Thomas Merton

Posted by PaulQ

Earlier this year a good friend of mine gave me a copy of Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. It is a remarkable autobiography about Merton's early travels through Europe and the U.S., and his eventual finding of God in the mists of a world war. After being baptised into the Catholic Church he shuns society and shrinks away to a Trappist monastery where he wrote this book.

Merton, an intensely brilliant and passionate man, spent the early part of his twenties attempting to find peace after realizing that nothing in his worldly life assuaged his growing restlessness. It is from this part of his life that I wish to share a quote with you. Merton, on a transatlantic trip from England to New York realizes (After reading Karl Marxs) that he wishes to change the world and create a class-less society. Thus he becomes a self-proclaimed Communist (in word not practice). I too have fantasized about this ideal and because of this feel like I can connect. It is a long quote but worth the read.

It is true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of this worldliness. And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

For there can be no doubt that modern society (this from the 1930's) is in a terrible condition, and that its wars and depressions and its slums and all its other evils are principally the fruits of an unjust social system, a system that must be reformed and purified or else replaced. However, if you are wrong, does that make me right? If you are bad, does that prove that I am good?

I don't know how anybody who pretends to know anything about history can be so naive as to suppose that after all these centuries of corrupt and imperfect social systems, there is eventually to evolve something perfect and pure out of them-the good out of the evil, the unchanging and stable and eternal out of the variable and mutable,m the just of of the unjust. But perhaps the revolution is a contradiction of evolution, and therefore means the replacement of the unjust by the just, of the evil by the good. And yet it is still just as naive to suppose that members of the same human species, without having changed anything but their minds, should suddenly turn around and produce anything but imperfection and, at best, the barest shadow of justice.