A Year With Thomas Merton - December 19

In the End, Grace Alone

I have to admit the truth that the particular frustrations of this life here are first of all not intrinsic to monasticism as such, and not essential to my own "way" by any means. They are the product of social background and involvement in the economic and cultural pattern of the country (unavoidable). We are much more involved than we think, and my assessments of the Abbot are based mostly on this: that he is through and through a businessman, and indeed even prides himself on his practicality and shrewdness, and yet he "gets away" with this by a formal unworldliness in certain spheres--discouraging correspondence, visits, recreations, etc. (He resents my involvement in the intellectual world. My frustrations are to some extent those of all intellectuals in a society of businessmen and squares.)

The great fault of my own spirituality is a negativism which is related to bourgeois sterility. What Jean-Paul Sartre calls "right-wing existentialism." Regarding angst as an ordinary, universal element in all life...(maybe this is to some extent true, however). Projecting my own frustrations and incapacities on the whole world. The fact remains that I here suffer from the sterility of my culture, and its general impotence. The optimism I reject is the optimism that denies this sterility. But where is the real optimism I should have as a Christian?

"The simplicity of the adult," says Emmanuel Mounier, "is won by long effort, without miracles." Grace alone, the grace of the heights, sets the final grace upon the rejuvenation of the new man!

December, 26, 1963, V.50

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 23

The Personalism of Emmanuel Mounier

The toughness and integrity of Emmanuel Mounier, and his book Personalism, demand careful attention. Maybe of all the mean of our time he is the one we need most to understand and imitate. He is clever and hard with words. You cannot be comfortable with his language unless you think along with it, which is not all that easy. Hence he will make almost everyone uncomfortable—assuming that they even listen to him at all.

Mounier says (in showing how individualism bars communication): “A kind of instinct works within us to deny or diminish the humanity of those around us….[T]he lightest touch of the individual seems sometimes to infect a mortal poison into any contact between man and man” (Personalism, p. 18).

Mounier again: “The person only grows in so far as he continually purifies himself from the individual within him. He cannot do that by force of self-attention but, on the contrary, by making himself available.”

August 17 and 19, 1956, III.66, 68-69

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 19

Taste and See

From moment to moment, I remember with surprise that I am satisfied, even though everything is not yet fulfilled. I lack nothing. Omnino replete me—He satisfies me in all things. Sapientia—wisdom = sapor boni—savoring the good (St. Bernard). To know and taste the secret good that is present but is not known to those who, because they are restless and because they are discontent and because they complain, cannot apprehend it. The present good—reality—God. Gustate et videte—Taste and see.

It is easy to say of every new idea that one meets, “It is all in St. Bernard.” It is very doubtful, for instance, whether Freud is “all in St. Bernard.” However, Emmanuel Mounier’s “Personalism” is essentially in St. Bernard. Hence to read Mounier with understanding is most profitable spiritual reading not only because it helps to understand St. Bernard but helps us to use him. We are paralyzed in our individualism and we turn everything to the advantage of sterile self-isolation (self-centered) and we do this in the name of our contemplative calling. What a disaster to build the contemplative life on the negation of communication. That is why there is so much noise in a Trappist monastery. The infernal chatter and hullabaloo, the continual roar of the machinery, the crash of objects falling from the hands of distraught contemplatives—all this protests that we hate silence with all our power because, with our wrong motives for seeking it, it is ruining our lives. Yet the fact remains that silence is our life—but a silence which is communion and better communication than words! If only someone could tell us how to find it.

August 20, 1956, III.70-71