Peace in the Post-Christian Era Paperback – September 23, 2004
by Thomas Merton (Author), Patricia A. Burton (Author)
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Writing at the height of the Cold War, Merton issued this passionate challenge to the idea that unthinkable violence can be squared with the Gospel of Christ. Censors of Merton's order blocked publication of this work, but forty years later if you substitute 'war on terrorism' for 'war on communism' Merton's message remains eerily topical.
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From Publishers Weekly
The story behind this treatise by the legendary Trappist monk from Kentucky's Abbey of Gethsemani is nearly as fascinating as the document itself. As explained in the foreword by Jim Forest, who corresponded with Merton while a member of the Catholic Worker movement, and the introduction by Patricia Burton, the book's publication was thwarted in 1962 by Trappist abbot general Dom Gabriel Sortais, who did not view such writing as the right kind of work for a monk. Merton's own abbot, Dom James Fox, however, allowed the manuscript to be mimeographed and put into limited circulation. Now, 42 years later, Merton's visionary message is being brought out for wider examination. Although it is dated by the writer's focus on the threat of nuclear annihilation in relationship to the Cold War, the book's ideas remain relevant and applicable to the current debate over the terrorist threat. Merton aficionados will especially appreciate the way he connects the quest for peace to the Christian life, and many will be encouraged by reminders of how much has changed since Merton worried about a general Catholic reluctance to speak out against war. Readers will be left with a sense that Merton's voice was heard despite the silencing of his words, a fact that should hearten those working for peace.
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Review
"Merton's book is as relevant and timely today as when he wrote it...Substitute 'war on terrorism' for 'war on communism, ' and his insights continue to challenge our culture of war and ourselves to become Gospel people of peace and nonviolence."
Product details
Publisher : Orbis (September 23, 2004)
Language : English
Paperback : 165 pages
ISBN-10 : 1570755590
ISBN-13 : 978-1570755590
Item Weight : 9 ounces
Dimensions : 6.46 x 0.47 x 8.24 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #972,741 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#649 in War & Peace (Books)
#1,912 in Religion & Philosophy (Books)
#2,865 in Political Commentary & Opinion
Customer Reviews: 4.4 out of 5 stars 10 ratings
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Biography
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has millions of copies and has been translated into over fifteen languages. He wrote over sixty other books and hundreds of poems and articles on topics ranging from monastic spirituality to civil rights, nonviolence, and the nuclear arms race.
After a rambunctious youth and adolescence, Merton converted to Roman Catholicism and entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, a community of monks belonging to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists), the most ascetic Roman Catholic monastic order.
The twenty-seven years he spent in Gethsemani brought about profound changes in his self-understanding. This ongoing conversion impelled him into the political arena, where he became, according to Daniel Berrigan, the conscience of the peace movement of the 1960's. Referring to race and peace as the two most urgent issues of our time, Merton was a strong supporter of the nonviolent civil rights movement, which he called "certainly the greatest example of Christian faith in action in the social history of the United States." For his social activism Merton endured severe criticism, from Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who assailed his political writings as unbecoming of a monk.
During his last years, he became deeply interested in Asian religions, particularly Zen Buddhism, and in promoting East-West dialogue. After several meetings with Merton during the American monk's trip to the Far East in 1968, the Dali Lama praised him as having a more profound understanding of Buddhism than any other Christian he had known. It was during this trip to a conference on East-West monastic dialogue that Merton died, in Bangkok on December 10, 1968, the victim of an accidental electrocution. The date marked the twenty-seventh anniversary of his entrance to Gethsemani.
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Randall Wood
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is to be a 2020 Christmas present.
Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2020
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Challenges of being Christian. Thomas Merton uses text from the World Bible to stimulate one's inner thinking. Search for the answer.
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DC Dave
5.0 out of 5 stars Merton's Message Resonates in the 21st Century
Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2018
First published in 2004, 36 years after Merton’s untimely and mysterious sudden death in Thailand on December 10, 1968, this is the manuscript that caused the worldwide head of the Cistercian Order to come down on him with a decree to stop writing about questions of war and peace. The year was 1962, and Merton was not allowed to fulfill his contract with the major publishing company, Macmillan. The reason given was that what he had to say, “falsifies the monastic message,” whatever that might mean
Merton’s critics, usually people who think of themselves as conservatives, often characterize him as some kind of fuzzy-minded leftist, pacifist idealist. No one reading this short little masterpiece of clear thinking with anything resembling an open mind could possibly come to that conclusion about the man. It is people who could write such patent nonsense about the supposed “monastic message” and who could seriously entertain the notion of almost inconceivable genocide as some sort of valid national defense strategy who are the mush-minded thinkers, not Merton. Least of all should we think of such critics as the genuine Christians. This is from the book:
"In the presence of an international politic based on nuclear deterrence and on the imminent possibility of global suicide, no Christian may remain indifferent, no Christian can allow himself a mere inert and passive acquiescence in ready-made formulas fed to him by the mass media.
--
"In a world that has largely discarded moral imperatives and which indeed no longer seriously considers the violent death of one hundred million human beings as a moral issue, but only as a pragmatic exercise of power, the Christian must regard himself as the custodian of moral and human values, and must give top priority to their clarification and defense. "
As I read page after page of the most cogently argued, heartfelt case against the widespread mindless support of our warfare state, whipped up evermore by the mass media that Merton had so well pegged, I could only wonder who it was that came down on Dom Gabriel Sortais, Abbot General of the Cistercian Order, to shut Merton up. Here’s another sample of Merton’s dangerous message, as our rulers would regard it:
"To reject a 'world-wide' outlook, to refuse to consider the good of mankind, and to remain satisfied with the affluence that flows from our war economy, is hardly a Christian attitude. Nor will our attachment to the current payoff accruing to us from weapons make it any easier for us to see and understand the need to take the hard road of sacrifice which alone leads to peace!
---
"We may amuse ourselves by reading the reports in the mass media and imagine that these 'facts' provide sufficient basis for moral judgments for and against war. But in reality, we are simply elaborating moral fantasies in a vacuum. Whatever we may decide, we remain completely at the mercy of the governmental power, or rather the anonymous power of managers and generals who stand behind the façade of government. We have no way of directly influencing the decisions and policies taken by these people. In practice, we must fall back on a blinder and blinder faith which more and more resigns itself to trusting the 'legitimately constituted authority' without having the vaguest notion what the authority is liable to do next. This condition of irresponsibility and passivity is extremely dangerous, and also it is hardly conducive to genuine morality"
Just think of it. Merton was writing about the “façade of government” in 1962, more than a half-century before the term “Deep State” had been coined. He was also enclosing “legitimately constituted authority” in quotation marks a full year before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He was also writing more than forty years before I penned my poem, “Barren Summit,” whose sentiments I feel confident he would have agreed with:
Forty years and counting
Since Kennedy was killed,
And our vacuum of leadership
Still has not been filled.
Why should those shoes present
Such difficulty in filling?
The candidates are weeded out
By those who did the killing.
Now as the apparently mindless vilification of Russia, a nation that is now perhaps more Christian than the United States and is certainly more Christian than most of our NATO allies—not to mention our two biggest Middle Eastern allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia—continues to escalate, Merton’s words appear more timely than ever:
"We have to become aware of the poisonous effect of the mass media that keep violence, cruelty and sadism constantly present to the minds of uninformed and irresponsible people. We have to recognize the danger to the whole world in the fact that today the economic life of the more highly developed nations is in large part centered on the production of weapons, missiles and other engines of destruction.
"We have to consider that hate propaganda, and the consistent heckling of one government by another, has always inevitably led to violent conflict… We must consider the dire effect of fanaticism and witch-hunting within our own nation. We must never forget that our most ordinary decisions may have terrible consequences."
The average person reading those words today has to regard them as prophetic and deeply frightening. Imagine if you can, though, that you are one of the power-wielders of the time reading what Merton had written, knowing that he was a man of great moral authority with a very large audience. Blocked from publishing, he mimeographed the manuscript and sent it to a large number of people, including Robert Kennedy’s wife, Ethel. If you were profiting from the system just as it was, would you not have regarded such a man as threatening?
I am reminded of the TV Western morality play of my youth that almost everyone watched, "Gunsmoke." The great dramatic strength of the program was in its painting of the bad guys, the villains. No matter how much you might have been infused with the spirit of Christian forgiveness at home or church, usually within the first quarter hour of the program the thought that would be foremost in your mind would be, “That guy really needs killing.” And you could be certain that the noble, handsome, and hulking sheriff, Matt Dillon, who also happened to be blessed with quicker reflexes and better hand-eye coordination than any villain who ever lived, would do the honors in the end in a very satisfying extra-judicial fashion.
Now imagine, if you can, that you were the villain, and you saw the work of Merton that threatened to stand in the way of your ambitions. The primary thought in your mind would doubtless have been, “That guy really needs killing.” And so he was.
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Starrider7777
5.0 out of 5 stars Merton's Voice is Sorely Needed In Today's Post-Christian world
Reviewed in the United States on February 29, 2008
This book is another of the most soul searing missives that I have had the good fortune of stumbling across. I read this one straight through. i would have done it in one sitting if I didn't have responsibilities that distracted me from it. This is one of those books that, although written decades ago, is still relevant, fresh and much needed in the toxic political and turbulent geopolitical world today. I have been a casual admirer of merton's writing for a while- but this book made so much sense to me that I now have tremendous respect for his wit and reason. The likes of him is direly needed in today's discourse of the faithful.
The excerpt below a very strong commentary of the very factors in play yet today in the whole paradoxical, sometimes absurd conservative vs. liberal dialog:
"It should be clear from the moral and mental confusion of our time that the present world crisis is something far more worse than merely political or economic conflict. It goes far deeper than ideologies. It is a crisis of man's spirit. It is a completely moral upheaval of the human race that has lost its religious and cultural roots. We do not really know half the causes of this upheaval. We cannot pretend to have full understanding of what is going on in ourselves and in our society. That is why our desperate hunger for clear and definite solutions sometimes leads us into temptation. We oversimplify. We seek the cause of evil and find it here or there in a particular nation, class, race, ideology system. And we discharge upon this scapegoat all the virulent force of our hatred, compounded with fear and anguish, striving to rid ourselves of our dread and of our guilt by destroying the object we have arbitrarily singled out as the embodiment of all evil. Far from curing us, this is only another paroxysm of which aggravates our sickness.
The moral evil in the world is due to man's alienation from the deepest truth, from the springs of spiritual life within himself, to his alienation from God. Those who realize this and try desperately to persuade and enlighten their brothers. But we are in a radically different position from the first Christians, who revolutionized an essentially religious world of paganism with the message of a new religion that had never been heard of.
We, on the contrary, live in an irreligious, post- Christian world in which the Christian message has been repeated over and over until it has come to seem empty of all intelligible content to those ears close to the word of God even before it has been uttered. In their minds Christian is no longer identified with newness and change, but only the static preservation of outworn structures.
But why is this? Is it merely that the spiritual novelty Christianity has worn off in twenty centuries? That people have heard the gospel before and are tired of it? Or is it perhaps because for centuries the message has been belied by the conduct of Christians themselves?"
I am not a Catholic, but I highly respect this man's thoughts on these topics and would recommend this book to anyone, Christian or not, that is interested in morality and/or moral truth or social comment.
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Ellen
Feb 11, 2013Ellen rated it really liked it
Shelves: catholicism
It would be interesting to republish this today and just insert "terrorism" every time the word "Communism" appeared. This remains a deeply important work, but I do wonder how Merton could insist on the rightness of the theory of Just War while constantly admitting that a Just War in reality is almost impossible. Even if we did have access to all of the right information that would allow us to determine which wars would be just, even if we could separate the truth from the relentless propaganda of the media and the belligerent insistence and perverted obsessions and motives of the Pentagon and the arms industry, no war remains "just" for long. His goal of preaching peace while maintaining the Just War loophole strikes me as inconsistent and ultimately doomed. (less)
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