Thomas Merton: Hedgehog and Fox
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
- Archilochus
Already there are some who unabashedly compare Merton to the Fathers of the Church. In fact, this is not far-fetched. It is simply an expression of the significance of what this compulsive writer from silence had to say, and a statement of his promise for the future.
- Victor Kramer, Thomas Merton: Monk and Artist p. 193
I. Introduction
The publication in 1953 of Isaiah Berlin’s classic missive, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, opened up fine pathways regarding the tensions that exist between those who think broadly and those who think deeply. The fox, of course, embodies those who think in a wide ranging manner---the hedgehog burrows deeply into a narrow channel. Tolstoy, Berlin suggested, lived the tension of the fox and the hedgehog---so did Thomas Merton. Merton thought, read and wrote widely----his sheer breadth links him to the best of the Christian Humanist Tradition. Merton also, more than most, played a significant role in reviving and renewing the contemplative way of knowing and being----he was very much the contemplative hedgehog in doing so. I think the perennial significance of Merton is the way that he, like Tolstoy, was both fox and hedgehog—this short essay will explore this reality and why Merton still matters.
II. Contemplative Hedgehog
There can be little doubt that Merton’s turn from the bustling and driven world of New York to the ordered silence of the Cistercians was a conscious turn to the vita contemplativa. Merton knew, in the depths of his mind and soul, that things were out of joint in western civilization, and like the proverbial canary in the mineshaft, Merton felt the toxins in his heart and imagination. Many of Merton’s books, beginning with What is Contemplation (1948) and Seeds of Contemplation (1949), track and trace his longing to understand and live into the contemplative way both within the historic Christian Tradition and, in the 1960s, in a more focussed manner, the mystical way in other faith traditions. Daniel Adams, in his early book, Thomas Merton’s Shared Contemplation, A Protestant Perspective (1979), followed, like the proverbial hedgehog, Merton’s fully catholic contemplative burrowings just as William Shannon’s Thomas Merton’s Dark Path: The Inner Experience of a Contemplative (1981) and James Finley’s Merton’s Palace of Nowhere: A Search for God through Awareness of the True Self (1978) reveal the complex nature of Merton’s contemplative clearings. New Seeds of Contemplation (1961) and Contemplative Prayer (1969) embody and reflect the subtler and more nuanced approach of Merton’s contemplative journey.
Merton was too wise and insightful to reduce the contemplative pathway to a series of techniques. The much deeper process of sifting the wheat of the true self from the chaff of the false self was at the core and centre of Merton’s contemplative probes. In short,
Man’s home-made image is his enemy.
This must be destroyed
With straight words and paradox
The Moment of Truth.
Or, to put the burning of dross of the actor ego from gold of the eternal in Christ self into fuller prose:
Contemplation is precisely the awareness that this “I” is really “not I”, and the awakening of the unknown “I” that is beyond observation and reflection and is incapable of commenting upon itself. Our external, superficial ego is not spiritual. Far from it, the ego is doomed to disappear as smoke from a chimney. It is utterly frail and evanescent. New Seeds of Contemplation pgs. 7-8
Merton thought deeply and widely about the contemplative way and he also wrote prolifically about such a journey--such a pilgrimage was, in many ways, at the heart of his monastic and human vocation. There is, of course, something quite perennial about the contemplative way and the recovery of it in an age in which most are addicted to the vita activa.
I think, therefore, one of the most significant contributions of Merton is the way he attempted to reverse the vita activa-vita contemplativa hierarchy that has come to dominate the modern world. Merton was very much the hedgehog as he grappled with this “one big thing”.
III. Humanist Fox
Thomas Merton was also the curious fox who covered immense terrain in his thinking, writing and life. The sheer breadth of Merton’s interests and speed by which he traversed a multiplicity of disciplines speaks much about a fully engaged humanist mind and imagination. Merton was poet, literary critic, novelist, correspondent, friend, biographer, autobiographer, historian, social critic, church reformer, journalist, agitator, ecologist, photographer, artist, liturgist, monk, master of novices and scholastics, patristic scholar, spiritual director, calligrapher, ecumenist, interfaith pioneer and farm worker. The rich harvest of Merton’s life has, in fact, created a sprawling Mertonian scholarly industry and following. The many trails Merton the fox has created or followed have kept his trackers (and there are many) more than busy.
There has been a mistaken tendency to assume Merton’s serious turn to the world of public affairs began with his oft quoted “Fourth and Walnut Street” experience in 1958. But, Merton was astutely aware, much earlier, of the need not to isolate the contemplative journey from the world of action. Merton’s article “Poetry and the Contemplative” (which initially appeared in Commonweal in 1948) had this to say: “true contemplation is inseparable from life and from the dynamism of life—which includes work, creation, production, fruitfulness, and above all love. Contemplation is not to be thought of as a separate department of life, cut off from all man’s other interests and superseding them. It is the very fullness of an integrated life”.
The essence, of course, of the best of the Christian humanist way is “the very fullness of an integrated life”. E. Glenn Hinson has ably tracked Merton’s more complicated integrated journey from the pre-Fourth and Walnut Street years in his fine article, “Contemptus Mundi – Amor Mundi: Merton’s Progression from World Denial to World Affirmation”(Cistercian Studies 26, 1991: 339-349). The fact that Merton went through a momentary and somewhat romanticised Contemptus Mundi phase must be set in the context of his much more integrated and consistent humanist and fox like Amor Mundi faith pilgrimage-----it is this probing fullness, this searching integration and authentic Christian humanism that makes Merton also perennially attractive. Merton was, in short, very much the free rambling intellectual fox.
IV. Hedgehog and Fox
Why was Thomas Merton an appealing and controversial person both when he was alive and today? I think the fact that he combines the role of the contemplative hedgehog who knows “one big thing” and the curious and investigative fox who “knows many things” makes Merton a fascinating human being and a person who has yet much to teach us about life and our all too human faith journey. It is this depth and breadth in Merton that, in many ways, as Kramer mentioned at the beginning of this missive, that reminds us of the patristic tradition of the Church as embodied in the Fathers (West and East) who Merton was most fond of.
Ron Dart
Comments