The Courage for Truth: The Letters of Thomas Merton to Writers (The Thomas Merton letters series) [Hardcover]

Thomas Merton (Author), Christine M. Bochen (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1993 | Series: The Thomas Merton letters series

From 1948, when he wrote his first letters to Evelyn Waugh, who was editing The Seven Storey Mountain, until his death in 1968, Merton corresponded with writers around the world, developing an ever-widening circle of friends. Here collected in the fourth volume of Merton's correspondence are his letters to Czeslaw Milosz, Henry Miller, Walker Percy, Boris Pasternak, and others.

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Amazon.com Review

Though he lived in an enclosed order, Thomas Merton was the most sociable of monks by mail. His first letter in this ever-surprising volume is to Evelyn Waugh, who in 1948 was editing The Seven Storey Mountain for English publication. Recounting how his work runs a gantlet of religious censors before being further altered by his publishers, Merton adds, "And after about four years a book appears in print." Hence, he pleads, "I need criticism the way a man dying of thirst needs water." The paradoxes of his life are all here: his great faith, his frustration with earthly authority, his obligation to honesty, and his essential sophistication. This is the man who "read Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies over more than any other book except for Ulysses: I mean before coming here."

The Courage for Truth includes 20 years of Merton's correspondence with fellow writers, among them Czeslaw Milosz, Boris Pasternak, James Baldwin, and even Henry Miller. Over time Merton's order gave him increasing intellectual and political leeway--though never quite enough. In one letter, he assures Milosz: "You can say nothing about the Church that can shock me. If I stay with the Church it is out of a disillusioned love, and with a realization that I myself could not be happy outside, though I have no guarantee of being happy inside either. In effect, my 'happiness' does not depend on any institution or establishment. As for you, you are part of my 'Church' of friends who are in many ways more important to me than the institution."

From Publishers Weekly

Famed Trappist monk Thomas Merton corresponded with an extraordinary range of writers, among them Evelyn Waugh, Henry Miller, Jacques Maritain, Walker Percy and William Carlos Williams. He spoke out boldly against political oppression, social injustice, racism and nuclear weapons, and expressed solidarity with Boris Pasternak, Czeslaw Milosz and James Baldwin. His letters to Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal and to Argentine feminist Victoria Ocampo reflect his deep love of Latin American culture. Spanning the years from 1948 to Merton's death in 1968, this fourth volume of his correspondence shows the crystallization of his belief that speaking the truth is an obligation which ultimately brings persons of integrity into confrontation with power structures and vested interests. Highly articulate and quietly inspirational, these letters also testify to Merton's conviction that contemplation is the source from which all action should flow. Bochen is secretary of the International Thomas Merton Society.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 314 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st edition (August 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374130558
• ISBN-13: 978-0374130558
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,184,201 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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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This review is from: Courage For Truth: The Letters Of Thomas Merton To Writers (Paperback)

This is definitely not a Thomas Merton primer. It is the fourth in a series of collected correspondences, with this particular volume devoted to exchanges between the cloistered Catholic monk and man of letters [literally and figuratively] and a bevy of international writers, some famous, some obscure. It strikes me that this is a work for a rather limited readership. There is in truth very little exchanged in these letters about the art of writing per se and more about the meaning of the lives and trials of the writers themselves. Consequently, one would need to know a good deal about Merton for these letters to make sense, nor would it hurt to have a passing understanding of the place of Evelyn Waugh, Jacques Maritain, Ernesto Cardenal, Boris Pasternak, and Czeslaw Milosz, to cite some of the Merton correspondents.

Those who have read Merton's seven volume journal will not be surprised that these letters reveal to some degree Merton's double life: the loyal churchman who observes monastic rubrics to the letter while questioning the very credibility of visible church structure and its coziness with American pragmatism. There is a surprisingly lively exchange between Merton and the poet Clayton Eshleman, the one correspondent in this volume who seems to have put the monk on the defensive about his inner contradictions.

The majority of the letters are addressed to South American poets, particularly Ernesto Cardenal, who had been a novice under Merton at Gethsemanae. Merton, who experienced a religious conversion of sorts in Cuba before entering the Trappists, enjoyed a romantic ideal of life south of the United States, and his interest in Hispanic poetry and authors strikes the reader as part escapist and part anti-capitalist. One cannot help but smile at his frequently professed desire to join Cardenal's experimental island community, Our Lady of Solentiname, when in his journal he expresses near horror at the prospect of living in the jungle of South Carolina [Mepkin Abbey] where he would die among snakes and alligators.

Generally speaking, Merton's letters here serve three purposes. First, they allowed him to vent feelings and frustrations that the writer believed would be misunderstood or outright harmful if expressed in the context of his monastery. Or put another way, his literary correspondences proved to him that he was not swallowed whole by the monastic mystique. Second, Merton's correspondences to writers-many agnostic or of undefined religious persuasion-met his need to believe that his monastic secluded existence served some sort of spiritual and secular reform mission. As much as he denied it, Merton did indeed question the relevance of a purely solitary contemplative life in a powerful country, and he desperately needed to establish solidarity with those behind the Iron Curtain and under repressive political regimes. I believe Merton to be sincere in this regard, though on paper the sentiment appears fawning at times and he sounds like the classic Cadillac liberal.

And finally, Merton wrote letters to other writers because "Amazon.com" had not yet been invented. From his mountain hideaway Merton conducted a book and poetry exchange operation that actually provokes outright laughter. Consider that his mail was censored and sometimes withheld without his knowledge by superiors, that he wrote to countries with irregular postal service, that he did have access to several publishing houses, that some of his correspondents were as unfocused as he was, and that Xerox machines were not yet in general use. It is quite possible there are monks in heaven who can honestly claim that their life's work consisted of sealing envelopes and mimeographing for Father Louis. That one of Merton's monastery responsibilities included reforesting is truly a sign of God's sense of humor.