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The Catholic Historical Review 86.3 (2000) 534-535



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Book Review

Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision

American

Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision. By Lawrence S. Cunningham. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 1999. Pp. xii, 228. $16.00 paperback.)

This book, one in the series of Eerdman's "Library of Religious Biography," is a biography of Thomas Merton during his monastic years (1941-1968), with a prologue briefly but helpfully summing up his pre-monastic story (1915-1941). Since Merton was a born writer, any biography of his life at Gethsemani must integrate his writings with his life story and do so in the context of the religious, intellectual, literary, and social milieu of a unique period of American and world history: the 1940's, '50's and '60's. No other biography has done this as convincingly and perceptively as Lawrence S. Cunningham in Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision.

The book's title seems to be taken from Merton's 1968 address at Calcutta, where he expressed his desire, in coming to the East, "to drink from ancient sources of monastic vision and experience." It is an appropriate title, since the book's thesis is "that Merton can be understood only if he is understood as a monk who spent twenty-seven years under a monastic rule and within the rich tradition of monastic ascesis, spirituality and prayer" (p. 190).

One of the fascinating aspects of the Merton who emerges from these pages is the constancy of his monastic commitment, coupled with a growth and clarification of his "vision" of what that commitment involved. The fuga mundi (at the heart of any monastic vision) grew from his desire to have nothing to do with the world (as seen, for instance, in devotional writing such as The Sign of Jonas) to a realization that life in the cloister did not exempt him from responsibility for the world in which he lived. How that responsibility could be carried out without belying the necessary withdrawal from the world implicit in the monastic life was a question he never ceased to struggle with, especially in the final decade of his life (see, for example, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander or Contemplation in a World of Action). "Conjectures is less fervently pious and less conspicuously 'monastic' in its tone, thus providing a good indicator of how Merton's outlook changed over the years" (p. 112). "This greater sense of human solidarity [capsulized in his "Fourth and Walnut experience"] did not undermine his conviction about the necessity of contemplative withdrawal or his own commitment to solitude" (p. 70).

Besides discussing the usual list of Merton books, Cunningham offers insightful glimpses into works less known, e.g., The Behavior of Titans (especially the essay on Herakleitos), seen as opening the way to the later, more [End Page 534] experimental works, such as Cables to the Ace and The Geography of Lograire. On a more specific topic, Cunningham offers, in the course of four or five pages, the most balanced account that I have read of Merton's 1966 agonizing and "serio-comic" (Cunningham's word) affaire de coeur.

Cunningham writes with an ease of style that draws readers into his reflections. There is a crisp conciseness to his writing: words used with care and never on overload. Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision is a book I can recommend unhesitatingly and enthusiastically. Of the many Merton books appearing so frequently these days, this must surely be rated among the best.

Two added bonuses: first a foreword by someone who knew Merton as a fellow-monk, namely, Abbot Timothy Kelly, recently retired as abbot of Gethsemani; and second, fifteen pages of bibliographical notes by Cunningham about works by and about Merton.

The only criticism I have is the failure throughout the book to identify sources of quotations.

William H.Shannon
Nazareth College of Rochester (Emeritus)

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