Wisdom, Our Sister: Thomas Merton's Reception of Russian Sophiology

Hagia Sophia

© Vince Millett

Sophia, the feminine child, is playing in the world, obvious and unseen, playing at all times before the Creator. Her delights are to be with the children of men. She is their sister.¹

The years between 1958 and 1968 were years of extraordinary tension and creativity for Thomas Merton, a period that produced arguably his most stunning and enduring works. It was also a period of extraordinary outreach to others. Well before the Second Vatican Council would turn the minds and hearts of Roman Catholics toward both the ecumenical and non-Christian worlds, Merton was reaching out in dialogue and friendship to practitioners of Orthodoxy, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism. These were no cursory field trips for Merton but engaged him, existentially and theologically, in the most difficult questions of epistemology, metaphysics, and method. Indeed, he wrote a great deal on these problems with as much acuity as many historical, philosophical, or contextual theologians today. In short, it was a period of explosive catholicity and intellectual vitality in Merton's life, the fruits of which are still far, very far, from being fully explored or discerned.² And yet this "explosion," as his friend Canon A. M. Allchin poignantly observes, was "a special kind of explosion, one which has no exact equivalent in the physical world. It was a non-disintegrating explosion, and hence [its] effects were constructive and not destructive." In other words, "The center did hold. He did not fall apart. Anyone less well integrated than he was might have done so."³

Whether inspired by Merton's catholicity or scandalized by it, few serious students of his life and writings would dispute that his conception of God and Jesus Christ changed as he allowed deeper encounters with Eastern religions to interrogate his faith. What is less commonly appreciated is how closely his engagement with Zen and other traditions corresponded with his internalization of a deep thread in the Christian East, namely, the Sophia tradition of Russian Orthodoxy, or "sophiology," which Merton encountered in the writings of Vladimir Soloviev (d. 1900), Sergius Bulgakov (d. 1944), Nicholas Berdyaev (d. 1944), Boris Pasternak (d. 1960), Paul Evdokimov (d. 1970), and others. What attracted Merton to the Russians was their recasting of the narrative of salvation in the boldest imaginative and metaphysical terms. From biblical, patristic, and modern philosophical sources they had fashioned a "positive theology," a theology brimming with content; that they did so in an age of unspeakable violence, a century in which Christian theology had every reason to lose its nerve, was also not lost on Merton.

Though Merton himself never developed a formal sophiology, his internalization of Russian imagery is amply evidenced in journals, letters, and lecture notes of the period, as well as in more formally crafted works such as The Behavior of Titans, The New Man, and New Seeds of Contemplation. The prose poem Hagia Sophia of 1962 is by far the most realized, lyrical, and daring of his meditations on the Wisdom figure of Sophia. What emerges in a close study of Merton's last decade is a kind of story-shaped Christology and theology of God, a story told through the life of Merton, but haunted more and more by the mysterious figure of Sophia. Indeed, "her" irruption into his consciousness not only helped Merton "hold the center" of an already deeply rooted incarnational and Trinitarian faith but helped catalyze his outreach in dialogue and friendship toward an extraordinary range of religious and non-religious "others."⁴

This essay explores Merton's turn to Wisdom-Sophia as a lyric symbol of divine-human relationality and the "communal eros" that is the very life of God. In what follows, my aim is to draw forward, in a somewhat narrative and poetical way, Merton's legacy as a significant heir and expositor of the sophiological tradition in the West, a case I have made systematically in my book, Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton. This essay offers a concise crystallization of the book...