Dancing in the Water of Life

by Thomas Merton

  “I think of what you say about the incommunicable manifestos of the poets of today, and their eagerness to preach a liberty made of drugs-or a justice made of slavery. I tell you that for me one of the worst demons is the demon of literature, in fact for many years I have felt the obsession of a writing that is tied up with evil. But lately I see even worse evils in the ‘ente politico’ [‘political area’], mixed up with literature.”11

  The cheese work is not yet great. Brother Clement and Brother Raphael are both in the infirmary, hobbling about after hernia operations.

  November 30, 1963. St. Andrew

  Cold, grey, a few flakes of snow swirling above the pines, and a crow fighting his way into the wind. Some ministers from Louisville, Baptist and Presbyterian Seminary. Jack [John H.] Ford, et al. from Bellarmine were here yesterday for some discussions and as usual I am dubious about it. At this time we seemed certainly to have much to say that was relevant. But what is more important is their being here–particularly ones like Glenn Hinson [from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary] who knows and loves the Fathers of the Church. Dale Moody [from Southern Baptist] kept referring to the wave of “charisms,” “glossolalia,” etc. which is sweeping through (Southern?) Protestantism. He is in favor of it. I regard it as a manifestation of spiritual insecurity and confusion.

  Episcopalian nuns from Versailles [Kentucky], whom I saw briefly after lunch today, brought up the same thing. It is in some Episcopal churches, too!

  After the Kennedy funeral, everyone is apparently calming down, with what seems to be a general impression of reassurance, based largely on the fact that Kennedy has suddenly become a giant in stature due to his death, and that there is a show of unity in support of Johnson. But my feeling of the unconsciousness of the whole thing persists.

  1. The South has apparently accepted Kennedy’s death with great satisfaction and absolutely no charity. On the contrary, some have openly regretted that Bobby [Kennedy] was not killed–there is real hate there. Flags are not being flown half mast (here of course they are, and in Kentucky), etc.

  2. The question of murder, the motives, etc. is still extremely unsatisfactory, and though everyone believes the “evidence” discovered by the Dallas police, perhaps it is not all as solid as it sounds. (Apparently there is no witness of Oswald’s shooting the patrolman, Tippitt, nor is it sure the man was shot with Oswald’s revolver, etc.)

  The whole thing is extremely grim, mysterious and much graver than people seem to believe, though God knows everyone was shocked. Our feds all have wanted a solution at any price and have taken the first one they could get. Is it good enough? Certainly Oswald shot the President: but it is important to know why. It is also very important to know more about this Ruby, and his endearing impulsiveness and the legend that he was just crazy about Presidents, always faithfully prayed in the synagogue, ran two highly respectable strip-tease joints and was the friend of all the cops.

  December 1, 1963. First Sunday of Advent

  Bright stars. I am still not going to the Night Office. Still need some traction to get the kinks out of my neck and shoulder when waking up. Take it again before going to sleep at night, so my time table does not quite jive with that of the community. But I love this season, need the hymns. Loved the responsories again yesterday in the snow-flaked mist. Yet the old liturgy itself recedes in a “past” which is itself being rejected, as if one were no longer allowed to cling to it, as if it were no longer sure to be there tomorrow. It is my own past and the past of my civilization and I must leave both, having them as though I had them not.

  The seventeenth chapter of De Casu Diaboli brings up a very modern question–our creativity, that is, the creative power of our liberty is perhaps, as far as we ourselves [are] concerned, a non-destructiveness. If we can accept creation we concur in creating because we have the “power” to destroy. Our power to create is a power to consent in creation, or to work in common with the creative will that transcends both our freedom and our world. Our power to destroy seems more ours (and it is so) and more of a power. What is happening now is that we concentrate more and more on the power which is a rejection. Yet paradoxically, to have the power to destroy and not destroy is to “make.” In this sense, by not destroying the world we seem to be creating it. We are said to make something “cum possumus facere utnon est et non facimus” [“when we could make something not be, and we don’t do it”].

  The problem is for people to see that the power to nurture and preserve which vanishes into the creative background of God’s will is the only true power, and does not appear as power. Whereas what appears as power, the power to destroy, is not power but self-defeat. Strangely, this power is regarded as the one great reality in our world. It is the one on which everything else is built. And it makes our power to preserve also take the shape of an unnatural decision.

  Now that my book Emblems of a Season of Fury is out, I discover by chance a curious and intriguing article on Emblèmes Religieux. Baroque books of direction, particularly Jesuit, based on stories and examples expressed in “emblems” which in turn inspired baroque preaching. There’s a kind of negative baroque in some of my own poems, perhaps. There’s certainly conscious parody of pseudo-moralism, and my “emblems” are baroque emblems turned inside out, as perhaps our society is a kind of bombed Dresden (morally).

  December 3, 1963. St. Eligius12

  Light rainy snow flying through the darkness, and the fields white in the gloom. I finished De Casu Diaboli. If a first reading can be said to finish such a book. Must go through it again. Especially for the difference between real freedom and mere determination. Perhaps the devil’s sin was after all merely to substitute (arbitrarily and out of his own will) one for the other. Freedom is God’s. He wills us to share it by rectitudo–willing according to the principle that is in reality itself–but the devil willed to have it regardless of rectitudo and reality, by his own arbitrary fiat. Hence he willed to be like God on his own (arbitrary and willful) terms–and by this he understood that the use of power in any way he chose was Godlikeness. Yet it was not. The devil’s sin was then to put his own power against all contingencies and ultimately against all principles, too–so that the final word was open purely and simply to power. That this was not “Godlikeness” is shown by the Incarnation and Redemption, works not of power but of justice and mercy.

  Father Charles (of Georgia) still in the Bardstown Hospital and I have not been to see him–as Father Abbot has always managed to arrange things so that I would not be able. Dorothy Day speaks of coming down to see him.

  The boy from Chicago–artist, very amiable, not yet a Catholic who visited a few months ago was mixed up in dope–who is trying to get away from Chicago, jazz, and marihuana–was doing drawings when he heard of Kennedy’s death and they instantly began to be drawings, in color, with angles and strange forms. His shock. It is easy for everyone but the right ones to declare themselves guilty of Kennedy’s death.

  Am well on the way to finishing Gironella’s great book (One Million Dead). Great in size, and a very competent work. A picture of the Spanish war that is complete and objective, not pretentious, compassionate, detached, often very humorous, but real. It is really quite an extraordinary book, rich in material, full of small touches, details, telling lines, full of people–characters all lightly drawn, the central one Ignacio in Spain, an impartial Spain–he has been on both sides, passed from one to the other through a kind of dynamiter’s tunnel in Madrid–an aorta.

  Everyone is not the crazy, humorous Catalan anarchists, the sour, efficient and brutal Communists (and André Marty running the International Brigade on Stalinist lines!). The idealistic Socialists, the English reporters (a very funny chapter on the two of them in Nationalist Spain) and then also the Falangists, the Casuists, etc. The Spanish Fascists are portrayed with accuracy and distaste–their gestures, their dramas, their slogans (“José Antonio–parasite!!”). Their relations with the Italians and Nazis, their speeches about the de
vil, etc. Very meaningful sketches–without comment. It is a very good, warm, humorous book, and basically a Christian one. A civilized book after all!! On the ancient model. Russia still tries to produce such–with what success I don’t know.

  December 5, 1963

  Another Spanish writer–fourth-century Egeria (Etheria, “Sylvia”) and her amazing Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Egypt, Sinai and Mesopotamia [Peregrinatio Aetheriae (The Pilgrimage of Etheria), 1919]. I love her. Simplicity, practicality, insatiable curiosity, and tremendous endurance as long as she is riding her mule (laments a little when she has to go “straight up” the side of Sinai–any influence on St. John of the Cross?). All the holy women she meets–they must have been delighted with her and overwhelmed. This is a really marvelous book, one of the greatest monuments of fourth-century literature, and too few know it. Two English translations, the most recent being 1919. I am tempted to do it–but better not! Is she Spanish? Sounds like a Spaniard, with the simplicity, mixture of hope, humor, idealism and endurance. Or maybe some day she will turn out to have been Irish!

  December 6, 1963

  Etheria (Egeria, Eucheria)–is my delight! Have read and dug around: [Germain] Morin in The Benedictine on Jerome’s Letter to Fusia (a veiled allusion to Etheria?–not too nice) and another letter, that of the seventeenth-century Spanish monk Valerius, on the “Blessed Etheria”–a beautiful document. She is one of “my saints” from here on!

  December 9, 1963

  Yesterday woke up with thunder rolling. Lightning and rain during Night Office (I said my Lauds and made a groggy meditation privately in novitiate). Cold afternoon of Our Lady’s feast. Thought a little of Sung Ts’an among the shales and pines in a bitter lovely wind beyond the lake across the road. There was a little snow in the air from time to time. But this morning (4:10) it is snowing. Brother Martin de Porres is cleaning up the common box prior to going to the juniorate. He is now the only Negro in the community. Brother Chrysostom Castel will go over with him. Brother Bartholomew made simple profession yesterday and Brother Timothy his solemn vows and Brother Savio (Herrera), the little Mexican from Texas, will have to leave. His emotions get too wound up and he had a breakdown. I am sorry to see him go: a very simple and good person with much love for God, and a background of poverty and hardship, mistreatment by police, etc.

  December 11, 1963

  Obsolescence of a certain type of moral thought that deals only in absolutes, that makes no room for change and for provisional situations. When dealing with nuclear war, this type of thinking proceeds immediately to the absolute, definitive conclusion which solidifies itself into an eternal statement at once–and in so doing is already absolute, because by the time the discussion is over and the statement is arrived at, the facts are already different, and the whole problem has a new aspect.

  Such people fail to see that the nuclear statement is at best unstable and provisional, that it represents a phase of a rapidly changing and revolutionary problem. But in order to safeguard a momentary set of interests, they evoke some eternal principle to justify (or condemn) nuclear weapons. In so doing they greatly risk canonizing nuclear power in a way far more definitive than even they themselves need. In “defense” of their thoughts, their values, their culture, they pronounce absolute determinations which seem to prescribe the use of the power that can destroy them. A clear sign of obsolescence!! The moral theology of bathos.

  December 15, 1963. Third Sunday [of] Advent

  Very cold (about six above this morning), bright sun. Cold sky. Yesterday the sky over the pines had an Apennine blue about it.

  Began reading the Council’s constitution on liturgy. (J[ames] Laughlin sent five pages of the N.Y. Times containing the full text.) It is really remarkable. There is no question that great things have been done by the Bishops, and Pope John was truly inspired. When one reads quotations from some of the statements one is more and more impressed by their fullness of meaning.

  Reading Tom Stonier’s Nuclear Disaster. A frightful book. Descriptions of the destruction, death and suffering at Hiroshima and Hamburg are already far more genuine than Dante’s Hell. It is benign and humane by comparison. And what would the big bombs do? The thing is that this is not the aspect of the problem one should get obsessed with. If he does he runs the risk of seeing no positive hope–and really things are still not bright. But one must concentrate on every positive step towards controlling this thing and getting rid of it, however impossible that may sound. Merely contemplating the possible horror is no use at all.

  Interesting notes on New Testament anthropology in Werner Georg Kümmel [Man in the New Testament, trans. John J. Vincent, 1963]. I don’t agree with his general thesis that man by nature has nothing whatever to dispose him for grace and life with God (no “image,” “spirit,” etc.). However, here and there profound meanings emerge. Especially in meaning of sin and man’s “boasting” before God. Also this: “Sarx denotes the man who lets himself be determined by his actual historical existence in the world; it does not describe man in his fundamental nature but rather his membership in this passing evil age” (Galatians 1:4).13 “In so far as he lets himself be determined by the reality of ‘this age’ and thereby denotes that he is yet sarx, so far he is a ‘slave of sin and death’” (Romans 6:16), p. 62–63. But (the Christian knows) that “man is sarx in his very existence and is determined by sarx” (Romans 7:14–8:7). This is a judgment not of nature but of man’s historic and existential relation to God. Yet this metaphysical language is impossible: “man is a historical being who derives his nature from his existence as a member of the present evil age and from his living in accordance with this historical existence,” p. 70. This is an absurd “bind” that can only be opened up by a whole new creation that has nothing whatever to do with nature, the wicked cosmos, etc., etc. I do not follow him.

  Of [Rudolf Karl] Bultmann: “Pauline anthropology is as a statement an act of the new life and not an anthropology in a general or obvious sense” (quoted by Kümmel, p. 71). He will end by rejecting Paul’s Areopagus speech and Peter’s “naturae” as Hellenistic and strange.14

  December 16, 1963

  The great value of the Kümmel book is its affirmation, conclusively proven, that in the New Testament man’s sin has nothing to do with his bodily existence. It is not that bodily life = sinful life and spiritual life or “sane life” = good life. But that the whole man either accepts or rejects God.

  December 17, 1963

  Cold stars. Steam coming up in the dark from the kitchens into the freezing night. Father Leonard with his routine in the grand parlor, in the dim light. Creak of the wooden steps leading down to infirmary refectory. Flamingos on the Standard Oil Calendar in the kitchen. Tea. Frost on the side of the coal pile. Dirty bread lying among the stones, frozen, for birds.

  Father Seraphim, Prior at [Assumption Abbey] Ava, Missouri, is here. He had written to me some time ago from Rome. Two years ago, or three, when there was a big question of several American Cistercians becoming hermits, and Dom Gabriel squashed it. Now Father Seraphim is planning a new kind of foundation in Alaska, and it looks reasonable. Simple, poor, austere. Certainly something of the kind is needed. The situation in the Order is such that a completely simple life is impossible in most of our houses, at any rate in America. Many of the American houses are confused, activistic, restless. There is a general air of restlessness in most of the houses. Ours is perhaps one of the most peaceful.

  He says that Gethsemani is one of the only places in this country where one feels that there is some spiritual depth. On the other hand, nothing much is happening. The general impression here, he says, is that Dom James “has got everything screwed down so tight that nothing can happen” and consequently no one knows what really is in the house. This is probably true. The peace here is temporary at best. But I think nevertheless with this year of work with the two novitiates joined and the juniorate, there is something of a solid foundation. And we have a good prior (Father Flavian).
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  I find I still have great confidence in my community and my abbot though one thing is definite–I no longer have any questions in my mind about changing stability. I have no desire even to see the gatehouse of any other monastery of this Order, or of the Camaldolese, or of the Carthusians–though I would like to visit a Charterhouse perhaps. (Heard from our former Father Alberic Rackley–Dom Denys at La Grande Chartreuse.)

  Father John of the Cross has been at Portsmouth Priory teaching this term but Dom Aelred [Graham] does not think he should stay. What will become of the man?

  [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty says: “Nothing can be explained by way of man, for he is not a strength but a weakness in the heart of being, for he is not a cosmological factor but the place where all cosmological factors, through never ending change, alter their meaning and become history” (Éloge de la philosophie [In Praise of Philosophy, 1963]). In my Book Providence,15 Merleau-Ponty is a radical and welcome discovery–he is like Zen, Herakleitos, much more radical and simple at the same time than Sartre, no need of any of Sartre’s passion and programs, and no need of Nausea. Does not admit Descartes, radically anti-cogito, anti-Parmenides, anti-Plato. The anti-Plato in me has always been this and never Aristotle. The anti-Plato in me is Zen and Old Testament. His idea of metaphysical consciousness–aware that intelligibility is contingent fact, springing from man’s existence and confrontation in history with being as pour soi [for oneself]. (The en soi [in oneself] is unintelligible.) This may seem radically antichristian (certainly anti-scholastic) yet I wonder if after all the Bible would not show it to be very Christian, cf. the approach of the W. G. Kümmel book.