Merton Forty Years Later

The December 2008 edition of The Catholic Worker celebrates the 40 year anniversary of Merton’s death with an article by Anna Brown and an excerpt from Merton’s “The Ecological Conscience” that appeared in CW in June of 1968. Merton was easily the most popular and influential Catholic spiritual writer of that turbulent period four decades ago. His article and Brown’s reflections are significant because they clearly reflect the direction liberal interest in ecology has taken since then.

Merton sounds a now familiar theme: that Western culture has dominated, controlled and desecrated nature and that we need an ecological awareness of our dependence upon our natural environment. At the time this was a prescient insight and by now is widely accepted even by evangelicals (Rev.Warrren), Catholics (Pope Benedict) and Republicans (Senator McCain.) What is absent from the article is any explicit reference to the person of our Creator or our Redeemer, in whom all of creation came to be. The Catholic tradition, expressed so lucidly by the “theologian of creation,” St. Thomas, sees in nature a gift, an image, a gesture from the personal creator. This awareness is blatantly absent from Merton’s piece…an important omission from a monk and the preeminent spiritual teacher of the era.

Merton emphasizes the theme of ambiguity: “Man is a creature of ambiguity. His salvation and his sanity depend on his ability to harmonize the deep conflicts in his thought, his emotions, his personal mythology. Honesty and authenticity do not depend on complete freedom from contradictions—such freedom is impossible—but on recognizing our self-contradictions and not masking them with bad faith.” Notice here that salvation is not a gift from Jesus our Savior; rather, it is a human achievement of recognizing and harmonizing psychic ambivalence. This is a pure statement of therapy as religion in the vein of 60s gurus including Jung, Fromm, Rogers and Marcuse. There is no apparent need to look beyond self and nature towards a transcendent, eschatological or heavenly salvation.

His article continues, however, and sheds any sense of ambiguity at all in regard to political and economic issues. “The ecological conscience is also essentially a peace-making conscience. A country that seems to be more and more oriented to permanent hot or cold war-making does not give much promise of either one. But perhaps the very character of the war in Vietnam—with crop poisoning, the defoliation of forest trees, the incineration of villages and their inhabitants with napalm—presents enough of a stark and critical example to remind us of this most urgent need.” Merton sees no ambiguity about this conflict: he is blissfully unconcerned with the spread of totalitarian communism but sees with stark simplicity the evil of American policy. He starts the excerpt by concentrating upon ambiguity but ends with an ideological perspective that is simple, uncomplicated and bereft of ambiguity in its condemnation of US policy. Ambiguity is resolved by a mythological demonizing of the Military-Industrial Complex; a belief system that is ritualized annually by pilgrimages to denounce the School of the Americas.

Anna Brown’s article continues in the same vein. Referring to her Social Justice classes at St. Peter’s College, she says: “”My hope and prayer is that each student will come to ‘see,’ for example, the mighty roar of a single raindrop. Unadorned and ordinary, this raindrop will show immediately the unity of all if only we are able to look.” Here is a nature mysticism of “a raindrop” as a sacramental of “the unity of all.” Again, there is no reference to the Creator or the raindrop as a gift from our God. Implicitly, she advocates here a New Age type of pantheistic mysticism that not only fails to lead us to God (as transcendent Father and Creator) but distracts us by absorbing us in the raindrop itself and an amorphous sense of unity.

Brown goes on to write of idolatry as “putting oneself and one’s nation above all others.” But idolatry as classically understood is the elevation of any creature to distract us from adoration of God alone. An ecological conscience and political ideology (bereft of ambiguity) that ignores the person of God our Creator and Jesus our Savior is itself an alternate religion and a form of idolatry.

A gift always has a dual purpose: to delight the beloved with the splendor of the gift and to arouse within the beloved love for and communion with the lover. Imagine that a beloved is so enchanted by the beauty of the gift (flowers, necklace or delicious chocolates) that she ignores the person of the giver. This would be tragic. The flowers will die, the candy be consumed and even the necklace may eventually be misplaced; but the final goal of the gift is to enhance communion between the lover and the beloved.

In these pieces, neither Merton nor Brown draws us towards our Origin and End, the Great Lover Himself. This is the problem: since 1968 our Catholic institutions are filled with people like Anna Brown. These are idealistic, generous, sincere and passionate in their advocacy of values like peace, woman’s rights and a clean environment. These are all, of course, good values. But oftentimes these teachers have not really understood and accepted the Catholic faith so that they are catechizing our young people into an alternate gospel that replaces creation with ecology, salvation with therapy, and sanctification with political correctness. This is, of course, their prerogative; but let us be clear that this is a rejection of Catholicism, not a more enlightened form of it.

And so we cherish and cultivate environment, creation and Mother Nature in all their splendor and integrity…always with a poignant sense that this world is temporary and provisional, it is passing away and is a premonition of our final destiny of eternal communion with our Father who created us, our Lord Jesus who saved us, and the Holy Spirit who even now is sanctifying us.