Nonviolence among the Powerful (Part 2).

Thomas Mertons Vision of the Person

By Paul Schwartzentruber Prometheus is the prophet and contemplative that is required by the atomic age. He is the symbol and scapegoat who justifies our momentous discoveries by his death-mysticism. As long as we do not have the courage to use well what we have discovered, as long as we feel compelled to use everything badly and turn all our power to our own destruction, Prometheus has to be nailed to the cliff in front of us to explain why. Thomas Mertoni The time is short, and all the idols are moving. They are so full of people that they are becoming at last apparently animated and when they get fully into action the result will be awful. It will be like the clashing of all the planets. Strange that the individual is the only power that is left. And though his power is zero, zero has great power when one understands it and knows where to place it. Thomas Mertonii

We begin with this vision of darkness, not because it is the key or central insight to the work of Thomas Merton but rather because, paradoxically, it illuminates the way to the point of hope, to the the jewel that is drawn up from the bottom of the sea, the vision of the person. As John Berger has so insightfully recognized, naming the intolerable is itself the hope. . . pure hope resides first and mysteriously in [this] capacity.iii To name the darkness as darkness, unquestioned power as suicidal selfdestruction and the forces of order as mere idolsall of this, expresses the paradox of hope, as a seeing through that already looks beyond. The Paradox of the Power of Zero The first part of this essay traced Thomas Merton's interpretation of Gandhi's teaching on nonviolence during the heat of the cold war in America (1960-68). Though he was not an activist, like the other great American follower of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Merton's work as a prominent anti-war writer and social critic created a natural receptivity to Gandhi's analysis of power and critique of violence. More importantly perhaps, Merton's own life-long search for a socially committed and 'critically' truthful monastic life resonated with a deep affinity for Gandhi's life of 'clinging on to truth' satyagrahawhere personal transformation becomes the cornerstone of social transformation. Because of this, Merton grasped the intrinisic and living connection that Gandhi developed between nonviolence (ahimsa) and truth (satya): to take up the path of nonviolence had to mean for the individual to step out of the sheltering lies and falsehoods of a society built on structural violence, to live and act in a resolutely new way, on the basis of this new truth alone.iv

Throughout this period of the late fifties and early sixties, Merton was realizing that the impetus of his own monastic life had not only led him to be a voice of dissent in Western society but also had set him on a path of progressive inner liberation from its governing economic, political and social illusions.v Truth in the spiritual life, as he was coming more and more to see, could only be attained by engagingand seeing through-the myths of power and confronting the idols of the culture.vi This was a spiritual liberation, to be sure, but it had its transformative impact on the social and political dimensions. At the same time, Mertons attempt to translate the Gandhian vision of nonviolence into American culture brought out in stark relief its own myth of dominance and power. As he reflected on this, however, Merton recognized that it was much more than an idea or an ideology. The myth of dominance was deeply embedded in psychological terms in the individual: both in a series of aggressive denials (of the other and their point of view) and in a deeply passive, submission (conformity) to the fantasy, passion and convention of the culture of power.vii This dialectic of an outer show of power and an inner act of weakness/submission is precisely what Merton sees symbolized in the death mysticism of Prometheus as a dialectic that turns our power to our own destruction. Along with this self-crucified Prometheus, another image, that of the clashing of the idols/planets, captures the dark dimension of the future that Merton fearsnamely, where human energy itself becomes the source of this self-destructive apocalypse (the idols. . . are full of people). Here, the very energy behind the violencethat of the individualreveals itself, however, as a kind of paradox: Strange that the individual is the only power that is left. And though his power is zero, zero has great power when one understands it and knows where to place it. We will take this paradox of the power of zero as a thread to unravel the skein of Mertons complex analysis of the Promethean culture of power and violence in America; for hidden in this individual and in the symbol of the zero is not only the selfdestructive power of violence but also what Merton saw to be the ultimate human hope, namely, the true self or person. This person is, for Merton, the deepest point of human identity, the intersection of the divine and the human, a reality that is both given and created, discovered and recovered through a commitment to truth. As such, it is a point of utter solitude before the divine and also the possibility of truthful connection with all other beings. Yet, Merton argued, the person must be rescued from the individual, and that means from its embeddedness as an unquestioning collaborator in the culture of power. In such a rescue, the person is the jewel that is drawn up from the bottom of the sea, an overcoming of the alienation of exile from the most meaningful depths of [our own] being. As we shall see, it is precisely this rescued person who becomes the source of the active power of love and the only real possibility of living nonviolence in a culture of violence. The Search for Human Fulfillment and the Path of Solitude It is important to recognize at the outset that Merton is not simply pursuing a religious solution to the human problem in the traditional formati.e., one that dissolves or evades the human problem by rising above it to a higher level. Like Gandhi, Merton is working with an explicitly post-modern and post-religious 2

understanding of religion: sacred and secular are indivisible. One crucial aspect of this new post-religious understanding is that the quest for human fulfillment and the spiritual/religious journey have become essentially identical. Gandhi articulated this identity by his well-known radical inversion in the claim that instead of saying that God is Truth, I say that Truth is God.viii Similarly, Merton comes to see that the religious path to holiness and sanctity is identical with the path to a true human identity: For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.ix This identity, however, does not involve a reduction of religion to the merely human realm of concerns closed to value or transcendence for either Gandhi or Merton. Quite the reverse; it places the radical demands of truth and sanctity (as ethical adherence to truth) into the very heart of the journey of human self-discovery.x In this sense, it might be argued that both Gandhi and Merton are re-grounding the claims of transcendence within the dimension of immanence--which is now understood, critically, (to mention a second important dimension of the post-religious position)--as the concrete, social and political life of the human being. The path of a purely individualistic salvation or religious spirituality is possible only as an expression of false consciousness, as we shall see below. In that light, however, it is especially important to explain the context for this breakthrough insight in Mertons work, for it develops out of his intense struggle to understand his own vocation to solitude as monk. What drove this line of reflection for him, from the beginning, were not the traditional motives of holiness or the purity attained by withdrawing from the world and its temptations, but rather the question of how this solitude could illuminate the concrete social existence of the human being. The questions he asked were--what purpose did solitude serve and what value did it havefor the human social order itself? Thus, while he experienced his own solitude as the basis of a liberating and deeper way of relating to the divine and to others, he had become acutely aware of how it was related to the problem of identity in modern culture: For Merton, contemporary culture was a collection of disconnected individuals, alienated human beings who had lost their center and extinguished their own inner light. They depended in abject passivity upon the mass in which they cohered without deep feeling or intelligent purpose--functioning as cogs in a great economic machine. By contrast then, he came to understand that the vocation of the monk was to construct his own solitude as a first step toward valid encounters with other persons and by so doing show the way--by example-back to essential life. From the beginning then, Mertons critical understanding of the modern individual, embedded passively in the collective emerges out of his reflections on the spiritual path of solitude. That spiritual path in turn is seen as one that leads the way back to essential

life by transforming the social context of the individual. Thus, these two strands of reflection will reinforce and deepen each other as they unfold in Mertons work: the authentic spiritual quest becomes the path of liberation from a (passive and exploited) individuality to a truly human personhood. Finally, as has already been suggested, both lines of reflection develop out of an ever deeper pondering over the problem of violence. The Person for Others: Beyond the Individual and Collective Violence This context of Mertons reflection on solitude gave a unique and very radical edge to his approach to the problem of the individual in the post-modern world. Individuality had, of course, been a central category of thought since before the Enlightenment and had come under increasing scrutiny and critique in the twentieth century from many different quarters. While it expressed the new set of powers available to the enlightened human beinge.g., the freedom for self-determination, the ability to dominate the natural realm, it also isolated the human being in crucial ways (from community and the dimensions of embodiment in the natural world). The result was a powerful but exposed, imbalanced and fragile self-consciousness. What was still more crucial in the post-modern context, Merton came to argue, was the degree to which this powerful/fragile individuality had become both passive in the face of both the state and the market and also alienated from its roots in the classical and Christian traditions of self-knowledge. Those traditions of self-knowledge (from Socrates through medieval mysticism) had provided an essential ballast, as Merton was well aware, against the overwhelming claims of the collective (whether in the society or in the Church). But individuality in the modern context was not grounded any longer on the possibility of such transcendent or ethical self-knowledge. Indeed the thin edge of self-awareness in a Cartesian universe provided little support for identity and no real comfort in the face of collective power. It was rather a kind of emptied identity, disconnected from the real roots of existence, and for this reason, Merton argued, constantly tempted toward grandiose displays of self-affirmation.xi As such, he came to see, the individual was highly susceptible to exploitation and domination by forces of violence and hatred and ultimately, set on the course of self-destruction. Merton reflects on this pervasive and overwhelming power of collective ideology on the modern individual in the well-known essay, Rain and the Rhinoceros (from the vantage of his monastic solitude in a cabin in the rainy woods)xii. On the exterior, this individuality was susceptible to collective thinking and Merton observed that inevitably its dialectic of power and need, of submission and satisfaction ends by being a dialectic of hate.xiii Collectivity, he argued, needs to absorb everyone it can, but also implicitly to hate and destroy whoever cannot be absorbed. Probing more deeply into this susceptibility of the individual, Merton came to see that it was based on a complex interior, psychological exchange between the individual and the collective. On the one hand, the modern individual experiences themselves as real [by] suppressing the awareness of [their] contingency. . . and radical need. xiv This human need was the very root of both the classical and Christian traditions of self-knowledge. On the other hand, by denying this need, the individual enters into the illusion of omnipotence cast by the collective and comes under its spell:

an illusion that the collectivity arrogates to itself, and consents to share with its individual members in proportion as they submit to its more central and more rigid fabrications. You have needs; but if you behave and conform you can participate in the collective power. You can then satisfy all your needs. Meanwhile, in order to increase its power over you, the collectivity increases your needs. Thus you become all the more committed to the collective illusion in proportion to becoming more hopelessly mortgaged to collective power. (Raids, 16) Merton saw this exchange and collective triumphalism working itself out on both sides during the cold war, in both the Soviet Union and in the West; for it was a far deeper dynamism than the ideologies and it cast its illusion over the individual through all the idols of power. Indeed, what was most pernicious and dangerous was the way this illusion of collective power embedded itself within the individual and reinforced its claim over them through their very understanding of themselves: If we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications even at the cost of violating our own truth. This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily [people] dedicate themselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have an enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect fictitious identitiesselves. (Raids, 15) For Merton, the very force of the claim of collective power and violence in the human being is based on this illusory identity of the individual as self-sufficient and selffulfilled, one who has no needs that [they] cannot immediately fulfill (Raids, 16). By denying true human needs (of the divine and of others), the individual claims a selfsufficiency that can only be fulfilled by the use of power and violence over others. To protect this illusion of power through a socially constructed identity (and thus ones share in a collective power)while avoiding ones true existential vulnerability, the individual becomes more and more dependent on the collective illusion of the group or nation. But this is a share in power bought at the cost of passivity and an ultimate despair, as the Prometheus myth shows.xv Thus, it also reveals the weakness of the human being as individual, namely, its fear of itself and inability to take up the task of finding its true identity. This fear is what, for Merton, ties the individual to the dynamism of collective power and its inevitable outcome as violence toward the other. This is the first sense in which the zero has great powerthe individual reduced to passivity and clinging to illusion of power, is the energy which animates collective power and its inevitable dialectic of violence. At the same time as he was developing this critique of modern socialized individuality, Merton was clear that the meaning of monastic isolation from the world, on which mystical traditions laid the hope for religious salvation through purification, had also been transformed in this post-modern context.xvi He realized that this path could no longer be conceived as a retreat from the world to a transcendent spiritual realmor even as a kind of romantic individual act of protest (as Thoreau imagined it).xvii On the one hand, the world which now threatens the human being is both more subtle and more encompassing: it is the involvement in the massive and absurd mythology of 5

technological culture and in all the contrived and obsessive gyrations of its empty mind.xviii On the other hand, that mythology (as we have already noted) had not only reshaped the social realm of human relationships, it had entered into the identity of the individual itself and come to control the governing illusions of the self. The Promethean self-affirmation of the myth of dominance existed at the core of the identity of the individual as a psychic and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, vulnerable, helpless I that is all we know as ourselves. xix It leads to despair, violence and ultimately, self-destruction. Even in his cabin in the woods, Merton recognized himself to be caught both by the inner despair of this myth of the individual (self-affirmation as a no that we fling in the face of everything) and by the consequences it had created for humanity of which he was a part; overhead he hears the passing nuclear-armed bomber carrying medicine that was strong enough to burn all these woods and stretch our eternities into hours of fun. Instead of going beyond this world, Merton would come to recognize, the path of isolation had to be transformed into a journey into the true solitude in which one faced the fear of ones own vulnerability so as to gain an encounter with truth: contemplative life, which must not be construed as an escape from time and matter, from social responsibility and from the life of sense, but rather, as an advance into solitude and the desert, a confrontation with poverty and the void, a renunciation of the empirical self, in the presence of death, and nothingness, in order to overcome the ignorance and error that spring from the fear of being nothing. The [person] who dares to be alone can come to see that the emptiness and uselessness which the collective mind fears and condemns are necessary conditions for the encounter with truth.xx The complex transformation that Merton sees as the goal of the contemplative life leads to the creation of an identity that has faced human vulnerability and thereby, found a fundamental commitment and empathy for all other human beings.xxi Far from being closed in itself this is a different form of identity, one that is empathetically open to all others and, for this reason, Merton insists that, paradoxically, the solitary cannot survive unless they are capable of loving everyone. On that level, the identity of the person has escaped the power of the collective mythology and also has freed itself inwardly of the claim of violence: "Only the human being who has fully attained his [or her] own spiritual identity can live without the need to kill, and without the need of a doctrine that permits [her or] him to do so with good conscience." (Raids, 22) This is a second sense in which the zero has great power: for the one who has accepted the transforming encounter with their own vulnerability, and taken up the task of fashioning a truly person-al identity, the emptiness of the self becomes the space available for the empowering energy of love. The space of vulnerability becomes the point of true openness to others.

The True Self: Beyond Self-Hatred and the Dialectic of Violence Merton explores and deepens this vision of the spiritual identity of the person throughout his important work, New Seeds of Contemplation, (1961). An earlier version- Seeds of Contemplationhad been written originally in 1949 as a traditional spiritual manual. By rewriting the work, Merton noted modestly that he was saying many new things that could profitably be added to the old (New Seeds, ix) and that this new perspective arose out of the authors solitude. . . by contact with other solitudes. . . with the loneliness of people outside any monastery, with the loneliness of people outside the Church (New Seeds, x) In fact, what this new encounter of solitudes in the modern world leads to, in New Seeds of Contemplation, is a profound rethinking of Christian theology and the contemporary human situation in the light of the concept of the person. And this expresses a significant broadening of his vision; for Merton, the reality of the person is no longer simply to be thought of as the achievement of a monastic journey but now of an essential and necessary human journey at the end of the modern era in America. The vision of the person-- expresses the intersection of the authentically human journey and spiritual identity as such. Beginning with the affirmation noted aboveThe problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and discovering my true self (New Seeds, 31), Merton develops a dynamic conception of both the work of divine grace and the human process of self-discovery. Our vocation is not simply to be, he argues, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny (New Seeds, 32). Thus, the seeds that are planted in my liberty at every moment, by Gods will, are the seeds of my own identity, my own reality, my own happiness, my own sanctity (New Seeds, 33). At the same time, Merton speaks of the traditional concepts of sin and ego as a false self: Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self which, he argues, is also dynamic in a self-destructive way: I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something real.xxii From both sides, then, Merton is led to rethink the concept of salvation as something far beyond ethical propriety: The word connotes a deep respect for the fundamental metaphysical reality of [the human being.] . . . It is not only human nature that is saved by the divine mercy, but above all the human person. The object of salvation is that which is unique, irreplaceable, incommunicablethat which is myself alone. This true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea (New Seeds, 38) To this process of salvific self-realization, Merton contrasts a life lived in division from other beings: the [one] who lives in division is not a person but only an individual. (New Seeds, 48) This life of division is a kind of false solitude in which no real compassion for the other is possible because when [one] is lost in the wheels of a social machine [one] is no longer aware of human needs as a matter of person responsibility (New Seeds, 53). This line of thought identifies the situation of the individual and the collective noted earlier: rather than being a human being capable of personal communion, the individual does not face the risks of real solitude or its 7

responsibilities, and at the same time the multitude has taken all other responsibilities off his [or her] shoulders xxiii Because of this, Merton insists, this atomized existence of the individual which is sometimes praised as humility or as self-sacrificeor obedienceor devotion to the dialectic of class war, can produce no real peace but only the escape from an immediately urgent sense of conflictIt is the peace not of self-realization and self-dedication, but of flight into irresponsibility. (New Seeds, 56) As we have already suggested, however, it is not enough for Merton to identify this atomized existence of the individual as the spiritual malaise of middle class culture. The implications of this flight into irresponsibility are embodied in a social order whose violence is both constant and global in scope. Thus, the analysis which Merton develops in New Seeds of Contemplation does not simply add a social and political dimension to the questions of spirituality, it re-grounds the religious dynamic into the heart of the social and political context of post-modern, technological societyand by doing so transforms it. These foregoing reflections culminate in a central chapter of the work, The Root of War is Fear, which portrays the problems of war and violence as central to this discussion of spirituality. Both problems, Merton argues, stem from the psychosocial dynamic of the individual: At the root of all war is fear: not so much the fear [people] have of one another as the fear they have of everything. It is not merely that they do not trust one another; they do not even trust themselves. (New Seeds, 112) This overwhelming fear, as we have already seen, makes the individual an easy prey to the collective power that first creates a suitable enemy, a scapegoat in whom we have invested all the evil in the world and then, develops the mythologies of dominance and violence that provide a sheltering idol for the fearful individual.xxiv But then Merton takes his analysis a significant step further and deeper; for the fear, which causes us to avoid facing our true vulnerability, also creates an inner dynamic of hatred/self-hatred: It is not only our hatred of others that is dangerous but also and above all our hatred of ourselves: particularly that hatred of ourselves which is too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced. For it is this which makes us see our own evil in others and be unable to see it in ourselves . . . The other in myself is too close to home (New Seeds, 112-3). What Merton means by the hatred of ourselves which is too deepto be consciously faced is, first of all, the kind of xenophobic paralysis that keeps us focused outward on our hatred of others and thus prevents us from turning inward to the other in myself. As we have already seen, this is not only the outward and occasional effect of war and its propaganda. In the post-modern world of the dominant cultures, as Merton has argued, this obsessive hatred of others has become a social constant. It is the source of what would later be called structural violence. As Merton was to argue in Faith and Violence, the problem of violence in the west is essentially structural (social) because it is grounded in this psycho-spiritual root of the modern individual: The population of the affluent world is nourished on a steady diet of brutal mythology and hallucination, kept at a constant pitch of high tension by a life that

is intrinsically violent in that it forces a large part of the population to submit to an existence which is humanly intolerableThe problem of violence, then, is not the problem of a few rioters and rebels but the problem of a whole structure which is outwardly ordered and respectable, and inwardly ridden by psychopathic obsessions and delusions.xxv Secondly, however, the hatred of ourselves has to do with the fact that by participating in this social order and its intrinsic violence toward others, we ourselves are forced to live in a crippling self-distortion as human beings; for this reason, Merton insists, the identity of the individual that is based on a hatred of others inevitably deepens into self-hatred. By taking on this identity, one becomes in ones own life, a false and shadow self, alienated from the deep sources of human life (which are in truth shared with all other human beings). This false self reinforces its hold by creating an identity that can survive only by hating what is other, but by doing soas the Prometheus myth illustratesit hates what is its own birthright as a human being: The fire Prometheus thought he had to steal was his own spiritual freedom. . . In the eyes of Prometheus, to be himself, was to be guilty. The exercise of liberty was a crime, an attack upon the gods which he had made (the gods to whom he had given all that was good in himself, so that in order to have all the he had, it was necessary to steal it back from them).xxvi It is not just that the creation of enemies out of the other is an illusion (since there is a common human nature), it is that by falling under the spell of this illusion one gives in to a dynamism of that is truly self-destructive. Thus, Merton argues, the individual takes on an identity that it can only resent and, ultimately, hate: this is the problem: having to live in complete servile dependence upon a system, an organization, a society or a person that one despises or hates. To live in such dependence and yet to be compelled, by ones own attachment to what appears to be an identity, to seemingly approve and accept what one hates. To have an I that is essentially servile and dependent (New Seeds, 109).xxvii Both resentment and self-hatred are powerful expressions of energy, but they are energies of the human being alienated from themselves and from their own depths. Thus resentment does not truly liberate but only allows us to adapt to the violence that surrounds us, and by doing so, only perpetuates itself.xxviii Self-hatred, in turn, is the illusory (promethean) energy of protest that keeps us facing the other as enemy, turned away from the other in myselfwho is ultimately our only hope. The hatred of others, embodied in and through the false self, freezes us in a violence that then becomes our own destiny. Prometheus remains a potent symbol of this negative and self-negating energy that cannot create and cannot connect to the other. It is truly the power of zero isolated and null; that is precisely where we remain, stuck, captive of the idols that, in our saner moments, we must necessarily despise.

Conscience, Moral Effort and Conversion: From Tolstoy to Merton Mertons analysis of structural violence and its enslavement of the modern individual has its roots to be sure in the Gandhian tradition. Indeed, it can be best set in context by reference to a much earlier work of this tradition--Tolstoys groundbreaking account of social violence, in the last chapter of the work the Kingdom of God is Within You (1894)a work which had a profound influence on Gandhi. Since Mertons unique contribution can be clearly identified in contrast with the earlier work of Tolstoy, it will be worthwhile, in conclusion, to contrast briefly the two accounts and to reflect especially on the nature of the remedy or possibility of liberation that each envisions from the debilitating illusion of structural violence. In his analysis, Tolstoy had focused on the violence that is perpetuated by and embodied in the state as the basis for its maintenance of the social order.xxix The order of things that is based on violence is kept in place, as he argues, by self-deception and the disguise of hypocrisy that is supported by false religion and by false science. xxx At an even deeper level, it is sustained by a widely accepted delusion that the existing order with its violence is necessary and immutable.xxxi Even those who are victims of the systemic violence, find themselves accepting the amazing delusion that the existing order, unprofitable, ruinous, and fatal as it is for them, is the order that ought to exist. Yet Tolstoy (like Merton much later) sees the self-contradictory, and self-destructive nature of this illusory belief in its relation to the human conscience: [People] have long been living in antagonism to their conscience. If it were not for hypocrisy they could not go on living such a life. This social organization in opposition to their conscience only continues to exist because it is disguised by hypocrisy . . .This is just the condition of the average [person] of our Christian society. He[/she] feels that all that [they do themselves] and that is done around [them] is something absurd, hideous, impossible, and opposed to [their]conscience; [they] feel [that their] position is becoming more and more unendurable and reaching a crisis of intensity.xxxii For Tolstoy then, the inner claim of conscience in its relation to truth is the key to liberation; the troubled conscience creates the possibility of an individual moral effort that allows one to see through the delusion: so the [individual] of the modern world need only make a moral effort to doubt the reality presented to him by his own hypocrisy and the general hypocrisy around him, and to ask himself, "Isn't it all a delusion?" and he will at once, like the dreamer awakened, feel himself transported from an imaginary and dreadful world to the true, calm, and happy reality.xxxiii That true, calm and happy reality is the human conscience as it stands in an innate relation to truth.xxxiv Echoing the Platonic tradition, Tolstoy clearly believed that the very vision of truth would be powerful enough to liberate us from the illusion of the present order. Violence, by contrast, remains in place and in power by virtue of the individual refusal to recognize the truth and participate in its creative work.xxxv

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Tolstoys remedy of conscience and moral effort certainly found their echo in Gandhi and his life of nonviolent practice. In Mertons work too, there is a powerful restatement of the essence of the Tolstoian vision of a liberation from violence through moral effort. Yet Merton, from his vantage in post-modern culture (as well as the spiritual traditions of self-knowledge), has added an important psycho-social dimension to this moral vision. This means, primarily, a recognition and account of the complexity with which the individual is tied (addicted and made dependent), through their identity, to the structures of violence. The false self and the powerful claims of the structural energy of violence cannot be displaced without the countervailing energy of a new identity and a renewed structure of relationships. For Merton, the adoption of this new identity can come about only through a kind spiritual redemption of the individual. This will have the form of a radical conversion of the ego and a transvaluation of values. At this point too, Merton adds something essential from the mystical traditions of Christian spirituality that Tolstoy rejected: the humbling encounter with the divine freedom in which the human being learns anew how to co-create their unique identity as person.xxxvi Thus, Mertons remedy for the dilemma of structural violence (both hatred and self-hatred) is as simple as it is demanding (in psycho-spiritual terms): we must first recover the possession of our own being.xxxvii This can only begin by a process of fundamental unlearning on the psycho-spiritual level, for the false self is rooted in a lifetime of habitual--addicted--negative action.xxxviii Ultimately, however, this unlearning will lead to a more radical disempowerment of the false self through an acceptance of solitude, that true solitude [which] separates us from others in order to freely develop the good that is [our] own. xxxix Though Merton is clear from the outset that the purpose of such solitude is to fulfill [our] destiny by putting [us] at the service of everyone else, the radical therapy of such solitude cannot be evaded if one is to become a person. This is because it is a crucial passage through disempowerment: An [individual] cannot enter into the deepest center of [themselves] and pass through that center into God, unless [they] are able to pass entirely out of [themselves] and give [themselves] to other people in the purity of a selfless love. And even this process of disempowerment is not controllable by spiritual discipline--as yet another of the acts of the individual: The shallow I of individualism can be possessed, developed, cultivated, and pandered to, satisfied: it is the centre of all our strivings for gains and for satisfaction, whether material or spiritual. But the deep I of the spirit, of solitude and of love, cannot be had, possessed, developed, perfected. It can only be and act according to the inner laws which are not of [our] contriving but which come from GodFor in this inmost I, my solitude meets the solitude of every other [person] and the solitude of God. Hence it is beyond division, beyond limitation, beyond selfish affirmation.xl Thus Merton can insist that true solitude is selfless and therefore, finds in itself inexhaustible resources to bestow on other people. xli 11

The encounter with divine freedom is, for Merton, a final purgation of the claims of the ego and it prevents moral effort from becoming yet another project of the individual, a project of self-improvement or a new spiritual materialism.xlii This encounter with divine reality was for him quite simply the unquestioned centre of his own spiritual life, but as such it also provides a crucial point of critique in the analysis of the individual and the myth of dominance. From the True Self to Original Human Unity The significance of Mertons analysis of structural violence (and the myth of dominance in Western cultures) rests on his account of the individual and the countervailing vision of the person. Although his thought stands deeply connected with that of Tolstoy and Gandhi, his emphasis on the mystical, the disempowering encounter with divine freedom and solitude as the catalyst for the moral effort that liberates the human being from structural violence is unique (and an intimate expression of his own personal journey). In addition, his immersion in the western religious traditions of self-knowledge (both Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian) as well as contemporary psychological and sociological thought, give an astonishing richness to his reflections on structural violence and its enduring hold on the individual. Because of this, he had an influence far beyond the framework of traditional religious discourse; he became a spokesman for the soul, the deep self, the sublime in an increasingly materialistic culture.xliii In this sense, Mertons work anticipates many of the cultural changes that were to comeparticularly with regard to the broadening of inter-religious dialogue beyond institutional control at the grassroots level. His own final years, led him toward a restating of his religious vision of the person in an increasing broad, inter-religious and spiritual formxliv; his final dialogues with Buddhist and Hindu and Muslim in India show his commitment to an open dialogue based on communion and an original unity.xlv Thus his spiritual vision of a holiness rooted in finding out who I am and discovering my true self has only deepened into a vision of an essential human unity: What we have to be is what we are. This is postmodern in the very best sense: an expression of the divine hope as the basis for the ultimate humanism. For Merton, the turn from negating claim of violence depended ultimately on the discovery (and self-discovery) that in our being there is a primordial yes that is not our own. This is a yes to others and all reality, including the lowest and highest dimensions. It is rooted in an original unity and therefore it is nonviolent in the deepest and truest sense, full of inexhaustible resources to bestow on other people. ____________________________ It is best to conclude in Mertons own rich words, with his humble description of the person and the path toward realizing its mystery: To live well myself means for me to know and appreciate something of the secret, the mystery in myself: that which is incommunicable, which is at once myself and not myself, at once in me and above me. From this sanctuary I must seek humbly and

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patiently to ward off all the intrusions of violence and self-assertion. These intrusions cannot really penetrate the sanctuary, but they can draw me forth from it and slay me before the secret doorway. If I can begin to understand something of myself and something of others, I can begin to share with them the work of building the foundations for spiritual unity. But we must first work together dissipating the more absurd fictions which make unity impossible.xlvi

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Thomas Merton, The New Man, (NY: Farrar and Strauss, 1961), p 27. Thomas Merton, Letter to Henry Miller in, The Courage for Truth, ed. Christine Bochen. (NY: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1993), pp. 277-78 iii John Berger, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos. (NY: Vintage, 1991) p. 18: ... the naming of the intolerable is itself the hope. When something is termed intolerable, actions must follow. These actions are subject to all the vicissitudes of life. But the pure hope resides first and mysteriously in the capacity to name the intolerable as such: and this capacity comes from afar - from the past and from the future. iv MK Gandhi, Autobiography. The Story of my Experiments with Truth, (NY. Dover, 1983), p. ix: But for me truth is the sovereign principle which includes numerous other principles. . . I worship God as Truth only. I have not yet found Him, but I am seeking after Him. I am prepared to sacrifice the things dearest to me ion pursuit of this quest. Even if the sacrifice demanded be my very life, I hope I may be prepared to give it. But so long as I have not realized this Absolute Truth, so long must I hold by the relative truth as I have conceived it. That relative truth must, meanwhile, be my beacon, my shield and buckler. Though this path is strait and narrow and shart as a razors edge, fo me it has been the quickest and easiest. v Robert Inchausti, Thomas Mertons American Prophecy, (SUNY: Albany, 1998), p. 72: "For Merton contemporary culture was a collection of disconnected individuals, alienated human beings who had lost their center and extinguished their own inner light. They depended in abject passivity upon the mass in which they cohered without deep feeling or intelligent purpose--functioning as cogs in a great economic machine. The vocation of the monk was to construct his own solitude as a first step toward valid encounters with other persons and by so doing show the way--by example--back to essential life". vi Inchausti, P 120: "The vocation of the dissident, like that of the monk, is the vocation of Job. The dissident must resist the lies of his or her comforters that stand between him and the truth--that sing in his ears and do his thinking for him. 'One goes into the desert', Merton tells us, 'to vomit up the interior phantom, the doubter, the double...the ascesis of solitude is, then, a deep therapy which has uncovered the ascetic archetype in man'. Monastic formation, like Zen training, is a turning away from all that is not soul force-giving up all one's projects and self-justifications to stand like Job before God in naked need and incomprehension". 120 vii Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, (NY: New Directions, 1972) p. 38: The object of salvation is that which is unique, irreplaceable, incommunicable--that which is myself alone. This true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent....The person must be rescued from the individual. The free son of god from the conformist slave of fantasy, passion and convention. The creative and mysterious inner self must be delivered from the wasteful, hedonistic and destructive ego that seeks only to cover itself with disguises. viii Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Writings, Oxford, UP, 2007, p. 46. ix Merton, New Seeds, p. 31.
ii

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Compare Gandhi, Essential Writings, p. 44: It is impossible to reach him, that is TRUTH, except through LOVE. Love can only be expressed fully when [the human being] reduces themselves to a cipher. The process of reduction to a cipher is the highest effort man or woman is capable of making. It is the only effort worth making, and it is possible only through ever increasing self-restraint. Cf Merton, New Seeds, p. 47: In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, and in order to find myself I must go out of myself, and in order to live I have to die. The reason for this is that I am born in selfishness and therefore my natural efforts to make myself more real and more myself, make me less real and less myself, because they revolve around a lie. xi Cf. Merton, Zen and Birds of Appetite, p. 31 But it is wrong to assume that these great needs demand the hypertrophy of self-consciousness and the elephantiasis of selfwill, without which modern man tends to doubt his own reality. On the contrary, I might suggest a fourth need of modern man which is precisely liberation from his inordinate self-consciousness, his monumental self-awareness, his obsession with self-affirmation, so that he may enjoy the freedom from concern that goes with being simply what he is and accepting things as they are in order to work with them as he can". 31 xii Merton, Rain and the Rhinoceros in Raids on the Unspeakable, (New Directions, NY, 1966), p. 10: What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen. xiii Raids, p. 22. xiv Raids, p 15-16: Such is the ignorance which is taken to be the axiomatic foundation of all knowledge in the human collectivity: in order to experience yourself as real, you have to suppress the awareness of your contingency, your unreality, your state of radical need. This you do by creating an awareness of yourself as one who has no needs that he cannot immediately fulfill. xv The New Man, pp. 23-4: "The Promethean instinct is as deep as man's weakness. That is to say, it is almost infinite. It has its roots in the bottomless abyss of man's own nothingness. It is the despairing cry that rises out of the darkness of man's metaphysical solitude-- the inarticulate terror man will not admit to himself: his terror at having to be himself, at having to be a person". xvi Merton also recognizes an active path to liberation through selfless service to others which we will examine more below. Raids, p. 17 xvii Merton, Raids, p. 12: Thoreau sat in his cabin and criticized the railways. I sit in mine and wonder about a world that has, well, progressed. I must read Walden again, and see if Thoreau already guessed that hew was part of what he thought he could escape. But it is not a matter of escaping. It is not even a matter of protesting very audibly. Technology is here, even in the cabin. xviii Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, (NY: Image, 1989) p. 284:What I mean by worldliness is the involvement in the massive and absurd mythology of technological culture and in all the contrived and obsessive gyrations of its empty mind.

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One of the symptoms of this is precisely the anguished concern to keep up with an everychanging, complex, and fictitious orthodoxy in taste, in politics, in cult, in belief, in theology and what not, cultivation of the ability to redefine ones identity day by day in concert with the self-definition of society. Worldliness in my mind is typified by this kind of servitude to care and to illusion, this agitation about thinking the right thoughts and wearing the right hats, this crude and shameful concern not with truth but only with vogue. 284 xix Conjectures, pp. 224-5: The things we really need come to us only as gifts and in order to receive them as gifts we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense, we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed identity. We have to be able to relax our psychic and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, vulnerable, helpless I that is all we know as ourselves. The chronic inability to relax this cramp begets despair. In the end, as we realize more and more that we are knotted upon nothing, that the cramp is a meaningless, senseless, pointless affirmation of nonentity, and that we must nevertheless continue to affirm our nothingness over against everything elseour frustration becomes absolute. We become incapable of existing except as a no, which we fling in the face of everything. This no to everything serves as our pitiful yes to ourselvesa makeshift identity which is nothing. It is at this point that the logic of the cramp begins to demand one final solution. Since the cramp itself is intolerable and since he cannot relax it, we can only destroy it. And since he has reduced himself, narrowed himself down to the point where he is nothing but his miserable cramp clutched on to itself, when the cramp destroys itself it destroys him.
xx

Raids on the Unspeakable, pp. 17-18. Raids, p. 18: It is in the desert of loneliness and emptiness that the fear of death and the need for self-affirmation are seen to be illusory. When this is faced, then anguish is not necessarily overcome, but it can be accepted and understood. Thus, in the heart of anguish are found the gifts of peace and understanding: not simply in personal illumination and liberation, but by commitment and empathy, for the contemplative must assume the universal anguish and inescapable condition of mortal man. The solitary, far from enclosing himself in himself, becomes every man. xxii New Seeds, pp. 34-35, Compare also on the false self This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy. (34) xxiii New Seeds, p. 54 and the following on p. 55 Each individual in the mass is insulated by thick layers of insensibility. He doesnt care, he doesnt hear, he doesnt think. He does not act, he is pushed. He does not talk, he produces conventional sounds when stimulated by the appropriate noises. He does not think, he secretes clichs. xxiv New Seeds, p. 114 and continuing: This kind of fictional thinking is especially dangerous when it is supported by a whole elaborate pseudo-scientific structure of myths, like those which the Marxists have adopted as their ersatz for religion. But it is certainly no less dangerous when it operates in the vague, fluid, confused and unprincipled opportunism which substitutes in the West for religion, for philosophy and even for mature thought.
xxi

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xxv

Quoted in Robert Inchausti, ed., Seeds. Thomas Merton, Shambhala: Boston, 2002, p. 33. xxvi Raids, p. 84, in the essay, Prometheus, a Meditation. xxvii New Seeds, p. 108. xxviii New Seeds, p 109: But if resentment is a device which enables man to survive, it does not enable him, necessarily, to survive healthily. It is not a real exercise of freedom. It not a genuine expression of personal integrity. It is the mute, animal protest of a mistreated psychophysical organism. Driven too far it becomes mental sickness; that, too, is an adaptation in it own way. But it is an adaptation by way of escape. xxix Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You: Christianity not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life. Trans. Constance Garnett, New York: Cassell, 1894. Formatted and edited by www.nonresistance.org, 2006. After my thoughts had for two years been turned in the same direction, fate seemed expressly to have brought me face to face for the first time in my life with a fact that showed me absolutely unmistakably in practice what had long been clear to me in theory, that the organization of our society rests, not as people interested in maintaining the present order of things like to imagine, on certain principles of jurisprudence, but on simple brute force, on the murder and torture of men. (p. 128) xxx Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God, p. 153: Hypocrisy in our day is supported on two sides: by false religion and by false science. And it has reached such proportions that if we were not living in its midst, we could not believe that men could attain such a pitch of self-deception. Men of the present day have come into such an extraordinary condition, their hearts are so hardened, that seeing they do not see, hearing they do not hear, and they do not understand. xxxi Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, p. 134: What, then, has brought these masses of honest men, on whom the whole thing depends, who gain nothing by it, and who have to do these atrocious deeds with their own hands, what has brought them to accept the amazing delusion that the existing order, unprofitable, ruinous, and fatal as it is for them, is the order that ought to exist? Who has led them into this amazing delusion? xxxii Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God, p. 153 and continuing: It is not possible that we modern men, with the Christian sense of human dignity and equality permeating us soul and body, with our need for peaceful association and unity between nations, should really go on living in such a way that every joy, every gratification we have is bought by the sufferings, by the lives of our brother men, and moreover, that we should be every instant within a hairs breadth of falling on one another, nation against nation, like wild beasts, mercilessly destroying mens lives and labor, only because some beknighted diplomat or ruler says or writes some stupidity to another equally beknighted diplomat or ruler. It is impossible. Yet every man of our day sees that this is so and awaits the calamity. And the situation becomes more and more insupportable. xxxiii Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, p. 154 xxxiv Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, p. 154:And as the man who is dreaming does not believe that what appears to him can be truly the reality and tries to wake up to the actual real world again, so the average man of modern days cannot in the bottom of his heart believe that the awful position in which he is placed and which is

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growing worse and worse can be the reality, and tries to wake up to a true, real life, as it exists in his conscience. That is to say, the recognition of truth, which is the cause of all the manifestations of human life, does not depend on external phenomena, but on certain inner spiritual characteristics of the man which escape our observation. And therefore man, though not free in his acts, always feels himself free in what is the motive of his acts--the recognition or non-recognition of truth. And he feels himself independent not only of facts external to his own personality, but even of his own actions.
xxxv

Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God, p. 156: The liberty of man does not consist in the power of acting independently of the progress of life and the influences arising from it, but in the capacity for recognizing and acknowledging the truth revealed to him, and becoming the free and joyful participator in the eternal and infinite work of God, the life of the world; or on the other hand for refusing to recognize the truth, and so being a miserable and reluctant slave dragged where he has no desire to go. Truth not only points out the way along which human life ought to move, but reveals also the only way along which it can move. And therefore all men must willingly or unwillingly move along the way of truth, some spontaneously accomplishing the task set them in life, others submitting involuntarily to the law of life. Mans freedom lies in the power of this choice. This freedom within these narrow limits seems so insignificant xxxvi New Seeds, p. 32: Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our life, our own identity, our own destinyTo put it better, we are even called to share with God in the work of creating the truth of our identity. xxxvii Seeds, p. 14-15 (Quoting from No Man is an Island) and also this passage on unlearning: On the contrary, what we must do is begin by unlearning our wrong ways of seeing, tasting, feeling and so forth and acquire a few of the right ones. xxxviii Cf., Conjectures, p. 64: The greatest need of our time is to clean our the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see, we cannot begin to think. xxxix Ibid, p. 16: True solitude separates one man from the rest in order that he may freely develop the good that is his own, and then fulfill his true destiny by putting himself at the service of everyone else. xl Seeds, p. 10 (Quoting from Disputed Questions). xli Seeds, p. 16 (Quoting from The New Man): True solitude is selfless. Therefore, it is rich in silence and charity and peace. It finds in itself seemingly inexhaustible resources of good to bestow on other people. xlii Spiritual materialism is a phrase developed by the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation. (Shambhala, Boston, 2002), p. 5: As long as ones approach to spirituality is based upon enriching ego, then it is a spiritual materialism, a suicidal process rather than a creative one. xliii Inchausti, Thomas Mertons American Prophecy, p. 151. xliv Cf., the work Zen and the Birds of Appetite, pp., 74-75: it is evident that the identity or the person which is the subject of this transcendent consciousness is not the ego as isolated and contingent, but the person as 'found' and 'actualized' in union with Christ. In other words, in Christian mystical tradition the identity of the mystic is never purely and 18

simply the mere empirical ego--still less the neurotic and narcissistic self-- but the 'person' who is identified with Christ, one with Christ. . . it is a kenotic transformation, an emptying of all the contents of the ego-consciousness to become a void in which the light of God or the glory of God, the full radiation of his Being and Love are manifested".
xlv

Seeds, p. 124 (quoting from an informal talk given in Calcutta): The deepest level of communication is not communication but communion. It is wordlessNot that we need to discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. . .We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are. xlvi Conjectures, pp. 81-82.

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