| Date | Author | Title | Source | Quotation by Merton |
| 1941/11/27 | Lewis Mumford | Culture of Cities |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 456
| Or do I want to go to Gethsemani because it is a perfect society, even in the natural order? Is it because last night, reading Mumford's Culture of Cities I got very depressed with the rottenness of New York? I think that made me want to be in Harlem, though-the most desperate of all places, to preach God! |
| 1959/09/18 | Paul Evdokimov | femme et le salut du monde : etude d'anthropologie chretienne sur les charismes de la femme / Paul Evdokimov |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 330
| Have been reading a marvelous book of theology by the Orthodox Father Paul Evdokimov who teaches at Saint Serge in Paris. It is called La femme et le salut du monde [The Feminine and the Salvation of the World] but is in reality a whole survey of Sophianic theology. Marvelous and exciting perspectives. Here is a real theologian-one of the few. But one thing helps and encourages me above all. This line: "Reconnaître le Christ même en ceux qui en apparence luttent contre Lui, mais en realite se revoltent contre des conceptions et des valeurs faussement Chretiennes, n'estce pas là un acte Chretien des plus urgents?" ["To recognize Christ Himself in those who by appearance struggle against Him, when in reality they struggle against ideas and values which are falsely called Christian, is that not an urgent Christian task?" p. 126.] |
| 1959/11/04 | Claude Tresmontant | Doctrine morale des prophètes d'Israel |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 340
| "Les camps de concentration, les massacres, les tortures"¦nous rappelent queue est l'essence du paganisme: Le mepris de l'homme que l'on sacrifie sans pitie aux mythes et aux interêts." ["Concentration camps, massacres, tortures"¦reveal to us the essence of paganism: contempt for human beings who are sacrificed without pity for the sake of myths and ideologies."] Tresmontant. p. 125. De Rougemont traces personalism to the Council of Nicea. The concept yes. Tresmontant is right in showing how the Old Testament is in reality the first great charter of human rights-in opposition to all the other religious codes for which the individual does not count. But is this exaggerated? What about Confucius? Aman-enope? |
| 1959/11/04 | Denis Rougement | Western Quest: the Principles of Civilization |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 340
| "Les camps de concentration, les massacres, les tortures"¦nous rappelent queue est l'essence du paganisme: Le mepris de l'homme que l'on sacrifie sans pitie aux mythes et aux interêts." ["Concentration camps, massacres, tortures"¦reveal to us the essence of paganism: contempt for human beings who are sacrificed without pity for the sake of myths and ideologies."] Tresmontant. p. 125. De Rougemont traces personalism to the Council of Nicea. The concept yes. Tresmontant is right in showing how the Old Testament is in reality the first great charter of human rights-in opposition to all the other religious codes for which the individual does not count. But is this exaggerated? What about Confucius? Aman-enope? |
| 1959/11/08 | Claude Tresmontant | Doctrine morale des prophètes d'Israel |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 341
| Yet of what Laurens Van der Post says about the Bushmen. Tribal morality degenerated into collective immorality.T. says very convincingly that perhaps original sin is not sin which society inherited from one individual, but sin which each individual contracts from society (Adam = man in the collective sense). Very important idea that one must break with the exterior, "tribal," mechanical and collective society to which one is passively subject, and isolate oneself in order to be actively united in a spiritual community which transcends national, social, and especially tribal limitations. |
| 1959/11/08 | Laurens Post, Van Der | Lost World of the Kalahari |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 341
| Yet of what Laurens Van der Post says about the Bushmen. Tribal morality degenerated into collective immorality.T. says very convincingly that perhaps original sin is not sin which society inherited from one individual, but sin which each individual contracts from society (Adam = man in the collective sense). Very important idea that one must break with the exterior, "tribal," mechanical and collective society to which one is passively subject, and isolate oneself in order to be actively united in a spiritual community which transcends national, social, and especially tribal limitations. |
| 1959/11/10 | Claude Tresmontant | Doctrine morale des prophètes d'Israel |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 341
| Finished De Rougemont and Tresmontant, two fine books, especially the latter. |
| 1959/11/10 | Denis Rougement | Western Quest: the Principles of Civilization |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 341
| Finished De Rougemont and Tresmontant, two fine books, especially the latter. |
| 1959/12/31 | Paul Radin | Primitive Man as Philosopher |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 364
| Interesting book by Paul Radin on Philosophy of Primitive Man. Also Merleau-Ponty and Cornford on the early Greek philosophers. |
| 1961/08/27 | Mircea Eliade | Mythes, rêves et mystères. English. Myths, dreams, and mysteries : the encounter between contemporary faiths and archaic realities / Mircea Eliade ; transl. by Philip Mairet |
Ltrs: HGL p. 131
| I have been reading a really remarkable book on Eckhart, by Vladimir Lossky, in French. It is very difficult in parts but it is one of the finest studies on the Meister. I highly recommend it. Published by Vrin. It is unfinished, as Lossky died. He was a great man, wrote a very fine book on the mystical theology of the Oriental Church which you should know. Also I just finished Mircea Eliade's Myths, Dreams and Mysteries. This too is very rich. He refers incidentally to Ananda and in the final pages has some very good things on Maya "¦ |
| 1962/08/30 | Joseph Campbell | Symbol without Meaning |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 240-41
| Interesting hypothesis of Joseph Campbell in Eranos Jahrbuch XXVI, p. 430 ff. That the mandala appears at end of hunting societies. Because in the primitive bushman type society the individual has in himself all he needs, he knows the whole culture, and is not a fraction of his society. Where agricultural society comes into being, the individual has a specialized function, is a fragment, and is under stress until he can "realiz" his relationship to the whole. He does this by means of symbols. This agricultural society goes back 8,000 years, while man has been on earth for 600,000 years. And we are now entering an industrial age (since 200 years!!) in which symbols of agricultural society break down. The highest concern of all mythologies and ceremonials, ethical systems etc. has been to suppress manifestations of individualism, "by compelling or persuading people to identify themselves not with their own interests, intuitions or modes of experience but with archetypes of behavior and systems of sentiment developed and maintained in the public domain." p 448 .... |
| 1963/07/19 | Johan Huizinga | Homo ludens : a study of the play-element in culture |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 166
| The following are the questions, with Merton's answers: 1. Name the last three books you have read. The Platform Scripture of Hui Neng, translated by Wing Tsit Chen The Proslogion by St. Anselm of Canterbury A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley 2. Name the books you are reading now. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture by John Huizinga Ratio Verae Theologiae (The Real Meaning of Theology) by Erasmus The Historian and Character by David Knowles 4. Books that have influenced you. Poetic Works of William Blake Plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas Sermons of Meister Eckhart De Doctrina Christiana, Confessions, and Sermons on Psalms of St. Augustine Rule of St. Benedict The Bhagavad-Gita The Imitation of Christ, etc. 5. Why have these books been an influence on you? These books and others like them have helped me to discover the real meaning of my life, and have made it possible for me to get out of the confusion and meaninglessness of an existence completely immersed in the needs and passivities fostered by a culture in which sales are everything. 6. Name a book everyone should read. Besides the Bible (taken for granted and not included above) and such classics as The Imitation of Christ, I would select a contemporary book which I consider to be of vital importance and which I think everyone should read at this time: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. 7. Why this book? This is the most forceful statement about a crisis that is of immediate importance to every American, and indirectly affects the whole world today. It is something that people have to know about. The Negro has been trying to make himself heard: in this book he succeeds. |
| 1963/11/10 | Robert Charles Zaehner | Matter and Spirit: Their Convergence in Eastern Religions, Marx and Teilhard de Chardin |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 32-33
| Finished some notes on Zaehner's Teilhardian pamphlet on Matter and Spirit which is good in intention, poor and hasty in execution. Have added this on to the material on Zen for the winter Continuum. Graham Carey wired that he wanted some of Art and Worship in Good Work. |
| 1963/12/15 | Werner Georg Kümmel | Man in the New Testament / trans. John J. Vincent |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 45
| Of [Rudolf Karl] Bultmann: "Pauline anthropology is as a statement an act of the new life and not an anthropology in a general or obvious sens" (quoted by Kümmel, p. 71). He will end by rejecting Paul's Areopagus speech and Peter's "natura" as Hellenistic and strange. |
| 1964/08/03 | Robert Ardrey | African genesis : a personal investigation into the animal origins and nature of man / Robert Ardrey ; drawings by Berdine Ardrey |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 132
| Someone has sent a book, African Genesis [by Robert Ardrey]. I had heard of discoveries of Leakey at Olduvai, prepared to accept hypothesis of Africa as the cradle of the human race. This book, however, takes scientific hypotheses and creates a myth of violence around them. Man's ancestor is the meat-eating club-carrying, sinister "killer-ap" who fought his way up from vegetarianism in order to become a cannibal and a nationalist. These, say the myth, are the facts. And when a myth says that it means, of course, the only facts. Man is by essence a, predator, a killer, a property owner, a hater, a joiner, an agitator, perhaps even a Goldwaterite. This is the scientific-mythology of proto-fascism. With all that, I am not as willing to accept Leakey, who is a different story, less "romantic"-of anthropoids that used tools and weapons?? Already man? |
| 1964/09/05 | Robert Ardrey | African genesis : a personal investigation into the animal origins and nature of man / Robert Ardrey ; drawings by Berdine Ardrey |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 141-42
| I was going to burn some wastepaper, but it is too dry a day. Sent out to the girl [Donna Mae Miller] at the University of Arizona the review of African Genesis ["Man Is a Gorilla with a Gun"] she asked for. I was not able to ignore this request. There is something good and special in this small, unprepossessing attempt at running a magazine (of all places in a Department of Physical Education for Women). I don't quite understand it, but there is something there. A sense of genuineness and humanity in spite of the cliches. |
| 1964/12/29 | Karlfried Dürckheim, von | Japanese Cult of Tranquility |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 184
| I finished Von Durkheim, The Japanese Cult of Tranquillity. The best and most revealing part is the appendix from a Japanese master of swordsmanship speaking of the "sword that kills and gives lif" in the tradition of Takuan. Actually the pinnacle of swordsmanship is not violence and killing but simply a "truth" against which the opponent can ruin himself or by which he can be enlightened. A fascinating concept. Only "the animal man" seeks to "win" ("prevail"). But the spiritual man is simply true and the law of truth has to "win" in him. |
| 1965/05/10 | Martin Lings | Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 246
| Already a most beautiful week of May has gone by. For part of it I was ill again, with the same bug that had me in the infirmary at the beginning of Holy Week. It was a good thing, for this time Father Eudes gave me an antibiotic which seems to have cleared it up properly. Last time it really stayed with me (my stomach remained quite upset even though I was "well"). So for a couple of days I lay around in the warm green shade of the end room, with no desire for any food, and read Martin Ling's book which he sent me (Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions), a good chunk of De Lubac's Exegèse medievale (Vol. 1) and the early part of Herbert Read's Green Child. The most exciting for me was De Lubac. |
| 1965/10/13 | Eric Gill | Clothes: An Essay upon the Nature and Significance of the Natural and Artificial Integuments Worn by Men and Women |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 303
| Reading Isaac of Stella. Disappointed in Eric Gill's book on clothes [Clothes: An Essay upon the Nature and Significance of the Natural and Artificial Integuments Worn by Men and Women, 1931]. Can't carry on with it (I was struck by it that Christmas at Fronti in Exeter thirty-three years ago). Will return it to the Hammers. Sun up. Say Prime and cut wood! |
| 1965/10/13 | Josef Pieper | In tune with the world : a theory of festivity / Josef Pieper ; transl. from the German by Richard and Clara Winston |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 302
| I finished Read's Icon and Idea-Monday finished [Josef] Pieper In Tune with the World: [A Theory of Festivity, 1965] and wrote a review. Brother Dunstan is typing the last of Conjectures. |
| 1966/04/22 | Robert Stephen Briffault | Mothers: the Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 234
| Many thanks for the Pavese books. I am well into one of them and he is a marvelous writer. I returned Suzuki on Mysticism Christian and Buddhist. I am not et finished with Briffault, The Mothers which is marked for August 31. Could I perhaps have it a little longer? I notice that Muir's Autobiography seems to be marked for that date too, and I am still working on it. |
| 1967/01/30 | Theodora Kroeber | Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 189
| am reading Ishi - which Doris Dana sent. A heartrending book about the last of the Yahi Indians - victims of genocide a hundred years ago. What a frightening past this country has - and yet people admire it. True, not all were vigilantes and a lot of Ranchers protested against the indiscriminate massacre. So later Vietnam today! An Indian war! |
| 1967/02/04 | Theodora Kroeber | Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 191
| Finished Ishi. A moving book. The best and the worst in America comes out in it. The furious stupidity and violence of vigilantes and the warm, touching friendliness of scholars. And Ishi who is the "real America" - at least who has the valid claim to be the America that was created natural. |
| 1967/03/23 | Raymond J. Nogard | Lord of the Absurd |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 209
| The new books that came in from Herder & Herder strike me more and more as superficial, contrived, thrown-together trifles, straining to be "new" and never quite managing to convince. For instance [Raymond J.] Nogar's Lord of the Absurd [New York, 1966] seemed to me to be very thin, chatty stuff, and I can't see how so many people (?) are impressed by it: except of course that it accepts evolution - but what is so marvelous about that? It's a hundred years late. |
| 1967/08/24 | Bengt Sundkler | Bantu Prophets in South Africa |
Ltrs: CforT p. 283
| You are much in my thoughts as I continue my explorations of Bantu ideas. I have on interlibrary loan an essential book: Bantu Prophets in South Africa by Bengt Sundkler, Oxford Press, 1961. The thing is not to distill "Bantu philosophy" out into pure speculative projects as we Westerners like to do. This particular book deals with the syncretism of Zulu religion and a kind of Evangelical Christianity in South Africa: prophetic cults (hundreds of them), nativistic and healing sects. Pursuit of health is a central theme. Joining you in your forecast I would say that in our coming Bantu society (is that accurate though, because our Negroes came from Dahomey, maybe that's a different bunch?) there will be considerable interest in medical diagnosis, psychosomatic illness, questions of potency, interesting treatments, resistance against nefarious influence of dead ancestors ("Uncle Toms" perhaps). |
| 1967/09/02 | Claude Levi-Strauss | Mythologiques I |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 285
| Began Claude Levi-Strauss Mythologiques I yesterday. Very exacting. Real new and stimulating beginning after my morning reading had more or less bogged down. |
| 1967/09/18 | John Paddock (ed.) | Ancient Oaxaca: Discoveries in Mexican Archeology and History |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 292
| This time, finished Two Leggings - a rather sad, futile sort of book. With all his striving for powerful visions and strong medicine he never got to be chief. Fought the Sioux on the side of the whites - and the whites took away the Crows' land anyway. In the end a white officer gave him a five-dollar gold piece. Sunday was great. Discovery of the Zapotecan city of Monte Alban in new book edited by J. Paddock. Rereading Mosley on the Mayas. Sacred cities in center of sparsely populated rural areas. Cult centers without army and without King. An ideal, peaceful civilization. No one knows why it finally folded up. Same all through Mexico in the "Classic" period. Zapotecs, Mayas, Toltecs. Violence came with decadence. Aztecs were the last end of it. The final corruption. |
| 1967/10/07 | Claude Levi-Strauss | cru et le cuit |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 299
| I am really most excited by the sophistication, versatility, scope, horizons of Levi-Strauss. In Le Cru et le cuit [The Raw and the Cooked] one tends to get snowed under by the sheer mass of material, concentrated in Brazil. But La Pensee sauvage [The Savage Mind] is more universal and gives a clearer exposition of his understanding of the epistemology and logic based on the idea of species. Real cosmic and "contemplativ" quality - aesthetic and scientific at the same time - yet with a sophistication that excludes romance and reminds us we are moderns, not neolithics - but that neolithic thought is more relevant than we think - more sophisticated and complex than some modern "scientific" common-sense categorizing. |
| 1967/10/07 | Claude Levi-Strauss | Pensee sauvage |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 299
| I am really most excited by the sophistication, versatility, scope, horizons of Levi-Strauss. In Le Cru et le cuit [The Raw and the Cooked] one tends to get snowed under by the sheer mass of material, concentrated in Brazil. But La Pensee sauvage [The Savage Mind] is more universal and gives a clearer exposition of his understanding of the epistemology and logic based on the idea of species. Real cosmic and "contemplativ" quality - aesthetic and scientific at the same time - yet with a sophistication that excludes romance and reminds us we are moderns, not neolithics - but that neolithic thought is more relevant than we think - more sophisticated and complex than some modern "scientific" common-sense categorizing. |
| 1967/10/08 | Claude Levi-Strauss | Pensee sauvage |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 300
| Compared with L.-S., Bachelard is flaccid and uninteresting, except for occasional intuitions. Levi-Strauss is much deeper because he deals in the basic substance of experience and discourse in primitive society - the raw matter and the primitive luxuriance of forms. Bachelard gets at it only in indifferent and recent poetry where the matter has gone thin and everything has long since been worked out of it. But see the magnificent concrete poem - mobile, visual and conceptual of Levi-S. on p. 201 of La Pensee sauvage. And this as a mere model of a great cosmic poem based simply on the duality species-individual. (Imagine it with 2 million species working and an almost infinite number of possible individuals: primitive thought really grappled with the world!) |
| 1967/11/12 | Kenelm Burridge | Mambu: A Melanesian Millenium |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 10
| The Burridge book (Mambu) is excellent |
| 1967/11/22 | Hugo Rahner S.J. | Man at Play |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 14
| Rain and mist all day for St. Cecilia [Feast day]. Hugo Rahner on the sacred dance in refectory. His book on Man at Play is very good. Other day when Rahner was talking of homo ludens [man playing], the witty Brother Isidore (in refectory near me) whipped out a box of cough drops and pointed to the name Ludens. Monastic humor. |
| 1967/12/30 | James Mooney | Ghost-dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 32
| I have [James] Mooney's wonderful Ghost Dance book finally and am reading the new George Steiner book [Language and Silence] which critics have to a great extent ignored or treated coldly. Very good. |
| 1968/02/13 | Ian Jarvie | Revolution in Anthropology |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 55-56
| I am really turned on by social anthropology and cargo cults. Jarvic's book The Revolution in Anthropology is, I think, important, though I distrust Popperites. But he very smartly shows how Cargo has found anthropologists in an impasse and thrown them into a crisis"”and their response has been a ritual methodological celebration which has, itself, the qualities of a Cargo cult. This is useful and instructive and leads somewhere! Where? I hope to discover. |
| 1968/02/26 | Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski | Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 59-60
| "Most important"¦to eliminate states of relaxation or inner emptiness, when innerresources are insufficient"¦. "The tendency to disperse oneself, to chatter, to make conquests (or I would add simply to make an impression) marks the degeneration of the creative tendency to reflect reality in one's own soul." These are good observations in Malinowski's diary (p. 112). [Note 13: Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski (1884-1942), the Polish anthropologist, was born in Kraków and taught in Poland, England, and the United States. He lectured at Yale University from 1939 until the time of his death in 1942.] "To get up, to walk around, to look for what is hidden around the corner"”all this is merely to run away from oneself, to exchange one person for another" (p. 115). Good! |
| 1968/03/04 | Peter Lawrence | Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 61
| Finished Peter Lawrence on Cargo (chiefly Yali), and realize I have to try to get some of this on paper soon. |
| 1968/05/05 | Mary Daly | Church and the Second Sex |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 173-74
| It took some time for Mary Daly's book [The Church and the Second Sex] to reach me. However, I am reading it now with great interest. I wish I had time to write a review of it for some publication, but unfortunately I have too many other things to do. Here's a statement, which, of course, you may quote if you wish. Mary Daly has given us a hard-hitting, highly original, and even revolutionary little book unmasking the latent anti-feminism of so much Catholic thinking and practice. The real impact of the book is not just in the area of crass and obvious discrimination, but in its "exorcism of the mystique of the eternal woman." She has brought out with relentless and sometimes infuriating clarity how this supposed idealization of woman in fact masks a mutilation of human persons"”both men and women. She writes with such passion that some readers might think she was advocating conflict and competition between the sexes: actually, she is talking about the more difficult and important work of achieving authentic partnership on a personal level. I am grateful to her for many new insights. |
| 1968/11/17 | Ruth Benedict | Chrysanthemum and the Sword |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 281
| "Dear Father Merriton," said the note, "Please make yourself at home the moment you arrive and just ask the bearer for anything you may require." Without my having to ask, the generator went on, the lights began to work, tea was provided in the big comfortable drawing room. I escaped quickly to the bungalow, aside, apart, alone, silent. Fire lit. Books unpacked, including one on Japan by Ruth Benedict and also Anaïs Nin's Under the Glass Bell, which I hope to finish. Along with the Buddhist books I have to return to Harold Talbott, who remains in the Windamere where he reads wrapped in a blanket. |