of conflict, of the merely instrumental use of reason, i.e., reason propelled by underlying assumptions and desires that were far from reasonable. Due, Merton thought, to the influence of utilitarianism, there had been a displacement of reason in the search for the true and the good in Western culture. In the philosophy of Bentham and Mill, with their emphasis on the greatest good for the greatest number, he observed, the cosmic order in being uncovered by reason in Greek and medieval philosophy had given way to a hierarchy of goods based on personal preferences and desires (Seeds 160).