Abstract
This essay examines the relationship between the Christian tradition of contemplation and social action. It takes as its paradigm the life and writings of Thomas Merton (Fr Louis), an American Cistercian monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, who became one of the most widely-read and influential spiritual writers as well as Christian social commentators of the mid-twentieth century. Merton, who often wrote through an autobiographical medium, gradually moved away from an early emphasis on contemplative withdrawal to a belief that the monastic life is a form of counter-cultural solidarity with those who struggle for social transformation and justice. The essay more broadly explores the theological basis for a coherence of mysticism and action in contrast to some misinterpretations of the Christian language of interiority. It concludes with an exploration of the relationship between contemplation and politics in a number of twentieth and twenty-first century theologians, both Catholic and Protestant. The American Cistercian monk and social activist Thomas Merton (1915-1968) has been described as one of the greatest spiritual writers of the twentieth century. He merited this description partly because, while a Roman Catholic, he embraced a generous “catholicity” beyond the boundaries of a single institution (cf. Mursell 2001:340).
Highlights
This essay examines the relationship between the Christian tradition of contemplation and social action
In the sense defined by the contemporary American Roman Catholic theo logian David Tracy, Thomas Merton can be described as a “spiritual classic”
Thomas Merton may be thought to be as much of a “classic spiritual text” as the Revelations of the English mystic Julian of Norwich or the prison letters of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Summary
In the sense defined by the contemporary American Roman Catholic theo logian David Tracy, Thomas Merton can be described as a “spiritual classic”. “Classics”, have the capacity to cross the boundaries of time or place and retain, or even increase, their popularity and importance in contexts very different from their origins They disclose something that re mains compelling, continue to challenge us and bring us into transforming contact with what is enduring and vital in the Christian tradition. Thomas Merton is, in so many ways, typical of the late twentieth century spiritual pilgrim. He stands for a movement outwards: from a spi rituality of excessive interiority — narrowly church-focused and world-rejecting — to one that embraces the external world of daily life and engages with “otherness” in all its forms. There is a clear development from the tradi tional pre-Vatican II spirituality of withdrawal in The seven storey mountain (1948) to the sympathetic and committed observations on the public world in Conjectures of a guilty bystander (1966)
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