Thomas Merton on Hell

 

 

THOMAS MERTON ON HELL

Thomas Merton is possibly the most famous U.S. Roman Catholic writer of the last century. His bestselling The Seven Storey Mountain, released by Harcourt Brace in 1948, continues to attract religion and spirituality readers from all generations, including the current one. Fulton J. Sheen described it as a “modern-day Confessions of Saint Augustine,” while America in its 1948 review lauded the autobiography as “undoubtedly one of the most significant accounts of conversion from the modern temper to God that our time has seen.”

Yet despite his undisputed success as a writer of Roman Catholic spirituality, Merton remains controversial in the Church in which he found his home, because of unshakable charges of unorthodoxy. Anthony E. Clark in Catholic Answers explains well the reasons underlying this allegation, which appears to be substantially founded.

“I’m going to be a bit critical of Merton’s interest in and writings on Asian philosophy and religion, not because I don’t admire his brilliance, but because his commitment to orthodox Catholicism appears suspiciously attenuated by the end of his life. In the 1969 book Recollections of Thomas Merton’s Last Days in the West, Benedictine monk Br. David Steindl-Rast wrote that Thomas said that he wanted ‘to become as good a Buddhist as I can.’ When he flew out of San Francisco for Asia on October 15, 1968, he left with the expectation of religious discovery, as if his monastic life at the Abbey of Gethsemani was a spiritual precursor to the insights he would gain in the East. He wrote in his journal:

“‘Joy. We left the ground—I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way after years of waiting and wondering and fooling around. …May I not come back without having settled the great affair. And found also the great compassion, mahakaruna…I am going home, to the home where I have never been in this body. (Asian Journal, 4)’

“He writes as if his Christianity and his Buddhism had already become enmeshed into a new hybrid religion, with ‘Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny,’ and he expresses his desire never to return until he has found mahakaruna, the Buddhist notion of ‘great compassion.’ As a Christian, I admire Buddhist mahakaruna, but as a Christian I also know that one need not look beyond Christianity to find it. I wonder—and we shall never know in this life the answer—what ‘home’ Merton was headed for that day in October.”

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/can-you-trust-thomas-merton

—Anthony E. Clark, “Can You Trust Thomas Merton?” Catholic Answers, May 1, 2008

Clark wisely and with acumen offers us his synopsis of Merton’s so-called “questionable” writings.

“Read with Caution

“By 1966 Merton’s writings begin to turn East toward Chinese and Japanese religious traditions. Starting with Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, his books begin to criticize the West and find answers in the East. Following are only a few examples of his more questionable works.

“Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1966

“Here Merton begins the part of his life that is critical of the West. While his criticisms of Western materialism and pragmatism ring loudly, especially in today’s world, one senses here a new interest in Eastern religion—and here is where his works become most problematic.

“Mystics and Zen Masters, 1967

“This is Merton’s first plunge into Eastern thought and religion. Its strength is its mostly cogent description of Chinese Daoism and Zen Buddhism, but one begins to discern Merton’s attitude shifting toward his later developed notion that Eastern religion is a necessary supplement to Catholicism.

“Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 1968

“By now Merton is swimming in Zen—this work is a comparative consideration of Buddhism and Christianity. Beautifully expressed, but his overall goal is to erase the lines between two very distinct religious beliefs.

“The Way of Chuang Tzu, 1969 [posthumous]

“This is one of Merton’s most problematic works: It valorizes the relativistic teachings of Zhuangzi, the Zhou dynasty Daoist. Here is Merton’s final interweaving of Eastern and Western thought.

“The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, 1973 [posthumous]

“Here we find his final writings, and they are full of cathartic angst. At the end of this journal one senses that Merton has knowingly wandered from clear Church teaching. While in Bangkok, a Dutch abbot asked him to appear in a television interview, for ‘the good of the Church.’ But Merton writes that, ‘It would be much “better for the Church” if I refrained.’”

—Ibid.

Those who understand Merton well will not be surprised at his maverick, ostensibly end-of-life religious syncretism. Unmistakably, Merton was an intellectual…unabashedly, incessantly curious, who synthesized seemingly contradictory ideas and then incorporated them into his expanding worldview, which, not surprisingly, was inevitably incorrigibly complex.

In the light of Merton’s uncertain orthodoxy, it is illuminating and even gratifying to read Merton in those instances he is not so religiously turbid.

His musings on hell, for example, are remarkable when they give literary voice to traditional doctrine.

In The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), Part II, Chapter 5, Merton writes:

“My opinion is that it is a very extraordinary thing for anyone to be upset by such a topic. Why should anyone be shattered by the thought of hell? It is not compulsory for anyone to go there. Those who do, do so by their own choice, and against the will of God, and they can only get into hell by defying and resisting all the work of Providence and grace. It is their own will that takes them there, not God’s. In damning them He is only ratifying their own decision—a decision which He has left entirely to their own choice. Nor will He ever hold our weakness alone responsible for our damnation. Our weakness should not terrify us: it is the source of our strength. Libenter gloriabor in infirmitatibus meis ut inhabitet in me virtus Christi. Power is made perfect in infirmity, and our very helplessness is all the more potent a claim on that Divine Mercy Who calls to Himself the poor, the little ones, the heavily burdened.”

Merton devotes an entire essay to “Hell as Hatred” in A Thomas Merton Reader, first published in 1962.

“A Thomas Merton Reader, which is a large volume of Merton’s essays, poems, and excerpts from his autobiography edited by Thomas P. McDonnell, was first published in 1962 and subsequently revised to include later writings. Some of the brief essays are revisited here. To begin, ‘Hell as Hatred’ is a scathing description of evil incarnate. ‘Hell is where no one has anything in common with anybody else except the fact that they all hate one another and cannot get away from one another and from themselves.’ Existentialists will note that this reflection sounds reminiscent of Sartre’s play No Exit (1944), in which one of the characters remarks that ‘Hell is other people.’ Sartre was an atheist but he unwittingly described the same hell Merton described, namely the reversal of our purpose for living, which is to love God; for Merton only by wholly loving God can we wholly love one another. When the love of God fails, we come to hate what is left…not only each other, but also ourselves, because nature hates a vacuum. When we choose not to love God, hate rushes in where angels fear to tread.”

https://catholicinsight.com/mulling-over-merton/

—Carl Sundell, “Mulling over Merton,” Catholic Insight, October 12, 2018

“Hell as Hatred” also appears in New Seeds of Contemplation (1961). The following excerpt is from the 27th printing of the 1961 edition, page 123.

“They are all thrown together in their fire and each one tries to thrust the others away from him with a huge, impotent hatred. And the reason why they want to be free of one another is not so much that they hate what they see in others, as that they know others hate what they see in them: and all recognize in one another what they detest in themselves, selfishness and impotence, agony, terror and despair.”

Merton gives lasting expression to two truths of revelation about hell: it is the unchangeable result of a final decision freely chosen by the damned; and it is separation from God and the rest of humanity—isolation in the most utter and absolute sense of the word.

Merton also affirms, consistent with the visions of chosen saints, that in hell God dwells as a fire of vengeance (page 124).

“Our God also is a consuming fire. And if we, by love, become transformed into Him and burn as He burns, His fire will be our everlasting joy. But if we refuse His love and remain in the coldness of sin and opposition to Him and to other men then will His fire (by our own choice rather than His) become our everlasting enemy, and [God’s] Love, instead of being our joy, will become our torment and our destruction.”

The original version of “Hell as Hatred” appears in Seeds of Contemplation (1949).