The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University

Citation of Books Detail

Click here to return to the main list

Author QuotedAeschylus
Title QuotedPrometheus Bound
Date (Year/Month/Day)1960/01/17
Imprint 
QuotationAfter dinner-read the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. Shattered by it. I do not know when I have read anything so stupendous and so completely contemporary. I felt like throwing away everything and reading nothing but Aeschylus for six months. Like discovering a mountain full of diamond mines. It is like Zen-like Dostoevsky-like existentialism-like Francis-like the New Testament. It is inconceivably rich. I consider this a great grace on the feast of St. Anthony! A great religious experience. Prometheus, archetypal representation of the suffering Christ. But we must go deep into this. Prometheus startles us by being more fully Christ than the Lord of our own cliches-I mean, he is free from all the falsifications and limitations of our hackneyed vision which has slowly emptied itself of reality.
Quotation SourceA Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk's True Life. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 3, 1952-1960.; Edited by Lawrence S. Cunningham. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1996, p. 370
Letter to 
Notes 
Link to Merton's Copy  

(If there is a link above showing up as a number, click it to open another window with a full text version.)