Thomas Merton: Selected Essays ed. by Patrick F. O’Connell, and: Thomas Merton: Faithful Visionary by Michael W. Higgins (review)

During his lifetime (1915–1968) Merton published around 250 essays. Many were collected into book collections published under his name either under his own direction or by others posthumously. Patrick O’Connell, among all of the many who have written about Merton, is uniquely qualified to take a judicious collection culled from the late monk’s vast corpus because of his judiciously encyclopedic knowledge of the writings of Merton.

This collection features thirty-three essays chosen by O’Connell who admits in his introduction that every Merton scholar is going to lament the omission of a particular favorite piece of Merton’s writings. With that frank admission in place one must say that this anthology reflects a mature and balanced selection of Merton’s prose. He puts his essays into historical order thus giving the reader some sense both of the maturing quality of Merton’s style as well as an overview of the wide interests of the monk as he grew from his earlier concerns into the prophetic writings of the last years of his life. Each of the essays has a head note indicating the publishing history of the essay, which for the more assiduous Merton readers is a blessing.

When approaching the thought of Merton, of course, the question always is: Which Merton do you wish to read? The spiritual writer? The poet critic? The social commentator? The usefulness of O’Connell’s judicious anthology is that it provides a reader with an overall sweep of his body of work with enough ancillary information in the form of an appendix which provides a chronology of all his essays to allow the reader to explore more deeply in the works of this extraordinary monk.

Michael Higgins’s brief biographical study of Thomas Merton is a contribution to an interesting series of brief lives being published by Liturgical Press with the express aim of getting these volumes into the hands of the general reading public. Higgins draws on his knowledge of Merton perhaps best expressed in his fuller study Heretic Blood: The Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton (1998). The problem which faces every Merton biographer is not that we know too little, but that we know too much of a person who suffered the furor scribendi. When one only considers the now published journals of the late monk, it is possible (almost) to describe each day of his monastic life by the simple practice of correlating what he writes about in the journals (and in the letters) in tandem with the monastic horarium. Higgins, then, was faced with the unenviable task of accounting for such a fully documented life in such a narrow space afforded him.

Higgins rises to his challenge in seven compressed chapters done in a more or less chronological fashion. Anyone unaware of the life of Merton could get a quick overview of the monk’s life in this engagingly written narrative. In that brief telling he artfully weaves in snapshots of many of the major figures who figured in his life. Those who know the Merton corpus well will most likely cavil about some of the emphases in this work, but his work is not for them. Higgins sees Merton as a prophetic figure who desired to pursue issues that more conventional Catholic commentators either did not touch or did approach gingerly. Because Higgins emphasizes the prophetic he is less centrally concerned with Merton as a religious thinker who, somewhat implausibly, did extremely perceptive commentary on a whole range of topics out of his monastic formation. My own sense is, and Higgins might well disagree, that if one does not understand Merton as a monk one understands him badly.

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of Merton’s birth. Much of what he wrote on, for example, social issues, is...