The Root of War Is Fear: Thomas Merton’s Advice to Peacemakers by Jim Forest (review)

Having just celebrated the centenary of Thomas Merton’s birth in January 2015, I have found myself thinking a lot of the decades following the death of St. Francis of Assisi (d. 1226). As the years drew on during the mid-thirteenth century, the earliest followers of Francis who lived with him and knew him best continued to age and began to die. Concern began to arise about how to preserve the institutional memory bound up with “those who were with him,” as the first friars came to refer to themselves, and so a commission was formed to interview and record the stories of the saint from Assisi from those who had first-hand knowledge of those early days. Similarly, as we mark the milestones of Merton’s one-hundredth birthday (2015) and the fiftieth anniversary of his death (2018), Merton scholars have raised concerns analogous to those of the early Franciscans; namely, what other narratives and information might we learn from “those who were with him” in the 1950s and 1960s? Jim Forest offers his own contribution along these lines in this new book.

Best known as a co-founder of the Catholic Peace Fellowship and an active member of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker community in New York, Forest’s peace activism in the 1960s led to his happenstance encounter with the renowned Trappist Monk and author Thomas Merton. Within his capacity as managing editor of The Catholic Worker newspaper, Forest was tasked by Day to correspond with Merton about his contributed articles and it was primarily through these letters that Forest developed a relationship with Merton. They met in person only on a few occasions when Forest visited the Abbey of Gethsemani.

The most famous of these in-person encounters is what has become known as the “Peacemakers Retreat,” which was hosted by Merton at his private hermitage on the Abbey grounds in 1964. The list of attendants for that gathering is a “who’s who” of the 1960s Christian peace movement: A. J. Muste, John Howard Yoder, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, W. H. Ferry, Tom Cornell, and others including Jim Forest. While it is interesting to get Forest’s personal recollection of the event, he spends surprisingly little time on this episode, dedicating only a single short chapter to the retreat. Those interested in learning more about those involved, what was discussed, and the impact this event had on peacemaking in the twentieth century should consult Gordon Oyer’s masterful Pursuing the Spiritual Roots of Protest (Cascade, 2014), which offers an incredibly detailed accounting of the event.

Much of this book follows a similar pattern: interesting breadth regarding glimpses into Merton’s growing consciousness about violence and peacemaking, but not as much depth in terms of detail or analysis. There are nineteen short chapters that generally follow a chronological structure, but rarely introduce new research or material previously unavailable to Merton researchers or even the general public. Forest weaves together generous block quotes from Merton’s correspondence, books, and articles with his own narration or periodic quotes from Day and other related figures. In general, this style makes for the presentation of a nice tableau framed by the first-person narration of one who was involved in some way in each episode. However, while the extensive use of direct quotation allows the voice of Merton to come through strongly throughout, this reviewer found that the editorial decision to format these very lengthy passages in italics led to reading fatigue.

This is an important book in the field of Merton scholarship for its contribution to preserving the recollections of one of “those who were with him.” Forest is a good writer whose prose is engaging, which is why I was disappointed that his own voice was not more prominent. In addition to Merton scholars and enthusiasts for whom this book will be a required addition to their...