Figures for an Apocalypse by Thomas Merton (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 101 be discovel,"ed among incompatible elements as they are represented in this book. Such true unity derives only from the God Who is Truth, and Who, being Truth, is One and Indivisible. It is only when God is recognized and worshipped, not as men would make Him to be, but as He is Himself and as He has revealed Himself to men, that there will exist that true fraternity which is vivified by the Spirit and preserved in the bond of peace. It would be interesting to learn Dr. Cuninggim's estimate of Religion in the Twentieth Century. It would be interesting to know what kind of nonsectarian religion he would offer to a campus having Hindus, Shintoists, Islamites, Catholics, Mormons, Swedenborgians, Jews, Christian Scientists and adherents of the Ramakrishna Movement. How long will the spiritually hungary of this day seek their longed-for unity on the circumference of religious manifestation and change? When will the sincere seekers of truth cease to search for the answers in terms of change and look rather in the direction of the unchanging and dynamic eternal? Truly, a slight error in the principles leads to a great error in the conclusions. It is time to look back to the beginnings-to the terminus a quo of the endlessly divisive movements; it is time to look to the rock whence they were hewn. Fenwick High School Dale Parle, Ill. THOMAS C. DONLAN, O.P. Figures for an Apocalypse. By Thomas Merton. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions; 1948. Pp. 111. $2.50. About ten years ago Thomas Merton with a companion communistminded student signed up for a course in medieval philosophy at Columbia University. From prospective hecklers, they became listeners, and fr~m listeners, disciples. At the end of the semester they asked for a continuation of the course. Their teacher gave them Duns Scotus. Before the semester's end, Merton had asked his teacher to direct him to a priest for instructions. Presently, he was baptized. Sometime later he returned to his professor of philosophy to ask about monastic orders and the religious life. He was directed to the Father Superior of Saint Bonaventure College where shortly he found himself teaching literature and learning the science of the saints. The sequel was his entrance into the Trappist Monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Kentucky. As Brother Louis and under the constraint of holy obedience, Thomas Merton has published since 1944 three slender volumes: Thirty Poems, Man in the Divided Sea, and Figures for an Apocalypse. They stand in the 102 BOOK REVIEWS temporal center of our century and will perhaps mean for this period what the three small first books of Francis Thompson, published between 1893 and 1897, have come to mean for its beginning. Immediately, other comparisons spring to mind: with Hopkins, with Eliot, with the disciples of these. Merton moves easily in the same intellectual orbit and in a rarer spiritual world. Other essentials being equalas they are, and more-this in itself underwrites his future as a poet. It is not unlikely that another generation ",ill appraise him in superlatives. This review will content itself with considering very simply his idiom, technic, themes, vision, beauty, these being the obvious factors out of which these twenty-seven least obvious of poems arise. Nothing defies the diction of the poet so completely as the slang, the vernacular, the current idiom of the day. Yet, Merton whips these unruly outlaws into complete subservience to the disciplined line as: or And the cops come down the street in fours With clubs as loud as bells All night long we waited at the desert's edge, Watching the white moon giggle in the stream: The age itself submits to this summary: Tomorrow is the millenium, The golden age! The human race will wake up And find dollars, growing out of the palms of their hands, And the whole world will die of brotherly love Because the factories jig like drums And furnaces feed themselves, And all men lie in idleness upon the quilted pastures, tuning their friendly radios and dreaming in the sun! The epitaph for New York City illustrates the language of the hour...