With seventy-five years of publishing under our belt, Notre Dame Press is proud to have a wide collection of impressive authors in our catalog. As part of our 75th anniversary celebration, we’re highlighting several of these authors and the important works that we’re proud to put on your shelves. Our next scholar of focus is Thomas Merton. A Trappist Monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani and a prolific writer, Merton was a prominent figure in conversations around interfaith understanding and general spirituality.
Merton had a devout belief in non-violence, a belief that he explores and expounds upon in his work Faith and Violence. The text is a deep theological consideration of war, and is as relevant today as it was in the late 1960s when it was originally published. Below is an excerpt from the text in Merton’s own words.
Theology today needs to focus carefully upon the crucial problem of violence. The commandment “Thou shalt not kill” is more than a mere matter of academic or senti mental interest in an age when man not only is more frustrated, more crowded, more subject to psychotic and hostile delusion than ever, but also has at his disposition an arsenal of weapons that make global suicide an easy possibility. But the so-called “nuclear umbrella” has not simplified matters in the least: it may ( at least temporarily) have caused the nuclear powers to reconsider their impulses to reduce one another to radioactive dust. But meanwhile “conventional” wars go on with unabated cruelty, and already more bombs have been exploded on Vietnam than were dropped in the whole of World War II. The population of the affluent world is nourished on a steady diet of brutal mythology and hallucination, kept at a constant pitch of high tension by a life that is intrinsically violent in that it forces a large part of the population to submit to an existence which is humanly intolerable. Hence murder, mugging, rape, crime, corruption. But it must be remembered that the crime that breaks out of the ghetto is only the fruit of a greater and more pervasive violence: the injustice which forces people to live in the ghetto in the first place. The problem of violence, then, is not the problem of a few rioters and rebels, but the problem of a whole social structure which is outwardly ordered and respectable, and inwardly ridden by psychopathic obsessions and delusions.
It is perfectly true that violence must at times be restrained by force: but a convenient mythology which simply legalizes the use of force by big criminals against little criminals-whose small-scale criminality is largely caused by the large-scale injustice under which they live-only perpetuates the disorder.
Pope John XXIII in Pacem in Terris quoted, with approval, a famous saying of St. Augustine: “What are kingdoms without justice but large bands of robbers?” The problem of violence today must be traced to its root: not the small-time murderers but the massively organized bands of murderers whose operations are global.
This book is concerned with the defense of the dignity and rights of man against the encroachments and brutality of massive power structures which threaten either to enslave him or to destroy him, while exploiting him in their conflicts with one another.
The Catholic moral theology of war has, especially since the Renaissance, concerned itself chiefly with casuistical discussion of how far the monarch or the sovereign state can justly make use of force. The historic context of this discussion was the struggle for a European balance of power, waged for absolute monarchs by small professional armies. In a new historical context we find not only a new struggle on a global scale between mammoth nuclear powers provided with arsenals capable of wiping out the human race, but also the emergence of scores of small nations in an undeveloped world that was until recently colonial. In this Third World we find not huge armed establishments but petty dictatorships (representing a rich minority) armed by the great powers, opposed by small, volunteer guerilla bands fighting for “the poor.” The Great Powers tend to intervene in these struggles, not so much by the threat and use of nuclear weapons ( with which however they continue to threaten one another) but with armies of draftees and with new experimental weapons which are sometimes incredibly savage and cruel and which are used mostly against helpless non-combatants. Although many Churchmen, moved apparently by force of habit, continue to issue mechanical blessings upon these draftees and upon the versatile applications of science to the art of killing, it is evident that this use of force does not become moral just because the government and the mass media have declared the cause to be patriotic. The cliche “My country right or wrong” does not provide a satisfactory theological answer to the moral problems raised by the intervention of American power in all parts of the Third World. And in fact the Second Vatican Council, following the encyclical of John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, has had some pertinent things to say about war in the nuclear era.
(excerpted from Chapter 1)