Survival or Prophecy: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Jean Leclercq (review)

Survival or Prophecy: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Jean Leclercq. Edited by Brother Patrick Hart. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. 224 pp. $22.00.

The correspondence between these remarkable monks began in 1950 with Leclercq asking for Merton's help in getting photos of certain manuscripts of the writings of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, which were held by the Abbey of Gethsemani. Leclercq, a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of Clerveux in Luxemborg, was already hard at work on a critical edition of the works of the great twelfth century saint and mystic, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a labor which would occupy him for the next quarter of a century when, in 1977, volume eight of the Opera Omnia would finally see the light of day. Merton, already famous (at least on this side of the Atlantic) after the 1948 publication of the story of his conversion to Catholicism and his subsequent entry into the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky, was eager to extend his knowledge of monastic theology and practice. Their first exchange concerned certain manuscript holdings in the possession of Gethsemani.

From that initial exchange of letters began a correspondence that would last until Merton's death in December of 1968. Leclercq was an indefatigable traveler who scoured Europe's archives for manuscripts while visiting North America, Africa, Asia, and Latin America as a teacher, retreat master, and researcher on matters monastic. Merton, by contrast, rarely left the monastery except in the last year of his life when he went to Asia (encouraged by Leclercq) for a monastic congress in Bangkok. He would die by accidental electrocution after giving his paper at a conference center outside of Bangkok.

If their styles of life were radically different, they were joined, nonetheless, by a common passion: to recover the authentic roots of Christian monasticism which had been encrusted with usages, prejudices, misunderstandings, and a false sense of tradition over the centuries. For Merton this meant getting behind the penitential and ascetic emphases of the seventeenth century reform of La Trappe to the purer teachings of the twelfth century Cistercian fathers while for Leclercq it was a matter of pushing beyond those justly famous figures (who, in the words of Etienne Gilson, gave up everything for God except the art of writing well) to the earlier strain of monasticism in the West which went back to Benedict and even earlier.

A major reason, then, why the publication of this exchange of letters is important is to see how these two men centrally concerned themselves with the labor of getting back to the more nourishing sources of the Catholic tradition (the process of ressourcement) in general and the monastic tradition in particular. This effort would continue to profoundly shape the very nature of Catholicism in the twentieth entury. Letters and essays went back and forth across the Atlantic in order, as Leclercq would write in an early letter, "to bring to light ideas and experiences which are to be found in old monastic books that nobody, even in monasteries, ever reads today" (9-10).

It would be easy to dismiss these efforts as a hobby of only antiquarian interest until we realize what, in fact, they accomplished. Merton not only mediated contemplative practices to his own community but to the larger world. To name one example, it is due to his careful attention to and reading of the medieval text The Cloud of Unknowing that we have "centering prayer" today. The common practice of lectio divina was only thinly understood before Leclercq began to investigate the ways in which prayer based on scripture was at the heart of monastic spirituality. Some of the fruits of that research are to be found in his brilliant work The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961).

In...