Thomas Merton's Dark Path: The Inner Experience of a Contemplative

By William H. Shannon

In the mystical tradition the "dark," or apophatic way has a long history. It is the way of John of the Cross, of Master Eckhart, of Juliana of Norwich, of the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and of Thomas Merton. This dark path of contemplation that Merton followed, wrote about extensively, and considered the focal point of his life is the subject of William H. Shannon's book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 1, 1987
• ISBN: 9781466801851

William H. Shannon

William H. Shannon is Professor Emeritus, at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York. He is the founding president of the International Thomas Merton Society, the general editor of the Thomas Merton letters, and coauthor of The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia with Christine Bochen and Patrick F. O'Connell. He is the author of the much acclaimed biography of Merton, Silent Lamp, as well as a number of books on spirituality, and has been published in many journals. He lives in Rochester, New York.

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A Prologue: Six Years Later

This book, published six years ago (in 1981), grew out of my conviction that some way should be found to bring to publication a typescript of Merton’s that he had indicated in his will should not be published. This typescript, called both The Inner Experience and The Dark Path, included material that Merton had worked on over a period of about ten years (roughly from 1949 to 1959). I felt that his only reason for not wanting it published was his desire to get back to it in order to revise it and perhaps bring parts of it up to date. He never found the time to do this.

Though it is quite true that there is material in this typescript that needs revision, I nonetheless believed that it also contained valuable and insightful material that would be cherished by Merton readers. In looking at the directive expressed in his will, I discovered that the prohibition was less than absolute. For Merton had not simply said it was not to be published, but that it was not to be published as a book. It seemed to me that he had clearly left the way open for a judicious selection of parts of The Inner Experience that could be published. I discussed this matter with the Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust. I proposed that selections from this unpublished work be placed in the context of an analysis of other works on the contemplative life that Merton had written both before and after his final (but never completed) efforts to revise The Inner Experience. As I mention in my Introduction, the Trustees graciously agreed to let me do a fairly detailed summary in my own words of the contents of The Inner Experience and then, in addition, a chapter of selections, with the proviso that these selections not exceed twenty percent of the typescript.

This is the basic content of this book: Merton’s writings on contemplation and, as a kind of centerpiece, the summary of and the selections from The Inner Experience. When I first wrote the manuscript, this content seemed to be appropriate. It would be helpful for Merton readers, I thought, to have together in one place a fairly generous summary of most everything Merton had written on contemplation. Many readers have expressed their appreciation to me for having done this.

In the five years since this book was published, I have had the fortunate privilege of being able to immerse myself in Merton studies, most particularly in the editing of the first volume of his letters, The Hidden Ground of Love. The deeper knowledge of Merton and his writings which this concentrated study has enabled me to acquire has brought with it a certain uneasiness about the book I wrote six years ago. It arises not from any desire to retract anything I said then (I am quite willing to stand by what is there) but from a deeply felt realization that I had not gone far enough. I had tried to answer the question: "What did contemplation mean to Thomas Merton? Where I had failed the reader was in not even asking the question: Where did contemplation lead him?" In the past six years I have come to realize that it is inadequate, even inaccurate, to isolate what Merton had to say about contemplation from the deep need he experienced, especially in the late fifties and in the sixties, of assuming his share of responsibility for the social problems of the world in which he lived.

To put it briefly, what I have come to realize is that the man who in the forties had left the world in order to become a contemplative had, by the sixties, returned to the world precisely because he had become a contemplative. He returned to the world not by leaving the monastery but by becoming involved in his own way in the social issues that occupied American society at that time—and still do. Such involvement, he came to understand, was not a betrayal of his monastic and contemplative vocation, but rather its fulfillment.

I am quite willing, then, to confess that in the first edition of this book I failed to lead the reader to an understanding of the involvement that contemplation demands. I am not willing, however, to assume all the blame for this failure. I want to place at least some of it on Merton, for it was only gradually that he came to realize that contemplation of necessity summons one to action. This was hardly Merton’s earliest understanding. In his best-selling autobiography and in other earlier works, he made it quite clear that he had left the world—and for good. In the best tradition of the fathers of the desert, he was fleeing from the world that he might give his whole life to the search for God. In The Seven Storey Mountain, in a passage that was probably written in 1947, he addresses God in one of those many prayers that thread their way through his conversion story: "I desire to be lost to all created things, to die to them and to the knowledge of them. For I know that it is only by leaving them that I can come to you" (SSM, 421; italics added). These are the words of a young man in deadly earnest. He does not want to belong to the world. He wants nothing that the world can offer. He wants only God; and to find Him, it was necessary—so he thought at the time—that he completely abandon the world.

Fourteen years later (1961, October) in the pages of a pacifist newspaper, The Catholic Worker, the same man is writing—with passion and a sense of indignation—that the one task God imposes on us in our day is to work for the total abolition of war. Christians, he says, must become active, with every ounce of concern, in leading the way toward a non-violent solution: they must mobilize all their resources for the fight against war. Every other responsibility to which we are called is secondary in importance.

This sense of social responsibility, so clearly expressed in 1961 but whose roots are considerably earlier than that date, continued to grow. Writing three months later to a cloistered Brazilian nun, he expresses the need for human solidarity with people all over the world in facing not just our own problems but those of all the world:

The problems of our times are very great … People seem exhausted with the labor of coping with the complications of this world in which we live. Yet it is absolutely necessary that we do so. We have got to take responsibility for it, we have got to solve the problems of our own countries, while at the same time recognizing our higher responsibility to the whole human race. (The Hidden Ground of Love, 186–87)

What happened during those fourteen years to change Thomas Merton from a world-denying ascetic to a man well ahead of his times in grasping the responsibility of Christians to grapple with the social issues of the day? The answer, of course, is that quite a number of things happened to him. The most important, I believe, is that he became a true contemplative. The more deeply he entered into the contemplative experience, the more he was pushed in a direction he could never have dreamed of when in 1941 he had left the world behind and entered the monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani with the hope of becoming a contemplative.

The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." So often, people seem content to live with a God who is an abstraction or even perhaps a projection of their own needs, fears, or desires. In genuine contemplation one meets the living God bare-handed, without gloves on, so to speak. The experience can be fearful, even dangerous. For it turns our world inside out and upside down. Contemplation transforms our consciousness and forces us to see reality in a new and totally different light. It gives you a sense of oneness not only with God but with the whole of reality that exists only because it is grounded in Him. That sense of oneness begets all sorts of responsibilities. Life can never be the same again.

Merton’s contemplative experience taught him that one cannot find God apart from the rest of reality. For the world that God made—especially the world of people—while distinct from God, is nevertheless not separate from Him. God is the hidden ground of love in all things. How could a thing—anything or anyone—be separate from that in which it is grounded? Thus, in finding the One, Merton found the Many. He found his sisters and brothers—and he found them in God. He realized that he was not in the monastery to escape people but to be there for them. What did it mean to be there for them? Merton spent much of the last years of his life pondering the answers to that question. He never answered it fully to his own satisfaction, but he knew that for him it was the right question. For if one really listens to God in contemplation, one hears the cries of people. On June 25, 1963, Merton wrote to Daniel Berrigan:

What is the contemplative life if one does not listen to God in it? What is the contemplative life if one becomes oblivious of the rights of men [and women] and the truth of God in the world and in His Church?

That was 1963. By that time this sense of oneness begetting responsibility was an abiding, irreversible stance in his life. Obviously it was an intuition whose full implications dawned only gradually upon him, as his maturing prayer-life continued to distance him from the overexuberant flight from the world that had defined his initial entrance into the monastery. This ripening intuition was given classical expression in what has been described as the Vision of Louisville.

On March 18, 1958, Merton was in Louisville on an errand in connection with the printing of a new postulants’ guide. Standing at the corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets, he had an experience which may well be described as mystical. He saw the crowd of people hurrying about the shopping district and was overwhelmed with a realization that he loved all these people and that they were neither alien to nor separate from him. The experience challenged the concept of a separate holy existence that made him, because he was a monk, different from all of them. He experienced the glorious destiny that comes simply from being a human person and from being united with, not separated from, the rest of the human race.

Merton wrote about this experience twice: first in his Journal on March 19 (St. Joseph’s feast), the day after it occurred, and secondly on September 20, 1965, as part of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. The Conjectures passage, written more than seven years later, was a considerable expansion of, and an enthusiastic reflection on, the much more sober Journal entry. Michael Mott in his biography of Merton (p. 311 fl.) suggests that the Journal entry captures the experience more concretely, whereas the Conjectures version seems to distance Merton from the people he is writing about. Yet there is, I think, another way of looking at these two versions. We do not always understand fully the significance in our lives of an experience, as we are undergoing it or even immediately afterwards. Hence, while the passage in Conjectures is indeed a later reflection and even something of a flight of poetic fancy, it may also be read as a drawing out of the broader implications of an experience whose meaning and significance grew as Merton reflected upon it. After it, his life did move in new directions to which the experience pointed, even though such directions may not have been entirely clear at the time. Moreover, the year 1958 was, I believe, a decisive year in Merton’s life (significant as, among other things, the year he wrote to Pasternak in Russia and Pablo Antonio Cuadra in Nicaragua, the year of many conversations with Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan novice at Gethsemani, the year of early ecumenical encounters, and the year of the election of Pope John XXIII). The Louisville Vision, therefore, was not an isolated experience, but one event on a trajectory of experiences that were almost inevitably thrusting him toward greater involvement in the social needs of the world of this time in his life. I might add, in passing, that this movement toward deeper involvement in social issues may help to explain why Merton’s efforts to revise The Inner Experience were not brought to successful completion in 1959 and why he never got back to it again. It is in this context of a growth toward maturity in grasping social responsibility that I should like to quote the Conjectures passage, remembering that it postdates the experience by a number of years, yet seeing it as an interpretation that later insight brought to that experience.

It is noteworthy that it takes place not in his monastic cell or in the monastic church, not even in the woods on the monastery grounds, but in the center of a shopping district at the corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets in the city of Louisville. (Occasionally, overly ardent disciples of Merton, when they are in Louisville, go in search of that corner in the hope that they, too, may have a mystical experience! Alas, they are doomed to disappointment: that corner can no longer be found. It is now Fourth and Muhammad Ali Streets!) Here are Merton’s words:

I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs … It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. (156)

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference, he goes on to say, was such a relief and such a joy that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: ‘Thank God that I am like other men [and women].’ His reflection on the experience, whether explicit or not at the time, enabled him to see that in some mysterious way his monastic solitude belonged to all these people.

I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone they are not they, but my own self. There are no strangers! (158)

He continues his reflection on the splendor of it all:

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts, where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more greed. (158)

Merton goes on in this passage to speak of that hidden core in each of us as the point vierge, the point of light that is at the center of our being and is like a pure diamond blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, he says, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely …

This moving word-picture of billions of points of light coming together in a blazing fiery unity recalls an experience I had several years ago (if I may be allowed a personal reminiscence), while making a retreat at what had been Merton’s hermitage in the woods of Gethsemani. One evening, as I sat for a long time on the porch of the hermitage, it grew dark and the fireflies, so it seemed, began putting on an entertainment for me. There seemed to be hundreds or even thousands of them in the valley. One would light up here, and then another there. The thought came to me: What if they all lit up at once? The whole valley would be a blaze of fiery light. And I remembered Merton’s words about those points of light in each of us and how if they could all come together in unity the darkness and cruelty of life would vanish. And yet my parallel is not entirely apt, since it can be said that we do not really come together in unity. The unity is there: we have to come to recognize it. As Merton said at Calcutta in October 1968: We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are (Asian Journal, 308).

It is one thing to arrive at a new insight, another thing to translate that insight into action. If Merton’s return to the world was rooted in his contemplation and the sense of unity it begot, the manner of that return was shaped by the historical circumstances in which he found himself and also by the people who became, in one way or another, associated with his life. In other words, if it was inner forces that expanded his consciousness of what his responsibilities were, it was external and historical forces (many of them seeming to converge in the late 1950s, and especially, as I have suggested, the year 1958) that helped him to identify concretely what those responsibilities entailed and what they called him to do. The equation is this: coming to know God means coming to know people and coming to know people means getting involved in history at a particular point in time.

Each period of history has its own lights and shadows. Merton felt keenly that the period of history in which he lived was a time of gigantic shadows. He identifies the shadows of his own time in a statement which links awareness of responsibilities with the concreteness of historical reality. The statement, though written in 1966, articulates an insight that had been his at least since the late fifties:

That I should have been born in 1915, that I should be the contemporary of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Watts riots, are things about which I was not first consulted. Yet they are also events in which, whether I like it or not, I am deeply and personally involved. (Contemplation in a World of Action, 161)

What that deep and personal involvement called him to was not always immediately apparent to him. Of one thing he was sure: the social needs of the time and his duties toward them would no longer allow him, as he himself expressed it in a letter to Pope John XXIII, to lock myself into solitude and lose all contact with the rest of the world (HGL, 482). Yet he was equally certain, as he makes clear in his rapier-sharing correspondence with Rosemary Radford Ruether, that he was not called physically to leave the monastery to struggle with what she called, in one of her letters to him, the dehumanizing forces in the city of man. Whatever appealing arguments there might be to the contrary, Merton knew that the monastery was the place where God willed him to be. He wrote to Ruether of his genuine realization that this is my vocation, even though he admits that as yet he had not quite found the way of being really true to it (HGL, 509). Still, he is quite clear about wanting to stay in the bushes, provided I can make some sort of noises that will reach my off-beat friends (HGL, 511). These words were written in May 1967, but they articulated a commitment that had long been ripening within Thomas Merton. In fact, nine years earlier, in his congratulatory letter to Pope John XXIII on the occasion of the latter’s election to the papal office, Merton had expressed the same conviction in less casual fashion to the Pope. The off-beat friends were at that time the many intellectuals everywhere in the world; and the noises were his writings which expressed understanding and sympathy with the terrible problems these people have to face. I have to think, he writes to the Pope, in terms of a contemplative grasp of the political, intellectual, artistic and social movements in this world. While there is an apostolic value in prayer and penance, there is yet more required of him: a sympathy for the honest aspirations of so many intellectuals everywhere in the world and the terrible problems they have to face.

The noises that Merton uttered in his many writings on social issues and the contacts he made with a wide circle of intellectuals from various parts of the world are not the subject of this book or, specifically, of this Prologue. What the Prologue is intended to make clear, however, is that these noises and contacts must be seen as the fruit of Merton’s contemplation. I hope that pointing this out with some emphasis in this revised edition of Thomas Merton’s Dark Path will in some degree at least make amends for my failure, in the first edition, to stress clearly the link between contemplation and action in the world and in history.

There is yet another addition I should like to make to the earlier version of this book. In Chapter VIII I have pointed out the influence of Zen on Thomas Merton’s thinking, and said something about his appreciation of the value of interreligious dialogue. I want, in this Prologue, to indicate in a very brief way the new perspective toward which this interreligious dialogue was leading him: a perspective I feel sure he would have continued to pursue, had it not been for his untimely death on December 10, 1968. What I refer to is what Merton describes as the final and complete maturing of the human psyche on a transcultural level (CWA,