Thomas Merton's Dark Path

I
What Is Contemplation
A small booklet, What Is Contemplation, represents Merton's first attempt to put into writing what he had read, studied, and experienced about contemplation in his early years as a monk. Written in 1948,6 six or seven years after his entrance into the monastery of Gethsemani, it deals with traditional material on the contemplative life and shows how thoroughly he had absorbed the Western Christian tradition about contemplation. He scarcely breaks new ground on the subject, as he draws his material from the Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas, and writers on the mystical life like his Cistercian Father, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and especially St. John of the Cross.
The booklet is divided into nine sections (numbers added): (1) What Is Contemplation; (2) The Promises of Christ; (3) St. Thomas Aquinas; (4) Kinds of Contemplation; (5) Infused Contemplation; (6) The Test; (7) What to Do; (8) The Danger of Quietism; (9) Prayer. I propose to discuss it in terms of three basic topics that I believe summarize the main content and thrust of the work; namely, the call to contemplation; the two kinds of contemplation; and the three kinds of Christians. The discussion of these three topics will be followed by a brief reflection on the contribution this work makes toward clarifying Merton's understanding of contemplation in his early years in the monastery and also toward indicating directions in which his thought on contemplation might be expected to move.
Merton begins his booklet with a lament that so many Christians have practically no knowledge of God's immense love for them and the power of that love to make them happy. These people do not realize that the gift of contemplation, which is the deepest experience of God's love, is not "something strange and esoteric reserved for a small class of almost unnatural beings and prohibited to everyone else." They do not see that it is the work of the Holy Spirit whose gifts are part of the normal equipment given to all Christians in baptism--gifts that presumably God gives because he wishes them to be developed. Merton's answer, therefore, to the question "Who can desire the gift of infused contemplation?" is: Everyone.
He finds justification for the claim that everyone is called to infused contemplation in the words of Jesus at the Last Supper, in which He promises union with God to the disciples and through them to us. Jesus said that He would send the Holy Spirit to us and that He and the Father would love us and come to abide with us. The abiding presence of God that Jesus promises is in a very true sense an experience ofheavenly beatitude on earth. For the knowledge and love of God that comes from the abiding presence of the Trinity within us is "essentially the same beatitude as the blessed enjoy in heaven."
Thus, Merton says, the seeds of perfect union with God --the seeds of contemplation7 and sanctity--are planted in every Christian soul at baptism. But it is a sad fact that in thousands of Christians these seeds lie dormant; they never grow. The reason is that so many Christians do not really desire to know God. They are content to remain "surface Christians" whose religious life is largely restricted to external practices. Because they lack any real desire to know God, He will never manifest Himself to them.
Merton quotes St. Thomas Aquinas on the absolute necessity of the desire to know God as a prerequisite for a true life of contemplation. In his commentary on the fourteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel, St. Thomas says: "Spiritualia non accipiuntur nisi desiderata." But he also adds: "nec desiderata nisi aliqualiter cognita." This is to say that there can be no desire for union with God, unless, in some measure at least, one has begun to experience such union. The paradox of the spiritual life is that you cannot know God unless you desire Him, yet at the same time you cannot really desire Him unless, to some degree at least, you have already come to know Him. One cannot have an appetite for a particular food unless he has first tasted it; so one cannot have the desire for God unless he has first in some way tasted the joy of His presence. As Merton puts it: "The only way to find out anything about the joys of contemplation is by experience. We must taste and see that the Lord is sweet."
How do we acquire a taste for the things of the spirit? The only way is love. Jesus makes it clear that the interior life depends on love, when He says in the discourse at the Last Supper:
If you love me ... I will ask the Father and He will give you another paraclete ... He that loveth me shall be loved of my Father and I will love him and manifest myself to him.
The love Jesus is talking about is not primarily feeling or sentiment; it is love at its deepest level, namely, loving obedience to His word. "If anyone loves me he will keep my word." St. Thomas puts it clearly and simply: "It is obedience that makes a man fit to see God."
Thus, desire based on some experience of love, love feeding desire and leading toward union, together with total uncompromising obedience to the will of Jesus--these are the dispositions needed in order to respond to the invitation, issued at baptism, to achieve union with God in the experience of contemplation.
After discussing the call to contemplation (pp. 3-9), Merton devotes the rest of his booklet (pp. 9-25) to an explanation of what contemplation is. He makes it clear that there is only one kind of contemplation in its strict and correct sense; namely, infused or pure or passive contemplation. This is a gift of God that we simply cannot achieve by our own efforts; it is a pure gift of God that involves a direct and experimental contact with God as He is in himself. It means emptying oneself of every created love to be filled with the love of God. It means going beyond all created images to receive the simple light of God's substantial presence.
There is a second type of prayer, analogous to infused contemplation, which Merton, following the tradition of Western mystical literature, calls active contemplation. Active contemplation, which is something that anyone canachieve by cooperating with God's ordinary grace, means a number of things to Merton. It is not restricted to a particular exercise or a single type of experience. It includes the use of reason, imagination, and the affections of the will. It draws on the resources of theology, philosophy, art, and music. It may involve vocal prayer, meditation, or affective prayer. It introduces a person to the joys of the interior life, showing him how to seek God in His will and how to be attentive to His presence. It builds in him the desire to please God rather than to enjoy the satisfactions of the world. It leads toward love and toward union with God in love.
The highest expression of active contemplation is the liturgy, which, with its rich fare of scripture, theology, music, art, and poetry, teaches one to be contemplative. Indeed, it may become the point of transition from active to passive contemplation. For, in the liturgy, Christ draws us to Himself. But Christ is, quite literally, the "embodiment" of contemplation, since His humanity is perfectly united to the Godhead. Hence, by drawing us to Himself, inevitably He draws us toward union with the Godhead and, therefore, toward infused contemplation.8
What makes active contemplation similar to infused contemplation is that the goal of both is union with God in love. What differentiates the two is that active contemplation is union with God in the liturgy of the Church or in the activities of one's life, whereas infused contemplation is union with God as He is in Himself. One way, perhaps, of expressing Merton's thought is to distinguish the immanence of God from His transcendence. The immanence ofGod is His presence in all reality; the transcendence of God is His very Being, as He is in Himself. In infused contemplation, one experiences both; in active contemplation, one ordinarily experiences only the first.
Infused contemplation, therefore, because it involves experiencing God as He is in Himself, is contemplation in the strictest sense of the terms, while active contemplation deserves the name of contemplation only by way of analogy. It must be pointed out, however, that the experience of the immanence of God in active contemplation can lead to a very deep love of God. Indeed, it could happen, in particular situations, that active contemplation could generate a deeper love of God than that achieved by some who may be pure contemplatives. "Such Christians as these," Merton says of those who live lives of active contemplation, "far from being excluded from perfection, may reach a higher degree of sanctity than others who have been apparently favored with a deeper interior life." Infused contemplation, while it is the experience of God at a deeper level, does not necessarily mean a deeper love for God than that which can be achieved in active contemplation.
It would seem correct to say that, in speaking of the interior life, Merton would distinguish three types of "practicing" Christians, namely (1) those who obey God but do not really love Him ("surface Christians"); (2) those who love God and are united with Him in the activities of their lives ("quasi-contemplatives");9 (3) those who love Godand experience Him as He is in Himself (pure contemplatives).
First of all, there are the "surface Christians," whose interior life, if indeed it may be called that at all, is "confined to a few routine exercises of piety and a few external acts of worship and service performed as a matter of duty." Their predominant symbol of God is that of One who rewards and punishes. They seek not Him but His rewards. Their spiritual goal in life is to achieve heaven and to avoid hell. They respect God as a Master; but their hearts belong not to Him, but to their own ambitions, cares, and concerns. They are not contemplative in any sense of the word; in no way do they taste the joys of union with God. They have no thought of seeking His presence. They willfully remain at a distance from Him. They live lives of divided allegiance, allowing God to maintain His rights over the substance of their souls, but with their thoughts and desires turned not toward Him but toward the world and external things. As far as experiencing God is concerned, they are in the same condition as men and women who refuse to acknowledge God at all.
Very different from "surface Christians" are those whom Merton describes as "quasi-contemplatives." These are Christians who truly love God and are united with Him in the activities of their lives. They serve God "with great purity of heart and perfect self-sacrifice in the active life." Their vocation to the active life does not allow them thesolitude and silence required for a life of infused contemplation; nor do their temperaments suit them for such a life. They would probably be uncomfortable if they gave up all activity for a life of solitude.
This does not mean that they cannot live interior lives or that the only alternative for them is a life of "surface Christianity." On the contrary, the promise of Christ that the three divine Persons will manifest themselves to all who love them is meant for them as well as for pure contemplatives. Though they may not be able to empty themselves of created things to lose themselves in God alone, as the pure contemplative tries to do, still they serve God with great purity of heart, expressed in fraternal charity, self-sacrifice, and total abandonment to God's will in all that they do and suffer. They serve God in His children on earth. They learn to find Him in their activities, living and working in His company, remaining in His presence and tasting the deep peaceful joy of that presence.
Their prayer life may be very ordinary, not rising above the level of vocal and affective prayer. Yet, because they are conscious of God's presence, their humble prayer may result in a deep interior life that brings them to the threshold of contemplation. Hence, though they are living active lives in the world, they may be called "quasi-contemplatives." They are not unfamiliar with graces akin to contemplation. Indeed, they may experience moments of true contemplation in their simple prayer life, in the liturgy, in the consciousness of God's presence in their lives as they go about fulfilling their daily responsibilities. They have fleeting moments, perhaps sometimes even prolonged periods of time, in which their intuition of oneness with God becomes a very vivid experience. Because of this union with God, immanent in their lives' activities, they may achieve a high degreeof sanctity--even, perhaps, higher than that of some who may have a genuine vocation to infused contemplation.
Besides the "surface Christians" and the "quasi-contemplatives," there is a third group of Christians who may be called pure contemplatives. It is about them and for them that What Is Contemplation is especially written. These pure contemplatives, who, Merton believes, will always be a small minority in the Christian community, are the people of the "desert," whose sole goal in life is to search for God and who find their sufficiency in Him alone. They live lives of solitude and silence in which they can empty themselves of all things outside of God, so that their emptiness can be filled with His transcendent presence. They alone are contemplatives in the strict sense. Merton writes: "In the strict sense of the word, contemplation is a supernatural Love and Knowledge of God, simple and obscure, infused by Him into the summit of the soul, giving it a direct and experimental contact with Him as He is in Himself."
Following the tradition of the Fathers of the Church, Merton stresses the purity of love that is at the heart of true contemplation. It is pure in that it empties the soul of all affection for things that are not God. It is pure in that it desires no reward, not even the reward of contemplation. This is to say that the reward of pure love is not something outside of love itself; it is simply the ability to love. In the words of St. Bernard of Clairvaux: "I love simply because I love and I love in order to love." Amo quia amo, amo ut amem (Serm. 83 in Cantica).
This disinterested love of God always brings peace and strength to the soul. Yet it would be a mistake to think "that infused contemplation is all sweetness and understanding and consolation and joy." There are times when the peace it brings is almost buried under pain and darkness andaridity. There are times when the strength it gives seems to be shrouded in an extreme sense of helplessness and incapacity.
The reasons for this darkness and helplessness are to be found in the very nature of the contemplative experience. For contemplation is the Light of God shining directly on the soul. But because the soul is weakened by Original Sin, the Light of God affects the soul the way the light of the sun affects a diseased eye. It causes pain. The soul, diseased by its own selfishness, is shocked and repelled by the purity of God's light. The brightness of this Light shatters the ideas of God that one has formed by his own reason. God as He is in Himself is not the God we imagined Him to be. It also shatters the ideas one has formed of himself; the flame of the divine light attacks a person's self-love and he no longer knows who he is before God.
Thus, "infused contemplation sooner or later brings with it a terrible revolution." The God we thought we had known is taken away from us and the mind is no longer able to think of Him. The joy of His presence is gone, because we no longer know Him who is present. We are not even sure that Anyone is present at all. The will that once loved God so ardently seems unable to love, because the object of love seems to have disappeared into impenetrable darkness. We no longer have Anyone even to pray to; hence, "gone is the sweetness of prayer. Meditation becomes impossible, even hateful." Liturgy turns into a boring exercise that appears to be without meaning. The ray of light becomes, for a time at least, "a ray of darkness": it seems to remove everything we have known and loved, while leaving nothing in its place. One experiences the deep meaning of St. John's words: "The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it" (John 1:5).
This is a crucial point in the life of prayer. For a personwants to depend on himself and make his own decisions, yet he finds himself called to wait for God to act. A person wants to know where he is going, yet he finds himself called to walk in emptiness with blind trust. A person wants to know at least that he is on the right path, yet he finds himself in a darkness that seems to deprive him of the certainty he once thought he had about God and about himself.
How can he know that he is on the right path, especially when he sees no path at all? How can he know whether this pain of separation from the God he once thought he knew is a real separation from God or the experience of a darkness wherein the true God is met more fully and deeply? How does he know whether what is happening to him is the beginning of infused contemplation or simply a growing distaste for the interior life that may signal an eventual return to a Christian life that is devoted largely to externals?
There are no easy answers to these questions; but the surest test that infused contemplation is beginning behind this cloud of darkness is "a powerful, mysterious and yet simple attraction which holds the soul prisoner in this darkness and obscurity." Although frustration is experienced, there is no desire to escape from the darkness and return to an easier stage of the spiritual life that preceded entrance into the darkness. At the same time, "there is a growing conviction that joy and peace and fulfillment are only to be found somewhere in this night of aridity and faith."
Then one day there is an illumination. The soul comes to realize that in this darkness it has truly found the living God. It is overwhelmed with the sense that He is present and that His love surrounds the soul on all sides and absorbs it. The darkness does not cease to be darkness, but,by the strangest of all paradoxes, it has become brighter than the brightest day. Life is transformed and there is only one thought and one love: GOD ALONE. The soul has been awakened. It has entered on what writers on the mystical life have called the illuminative way. Truly awakened to the reality of God, it is being drawn toward union with Him as He is in Himself.
How does one deal with this new experience? this awakening? this call to move from illumination to union with God? For help in answering this critical question, Merton turns to the writings of the great sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross. Drawing on The Dark Night, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, and The Spiritual Canticle, Merton offers several guidelines to help the awakened soul on the path toward contemplative union with God. These guidelines may be summarized as follows:10
1. First of all, it is important that you know what God is doing in your soul and accept it. His purpose is to bring you to "the threshold of an actual experimental contact with the living God." John of the Cross says that in this Dark Night
God secretly teaches the soul and instructs it in the perfection of love without its doing anything or understanding of what manner is this infused contemplation. (Dark Night II, v, 1)
If you realize what God is doing, you will not seek the very things God is trying to drive out of you; namely, the precise concepts you have had of Him and the sweetness and consolation you have experienced in prayer. You must know when to leave meditation and affections behind. God wants to replace these created experiences with His presence: Hewants to infuse into your soul His Light (to replace your concepts of Him) and His Love (to replace the consolations and sweetness you had heretofore been experiencing in prayer). Let God act! If you attempt by your own action to increase the precision of your knowledge of God or to intensify your feeling of love, you will interfere with His work.
2. Find solitude as much as you can. Live as much as possible in peace, quiet, and retirement. Do the tasks appointed to you as perfectly as you can with disinterested love, wanting only to please God. Do not strive for spectacular "experiences," such as you read about in the lives of the great mystics.
None of these graces (called gratis datae) can sanctify you nearly as well as this obscure and purifying light and love of God which is given you to no other end than to make you perfect in His love.
3. Do not be overanxious about your progress in prayer. "You have left the beaten track and are travelling by paths that cannot be chartered or measured." Let God take care of your prayer and your progress in it. Seek only to purify your love of God more and more. Seek only to abandon yourself more and more perfectly to His will.
4. Accept the trials and crosses that God sends you, even though they baffle you. Know that God is using them to form his image in you more and more perfectly.
5. Above all, realize that sanctity and pure contemplation are only to be found in the perfection of love.
The truly contemplative soul is not one that has the most exalted visions of the Divine Essence but the one who is most closely united to God in the purity of love and allows itself to be absorbed and transformed into Him by that love.
Let everything, pleasant or unpleasant, be a source and occasion of love. Merton quotes the celebrated passage from the Spiritual Canticle on the bee.
Even as the bee extracts from all plants the honey that is in them and has no use for them for aught else save for that purpose, even so the soul with great facility extracts the sweetness of love that is in all things that pass through it. IT LOVES GOD IN EACH OF THEM, WHETHER PLEASANT OR UNPLEASANT.
(Spiritual Canticle xxvii)
Such love leads to a holy indifference, the apatheia that the Fathers of the Church speak of, wherein the only thing that matters is to please the Beloved.
Merton concludes his "borrowings" from St. John of the Cross with a quotation from the Spiritual Canticle on the value of contemplation:
Let those that are great actives and think to girdle the world with their outward works take note that they would bring far more profit to the Church and be far more pleasing to God if they spent even half this time in abiding with God in prayer ... Of a surety they would accomplish more with one piece of work than they now do with a thousand and that with far less labor. (Spiritual Canticle xxix, 3)
What Is Contemplation leaves a number of questions unanswered, especially questions about the call to contemplation and the distinction between infused contemplation and active contemplation.
In the introduction Merton openly and with enthusiasm espouses the egalitarian view that all are called to contemplation. For all are given in baptism the gifts of the Holy Spirit that are intended by God to produce as their fruit the life of contemplation. "Why," Merton asks, "do we think of contemplation, infused contemplation, mystical prayer as something essentially strange and esoteric reserved for asmall class of almost unnatural beings and prohibited to everyone else?"
Yet further on he moves full-circle to an elitist view of contemplation: he states quite clearly that few will achieve it. "The great majority of Christians," he says, "will never become pure contemplatives on earth."
The discrepancy between these two perspectives he seems to resolve initially in terms of the desire for contemplation. He writes: "God often measures His gifts by our desire to receive them." This would seem to mean that the reason the majority of Christians never become pure contemplatives is that they lack the desire.
Yet later Merton appears to reduce the difference between pure contemplatives and "quasi-contemplatives," not to desire or its lack, but to a difference in life style. Pure contemplatives have the silence and solitude necessary for the true contemplative experience; "quasi-contemplatives" do not. Merton admits that the latter, because of purity of heart, "maintained by obedience, fraternal charity, self-sacrifice and perfect abandonment to God's will, may well achieve a greater sanctity than those who have been apparently favored with a deeper interior life." Certainly, therefore, these "quasi-contemplatives" have a desire for union with God. It would appear, therefore, that life style, rather than desire, is the practical determinant as to whether or not they can respond to the call to contemplation as a way of union with God.
If this is a correct reading of Merton's thought, it means that he is really saying that the call to infused contemplation, given theoretically to all, can in practice be responded to only in the monastic life or at most in a life style that reproduces the solitude and silence that characterize the monastic life.
While this interpretation of Merton's thought severelylimits the eligibility list for infused contemplation, it is not intended in any way to suggest that Merton saw the monastery as the only breeding ground for sanctity. Merton certainly believed that sanctity is something that all men and women can achieve, whatever their state in life. For sanctity is primarily a matter of love.
Would Merton, perhaps, have been better advised to suggest that the call to sanctity, rather than the call to infused contemplation, is given to all, but that infused contemplation as a way to sanctity is restricted to the few? Would it have been enough for him to say that infused contemplation is a special and unique way to sanctity, but that there is also another way: the way of active contemplation?
Yet, answering these questions in the affirmative would still leave unanswered a whole other series of questions:
1. Does union with God as He is in Himself (which is the goal of pure contemplation) produce of itself greater sanctity than union with God in the activities of one's life (which would ordinarily be the highest achievement possible to the "quasi-contemplative")?
2. How does union with God in His transcendent Being differ from union with God in the activities of one's life?
3. What does it mean to be united to God in the activities of one's life?
4. Can a person be united with God in the activities of his life without, in some measure at least, being united with God as He is in Himself?
5. Does the pure contemplative differ from the "quasi-contemplative," not in the sense that his union with God is different from that of the "quasi-contemplative," but simply in the sense that his experience of that union is different?
These questions, suggested but left unanswered by WhatIs Contemplation, may well be kept in mind, as we venture further into Merton's writings on the contemplative life.
One thing concerning What Is Contemplation about which there can be no question is Merton's appropriation of the "apophatic way," the way of night and darkness, as his preferred approach to describing the contemplative experience. He speaks of "the curtain of darkness," "the cloud of obscurity," "the cloud of darkness," "the night of aridity and faith," "the night of faith," "the power of an obscure love," "the ray of darkness."
Yet it is important to realize that for Merton the darkness of the apophatic way must be understood dialectically. It is one way of expressing the experience, but it never conveys the total experience. Thus it is darkness from our side (because the light of our faculties is put out), but not from God's side (for it is the very intensity of His light that causes the darkness). The darkness of the apophatic way is never complete and total darkness. That is why Merton speaks of the power of an obscure love. That is why he speaks of the ray of darkness, which is really a ray of light but so brilliant a light that it blinds us so as to leave room for the activity of God. That is why the love that is obscure is yet a love that has power. That is why the "ray of darkness" is still a ray. "The darkness remains as dark as ever and yet, somehow, it seems to have become brighter than the brightest day."
Merton's apophaticism will be developed in more detail in the discussion of his later works. This work sufficiently establishes him in the apophatic tradition.
Copyright © 1981, 1987 by William H. Shannon Previously unpublished Thomas Merton material copyright © 1981 by the Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust