MARITAIN AND MERTON AS I KNEW THEM: TWO CASES IN THE COINCIDENCE OF OPPOSITES
by Jean Leclercq
Presented at the Maritain-Merton Symposium: Spirituality in Secularized Society (September 25-26,1980) Louisville, Kentucky
(The event was conceived by José Rafael Revenga
when I attended with my wife Alba a conference of The International Institute Jacques Maritain at Venice, Italy on december 1978. I also arranged funding. The encounter was put together admirably by Anthony O. Simon).
In 1978, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death, for which I was partly responsible since it was at my instigation that he came to Bangkok, I had various opportunities to speak about Merton in the light of the many letters he sent to me. At that time my interest focussed on points necessary to avoid certain misunderstandings of his personality, particularly with regard to the evolution of his monastic and eremitical vocation. My approach then was intimate and subjective. Here I would like to take a more objective point of view in order to consider his attitude toward truth. Naturally, this is inseparable from the journey of Merton the monk and the hermit, and also from his earlier secular evolution. He was not a philosopher, as he knew so well, but he had always been a thinker and activist. It is on both these grounds that he had something in common with Maritain, and through these interests that he came to meet him.
As I knew Merton and Maritain, the common factors I noticed in both of them were: (1) their contemplation overflowed into their social action and their sometimes radical commitment; (2) both of them were marginal men, free from and for the world; (3) they were continuosly on the roads of the world, either physically (Merton more rarely than Maritain) or spiritually. In neither man was there any alienation from anything or anybody. On the contrary, they were constantly in communion with everything and everybody. In both Maritain and Merton, what struck me was the liberty and fidelity of their reconciliation of contemplation and commitment.
Maritain and Merton were obviously extremely different from one another. But both reached similar ways of life in the end. Merton put the matter in a letter to me dated November 18, 1966: "Jacques Maritain was here in October and we had a fine visit.He is very much a hermit now, and his latest book has added a hermit voice to the contemporary harmony (or disharmony). Le Paysan de la Garonne is, I think, very fine."
This reference to the final stage in the evolution of Maritain and Merton is very revealing. What was common to Maritain and Merton was not the search for truth. They had the truth --the Truth-- and they knew it. It was their quest to insert the truth into life which was common to them, not only into their private lives, but into the public life of their countries, of Christianity, of the Church, of the world. A similar observation could be made concerning other great men of that generation whom I knew and who knew Maritain as well, like two of my very dear masters and friends, Erik Peterson and Etienne Gilson. it was after entire life-times of striving to insert truth into life that Maritain ended as a poor contemplative hermit, and that Merton died as a wandering missionary of monasticism.
The first memory I have of Maritain is a quotation of Rimbaud in Art and Scholasticism which I can still cite from memory:
"Son coeur, plutot contemplatif
Pourtant saura l´oeuvre des hommes."
(His heart, rather contemplative, nevertheless will
appreciate the works of men.)
Contemplation and humanism-- this was also the theme of Maritain´s little book, Religion and Culture, which enchanted our youth as Benedictine novices of the mid-20th century. When we started studying philosophy, we used his first doctrinal basic books, Cinq Leçons sur l´ ètre, for example. What helped us to make the synthesis between what later on I called The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, were these beautiful little books of Maritain the poet, the artist, the mystic. Behind the scene was always Raissa, who in these years published a translation of the treatise of John of St. Thomas on the gifts of the Holy Spirit. She rarely appeared in public with him, a fact which on one occasion provided the opportunity for a pleasant presentation (impossible to render into English) alluding to the Samaritan woman of the Gospel: "Aujourd´hui, M. Maritain est venu sans sa Samaritain."
As early as the mid 20s Maritain the philosopher had to take a stand in the political arena defending the Holy See after the condemnation of Action Francaise. Pourquoi Rome a parlé and his other writings on this affair were a great help to my generation in this time of deep confusion. In the 30s when I was a student in Rome I met and heard Maritain and Gilson who were the first two scholars (interestingly enough, for that time, both laymen) to receive honorary degrees from the new Angelicum restored under under Pius XI by Fr. Stanislas Gillet. In the meantime there had appeared the great synthesis of philosophy, theology and mysticism, Les degrés du savoir. This was the time when Fr. R. Garrigou-Lagrange enjoyed his greatest prestige in the field of spirituality. He used to come to St. Anselm to give us talks. But Maritain added to this Thomist and Carmelite learning a flavor of literary art which made of his writings "things of beauty."
In the 30s when, after being at Rome, I was sent as a student to Paris, I attended the lectures of Gilson at the College de France. At the same time I followed everything that Maritain had to say to various audiences concerning contemporary Church and world problems. He was involved, but always a contemplative. One day I received an invitation to one of the philosophical tea parties that Raissa and Jacques regularly held in the mansion in Meudon. Printed in the corner of the card were the words, "On parlera des anges" --"Topic: Angels". This occurred at the time when Jews were being persecuted first in Nazi Germany and then in Fascist Italy. Maritain, Peterson and my other master and friend, Father Anselm Stolz (who died prematurely in 1940), affirmed the mystery of thr Jewish people as a witness of God. This shows Maritain never ceased to be a contemplative committed to human and religious interests.
Then came the war and his stay in the United States. I confess that after his return his delightful little book, Reflections on America, helped some of us to overcome the superiority complex that many Europeans felt towards the American way of life. He showed us that beneath the surface was a culture and a sense of humanity which were to develop richness in the decades to come.
I found the Maritains in Rome again when he was Ambassador of France to the Holy See. In the meantime there had appeared a group of essays, dealing mainly with freedom and Christian humanism, which he had published in America and which were collected, first in French and very soon in English in such volumes as The Range of Reason (1952). All this gave Maritain the image of a liberal, even of a radical, and excited a certain opposition to him. In the late fifties when, with Christine Mohrman and a few others, we received honorary degrees from the Catholic University of Milan, Maritain had been on the list of the proposed candidates. But his name had been removed by the Sacred Congregation for Studies and Seminaries. When the story was told to a group of friends at a dinner in the French embassy to the Holy See, there was a unanimous protest which I can still recall: "We will write to Jacques to express our solidarity with him and our congratulations for his missed doctorate." But the day we received our diplomas, Archbishop Montini (recently made a cardinal by John XXIII) was there, and it was he who was to restore entirely the Roman reputation of Maritain.
These years of suffering and of retirement in solitude led him to his last articles in Nova et Vetera and his last books like On Grace and the Humanity of Jesus Christ, in which he poured out his contemplation. To his knowledge of the traditional metaphysics of the Thomist and Carmelite traditions he had the courage to add new insights inspired by modern psychology which he developed in a personal way. Thus, for 60 years this man of God developed steadily, faithful to his first convictions enriching himself and his readers with all the resources of contemporary learning.
Philosophically and politically, Maritain had managed to remain free from every pressure, from one side or the other, and to remain free in his faith and in his thinking. He had been too free to receive certain forms of official recognition. I heard Gilson say: "I shall never enter the French Academy while Maritain is not a member." But he was never to be admitted, as Gilson realized later on. The message that Maritain had delivered to us consistently had been one of reconciliation between the obedience of faith and the freedom to think, between a contemplative attitude and a disinterested involvement for justice and peace among men.
In comparing Merton and Maritain, as I cannot help doing, I see various fields of practical involvement in which they were in deep convergence, in spite of the very different circumstances in which they lived. At the basis of facing similar problems and as a prerequisite to any solution, I discern a common element: their spiritual culture.
We know from what Merton says in The Seven Storey Mountain, in The Ascent to Truth and in The Sign of Jonas that he was reading Maritain, Gilson, and other great thinkers during his years of formation. He was not only gathering notions, learning facts and concepts, but also reflecting, judging, reacting personally, especially on a point which was central for Maritain and himself: the reconciliation of knowledge (theological and historical) and of personal spiritual experience. As an example, I shall quote a passage from one of the earliest of his letters which I have kept. It is of October 9, 1950. Commenting on some suggestions I had made in my book Saint Bernard Mystique, he writes:
"There is the evident desire of the saint to penetrate the text (of Scripture) with a certain mystical understanding and this means to arrive at a living contact with the Word hidden in the word. This would be tantamount to saying that for Bernard, both exegesis and theology found their fullest expression in a concrete mystical experience of God in his revelation. This positive hunger for "theology" in its very highest source would be expressed in such a text as Cant. lxxiii, 2: "Ego. . . in profundo sacri elquii gremio spiritum mihi scrutabor et vitam." He is seeking "intellectum" and "Spiritus est qui vivificat: dat quippe intellectum. An non vita intellectus?".Merton continues:
"As you have so rightly said (p. 488) "Sa lecture de l´E. Ste. prepare et occasionne son experience du divin." But I wonder if he did not think of Scripture as a kind of cause of that experience, in the same sense, servata proportione, as a sacrament is a cause of Grace? Scripture puts him in direct contact with the Holy Spirit who infuses mystical grace, rather than awakening in his soul the awareness that the Holy Spirit has already infused a grace kindred to that spoken of in Scripture. Or am I wrong? In any case, words like "scrutabor" and "intellectus" tempt me to say (while agreeing in substance with all your conclusions) that there must have been a sense in which St. Bernard looked upon himself both as an exegete and as a theologian in his exposition of the Canticle. Although I readily admit there can be no question of his attempting as a modern author might to "make the text clear" or to "explain its meaning". That hardly concerned him, as you have shown. But do you not think, that in giving the fruit of his contacts with the Word through Scripture he was in a sense introducing his monks to a certain mystical "attitude" towards Scripture -not a method, but an "atmosphere" in which Scripture could become the meeting place of the soul and the Word, through the action of the Holy Spirit?
" Perhaps these are useless subtleties; but you guess that I am simply exercising my own thought in order to confront it with the reaction of an expert and this will be of the greatest service to me in the work that has been planned for me by Providence. I am also very much interested in the question of St. Bernard´s attitude towards "learning", and feel that a distinction has not yet been sufficiently clearly made between his explicit reproofs of "scientia" in the sense of philosophia, and his implicit support of scientia in the sense of theologia, in his tracts on Grace, Baptism and his attacks on Abelard, not to mention (with all due respect to your conclusions) this attitude to the Canticle which makes that commentary also "scientia" as well as "sapientia". Have you any particular lights on this distinction between science and wisdom in the Cistercians, or do you know anything published in their regard? It seems to me to be an interesting point, especially to those of us who, like yourself and me, are monks engaged in a sort of "scientia" along with their contemplation? (It is very interesting in William of St. Thierry)".This abstract of a letter shows that Merton always thought about faith, contemplating its mysteries, and that he did so without drawing a dichotomy between knowledge and spiritual experience. For him --as much as for Maritain-- the degrees of knowledge led from study, learning to mysticism. At the same time, he was concretely involved in a sort of monastic secularity: the physical activity of manual labor.
The first time I saw him, he was working in Gethsemani like any other monk. In a letter of August 21, 1953 he wrote:
"We have had a busy summer with much harvesting and other farmwork. In addition to that, our cow barn burned down and we have also bought a new farm, so that everyone has been exceptionally busy and I am two months behind with practically all correspondence". But in the same letter he also denounced the danger of excessive material activity and defended his vocation to become a hermit: "One illusion which is very strong in this country still is the idea that the eremitical life is essentially "dangerous" and "impossible" etc. Some monks who claim to have a high contemplative ideal actually run down the solitary life and show a preference for the rather intense activity which is inevitable in a big, busy monastery of cenobites. It is all very well to have a big, busy monastery; but why claim that thisis the highest possible ideal of contemplation? The French have a good word for that: Fumisterie."This, even within his own vocation, Merton was --and already in 1953-- a protester, a monastic radical, an activist involved in fighting for a less acxtive type of contemplative life. In fact, the evolution which took place in the following years proved that his protest had been heard.
Merton´s just-quoted statements echo this passage of Maritain:
"I believe that the spirit of contemplation is called upon to assume new forms, to make itself more available and bolder, to clothe itself in the love of one´s neighbor in proportion as it spreads out into ordinary life. This means that action can be a disguise for mysticism, but it does not mean there can be a mysticism of action. There is no more mysticism of action that there is none of inertia. Stop now, says the Lord, wait a minute, keep quiet a little: be still and learn that I am God....Allow me to draw your attention to the fact that a book on the subject of contemplation written comparatively recentrly by a poet who became a Trappist sold tens of thousands of copies in the United States, as also the book by the same author in which he tells of his conversion. This is only the most trifling indication, but it interests me particularly because for many years I have the highest regard for Thomas Merton, because for many years I have thought that the most active land in the world is obsessed with a latent desire for contemplation 1 ."A paper by Maritain which was reprinted in the The Range of Reason begins with this strong assertion:
"Whenever we have to deal with the ingredients of human history, we are prone to consider matters from the point of view of action or of the ideas which shape action. Yet it is necessary to consider yhem also -and primarily-- from the point of view of existence. I mean that there is another, and more fundamental, orden than that of social and political action: it is the order of communion in life, desire and suffering. In other words there must be recognized, as distinct from the category to act for or to act with, the category to exist with and to suffer with which concerns a more profound order of reality." 2This idea is developed magnificently in the body of this chapter of The Range of Reason. To exist with the people as the text says, is what the Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus do. It is understandable that Maritain ended his life with them; he was consistent.
Merton always had the sense of solidarity with the poor, the weak and the oppressed- He did not think it was enough to pray for them or to do something for them. He desired to exist with them. Consider the following passages drawn freely from his letters: "May I ask your prayers in turn for a new hope of mine --that perhaps some day we make a foundation in the Andes, and that I may be sent there if God wills." (November 13, 1957). Two years later, speaking of his desire to become a hermit in Latin America, he wrote (in his only letter to me in French from which I attempt to translate a few sentences):
"Obviously, I am who I am, and I always keep a writer´s temperament. But I wouldn´t go there to write and to be known, but on the contrary to disappear, to find solitude, obscurity, poverty. Chiefly, to escape the collective falseness and injustice of the U.S.A., which so much involve our monastery and the church in this country....It is possible that my health would not withstand the diseases prevalent in the tropics. In that case, I should renew my attempt elsewhere, perhaps in Europe, or in the areas of the U. S. where there are Indians." (November 19, 1959)On July 18, 1967 he ended a letter with this invitation: "I hope you will come down here...I´d like you if possible to meet a woman theologian who has some strong ideas about monasticism having "lost its soul" (she´s a radical eschatologist and works with Negroes)." I had written to him from a monastery in Vietnam which had been partly destroyed in the Tet Offensive. On March 9, 1968, he wrote: "What you say of Thien An breaks my heart. I think of those poor monks, to whom I felt so close, and to whom I had written not so many months ago. I shall certainly pray for them very earnestly, especially in the Eucharist." Witnessing to God, even unto the form of martyrdom, was an exigency of the Christian faith frequently mentioned by Maritain in the time when the Nazins were persecuting Jews and Christians. In the preface which he wrote for my book on Pacla Giustiniani, a Camaldolese hermit of the 16th century, Merton splendidly developed the theme of martyrdom as the highest form both of spiritual "annihilation" and of universal communion. He applied this to the solitary, and mystic, to St. John of the Cross and to Giustiniani. Consider these phrases from the preface: ""coincidence of humility and greatness in the experience of union", a "share in the humility and ppoverty of Christ.""solitude in his soul, in his all and universal love" Elsewhere he wrote:"And a life alone with God...reaches up to God himself, and in doing so, embraces the whole Church of God. Meanwhile the hermit supports this interior poverty of spirit with the greatest exterior poverty."
This sense of poverty, hunility and solidarity led Merton to become a protestor on behalf of all victims of material power. He did what he could by praying, fasting and writing. In a letter dated November 13, 1965 he wrote: "Thanks for the clippings. The one on the non-violent fasting women was in part, a surprise. I did participate in a very mild way...Obvously, I did not go ten days without food, I´m not thas ascetic. I took a week of odinary lenten fast, as we have it here." But on other occasions, and increasingly so, he took a stronger stand. On March 9, 1968: "I have a very great problem about staying in America (U.S.A.)...Perhaps if this society is under judgement, I too should remain and sustain myself the judgement of everyone else...". No need to insist on these memories. Let it suffice to have suggested how deeply, how radically, this contemplation was involved in the problem of his time and of his country.
A problem which Maritain faced courageously was, as the title of the chapter of The Range of Reason has it. "The meaning of Contemporay Atheism", What interpretation are we to give to the fast that in the modern history of the West, atheism has become so diffused? Has it answered the need of so many people? Is this fact entirely negative? Does it not conceal some similarities, as well as enormous differences, between "the atheist and the saint"? This question has been the object of prolonged consideration. It appeared in a document in 1971, "The message of the Contemplatives to the First Synod of Bishops", in which merton and Maritain showed a lively interest. Since then it has become a matter of current theological reflection.
In 1968 I asked Merton to give a presentation on Marxism and monasticism today at the forthcoming Pan Asian Conferenece in Bangkok. He inmediately and enthusiastically answered:
"Thanks for your good letter about the arrangements for Bangkok. i will be glad to give the talk on Marxism and so on. Important indeed! I've familiarized myself prety well with Herbert Marcuse whose ideas are so influential in the "students' revolts" of the time. I must admit that I find him closer to monasticism than many theologians. Those who question the structures of contemporary society at least look to monks for a certain distance and critical perspective. Which alas is seldom found. The vocation of the monks in the modern world, especially marxist, is not survival but prophecy. We are all busy saving our skins".
The opposite of saving one's skins seems to be the acceptance of death. There are various kinds of death. The one Merton chose for himself, freely, when in good health and full activity was what he liked to call "to disappear." This was also to be the last word he said in public before he was electrocuted in Bangkok. The mystery of this voluntary disappearance was one he mentioned most frequently in his intimate letters, and not only during his last years. Already on August 11, 1955 he wrote:
"I realise that I have perhaps suffered more than I knew from this 'writingg career'. Writing is very deep in my nature, and I can not deceive myself that it will be very easy for me to do without it. At least I can get along without the public and without my reputation! Those are not essentially connected with the writing instinct. But the whole business tends to corrupt the purity of one's spirit of faith. It obscures the clarity of one's view of God and of divine things. It vitiates one' s sense of spiritual reality, for as long as one imagines himself to be accomplishing something he tends to become rich in his own eyes. But we must be poor, and live by God alone- whether we write or whatever else we may do. The time has come for me to enter more deeply into that poverty."
A year later, in 1956, with a reminiscence of the "todo y nada" of John of the Cross about which Maritain had commented in The Degrees of Knowledge, showing the "practicality" of this high mystical teaching, Merton
"The question of solitude is no longer any kind of a question. I leave everything in the hands of God and find my solitude in his will, without being theatrical or glowingly pious about it. I am content. But the right kind of contentment is a perfect solitude. When one is more or less content with the "nothing" that is at hand, one finds in it everything. I do not mean "nothing" in a trtagic, austere sense, but the plain nothing which is the something of everyday life. The life of a Benedectine does not require all the fierce strippings of a St. John of the Cross, but the common way of life without exaltation (even in nothingness) is enough."His most frequent words and images, when speaking of himself are those which evoke obscurity, solitude and poverty: "I value your prayers in this time of my story and searching. It is more and more evident to me that one must go through this kind of thing. By bthe mercy of God, I am one of those who must pass through the cloud and the sea. May I be one of those who reach the Promised Land" (January 3, 1955). Again:
"The very idea of the solitary life is to live in direct dependence on God, and in constant awareness of our povertry and weakness...My chief reaction is a deep understanding of my poverty, and a feeling of solitude, which is a kind of lack of human support. True, one must go without support, one must learn to walk on water. But I like to think the Church is supporting me nevertheless, and that I am not merely wandering off my own tangent." (August 11, 1955)This awareness of his own misery and this total trust in the Church really made Merton a committed contemplative: separated from all and united to all. It is through this reconciliation of poverty and solidarity, of solitude and communion, that he found peace and freedom for himself and was able to show the same to others.
NOTES
1. Jacques Maritain, The Range of Reason (New York: Charles
Scribner s Sons, 1961) p.215.
2. Ibid., p. 121
3. Dom Jean Leclercq, Alone with God (New York: Farrar,
Strauss and Cudahy, 1961) See: the Preface by Thomas pp. xii- xxvii.
