Thomas Merton, Like C.S. Lewis and Simone Weil, Has Not

C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton:

Soul Friends

Thomas Merton, like C.S. Lewis and Simone Weil, has not

always been best served by his most ardent admirers. It is

a welcome thing that—in all these cases—we have so much

‘informal’ material to help us see them actually developing

their ideas, testing out thoughts without feeling they have

to take full responsibility for them. The trouble comes when

those admirers, rather overwhelmed by the sheer volume of

material, feel obliged to defend everything their heroes wrote,

formal and informal, so that the fallible and multi-coloured

humanity of the writer becomes a bit fixed and frozen. 1

Rowan Williams

I think that Thomas Merton could easily be called the greatest

spiritual writer and spiritual master of the twentieth century in

English speaking America. There is no other person who has had

such a profound influence on those writing on spiritual topics,

not only on Catholics, but non-Catholics, as Merton. The only

contender would be the enormous popularity of C.S. Lewis. I

think that they are very different kinds of persons who led very

different kinds of lives. They both were greatly shaped by the

English literary tradition, both of them were excellent writers,

and both of them wrote out of very deep experience. 2

Lawrence Cunningham

I

Separate Solitudes

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) and Thomas Merton (1915-1968) have tended to have different followers and devotees. Many are the articles, books, conferences and societies that hold high Lewis and the Inklings (and those like MacDonald, Chesterton, Barfield and others), but such a committed tribe often know little about Thomas Merton. Many are the conferences, learned journals, books and articles that celebrate the life and writings of Thomas Merton, but many in the Merton clan often know little about Lewis and friends. This essay will, hopefully, transcend such tribalism by examining and exploring both the thematic affinities between Lewis and Merton and, equally important, the explicit references both men make, in an appreciate manner, about one another.

Rowan Williams has published books on C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton and, in a sense, he points a positive way towards honouring, in a thoughtful and critical way, the contributions that Lewis and Merton have made to the Christian faith and life journey. ASilent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton (2011)and The Lion’s World: A Journey Into the Heart of Narnia (2012) are fine entrée level missives into the ethos and probing world of Lewis and Merton. In short, the time has come when the separate solitudes that Lewis and Merton have dwelt in (often appealing to different clans in the Christian family) needs to be overcome. Bridges need to be built between these Christian contemplatives, literary guides, ecclesial visionaries and public intellectuals. The further such a trail is taken, the fuller will be our understanding of Christianity in our remnants of the modern world and pressing challenges of the western post and postmodern world.

My first foray into comparing and contrasting the lives and writings of C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton was a short article, “C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton: Poetic Affinities”, in The Merton Journal: Journal of The Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain & Ireland (Advent 2010: Vol. 17, No. 2). There were virtually no essays at the time on Lewis and Merton, and my essay was but a key in the ignition primer on the topic.

There was much more I could have said then, but space/word count limited a fuller expansion on the topic. This article will be much longer, but again, it will be but a pointer—a book/thesis needs to be written on the topic that judiciously weighs the areas of affinity and differences (both in style and content) between Lewis and Merton. We take what steps we can and pass the torch onto others who will carry it further and lighten the world better.

II

Lewis, Modernity and Ad Fontes

The Enlightenment project that we have come to call Modernity has tended to fragment in three different directions: right of centre scientific rationalism, left of centre mythic romanticism and a via media synthesizing humanism. The form of the Enlightenment that has tended to dominate in many academic settings and the larger culture is right of centre scientific rationalism---such an approach to knowing and being favours the empirical, inductive, deductive and logical method, and the promise of such an approach is objective information and knowledge which can be verified or falsified using an experimental method. Such an approach has had a predictable tendency to disenchant the world, banish mystery and be committed to clear and distinct ideas. We can see the seeds of such a way of knowing in Late Medieval scholasticism, protestant confessionalism and, in a more fully developed form, the philosophical commitment of Descartes and Francis Bacon---the NovumOrganumScientiarum(1620)is a must read just as is Bacon’s scientific utopia, The New Atlantis(1627). Pascal had his clashes with Descartes, but the Pascalian way of knowing was subordinated to the Baconian---the right of centre form of the Enlightenment rose to the throne, spread out in an imperial way and manner and came to dominate and colonize other ways of knowing, including the romantic and humanist forms of the enlightenment. Lewis and Merton were born into such a reality, and, their faith journey, they grappled with and through such a method, paradigm and world view. There have been types of Christian apologetics that have attempted to prove the validity of the Christian faith within the premises of scientific rationalism, but Lewis and Merton were too wise and subtle to uncritically genuflect to such a one dimensional way of knowing.

Lewis was born in 1898, and the dominant philosophical mood at the time was scientific rationalism, logical positivism and hard facts. Lewis was drawn to such a way of knowing by one of his earliest teachers (William Kirkpatrick). Logic, logic and more logic was front and centre. The more Lewis was drawn into such a vortex, the more he came to see that logic both revealed and concealed much. Lewis was also a great lover of myth, including the myths of many of the great civilizations of the world. Myth gave him life, unfolded reality to him in a meaningful manner, but logic and sheer reason seemed to debunk the life giving qualities of myth. Much of Lewis’ struggles in his twenties were between which faculty within would he heed and hear: reason and logic or imagination and myth.

The drying up of Lewis’ life tended to occur the more he isolated and elevated reason and logic above imagination and myth. Lewis saw himself, when young, as a poet, and these tensions were painfully played out in his earliest poetic strivings: Spirits in Bondage (1919) and Dymer(1926) are poems not to miss in Lewis’ poetic and philosophical journey. There is a tension in these poems between the hope and possibilities opened up by myth and the cynicism and skepticism that reason often delivers. A close study of Spirits in Bondage and Dymerare must reads of Lewis to get a fix and feel for the young Lewis’ quest for deeper meaning, all the portals to such places being closed and his anger and frustration at being at such a crossroads----Loki Bound is also a foundational read of Lewis at this period of his life. Many are those who read the adult Lewis, but fewer have read the groping, doubting, probing poetic Lewis. A meditative read through Don King`s C.S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse (2001) is basic for getting a feel and fix for Lewis engaging both the appeal and limitations of scientific rationalism just as the more suggestive and less substantive missive by Roland Kawano, C.S. Lewis: Always a Poet (2004), is a pathway into the same poetic questing of Lewis.

I think it can be reasonably suggested that some of the conclusions Lewis reached about faith, Christianity and the notion of life beyond time in the 1920s were similar to the story telling and mythic vision of

the bestselling, controversial and contemporary work of Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials and his other works of fiction and non-fiction.

Lewis was at Oxford in the 1920s, and when at Oxford the positivist approach dominated the intellectual terrain. These were years in which Lewis both accepted the insights offered by logic but he also came to see that such an approach obscured and concealed many of his deeper longings and desires for meaning that myth delivered. The many paths and byways that Lewis took on such a pilgrimage were, as he came to see the depth and richness of Christianity, spelled out in an insightful but rather dry way in The Pilgrim`s Regress (1933). Lewis was, later in life, to acknowledge the inadequacies of the book, but it was his first attempt to clarify his philosophical journey to Christianity by tracking and tracing his way on attractive byways that did not hold his heart and head when day was done. The Pilgrim`s Regress, like Merton`s more popular, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), were, in time, seen as books by their authors as immature manifestos of their faith journey.

The fact that Lewis saw in significant aspects of the modern world passages closed off to meaning and purpose, to good news from a far country, meant a search to other periods of history when the portals between time and eternity were more transparent and lucid. This is what led Lewis to become a Medieval and Renaissance scholar---a turn, in short, to the ad fontesof the Classical and Christian faith. The problem with the right of centre way of modernity was its reductionism and narrowing, a negating of alternate ways of being and knowing---the Medieval and Renaissance way was more spacious and generous, open minded of heart and head, layered in ways of knowing and Biblical interpretation.

The publication of Allegory of Love (1936), A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama(1944) established Lewis as a Medieval-Renaissance scholar---his reflections on Spencer`s allegoricalThe Faerie Queene(the 16th century equivalent to Lord of the Rings) positioned Lewis well to dwell in the trying tension of reason, imagination and memory. But, it was Lewis` pilgrimage through the challenges of rational modernity that positioned him well to become a nuanced Christian apologist when at Oxford.

The Socratic Club at Oxford was started by Stella Aldwinkle, and Lewis was the main attraction from 1941-1954 (when he left for Cambridge). The Socratic Club was a rite of passage club to which Lewis invited many of the opponents of Christianity and agnostics to speak and argue their case. A list of the main speakers at the Socratic Club from 1942-1954 takes in most of the main doubters of the time---Lewis understood their concerns and reasons for keeping a distance from Christianity---he had been there, and he still had his ongoing questions about the faith journey. But, there was more to Lewis than merely the rational apologist. The fact he was steeped andsaturated in the Classical-Medieval-Renaissance tradition meant that the best of the Christian humanist way was at the centre and core of his thinking. There was more to knowing than merely the tensions and clashes between reason-imagination-memory—there was also the turn to the contemplative way of knowing and, deeper still, the transformation of the old dying self to the new and eternal self---these themes are played out subtly and wisely in Till We Have Faces, Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, Letters to Malcolm, The Great Divorce and his not to be missed or neglected space trilogy.

The posthumous publication of Lewis’ The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Macrobius, Pseudo-Dionysius and Boethius are important to note),and his timely and true to the mark essay on “Old Books” in Sister Penelope’s translation of Athanasius’ On The Incarnation,makes it abundantly clear why the past had yet much to reveal to the moderns who had concealed much by their single vision sleep. Lewis, after some confused offers for the chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge, gave the inaugural address Monday, 29 November 1954. There can be no doubting Lewis’ swipe at the modern project---he calls it “chronological snobbery”, and he sees himself as an “Intellectual dinosaur”---certainly the ad fontes commitment cannot be missed. Lewis made it clear that the English Renaissance was not (as some “progressives” made it appear) an enlightened break from the dark middle ages, but a thoughtful “Golden Period” that brought together the best of Western Christian thought and culture---such an approach was diametrically opposed to the notion of the secular and humanistic Renaissance that challenged a feeble Christianity. Lewis was convinced that it was these ancient wells that still had much health giving waters for the soul and society.

It was this turn to the more ancient vita contemplativaas a response and criticism of the western addiction to the vita activathat puts Lewis on the same page as Merton. Dixon has rightly suggested that Lewis` `Contemplative Verse` (chapter 7) is essential to understanding Lewis` approach to his unfolding faith and poetic vision. It is Lewis’ turn to the classical sources that takes him deeper than merely the contested differences between imagination, memory and reason as ways of knowing---the countercultural vita contemplativa, in an ethos dominated by the vita activa, deconstructs the thin pretensions of modernity and notions of the self and identity—what is fiction, what real, what is passing, what illusion, what diamond true and eternal, what dross, what gold in the deified self, what wheat and what chaff?---Lewis probed these issues deeper and further, and this was why his interest in the best of the Anglican, Roman Catholic and Orthodox way held him—the contemplative way, in such traditions, was the root of our new being from which the nutritious and life giving fruit of eternal life would emerge---takean ax to the contemplative roots, as modernity has, the fruit becomes insipid and thin. It is significant that one of Lewis’ dearest friends, Gervase Mathew (with his brother, David), wrote the classic book, The Reformation and the Contemplative Life: A Study of the Conflict Between the Carthusians and the State (1934). It is also pertinent to note that in Lewis’ English Literature in the Sixteenth Century that Francis Bacon is often targeted as a thinker/activist that created, in a thoughtful and dominant way, a scientific method that reduced nature to a thing (object) that could and should be probed and examined to draw out her secrets. The more receptive, attuned and attentive contemplative way was marginalized by Bacon (and his followers) in their quest to know and, in time, dominate nature. Lewis realized, only too keenly, that neither the depth of Nature, God or Humans would be revealed or unconcealed in such a rapacious manner. It was in the contemplative way that openings and clearings occurred, and silence and stillness, inward purity of heart, grace and love unlocked the door into the deeper joy and longings (sehnsucht) of the soul.

III

Merton, Modernity and Ad Fontes

Already there are some who unabashedly compare Merton

to the Fathers of the Church. In fact, this comparison is not

far fetched. It is simply an expression of the significance of

what this compulsive writer from silence had to say, and a

statement of his promise for the future. 3

Victor Kramer

There has been a turn in the last twenty plus years by the moderate and thoughtful evangelical and reformed family to an older and deeper way that existed before the reformation. The renovareand resourcementmovements, in their different ways, reflect and embody such a turn. But, before such a turn, Lewis and Merton were drinking from the ancient wells and pointing others to such sacred historic sites. This was not a nostalgic and sentimental turn to the past---this was much more a visiting those places and portals where deeper truths for the soul, church and societycould be seen and lived in a cleaner and clearer way and manner.

Merton was born in 1915, and he had many an affinity with Lewis, although he was much more the artistic and intuitive contemplative than Lewis. Merton never felt an overweening need to enter the rationalist Christian apologetic way that Lewis did. This does not mean that Merton did not face, head on, the challenges of reason and science---he merely questioned the means by which reason and science were defined. Merton’s parents were artists and Merton, in many ways, was very much the artist and poet in a way Lewis never was. But, before we reach Merton’s contemplative vocation, let us begin at the beginning.