“‘Wisdom Cries the Dawn Deacon’: Thomas Merton and ‘The Ox Mountain Parable’”

For devoted readers of Thomas Merton, the sixties was a traumatic and challenging time. The quiet voice of monasticism had seemingly disappeared into the Gethsemani woods, and the new Merton was disturbing and could grate on his reader’s sensibilities. The reaction of some readers was noted by Merton, when he wrote in a 1968 letter to Czeslaw Milosz, that “Conservative Catholics in Louisville are burning my books because I am opposed to the Vietnam war. The whole thing is ridiculous” (Striving 175).

In December of 1964, while Thomas Merton sat in his hermitage at Gethsemani, the SAC planes—strategic air command bombers—disturbed his silence as did the thudding and thumping of the guns at Fort Knox, that quintessential symbol of American military power and wealth, not quite thirty miles from the Abbey of Gethsemani, as the crow flies.

Thomas Merton sat in his hermitage listening to the sound of the rain, allowing cornmeal to boil over on his recently purchased Coleman stove whilst he toasted some bread at his log fire. In the isolation of his hermitage, an isolation deepened by the darkness of the night and the cold winter rain, he thought deeply about the modern world against the background of Philoxenus, a sixth-century Syrian hermit whom he was reading, the theater of the absurd, in particular Eugene Ionesco and his play Rhinoceros, and his own predicament—living the most solitary life anyone in his own Cistercian order had been permitted to live in centuries as he moved towards becoming a full-time hermit in the summer of 1965. Against this background, Merton drafted one of his finest essays, “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” he worked on the manuscript of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, and prepared novitiate conferences on Philoxenus, conferences he humorously titled “In Church with Louie: Monastic Life in the Raw” (Merton “What is a Church?”).

In this essay, I want to look in more detail at Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, as I think in it Merton sets out most clearly his understanding of the role of the monk, his own role as a “guilty bystander” in an age when such voices could easily be overlooked against the bellowing of herds of pachyderms. Almost fifty years have passed since he penned Conjectures, yet his reflections on the role of the guilty bystander are still as relevant as when he wrote them, if not more so, and such voices are still mostly going unheard, still being drowned out by the grunting and bellowing of the herd.

The very title of this book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, points to some of the changes and developments that had taken place in Merton’s life up to this point.¹ Let us just take a moment to see the origins of Merton’s use of this term. In an essay he published in 1958 titled “Letter to an Innocent Bystander,” Merton suggests that, if he, or another person, were “bystanding” from a sense of inertia this could be a “source of our guilt” (Raids 34, 37). He questions whether non-participation is possible and whether complicity can be avoided. Merton then looks at the role of intellectuals as bystanders, pondering how they could stand between those in power and authority and the majority who find themselves subject to such people. From this position, Merton suggests that the vocation of the innocent bystander is to speak the truth at all costs.

“Letter to an Innocent Bystander” was written in the year of Merton’s Louisville epiphany and at a time when his correspondence was burgeoning, particularly with his contacts in Latin America (Conjectures 140–42). It was a year marking a distinctive change in Merton. By 1959, Merton was beginning to question his description of himself as an “innocent” bystander, moving towards the term “guilty” bystander instead. This can be seen most clearly in letters Merton wrote to Czeslaw Milosz, where he questions his use of the term “innocent,” suggesting that the only answer he knows is “to be responsible to everybody, to take upon oneself all the...