The ever complex Thomas Merton
It is a timeworn literary conceit, but some writers seem to be several people....a kind of multiple personality disorder keeps turning up in writers-and writers with a religious bent seem particularly susceptible, as they keep in play not only complex human realities but divine realities as well. Dostoyevsky, Graham Greene, Walker Percy, and many other distinguished names attest to how common a phenomenon this is. But of all the great modern religious writers, no one harbored within himself a larger cast of dramatis personae than Thomas Merton.
Even for a man not vowed to silence, Merton's several dozen books would have been an extraordinary output. But adding the journals...can a man committed to the wordless apophatic way and a forgetting of self be preoccupied with recording-and publishing-every thought and act?
Merton made a gradual turn from a convert's effusive gratitude to the type of critical stance usually associated with cradle Catholics. Partly this was a reaction to monastic restrictions and a widening and deepening of his knowledge of human nature. But there was a more rebellious element in him as well. Merton sometimes took pride in what he regarded as the fact that poets and monks are marginal people. The Trappist life occasionally seemed good to him because it represented the greatest nonconformity in the world.
Merton is beyond doubt one of the great spiritual masters of our century. His personal turmoil and the misjudgments in his social thought notwithstanding, he is a forceful reminder that what may appear the most rarefied of contemplative speculations have powerful and concrete implications for the world. God dealt Thomas Merton a difficult hand. His greatness as a man lies not only in that he was able, more or less, to keep several different persons together in difficult times under the banner of "Thomas Merton," but that he provides an enduring witness to all of us much less gifted seekers who have to shore up our own fragmentary lives in quest for the "hidden wholeness." - Robert Royal
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