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Thomas Merton, the problem of war and the character of Christian nonviolence

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For Thomas Merton (1915-1968), the goal of nonviolence is not immediate victory over the adversary but the transformation of human relationships.()

On 10 December 2018, we marked the 50th anniversary of Thomas Merton's untimely death in Asia. On 31 January 2019, we celebrate the 104th birthday of this monk and writer whose writings on spirituality and on social issues continue to influence readers today. Unfortunately, Merton’s thoughts on the problem of war remain as relevant today as they were in the 1960s.

Those familiar with the life and work of Thomas Merton ― whom Pope Francis described as "a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions" before the U.S. Congress ― know that his interest in peace issues didn't emerge out of thin air. Recall from The Seven Storey Mountain that, prior to his conversion to Catholicism, Merton joined a peace strike at Columbia University at which speakers argued that just war in our time was impossible.

After his conversion, Merton grappled with his position on war given that the American government had instituted the draft in preparation for possible participation in the Second World War. He accepted Catholic teaching on just war, as he would for his entire life, but he had doubts about the morality of modern warfare and consequently applied to be considered a non-combatant objector. His entrance into the Abbey of Gethsemani on 10 December 1941 kept him out of the war and put a cloister wall between a world at war and himself.

That said, although separated from the world by a monastic enclosure, he was regularly reminded of the war's existence. His younger brother, John Paul, was killed in the Second World War, and he regularly recounts in his journals hearing the guns firing at Fort Knox and seeing Air Force planes flying over the monastery.

But Merton's writings from the 1940s into the mid-1950s contain few references to the problem of war. His private journals are largely silent on this issue during these years, and his published writings focus primarily on prayer and contemplation. Later, Merton describes this period as being a time characterised by a "highly unworldly, ascetical, intransigent, somewhat apocalyptic outlook" in which he operated out of a perspective that saw a "[r]igid, arbitrary separation between God and the world."

Merton's understanding of his relationship to the world begins to change in the mid-1950s. Such rethinking is on full display in a November 1957 journal entry: "Politics vital ― even for monks ... To live in a monastery as if the world had stopped turning in 1905 ― a fatal illusion."

Merton's epiphany

It is, however, an experience Merton had on 18 March 1958 that seems to have permanently redirected Merton's eyes back to the world. For reasons not made clear in his journal, Thomas Merton was in Louisville on that day. Perhaps he was in the city for a doctor's appointment - he suffered from a variety of maladies - but it matters little why he was there. On this trip into the city, he found himself in downtown Louisville, on the corner of 4th Street and Walnut Street.

There are two versions of what happened. The first is that found in Merton's journal, written the day after his trip to Louisville. The second is the version found in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, published in 1965. For this version, Merton edited and re-wrote his original journal entry, which is more raw and unpolished. It is the original journal entry I want to cite here, specifically because of its rawness. The entire passage is worth quoting at length:

Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, suddenly realized that I loved all the people and that none of them were, or, could be totally alien to me. As if waking from a dream ― the dream of my separateness, of the 'special' vocation to be different. My vocation does not really make me different from the rest of men or put me in a special category except artificially, juridically. I am still a member of the human race ― and what more glorious destiny is there for man, since the Word was made flesh and became, too a member of the Human Race!

Thank God! Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them. I have the immense joy of being a man! As if the sorrows of our condition could really matter, once we begin to realize who and what we are ― as if we could ever begin to realize it on earth.

Here he was, a monk in an austere monastery, just outside a lavish hotel at the corner of a busy intersection in the middle of the shopping district. And far from experiencing revulsion or a sense of superiority in the face of people who lived radically different lives from his own, Merton fell in love.

Those who have read his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, know the Merton who saw in the monastery a place of refuge from a world bent under the weight of sin and corruption. The monastery represented an escape from the world, a place where Merton could devote himself to a higher way of being away from the pernicious influences of others. The revelation Merton experienced on the corner of 4th and Walnut, therefore, was just that ― a revelation. It shattered his perception that his vocation was characterised primarily by its isolation from and superiority to the world. Instead, he experienced a profound unity with all those he saw on that street corner, a unity rooted in their shared humanity and, most importantly, in the dignity accorded humanity when God became human.

I don't want to make too much of this epiphany. If you read his journals, you can see that, prior to 18 March 1958, Merton was thinking more and more seriously about the world outside the monastery. But it is clear that his experience on the corner of 4th and Walnut compelled him to think more thoroughly about his relationship to the world and, specifically, to address various issues in whatever way was possible for a cloistered monk.

The root of war

Chief among the issues he grappled with was the problem of war and the Christian response to it. Compelled by a strong sense of the dignity of all human life, Merton reacted with incredulity, not only to the possibility that humanity would doom itself to annihilation through nuclear war, but that American Catholics ― including bishops ― supported American use of its nuclear arsenal in a first strike against Russia. Given this situation, he saw no alternative but to devote himself fully to the task of peace. As he wrote in a letter from 1961:

I feel that the supreme obligation of every Christian, taking precedence over absolutely everything else, is to devote himself by the very best means at his disposal to a struggle to preserve the human race from annihilation and to abolish war as the essential means to accomplish this end.

And writing to Dorothy Day in that same year, Merton writes:

I don't feel that I can in conscience, at a time like this, go on writing just about things like meditation ... I think I have to face the big issues, the life-and-death issues.

A month after this letter, Merton ventured into the anti-war waters by sending a chapter from his forthcoming book, New Seeds of Contemplation, to The Catholic Worker for publication. The title of the chapter was "The Root of War is Fear," and the chapter itself had been censored and approved by the Order. Not censored, however, were the three paragraphs that he added to the beginning of the version he sent to The Catholic Worker designed to "to situate these thoughts in the present context."

Two days after the article was published, Merton wrote in his journal that its publication marked a distinct and significant shift in his life, knowing as he did that he was heading into controversial territory, particularly for a monk: "Walking into a known and definite battle. May God protect me in it." He was one of the few Catholic clerics in the United States to call for the abolition of war and the active practice of nonviolence, and he knew that there was likely to be backlash both from those inside and outside the church. He was right. Merton followed "The Root of War is Fear" with further essays in 1961 and 1962 on war and peace, and immersed himself as fully as a cloistered monk could in the peace movement, becoming a member of Fellowship of Reconciliation, a largely Protestant pacifist organisation, and a sponsor of a Catholic peace organization called Pax.

In the spring of 1962, however, the axe came down. Dom Gabriel Sortais, Abbot General of the Cistercians, asked Merton to stop publishing anything on war because he felt it was a subject about which monks should not write as it "falsifies the message of monasticism." Two factors likely played into Dom Gabriel's silencing of Merton. First, the backlash against Merton's early writings was intense within the American church, and it is probable that many were pressuring the Abbot General to keep his renegade monk in check. Second ― and Merton hints at this ― Dom Gabriel does not appear personally to have agreed with Merton's assessment of nuclear weaponry.

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No matter the cause, Merton obeyed his superiors ― at least, to the letter of the law. Anything published publicly in a large forum required formal censorship by the order. Not so anything published privately on a small scale. Therefore, with his abbot's knowledge, Merton mimeographed and privately circulated two books on war. The first, Cold War Letters, is a collection of more than one hundred letters to friends and activists about the problem of war. The second, provocatively titled Peace in the Post-Christian Era, was a book that was completed when the axe came down; it was not finally published until 2004. Merton also published a few articles under rather uninventive pseudonyms like Benedict Monk.

In 1963, Pope John XXIII released Pacem in Terris, his encyclical on peace. Writing to Dom Gabriel shortly after the encyclical's publication, Merton somewhat pointedly remarked that it was a good thing that the pope didn't have to go through the order's censors, otherwise it would never have been published.

Merton hoped that, now that the pope had weighed in on the issue of war and peace in a manner similar to what Merton himself had been doing, he would be allowed to publish on it again. The Abbot General would have none of it, arguing that it was the job of bishops and theologians to write about such things, not Trappist monks. It was only after Dom Gabriel died in November 1963 that restrictions on Merton's writing began to be lifted, and Merton wrote some of his most insightful essays on nonviolence.

The human dilemma

One of these essays is titled "Blessed are the Meek: The Christian Roots of Nonviolence." Merton wrote it in response to a request from Hildegard Goss-Mayr, a prominent Catholic peace activist who worked with Cardinal Ottaviani to craft documents against war during the Second Vatican Council. She wanted an article on humility for the journal Der Christ in der Welt. Two weeks after this request, Merton wrote to Goss-Mayr to let her know that the article was completed, and that it had actually turned into an article on meekness as applied to Christian nonviolence. It was translated into German and published in the April-June 1965 issue of Der Christ in der Welt. In 1967 it was published in Fellowship, the journal of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and later that year, the Catholic Peace Fellowship published it as a pamphlet complete with a cover by the great Sister Mary Corita.

Although "Blessed are the Meek" is Merton's fullest treatment of nonviolence, it is not the first place he discusses it. In his first writing on war and peace, the aforementioned three uncensored paragraphs in "The Root of War is Fear," Merton writes that, to address the problem of war, "nonviolence is to be explained as a practical method, and not left to be mocked as an outlet for crackpots who want to make a show of themselves."

Merton begins "Blessed are the Meek" by describing, not what Christian nonviolence is, but what it is not. It is not, Merton writes, "a novel tactic which is at once efficacious and even edifying, and which enables the sensitive [person] to participate in the struggles of the world without being dirtied with blood." It is not "a way of proving one's point and getting what one wants without being involved in behaviour that one considers ugly and evil." Nonviolence is not about prevailing over an adversary, nor is it about proving the adversary wrong and ourselves right. Christian nonviolence cannot become a form of moral aggression or "subtle provocation designed ... to bring out the evil we hope to find in the adversary."

In other words, any form of nonviolence that caters to selfish and prideful inclinations to attain anything at the expense of our adversary is not Christian nonviolence. As Merton writes, "[t]o practice nonviolence for a purely selfish or arbitrary end would in fact discredit and distort the truth of nonviolent resistance."

Merton's comments about what nonviolence is not are rooted in his understanding of human sin and its implications for how we interact with one another. Later in "Blessed are the Meek," Merton refers to the incessant temptation we have to demonise our adversaries, to view them as totally unreasonable, wicked and evil, particularly when we are appealing to what understand to be higher ideals. Such temptation emerges out of the divisiveness that characterizes human society, a divisiveness that is the root of violence.

Humanity's propensity toward fragmentation, and thus toward violence, is a consistent theme in Merton's writings. In a book entitled The New Man, Merton explores this propensity through analysis of the creation stories in Genesis. He argues that these stories tell us that human beings were not created as isolated monads, as individuals, separate from one another. Rather, we were created for one another, to give ourselves to one another. We were created for relationality, we were created to love, and Merton insists that, for us to be fully human ― that is, to live out our existence as persons created in the image and likeness of God ― we are to go out of ourselves toward others. To become self-focused is to be less than human, less than what we were created to be.

Enter sin. The story of the fall, according to Merton, is a story of humanity's descent into prideful self-centeredness. "By an act of pure pride," Merton writes, "Adam put an abyss between himself and God and other [people]. He became a little universe enclosed within itself." As such, Adam "fell beneath himself," becoming less than what he was created to be, and we continue to mimic this prideful self-centeredness, asserting ourselves against others.

What emerged was what Merton refers to as a "false self" ― a self that, contrary to the purposes for which humanity was created, attempts to exist as self-sufficient and private. In New Seeds of Contemplation, one of his most popular books, Merton posits that each of us "is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self." This false self is self-focused, self-obsessed and oriented entirely toward maintaining the illusion of its separateness from God. As such, it is a "self that exists only in my own egocentric desires," but it's a self that has no actual reality, based as it is on premises opposed to human createdness.

To focus on the false self, to live into it, not only alienates us from God, but also from one another, resulting in the deep fragmentation of a humanity created to exist in unity. All attempts to find my identity in this false self leads inevitably to conflict with others as I seek to find myself by asserting myself ― my "desires and ambitions and appetites" ― against others and appropriating for myself a private share of the common good. I thus find my identity by accentuating the differences between myself and others.

In "The Root of War is Fear," Merton explores this propensity to divide, analysing "the psychological forces at work in ourselves and in society." Merton here argues that one of the ways we deal with our faults and weaknesses is by exaggerating the faults and weaknesses of others. While we are willing to distance the malice within as being somehow distanced from who we really are, we do not extend this assessment to others. We compensate for minimising our own sins by exaggerating the faults of others. Thus, to deal with our own sense of guilt, we create enemies who, by our assessment, are evil and who therefore need to be eliminated in the interests of "peace."

In short, we divide as a means of elevating ourselves at the expense of others who thus become our adversaries.

It is because of our divisiveness that Merton outlines precisely what nonviolence is not at the beginning of "Blessed are the Meek." He is convinced that nonviolence has the potential to play into our inclination to divide insofar it can be used to differentiate and further division rather than to heal the divisiveness that characterises human relations. That is, to make our nonviolence the means by which we conquer and subdue our enemies, to make it a way to manifest our adversary's evil and our righteousness, is to turn nonviolence into a form of violence that simply caters to that which is least human in us.

Nonviolence and the Incarnation

If divisiveness is both the consequence of sin and the cause of violence, Christian nonviolence ― rooted in the person, teaching, and example of Jesus Christ ― is focused squarely on fostering unity. What is required is a theological anthropology that takes seriously the Incarnation, which, according to Merton, changes everything in terms of how we interact with one another. In essence, Merton argues that Christians need to see all people, including adversaries, in the light of the Incarnation of the Son of God. The Incarnation, God-becoming-flesh, reveals to us the possibilities of human transformation through the radical love of a God who became one of us.

In his 4th and Walnut experience, Merton expresses this point beautifully. Reflecting on this experience seven years after his epiphany, Merton writes:

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

"[W]alking around shining like the sun." The Incarnation reveals to us the immense dignity and surpassing value of each person, such that, if we take it seriously, we come to see each person in the light of what they can be and of what they already are in God's eyes. And if we could see that ― really see that ― what would be the implications? According to Merton, they would be enormous: "There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed ... I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other."

The Incarnation means that we cannot view anyone, including our adversary, as inherently evil or beyond hope. Rather, as Merton writes in New Seeds of Contemplation, "[i]f we believe in the Incarnation of the Son of God, there should be no one on earth in whom we are not prepared to see, in mystery, the presence of Christ." It is this new way of seeing other people that Merton insists is at the heart of Christian nonviolence. We must view all people, including our enemies, as brothers and sisters, rather than as adversaries. For, as Merton writes in a letter to Dorothy Day, "we justify the evil we do to our brother because he is no longer a brother, he is merely an adversary, an accused."

Therefore, as Merton writes in "Blessed are the Meek," Christian nonviolence "is not built on a presupposed division, but on the basic unity of [humankind]." That is, we must approach others not from the starting point of negation but from an orientation of affirmation, rooted in an acknowledgement of our unity with them. This does not mean for Merton the adoption of a kind of supernatural naïveté that ignores the reality of conflict and division, but it does mean viewing other people eschatologically through the lens of the kingdom Jesus established ― a kingdom characterised by a fundamentally new way of existing and interacting with one another.

Christ assumed human nature and died out of love for all people, to be united in and with all. The Kingdom of God he established is therefore a kingdom "to which all are summoned." The gospel message of salvation is for every person, and this message of salvation is one focused on the re-attainment of human unity in and through Christ. It is for this unity that the Christian nonviolent resister fights. She is not fighting for her own truth or her own side, as if she has a truth to which the other has no access. Rather, she "is fighting for the truth, common to [her] and to the adversary, the right which is objective and universal." She is fighting for a truth that transcends all supposed divisions between ourselves and our adversaries, that truth being that we are all ― adversaries including ― called to the Kingdom of God. This means for the Christian that she must act in a particular way towards her adversary, recognising that salvation extends as fully to him as it does to her.

Therefore, because salvation and the potentiality for transformation is possible for all people, Merton argues that we must approach others from the orientation that they, as creatures of God for whom God became human, have a great capacity for good. As Merton writes, "there is in [humanity] a potentiality for peace and order which can be realized provided the right conditions are there." Merton emphasises that this should not be a naïve optimism in humankind. Evil does exist and people can indeed do evil things. It is, however, based on the idea that inherent within all persons is the possibility of transformation. "The Christian knows," Merton writes, "that there are radically sound possibilities in every [person], and he believes that love and grace have the power to bring out those possibilities at the most unexpected moments."

Nonviolence as a "style of politics"

Given this understanding of the divisiveness of sin and the possibility of human transformation, Merton argues that only nonviolence rooted in meekness can lead to the actual transformation of individuals, societies and, indeed, the world. One of the most "insidious" temptations nonviolent resisters face is a "fetishism of immediate results." The question inevitably posed whenever nonviolence is raised as a possibility is, "But will it work?" The premise of such a question is that there is an adversary who is wrong and who therefore needs to be conquered or eliminated as quickly as possible.

This is a perversion of the telos of Christian nonviolence. The goal of nonviolence is not immediate victory over the adversary, but the transformation of human relationships ― of society ― through the healing and restoration of human nature. This means, however, having the meekness, the humility, to recognise that you are as much in need of healing and restoration as your supposed adversary.

And this is where we see that Merton's understanding of nonviolence comes with extraordinary demands. "Christ brought to His disciples a vocation and a task," Merton writes, "to struggle in the world of violence to establish His peace not only in their own hearts but in society itself." Merton insists that, not only must nonviolent resisters be unwilling to use power in any way to vanquish the adversary given his dignity and worth, and given our call to unity with him, but the nonviolent resister must enter into the kind of dialogue with the adversary in such a way as to be open to learning from and being transformed by him.

If our nonviolence is characterised by an unwillingness truly to listen to the adversary, if we demonstrate our conviction that he has nothing worthwhile to say, our adversary will recognise that our concern is not love but domination. Moreover, we prove by our unwillingness to listen "that we are interested not in the truth so much as in 'being right'." Such unwillingness to enter into genuine dialogue is, according to Merton, inherently unchristian, for it presumes both an overly pessimistic assessment of the other and an overly prideful assessment of our own grasp on truth. Moreover, it violates the reality of the Kingdom of God established by Christ.

Pope Francis has described nonviolence as "a style of politics for peace." For Thomas Merton, nonviolence is just that. It is an alternative form of politics that is governed by the ethics of the Kingdom of God, inaugurated by a saviour who chose the way of love rather than the way of power and exhorted his followers to do the same. Merton exhorts us to take seriously the message and example of Jesus as a whole, and not simply to pick and choose which aspects of Christ's kingdom ethic we wish to adopt.

One of my favourite Merton books is Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, published in 1965. It's a unique book. It contains no narrative flow, but is rather a series of brief meditations on the world and the church. Merton holds nothing back in this book in his criticism of the dominant political climate of the 1960s and of the willingness of his fellow Roman Catholics to buy into a politics dominated by individualism and power. This Merton calls the "practical atheism" of many Christians who not only buy the dominant political culture, but who actually view power and coercion as the most appropriate and realistic approach to deal with adversaries.

But Merton will have none of this. Throughout his writings, Merton emphasises repeatedly that the genuine transformation of human society can never occur through violence. At best, violence begets hatred and more violence. At worst, in a nuclear age, violence results in the destruction of all life.

Thomas Merton argues that Christ came to inaugurate a new way of being, a new Kingdom in which the predominant mode of doing politics in the world is rejected. Nonviolence is not to be rejected, as it so often is by Christians and non-Christians alike, as "phony and sentimental." Rather, based as it is on a decidedly Christian understanding of humanity in light of the Incarnation, it is the only means of being political that can actually lead to genuine transformation, a transformation rooted in love. For, as Merton writes, "Love, love only, love of our deluded fellow man as he actually is ... this alone can open to the door to truth." Not only, therefore, is it "a style of politics for peace." It is for Merton the only style of politics open to Christians.

"A fully human solution"

What about the practical implications of Merton's call to nonviolence? This is where Pope Francis's teaching on nonviolence provides some practical guidance not necessarily found in Merton's writings. Pope Francis talks about enacting nonviolence in every facet of our lives, but zeroes in on the family ― referring to the family as providing "the domestic roots of a politics of nonviolence." He writes:

The family is the indispensable crucible in which spouses, parents and children, brothers and sisters, learn to communicate and to show generous concern for one another, and in which frictions and even conflicts have to be resolved not by force but by dialogue, respect, concern for the good of the other, mercy and forgiveness.

Nonviolence is not something that we adopt at certain times in our lives when expedient, but is to characterise our lives as a whole, particularly in our interactions with those closest to us. It is not a method, but a way of being, one characterised by the kind of love that flowers into genuine dialogue.

So Pope Francis ― and Merton would agree ― argues that nonviolence has to begin at home, in our everyday interactions with our loved ones. Where else might nonviolence play out practically? Obviously, if we accept the vision laid out by Thomas Merton and Pope Francis, we will understand that we as Christians cannot and should not support or participate in any form of violence that compromises the dignity and value of our adversaries. Both Merton and Pope Francis accept the church's traditional teaching on just war, but in Merton's case, he came to believe that the possibilities for the just use of violence had become so limited in our current age as to be almost non-existent.

What about other forms of nonviolence? The practice of nonviolence should extend to our political discourse, particularly on social media. As I've shown, Merton argues that violence is rooted in the demonisation of our adversaries as being beyond the pale of redemption and as having nothing worthwhile to contribute. Now, I'm a fan of Twitter. It's a good tool for keeping up with current events in the church and the world. Unfortunately, Twitter lends itself to a kind of lowest common denominator political discourse whereby people express their opinions loudly without nuance and apparently without any openness to learn from or understand opposing viewpoints.

There is a great deal of demonisation on social media, and I would argue that such demonisation is itself a form of violence that violates the dignity of those with whom we may disagree. This Merton would describe as a "flatly unchristian refusal to love ... to accept them in our hearts, to treat them without suspicion and deal with them without inner reservations." To practice nonviolence is to be open to dialogue even with our adversaries, and to see them eschatologically, as a brother or sister.

It is no accident that Pope Francis referred to Thomas Merton in his address to the U.S. Congress as a "man of dialogue" who provides for us a model of how to exist in the world. Throughout his pontificate, Francis has continually emphasised the preeminence of dialogue as being at the heart of the transformation of the church and the world. For Merton, such dialogue has to be at the heart of Christian nonviolence, for genuine dialogue has as its basis an understanding of the other rooted in the Incarnation, the humility of recognising that one's purchase on the truth apart from the other is incomplete, and the unwillingness to use power or force in any way to eliminate an adversary from whom one needs to learn.

Dialogue that emerges out of love for the other is a dialogue that recognises that we are as individuals incomplete without the other, that the Kingdom of God is manifested on earth through the reestablishment of relationships in love. It is only through dialogue that we can come to know both our adversary and know ourselves, and it is therefore through the nonviolence of dialogue that humanity can be transformed to become what it was created to be. And it is for this reason that Merton refers to nonviolence as "a fully human solution."

Gregory Hillis is Associate Professor of Theology at Bellarmine University.

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