As part of our 75th anniversary celebration, we’re highlighting several of the incredible authors on our lists and the important works that we’re proud to put on your shelves. We’re continuing our focus on monk, scholar, and writer Thomas Merton with another one of his impactful titles.
Published thirty years after Faith and Violence, Merton’s Contemplation in a World of Action focuses not on soldiers and their actions, but on men of god and monks. The text focuses on self-discovery and self-reflection, looking into the role of monks in modern society and how their work can benefit us all. Below is an excerpt from the text in Merton’s own words.
The monk is (at least ideally) a man who has responded to an authentic call of God to a life of freedom and detachment, a “desert life” outside normal social structures. He is liberated from certain particular concerns in order that he may belong entirely to God. His life is one dedicated completely to love, the love of God and man, but a love that is not determined by the requirements of a special task. The monk is, or should be, a Christian who is mature enough ,and decided enough to live without the support and consolation of family, job, ambition, social position or even active mission in the apostolate. He is also mature enough and determined enough to use this freedom for one thing only: the love and praise of God and the love of other men. He is mature and free enough to exercise a love of other men that is not confined to this or that apostolic routine, this or that particular form of work.
The monk is not defined by his tasks, his usefulness. In a certain sense he is supposed to be “useless” because his mission is not to do this or that job but to be a man of God. He does not live in order to exercise a specific function: his business is life itself. This means that monasticism aims at the cultivation of a certain quality of life, a level of awareness, a depth of consciousness, an area of transcendence and of adoration which are not usually possible in an active secular existence. This does not imply that the secular level is entirely god less and reprobate, or that there can be no real awareness of God in the world. Nor does it mean that worldly life is to be considered wicked or even inferior. But it does mean that more immersion and total absorption in worldly business end by robbing one of a certain necessary perspective. The monk seeks to be free from what William Faulkner called “the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing” which is the essence of “worldliness” everywhere.
Teilhard de Chardin has developed a remarkable mystique of secularity which is certainly necessary for our time when the vast majority of men have no choice but to seek and find God in the busy world. But where did Teilhard acquire this perspective? In the deserts of Asia, in vast solitudes which were in many ways more “monastic” than the cloisters of our monastic institutions. So too Bonhoeffer, regarded as an opponent of all that monasticism stands for, himself realized the need for certain “monastic” conditions in order to maintain a true perspective in and on the world. He developed these ideas when he was awaiting his execution in a Nazi prison.
What the monastic life should provide, then, is a special awareness and perspective, an authentic understanding of God’s presence in the world and his intentions for man. A merely fictitious and abstract isolation does not provide this awareness. The symbol of medieval monasticism is the wall and the cloister. Instead of merely being self-enclosed, the modern monk might perhaps emulate Teil hard in the desert of Mongolia or Bonhoeffer in prison. These are more primitive and more authentic examples of what a charismatic solitude can mean!
The need for a certain distance from the world does not make the monk love the world less. Nor does it imply that he never has any contact with the outside world. Certainly the monastic community has the right and duty to create a certain solitude for the monks: it is no sin to live a silent life. But at the same time the monastic community owes other men a share in that quiet and that solitude. Obviously the balance must be very delicate, for quiet and solitude are destroyed by the movement of crowds. But the fact remains all the more true: the monk has a quiet, relatively isolated existence in which it is possible to concentrate more on the quality of life and its mystery and, thus, to escape in some measure from the senseless tyranny of quantity.
(excerpted from Chapter 1)