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

At the beginning of his introduction to this volume, the editor, Patrick Hart, quotes the following statement by Bernard McGinn: "When the history of twentieth-century monasticism comes to be written, it is hard not to think that two monks will dominate the story: Thomas Merton and Jean Leclercq" (p. xvii). Merton is, of course, the best-known and most widely read monk of his own and perhaps of any era. Leclercq, the French-born Benedictine monkscholar from the Abbey of Clervaux in Luxembourg and editor of the monumental critical edition of St. Bernard, was equally prolific and of comparable significance, although attracting a more restricted audience for his studies of monastic history and spirituality such as his celebrated Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu (1957; trans. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, New York, 1961).

First published in 2002 and now reissued in paperback, Survival or Prophecy?includes fifty letters from Merton and forty-seven from Leclercq over the course of almost three decades, from Leclercq's January 28, 1950, response to a missing Merton letter that had evidently focused on their mutual interest in St. Bernard and other early Cistercians to Merton's brief July 23, 1968, letter about the monastic conference in Bangkok that Merton would attend through Leclercq's initiative and at which his life would come to an unexpected end; it is the conclusion of this letter that gives this collection its title: "The vocation of the monk in the modern world . . . is not survival but prophecy" (p. 129).

In the course of their correspondence the two monks exchange information about monastic manuscripts; send and receive books and articles, their own and those of others; encourage one another in their work; and rejoice and lament at the state of the world, both monastic and secular. Merton confides to Leclercq his desire for greater solitude and his various efforts to obtain it, while Leclercq provides support through his knowledge of the tradition of eremitic life in monastic history. The peripatetic Benedictine shares with the stationary Cistercian his enthusiasm for the flowering of new forms of monastic life as encountered in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. They comment on their enjoyment of one another's company after Leclercq's occasional visits to Gethsemani. They articulate their vision of a renewed Benedictine life transcending the distinctions of orders in the heady days of the Second Vatican Council and its immediate aftermath, which Leclercq experienced close at hand from his post at Sant'Anselmo, the Benedictine university in Rome. This rich exchange provides a privileged viewpoint not only for gaining insight into the life and thought of these two remarkable men but also for receiving their insights on the Church and world of their time.

Although the subtitle is rather oddly altered from "The Letters of Thomas Merton and Jean Leclercq" to "The Correspondence of Jean Leclercq and Thomas Merton," the contents of the original edition are found in a virtually identical text (although reset and therefore with different pagination) in this version. (The only alteration noted was in a footnote [p. 12] where "… as of this writing (2001)" became "…(2008)"; even the extensive chronology ends in 2002 with the listing of Survival or Prophecy?itself.) The foreword of Archbishop and former Benedictine Abbot Primate Rembert Weakland helpfully situates Merton's and Leclercq's contributions in the wider context of mid-twentieth-century monastic renewal (although his claim that "Merton was harder to come to know" [p. x] than Leclercq is based on the extremely limited contact the two men had in Bangkok and is problematic, given the amazingly wide circle of Merton's friendships). The brief introduction and briefer editor's note by Brother...