| Date | Author | Title | Source | Quotation by Merton |
| 1939/09/14 | Thomas Aquinas | Summa Theologiae |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 23
| The difference: Pascal considering man in the light of the fall, original sin, redemption, etc. recognizes as "le mal" something easy in the fallen state. It is diverse; it is everywhere. Le bien est unique. cf. Saint Thomas. II-1.2.-Q70-A.4.16 [note 16:] The Summa Theologica, one of the major works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, was read and meditated upon by Merton during this period of his life in New York. He undoubtedly worked easily from the Latin text, as this journal makes clear. |
| 1939/10/00 | Thomas Aquinas | De Ente et Essentia |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 151
| One of the most extraordinarily difficult things I have ever tried to do is understand St. Thomas' De Ente et Essentia. But it's sure fine when I can manage to make something of it. |
| 1939/10/16 | Francis, Saint | little flowers of St. Francis. The mirror of perfection. The life of St. Francis |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 59
| On his [Dan Walsh] advice, after he had arranged an interview for me, I went to see Father Murphy, at the monastery. On the way down, happening to be wondering and anxious about what would happen, I opened the Little Flowers of Saint Francis I was carrying and read "Brother, this offer (profferta) of yours I accept in the Name of God" or words like that, and I was very happy. |
| 1939/11/02 | Thomas Aquinas | De Ente et Essentia |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 84
| The value of the distinction in De Ente et Essentia, cap. II, where Plato's separate forms are attacked and disposed of, I think, conclusively. At any rate it appears that way to me, although I do not follow the whole thing as clearly as I might. Distinction between a metaphysical and a logical definition. First and second intention. The first, metaphysical, deals with things as they are, in fact: the second, logical, treats them as they are, abstractly, in the mind. In other words, a metaphysical definition is stated in terms of act and potency and a logical definition in terms ofgenus and species, which are second intentions. They are the means of understanding things but not the things we understand. |
| 1940/01/13 | Ignatius of Loyola | Spiritual Exercises |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 135
| I have been going through the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. Not giving them four hours a day but at any rate two and a half. |
| 1940/01/28 | Anselmus of Canterbury | Proslogion |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 9
| I have just corrected eighty-six English exams in one of which I read: "Chaucer's ABC was a dirty character in one of the Canterbury Tales." There is a lot of snow here, and it is mostly very nice. I am not bothering to go further than Olean between terms because I have a lot of good things to do here. I have been reading St. Anselm's Proslogion, and St. Bonaventure's Itinerarium with this Franciscan philosopher from Germany, and I am finding out all sorts of good things about scholastic philosophy, and, incidentally, learning to be critical of St. Thomas, which is a good thing for a Catholic to be, I find"”and a rare one. |
| 1940/01/28 | Bonaventura | Itinerarium |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 9
| I have just corrected eighty-six English exams in one of which I read: "Chaucer's ABC was a dirty character in one of the Canterbury Tales." There is a lot of snow here, and it is mostly very nice. I am not bothering to go further than Olean between terms because I have a lot of good things to do here. I have been reading St. Anselm's Proslogion, and St. Bonaventure's Itinerarium with this Franciscan philosopher from Germany, and I am finding out all sorts of good things about scholastic philosophy, and, incidentally, learning to be critical of St. Thomas, which is a good thing for a Catholic to be, I find"”and a rare one. |
| 1940/02/13 | Jacques Maritain | Introduction to Philosophy / Translated by E. I. Watkin - Foreword by Ralph McInerny |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 150
| Reading Maritain's Introduction to Philosophy and finding it very exciting, stimulating, entertaining, clear, forceful. It must make anyone but Aristotelians or Catholics terribly angry, but why not? It is necessary for the truth to be defended without compromise and without a lot of polite philosophical doubletalk. The thing for the other side to do is write something a little more forceful than Edman's Candle in the Dark or a little more coherent and less impotently raging than Communist pamphlets. Maritain can be high-handed because he is completely competent and sure of himself and right. And it is right that people should start philosophy from something as good and clear as this. |
| 1940/05/21 | Thomas a Kempis | Imitation of Christ |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 220
| Most of the time wrote and wrote: a Journal, longhand, in a ledger. A novel that has perplexed three publishers without any result. And also I read. Pascal, The Little Flowers and Rule of Saint Francis; Lorca; Rilke; Imitation of Christ; Saint John of the Cross and also William Saroyan, when I was too tired to read the hard stuff. |
| 1941/10/08 | Henri Gheon | Sainte Therèse de Lisieux |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 431-32
| I have just read straight through Gheon's book about Saint Theresa of Lisieux and am knocked out by it completely. What the book is about, if not the book itself, is the most exciting thing I have read for I don't know how long: this story of a middleclass French child who went into a convent, who never, according to the world or to nature, did anything; who died; and who was inexplicably hailed right after her death by Catholics in every part of the world for her great saintliness (because of countless miracles following the invocation of her name)-all this story is more terrific than any I have read since the story of the works of the First Apostles, in he Acts, or the story of Saint Francis. |
| 1941/10/08 | Saint John of the Cross | complete works of Saint John of the Cross, doctor of the church / Saint John of the Cross ; transl. from the critical edition of P. Silverio de Santa Teresa, and ed. by E. Allison Peers |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 434
| The Ascent of Mount Carmel and Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and the "Book of Job" and the Dark Night of the Soul do not suffice to explain the heroism of this mighty child who is still, with all that, under this appearance of mediocrity which has allowed the memory to be surrounded by statues that revolt anyone who ever knew what taste was, and be desecrated by a commercialism that calls to heaven for vengeance-and yet doesn't! |
| 1941/11/27 | G.F. Lahey | Gerard Manley Hopkins |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 455
| I spent maybe the whole afternoon writing a letter to Aldous Huxley and when I was finished I thought "who am I to be telling this guy about mysticism" and now I remember that until I read his Ends and Means just about four years ago, I hadn't known a thing about mysticism, not even the word. The part he played in my conversion, by that book, was quite great. Just how great a part a book can play in a conversion is questionable: several books figured in mine. Gilson's Spirit of Medieval Philosophy was the first and from it more than any other book I learned a healthy respect for Catholicism. Then Ends and Means from which I learned to respect mysticism. Maritain's Art and Scholasticism was another-and Blake's poems; maybe Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism although I read precious little of it. Joyce's Portrait of the Artist got me fascinated in Catholic sermons (!) What horrified him began to appeal to me! It seemed quite sane. Finally, G. F. Lahey's life of G. M. Hopkins. |
| 1942/11/21 | Teresa of Avila | Autobiography |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 166
| All these things I read in St. Augustine: the Commentary on the Psalms, the Book on the Sermons on the Mount, etc. Also another wonderful writer is St. John Chrysostom, whom I read not in Greek however. All the Greek Fathers are translated into Latin. So I also read Dionysius the Areopagete, who is very like St. John of the Cross. Then I read St. Teresa of Avila's Autobiography. O boy! This you should read as fast as you can get it! O what a book! Or maybe you already read it? |
| 1947/11/06 | Deodat Basly, de | Deux grandes ecoles catholiques de B. Duns Scot et de S. Thomas |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 130
| The last two days or so I have been reading Deodat de Basly [Les deux grandes ecoles catholiques de B. Duns Scot et de S. Thomas (Paris, 1906)] and not sure whether I like it, and I was going to toss him away, but the texts from Scotus in the footnotes prevented me. Even if he is an enthusiast and gets too excited and as shrill as Fr. [Frederic William] Faber in spots [Growth in Holiness, 1854], yet I like him for the sake of the Scotus. And God comes and dwells in me there in the sun, and I look at the woods and everything obscurely begins to sing with a vivid silence, with the deep energy of absorption His love brings. |
| 1947/11/06 | Frederick William Faber | Growth in Holiness |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 130
| The last two days or so I have been reading Deodat de Basly [Les deux grandes ecoles catholiques de B. Duns Scot et de S. Thomas (Paris, 1906)] and not sure whether I like it, and I was going to toss him away, but the texts from Scotus in the footnotes prevented me. Even if he is an enthusiast and gets too excited and as shrill as Fr. [Frederic William] Faber in spots [Growth in Holiness, 1854], yet I like him for the sake of the Scotus. And God comes and dwells in me there in the sun, and I look at the woods and everything obscurely begins to sing with a vivid silence, with the deep energy of absorption His love brings. |
| 1947/11/10 | Johannes Duns Scotus | Opus Oxoniense |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 131
| For the first time I really saw into something of the import of the Mystery of the Holy Trinity in lines from the4th C.[hapter] of the Prologue of the Oxoniense, on the end of theology. How is the knowledge of the Trinity practical, i.e. how does it serve to further our love, our union by love with God? |
| 1947/11/30 | Jan Ruusbroec | Oeuvres de Ruysbroeck l'admirable / Jan van Ruusbroec ; trad. du flamand par les Benedictins de Saint-Paul de Wisques par Ernest Hello |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 140
| The day before the retreat began, two volumes of the Wisques translation (French) of Ruysbroeck arrived [Oeuvres de Ruysbroeck l'Admirable, 6 volumes (Brussels and Paris, 1912"”1938)]. Father Kothen in Belgium sent them. I had been trying to get them for more than two years. Everybody said it was impossible. So that is a great grace. Ruysbroeck's feast is the day after tomorrow. So I expect great things from him in this retreat. The important thing"”find out what God really wills for m"”perfect union with His will"”give Him everything without reservations. |
| 1947/12/16 | Johannes Duns Scotus | Reportationes Parisiensis / o.f.m. |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 146
| Reading Duns Scotus' Reportationes III on the Incarnation. |
| 1948/02/12 | Jan Ruusbroec | Oeuvres de Ruysbroeck l'admirable / Jan van Ruusbroec ; trad. du flamand par les Benedictins de Saint-Paul de Wisques par Ernest Hello |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 167
| But, on the other hand, I read Ruysbroeck with joy, all about immediate contact with God, "meeting" Him in the unity of our Spirit - our natural and supernatural union with Him - how He wants us to dwell with Him "above all gifts, graces and virtues". The concept has been fascinating me for a year. |
| 1948/02/21 | Bernardus of Clairvaux | De Diligendo Deo |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 170
| The Lenten Book (De Diligendo Deo) is, from the point of view of my own interest and alertness to its value, the best I have had so far. |
| 1948/03/28 | Wilhelm Schamoni | Face of the Saints |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 194
| In the library I lookesd at that marvelous book The Faces of the Saints [by Wilhelm Schamoni, London, 1948], pictures as near as possible genuine portraits "” contemporary "” of saints. The Patristic one from mosaics were some of the most beautiful. St. Catherine of Siena, too, and another I have forgotten. More modern ones"”some of the death-masks frighten me. |
| 1948/05/13 | Matthias Joseph Scheeben | Mysteries of Christianity |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 205
| I looked into [Matthias Joseph] Scheeben's Mysteries of Christianity [St. Louis,1946] and found some good pages on the Mission of the Holy Ghost. Also in St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas. |
| 1948/05/30 | Giovanni Papini | Letters of Pope Celestine VI |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 208
| Fr. Raymond lent me [Giovanni] Papini's new book, The Letters of Pope Celestine VI [New York, 1948], and although it is a bit scatterbrained in parts and a little out of line here and there, it is full of things that need to be said, which it says, things that comfort and encourage me and make me glad and help me. So far the strongest parts I have read are those about priests, monks and theologians. |
| 1948/09/07 | David Knowles o.s.b. | Religious Orders in England |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 230
| In Dom David Knowles' new book (Religious Orders in England [volume I of 3, Cambridge, 1948]) I found a few fine sentences on St. Francis and they got me all up in the air about poverty. Still, with the grace of God I might be able to do something about it, because it doesn't seem to be much use in going on as I am now. Today we were cleaning out that room and I got rid of a lot of things I don't really need. |
| 1948/10/19 | Gerald Ellard | Christian Life and Worship |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 239
| This morning I got the idea that perhaps I ought to be reading something about the subdiaconate, since my ordination is coming up soon. So instead of getting off somewhere quietly and praying, I wasted almost the whole morning interval in the Scriptorium dipping into Ruysbroeck and books like that, and [Gerald] Ellard's Christian Life and Worship, not to mention the index to Migne P.[atrologia] L.[atina]. I couldn't get settled on anything. I have less and less desire to read anything about anything"”all I need is a book about prayer"”or a Bibl"”something that can give me one sentence as a spring board for contemplation. |
| 1949/02/10 | F.D. Joret o.p. | Dominican Life |
Ltrs: CforT p. 24
| But in any case, what amused me was that the Father who wrote the article asserted that "the degree of union with God" had "nothing to do with the problem" of differentiating between vocations in the objective sense of state. I opened [Pierre] Joret's book on the Dominican life and found a whole page which said that the life of union with God marks the summit of Dominican life and also that contemplation, far from being even an intermediary end, for a Preacher, is a true end to be sought for its own sake, the highest of all ends and not just a means to the apostolate. |
| 1949/02/24 | F.D. Joret o.p. | Dominican Life |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 305
| Talking about the active apostolate: the Thomist got after me for something I said. I felt it was rather flattering, on the whole, for a third year theology student to be refuted by one of the foremost magazines in the country. They got me on a technicality"”it concerns the material included in pp. 414 to 419 of the Mountain. It seems to me that what I was trying to say was obvious enough: first that no matter what state of life you belong to, one can and should lead a life of close union with God, and even be something of a contemplative, and share the fruits of that contemplation one way or another. And I also wanted to say that it seemed to me that since the preaching Orders were engaged in "active works that by their nature flow from the fulness of contemplation" that they were also committed, ipso facto, to contemplation, Nemo dat quod non habet. I find the same thing stated much more strongly than I made it in Joret's Dominican Life (pp. 82, 83). I mention this so that you can tell anyone where to get off if they say I am a heretic. |
| 1949/05/23 | John of the Cross | Living Flame of Love |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 314
| I can't read anything but St. John of the Cross. I opened The Living Flame at the line Rompe la tela de este dulce encuentro [Tear the veil of this sweet encounter]. The priesthood as an encounter of the substance of my soul with the Living God! I do not understand it yet. Perhaps I will know more about it on Thursday. Anyway, that will be my prayer: that more of the curtains may be taken away, and that the servitude of desires that burden my whole life may be diminished, and that I may be liberated and come closer to Him in the Mass-in every Mass I offer. |
| 1949/07/09 | Jean-Baptiste Porion | Sainte Trinite et la Vie Intereure |
Ltrs: CforT p. 25
| Dom Porion sent me his delightful book on the Holy Trinity and the interior life, and on every page I found echoes of my own deepest interests and preoccupations. It is a beautiful book, especially beautiful in its simplicity. I close with the assurance that I remember you in my Mass, which remains my greatest joy, and I feel that Our Lord is pouring out the love of His Heart upon all my dear friends through this Sacrifice which He has given me the privilege of offering each day for them. |
| 1949/07/10 | Jean-Baptiste Porion | Sainte Trinite et la Vie Intereure |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 333
| Dom Porion sent me a little book he wrote anonymously, La Sainte Trinite et la Vie Interieure [Paris, 1948], and I was charmed by it. It is perfect in its kind. It is really a summary of all dogma, but very simple. It is a contemplative summary and therefore at the extreme opposite to anything that might have been boiled down for students. This is a summary which reveals the simple, allembracing intuition of the contemplative who sees all theology in the light of his mystical taste of reality in its highest causes. |
| 1949/08/04 | Thomas Aquinas | Summa Theologiae |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 344
| The short Prologue of St. Thomas to his Summa Theologiae is a very beautiful paragraph containing a whole discipline of study. His three points are that students (beginners, but it applies to all) are impeded from arriving at truth by: 1) the great number of useless questions, arguments and articles, 2) the lack of order in the way doctrine is presented, 3) repetition which produces confusion and boredom. The Dominicans and Cistercians had this at least in common"”that they wanted to get rid of all non-essentials. |
| 1949/08/05 | Thomas Aquinas | Commentary on the Gospel of St. John |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 345-46
| I find an interesting passage in St. Thomas' commentary on St. John, Chapter I (Lectio XIV), the place where Jesus turns to Andrew and John who have asked Him where He lives and He says, "Come and see." Thomas interprets this mystically as evidence that we can only come to know Jesus dwelling within us by experience. But I take this experimental knowledge of the presence of God in us to be contemplation. He then says there are four ways of arriving at this experimental knowledge. Two are, as one might expect, by interior quiet and rest, and by the taste of the divine sweetness. But the other two are, first, by the performance of good works, and second, per operationem devotionis [by works of devotion]. I don't know precisely what that means but in any case it is an activity. Hence it is easy to see that for St. Thomas there is in practice no contradiction between contemplation and activity. |
| 1949/08/11 | Paul Philippe O.P. | Très Sainte Vierge et le Sacerdoce |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 353
| To my great joy, Fr. Paul Philippe's book, La Très Sainte Vierge et le Sacerdoce [Paris, 1947] arrived the day before yesterday: that was the other thing that made me joyful besides Dom Porion's letter. There were four copies of the book and I began it at once. It is short but I have to read slowly. I can't read more than three paragraphs of anything without stopping. If I read fast and go right on, I get confused and my mind simply ceases to grasp anything, and in half an hour I am exhausted and worried, as if I had been roughed up in a dark alley by a gang of robbers. |
| 1950/10/09 | Jean Danielou | Signe du temple ou De la presence de Dieu |
Ltrs: SofC p. 25
| I am extremely eager to get Fr. Bouyer's new book on monasticism, but have not yet been able to do so. I feel that our book dealer sometimes takes orders and then forgets about them"”I mean for books to come out later. I liked his Saint Antoine. Still, I wonder if he does not overdo his interest in the fact that in the early ages of the Church people were so clearly aware that the fall had put the devil in charge of material things. Fr. Danielou's Signe du Temple, in its first chapter, gives a good counterpoise to that view"”for heaven still shone through creation and God was very familiar with men in Genesis! |
| 1953/05/10 | Joseph Creusen | Religious Men and Women in the Code |
Ltrs: SofC p. 57
| The main thing Dom Louis did was to make clear the fact that the Prior takes care of all the material needs of the scholastics"”looks after their needs when sick, etc. The M.S. [Master of Scholastics] does this only indirectly"”drawing to the attention of the Prior or infirmarian that such and such a student needs care. Prior receives accusations for breach of rule, gives public penances, etc. M.S. has no disciplinary function. Here the Fr. Prior also takes care of the investigation of candidates before ordination, as directed by the instruction of the S.C.R., "Quantum religiones omnes" (see appendix to Creusen, "Religious Men and Women in the Code," pp. 287 ff.). |
| 1953/05/18 | Jean Leclercq o.s.b. | St. Bernard mystique |
Ltrs: SofC p. 59
| I am not doing any work on a book on St. Bernard and there has been no announcement of any such book; hence I don't think it is in competition with your St. Bernard Mystique. If it gets finished"”or started"”before 1955, I will be surprised. The plan still exists, but I have no time to work on it. |
| 1954/11/04 | Cuthbert Butler o.s.b. | Benedictine Monachism: Studies in Benedictine Life and Rule |
Ltrs: SofC p. 80
| A few weeks ago, by some miracle, we actually started reading Dom Cuthbert Butler's Benedictine Monachism in the refectory. That has never been done before, and it was not done this time either. We got as far as the third chapter. It would have been interesting to go right through such a book in a Trappist refectory. There might have been riots, etc. Most interesting. Whatever may be the shortcomings of the book, I think he is still one of the best and surest interpreters of the mind of St. Benedict"”yet in the end there is a tremendous difference between his interpretation and St. Benedict. As for me, I have got to the point where I stop interpreting. It is all I can do to wedge in a little solitude here and there, and that is what occupies me more fruitfully, I think, than haggling about the "ideal." For the rest, the students and St. Paul keep me busy, with my various projects "¦ |
| 1955/09/12 | Henri Lubac, De | Catholicism |
Ltrs: HGL p. 314
| Most of the Fathers of the Church looked at the Incarnation in that light, and Duns Scotus, for instance, is always speaking of the Humanity of Christ as the assumptus homo, the man who was taken up by God. This is far stronger than adoptionism, for it says that the Man Christ was not only "adopted" but the true Son of God"”"true God and true man." All our ideas on the dignity of man, all our "humanism" really flows from the right understanding of the mystery of the Incarnation and of the recapitulation of all in Christ. If you are interested in a good exposition of this idea, De Lubac's Catholicism brings it out very well in the first couple of chapters. |
| 1956/03/03 | Hilda Graef | Scholar and the Cross: The Life and Work of Edith Stein |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 130
| Shall I add to the immense list of books you ought to read? The February issue [of La Vie Spirituelle] has an excellent article by Regamey on psychoanalysis. Not just saying that analysis is okay for pious folk, but much more, doing a lot of good analytical thinking on Catholic lines. Also if you don't know Gustave Thibon, get to know him real quick. He is excellent. Regamey has other good books"”Poverty is one, The Cross and the Christian is good. Louis Bouyer's Paschal Mystery is good. You might like Hilda Graef's book on Edith Stein"”but oh well, there we go again. Everyone probably forgets that all you do is read books. I don't know how you can possibly stand it. I read actually very little now. Just walk around and think. |
| 1956/03/03 | Louis Bouyer | Mystère Pascal: meditation sur la liturgie des trois derniers jours de la Semaine Sainte |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 130
| Shall I add to the immense list of books you ought to read? The February issue [of La Vie Spirituelle] has an excellent article by Regamey on psychoanalysis. Not just saying that analysis is okay for pious folk, but much more, doing a lot of good analytical thinking on Catholic lines. Also if you don't know Gustave Thibon, get to know him real quick. He is excellent. Regamey has other good books"”Poverty is one, The Cross and the Christian is good. Louis Bouyer's Paschal Mystery is good. You might like Hilda Graef's book on Edith Stein"”but oh well, there we go again. Everyone probably forgets that all you do is read books. I don't know how you can possibly stand it. I read actually very little now. Just walk around and think. |
| 1956/03/03 | Pie Raymond Regamey | Cross and the Christian / Translated from the French by Angeline Bouchard |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 130
| Shall I add to the immense list of books you ought to read? The February issue [of La Vie Spirituelle] has an excellent article by Regamey on psychoanalysis. Not just saying that analysis is okay for pious folk, but much more, doing a lot of good analytical thinking on Catholic lines. Also if you don't know Gustave Thibon, get to know him real quick. He is excellent. Regamey has other good books"”Poverty is one, The Cross and the Christian is good. Louis Bouyer's Paschal Mystery is good. You might like Hilda Graef's book on Edith Stein"”but oh well, there we go again. Everyone probably forgets that all you do is read books. I don't know how you can possibly stand it. I read actually very little now. Just walk around and think. |
| 1956/03/03 | Pie Raymond Regamey | Poverty: An Essential Element in the Christian Life / Translated from the French by Rosemary Sheed |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 130
| Shall I add to the immense list of books you ought to read? The February issue [of La Vie Spirituelle] has an excellent article by Regamey on psychoanalysis. Not just saying that analysis is okay for pious folk, but much more, doing a lot of good analytical thinking on Catholic lines. Also if you don't know Gustave Thibon, get to know him real quick. He is excellent. Regamey has other good books"”Poverty is one, The Cross and the Christian is good. Louis Bouyer's Paschal Mystery is good. You might like Hilda Graef's book on Edith Stein"”but oh well, there we go again. Everyone probably forgets that all you do is read books. I don't know how you can possibly stand it. I read actually very little now. Just walk around and think. |
| 1956/08/17 | Emmanuel Mounier | Personalism |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 66
| The toughness and integrity of Emmanuel Mounier [Note 7: Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950) was a French philosopher, resistance fighter, and founder of the journal Esprit. Merton was reading his Personalism (London: Routledge & Paul, 1952).] demands careful attention. Maybe of all of the men of our time he is the one we need most to understand and imitate. He is clever and hard with words. You cannot be comfortable with his language unless you think along with it, which is not all that easy. Hence he will make almost everyone uncomfortable-assuming they even listen to him at all. |
| 1956/08/19 | Emmanuel Mounier | Personalism |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 68-69
| Mounier says (in showing that the idea of person must be defined by the power to communicate - and showing how individualism bars communication - ) A kind of instinct works within us to deny or diminish the humanity of those around us"¦the lightest touch of the individual seems sometime to infect a mortal poison into any contact between man and man. Personalism p. 18... "The person only grows in so far as he continually purifies himself from the individual within him. He cannot do that by force of self-attention but on the contrary by making himself available." (Mounier-[Personalism]) |
| 1956/08/20 | Emmanuel Mounier | Personalism |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 70-71
| It is easy to say of every new idea one meets-"It is all in St. Bernard." It is very doubtful, for instance, whether Freud is "all in St. Bernard." However, Mounier's "Personalism" is essentially present in St. Bernard. Hence to read Mounier with understanding is most profitable spiritual reading not only because it helps to understand St. Bernard but helps us to use him. We are paralyzed in our individualism and we turn everything to the advantage of sterile self-isolation (self centered) and we do this in the name of our contemplative calling. |
| 1957/00/00 | Hans Urs von Balthasar | Presence et pensee. Essay sur la philosophie religieuse de Gregoire de Nysse |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 84
| "Etrefidèle à la Tradition, ce n'est donc pas repeter et transmettre litteralement des theses de philosophie ou de theologie, que l'on se figure soustraites au temps et aux contingences de l'histoire. C'est bien plutôt imiter de nos Pères dans la foi l'attitude de reflexion intime et l'effort de creation audacieuse, preludes necessaires de la veritable fidelite spirituelle." ["To be faithful to Tradition does not mean that one hands on theses of philosophy or theology indifferent to the time and vagaries of history. Rather, one should imitate our fathers in the faith with that attitude of deep reflection as well as the effort of bold creation which are the necessary preconditions for true spiritual fidelity."] H. Von Balthasar. Presence et pensee. "Lisons l'histoire, notre histoire, comme le recit vivante de ce que nous fûmes jadis, avec le double sentiment que tout celà est passe pour toujours et que malgre tout, cette jeunesse et chaque instant de notre vie reste mysterieusement present au fond de not ame en une sorte d'eternite delicieuse." ["Let us read history, our history, like a living record of what we once were, with the dual sentiment that all this has passed by forever and, despite that, youth and each instant of our life remains mysteriously present in the depths of our soul as a kind of delectable eternity."] id. [H. Von Balthasar. Presence et pensee]. |
| 1957/10/11 | Karl Adam | Spirit of Catholicism |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 124-25
| "Whoever seeks Christ without the Church, putting his trust in his own insight and what goes by the name of criticism, deprives himself of all possibility of finding the living Christ"¦The Christian Community is nothing more than Christ's power of resurrection working on in history, Christ eternal unfolding Himself in history, the fullness of Christ"¦The Church would have been able to give the living image of Christ to us even without the bible because the content of faith is, to such a vast degree, this very imag"¦Christ is as near to us today as He was to Peter"¦The source of my faith is to be found where the Pentecostal Spirit breathes-in the community of the Holy Spirit, in the company of the Saints, in the Church as the Pentecostal congregation." Karl Adam. |
| 1957/10/13 | Karl Adam | Spirit of Catholicism |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 125
| "The real root of every heresy is to be found not in the sphere of revelation but in the pagan philosophies." Karl Adam. |
| 1957/10/26 | Georges Bernanos | Diary of a Country Priest |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 130
| One reason why it is so hard to read Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest is breaking this ghetto wall. Don't mind the Jews in their ghetto-But we in ours-! That is harder to stomach. But Father! Our ghetto is so truly refined, it is a veritable paradise! Fresh air! |
| 1957/10/31 | Karl Adam | Spirit of Catholicism |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 131
| "The man who does not in his heart protest against obvious baseness and does not passionately try to suppress it whenever he can is not a moral man." K. Adam. However I do not accept at all the context from which this statement comes-K. Adam's portrait of a "choleric" Jesus. |
| 1957/11/06 | Karl Adam | Spirit of Catholicism |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 133
| Very satisfied with Karl Adam's Scotist solution of the problem raised by Christ's statement that not even the Son knows the hour of the last judgment. Distinction between natural and habitual possession of scientia visionis [the knowledge of the (beatific) vision]. Christ would know all Truth necessarily and as He applied his mind to it, according to the will of the Father, and He had not yet looked to see this one thing which the Father had not yet willed Him to know and reveal. This really fits the text and spirit of the gospels. |
| 1957/11/06 | Karl Adam | Spirit of Catholicism |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 134
| "The history of philosophy is the history of human inquiry and human error, not the history of Truth. Truth has no history. It is an eternal present, the Word of Jesus." Karl Adam. |
| 1957/12/24 | Georges Bernanos | Dialogue des carmelites |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 148
| Bob also sent Bernanos' Dialogue des carmelites one of the first things I read after coming over to the novitiate. |
| 1958/08/03 | Louis Bouyer | Newman: His Life and Spirituality |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 211
| [Louis] Bouyer's book on Newman, in the refectory, is very good - especially interested in the parts about Oxford. If I could have lived my undergraduate life over again - if I could do it now I mean! But I cannot and am glad in the end. What is done is done and my life is what it is - and the mercies of God have been very great. |
| 1958/09/04 | Louis Bouyer | Newman: His Life and Spirituality |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 231
| In the refectory they are reading Newman's life by Louis Bouyer, a splendid book "¦ I think it is the wisest and most outspoken book about the problems of converts that I have ever seen"”it has made me really understand and sympathize with Newman for the first tim"”and now I am sold on him, I think he was really a saint "¦ |
| 1958/10/15 | Louis Bouyer | Trône de la sagesse |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 224
| Finishing up a very good two day retreat. Spent it all under the five or six pine trees near St. Teresa's field in the calf pasture-the part that is now "ours." could hardly think of a better place and was not tempted to look for one. Barefoot most of the time. Read little. Some psalms. Some of the new Bouyer book (Le trône de la sagesse), some Symeon the New Theologian, some Zen. Whatever problems I have are on the level where Zen can hit them squarely. |
| 1958/12/09 | Hans Urs von Balthasar | Dieu et l'homme d'aujourd'hui |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 235
| Hans Urs Von Balthasar. "Dieu et l'homme d'aujourd'hui" [God and Man Today] |
| 1959/01/11 | Romano Guardini | Religiöse Gestalten in Dostojewskijs Werk: Studien über den Glauben |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 246
| I really think that in almost everything I read I find new food for the spiritual life, new thoughts, new discoveries (for instance the deep spiritual content of Jan Van Eyck's portrait of the Arnolfinis)-a whole new light on my concept of the hieratic (in the good sense) in art. Or the Gregg book on non-violence-some LaFontaine "fables" (The Rêve d'un habitant du Mogra struck me deeply the last time I was in Louisville and I saw it in Gide's anthology). Three or four pieces on "religion" (decadent) in Edmund Wilson's collection of articles about the '30s (American Earthquake)-some things on Mayan civilization-Kierkegaard's "Works of Lov"-Guardini on Dostoevsky. etc. etc. |
| 1959/01/17 | Romano Guardini | Religiöse Gestalten in Dostojewskijs Werk: Studien über den Glauben |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 248
| Moved by Guardini's wonderful book on Dostoevsky. |
| 1959/05/05 | Louis Bouyer | Newman: His Life and Spirituality |
Ltrs: HGL p. 390
| But the important thing for you at the moment is not Zen or I Ching, so please do not let me distract you from what really matters. All that these others have to teach is found in the Church also (and they too are of "the Church" in their own hidden way). There is such a sea of wonderful things for you both to fall into and swim in"”where can you begin? What are you reading, or doing, or thinking? Perhaps I am wrong, but I keep thinking I ought to recommend to you a book by another English Dominican, Conrad Pepler, The English Religious Heritage. It is not perfect, but is full of many fine things and would give you many leads. And Bouyer's life of Newman "¦ Best of all is to go to the sources, the Fathers, the Bible, and I am sure you do "¦ |
| 1959/10/25 | Josef Pieper | Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 336-37
| I have been in St. Anthony's Hospital, Louisville, for the removal of a rectal fistula. Went on the 14th. and got back Friday.... Mostly, it was a very good retreat. I had several quiet days with plenty of time to read and think. (Heschel-Man Is Not Alone, Pieper, on Prudence, The Secret of the Golden Flower, and Villages in the Sun (Chandon)-to get some ideas about everyday life in Mexico.) |
| 1959/12/06 | Rene Voillaume | Au coeur des masses. La vie religieuse des Petits Frères du Père de Foucauld |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 353
| Read a bit of Voillaume on the poverty of the Little Brothers. Finished Neal Breman's excellent book The Making of a Moon. |
| 1960/01/13 | Cyprian Vagaggini | Theological dimensions of the liturgy : a general treatise on the theology of the liturgy |
Ltrs: SofC p. 129
| Thank you for Dom Cyprian Vagaggini's book which I am slowly reading with very great satisfaction. It is solid and deep and, again, liberating. Veritas liberabit vos [The Truth will make you free]. |
| 1960/01/17 | Justus George Lawler | Catholic Dimension in Higher Education |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 369-70
| Very fine book by J. G. Lawler on The Catholic Dimension in Higher Education with splendid quotations from Newman whom I have too long underestimated. A clear and liberating diagnosis of so many ideas that affect us particularly in the monastery - our anti-naturalism, our distrust and hatred of the intellect, of art - our pious pragmatism, the mechanical thinking by which we avoid intellectual commitment and sterilize real thought"¦ "As to Faber, I never read his books." - Newman. "In small things I went according to my natural inclination-and I still do-instead of considering which was the more perfect cours"-St. Teresa. Compare previous entry Jan 15. Both go together. Teresa [of Avila] would in another context argue with The Fiery Arrow. Not a question of being absolute. Principles applied according to circumstances, surely. What is wrong is a confused flight into secular consolations, without discernment. One must choose what is healthy and right, for this is willed by God. It need not be pious. It must be sane and productive. |
| 1960/01/18 | Justus George Lawler | Catholic Dimension in Higher Education |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 235
| Thank you for the new Qumram book which looks solid and interesting. I hope to enjoy it. At the moment I am ploughing through a heavy reading schedule to get into the clear. One very interesting book is [George Justus] Lawler's volume on the Catholic Dimension in Higher Education. It is excellent, and I hope many will read it here as we go into our tentative and sketchy college program which I am rather dubious about. |
| 1960/01/30 | Jacques Maritain | Liturgie et contemplation / par Jacques et Raïssa Maritain ; pref. de Charles Journet |
Ltrs: CforT p. 28
| Many thanks for your valuable little book on Liturgy and Contemplation [Liturgie et contemplation, coauthored with Raissa]. I have read it with pleasure and deep agreement and am happy that you have spoken out, so clearly, on the misunderstandings and ambiguities of this pseudoproblem. It is certainly true that those who oppose one to the other are either false liturgists or false contemplatives, and it is doubly true that behind a lot of the insistence on liturgy is a purely human gregariousness. "Togetherness""”and a sort of boyscout mania for organized piety, I wonder what the reactions will be. I do not have to wonder, though. There will probably be the usual misunderstandings and recriminations. |
| 1960/04/16 | Josef A. Jungmann | Sacrifice of the Church: the Meaning of the Mass |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 384
| Excellent book by Scholem Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and Traherne's Centuries, sent by Natasha Spender. Finished Fromm on love. And a little thing by Jungmann, The Sacrifice of the Church. |
| 1960/06/01 | Georges Bernanos | Dialogue des carmelites |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 268
| Did I thank you yet for Bernanos' Dialogues des Carmelites? It is a splendid thing, and it is good to have it here in French. I had read it a long time ago in English. |
| 1960/08/05 | Giulio Basetti-Sani | Mohammed et Saint-Francois |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 26
| A passionate and convinced book by a Franciscan [Giulio Basetti-Sani, Mohammed et Saint François, Ottawa, 1959] on Mohammed and St. Francis, so far a survey of the incapacity for dialogue between Christians and Moslems - and pointing to the need for it. |
| 1960/08/10 | Giulio Basetti-Sani | Mohammed et Saint-Francois |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 30
| L. Massignon believes that the "nocturnal ascension" of Mohammed brought him to the threshold of mysticism but he would go no further, and that therefore mysticism was barred, under pain of death to all other Moslems. (Though some got away with it.) I think Fr. Giulio Basetti-Sani is a little romantic when he asserts that St. Francis, having offered himself for martyrdom at Damiette, became a substitute for Mohammed and went the whole way on Mount Alvernia. Isn't this a bit arbitrary? |
| 1960/08/10 | Jean Steinmann | Saint Jerome and His Times |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 30
| [Jean] Steinmann's book on St. Jerome [St. Jerome and His Times, New York, 1959] in the refectory is interesting and well done but I am sick of Jerome, his querulous sensitivity, his rages, his politics-and I am tired of Steinmann's anti- Origenism. It is too insistent. I am for Rufinus and St. John Chrysostom. |
| 1960/09/04 | Giulio Basetti-Sani | Mohammed et Saint-Francois |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 279
| As you know, Herbert has been here. He was telling me that you were going to Moscow, etc., and I did not write to you. I hope your trip was not too wearisome, but very fruitful. I have read the fascinating book on St. Francis and Mohammed [by Fr. Giulio Bassetti-Sani, published in Montreal in French]. It is very clear, very original. We need books like this and I found some magnificent sentences from the Koran. |
| 1961/03/05 | Benet of Canfield | Rule of Perfection |
Ltrs: HGL p. 340
| I am reading Part III of Benet with the very greatest interest. It is true that he has a welter of divisions and subdivisions which I rather regret, but in between there are some marvelous passages. I find him very like Eckhart. We do have to open our hearts and "flow with God" with self-forgetfulness and the renunciation of mental objects, even the highest forms. In this of course we must always be called and led. He makes it clear. We are too rational. We do not permit anything to remain unconscious. Yet all that is best is unconscious or superconscious. Yes, the first and second mean are superb. I am not a professional San Juanist and have no more labels by which to be known. I think The Ascent [to Truth] is my worst book, except for two early ones "¦ |
| 1961/04/02 | Julian of Norwich | Revelations of Divine Love |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 105
| Yesterday-reading bits of Dame Julian of Norwich and today I began Gregory of Nyssa's homilies on the Canticle. |
| 1961/04/16 | F.X. Durrwell | Resurrection: a Biblical Study / translated by Rosemary Sheed |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 108
| [F. X.] Durrwell's book on the Resurrection, sent by Frank Sheed, is excellent when you get into it. A remarkable insight into the visible and institutional aspect of the Church as something provisional, belonging along with death and suffering to the time of imperfection. A necessary corrective. Too many evils are excused by a passionate and one-sided attachment to the Church as a juridical institution. Pius XII says truly that the evils of the Church's history are to be blamed on men, not on the institution. But men use the institutional framework of the Church as the scene and the refuge of certain injustices and inequities, and bend it at times to serve their purposes. It would even seem that the framework lends itself to this-at least in its present complex condition. It is not new to remark [on] our perpetual need of reform. |
| 1961/04/21 | John C.H. Wu | Beyond East and West |
Ltrs: HGL p. 615-16
| I am very glad the Mencius finally arrived and I knew you would like it. I am glad you approved of the "night spirit." It seems to me that Chinese is full of wonderful things that the West does not suspect"”like your observation on the lunar month which deeply touched me in Beyond East and West. There are so many fine things in your book. I especially enjoy the notations from your diary that are being read now. The community was in a state of near riot when you described your marriage. I am in love with your parents. The book is most enjoyable and moving. |
| 1961/04/22 | Benet of Canfield | Rule of Perfection |
Ltrs: HGL p. 341
| I now have the first two parts of Canfield's Rule, though I have not had a chance to read them. The notes arrived safely some time ago in case I did not thank you already. Now: would you consent to my getting one of my friends to handprint, in a limited edition of not more than 100 copies, some selected passages from Part III, with perhaps a little note of introduction which I would write, Deo volente? This would not, of course, interfere with what they refer to as a "trade edition" of the complete Rule. And I would expand my introduction for that edition. I have at least three friends in mind, all of them great printers and two having a fine reputation among collectors. One of them will surely want to do this. What do you say? All we will "get out of it" (!) will be a few copies of the book, but I feel amply rewarded just in seeing something fine finely printed. For God's glory and for the honor of His saints! "¦ Do you know where I might get hold of the Vansteenberghe life of Canfield? If necessary you could order it from Blackwell's for me and the bill could be sent to my London publisher. Please let me know. |
| 1961/06/10 | William G. Congdon | In My Disk of Gold: Itinary to Christ by William Congdon |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 125
| Wrote a couple of pages for Bill Congdon's book the other day. He deserves a statement. He needed the transparency of Christ Walking on the Waters and I hated to part with it. It is really beautiful. A delight. |
| 1961/07/11 | Pius XI | Divini Redemptoris |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 141
| Essential soundness of the principles in Divini Redemptoris - Pius XI's Encyclical against atheistic communism. It is an old one, 1937, but it has lost none of its value today. On the contrary. In this, besides everything else, he says clearly: "Every other enterprise, however attractive and helpful, must yield before the vital need of protecting the very foundation of faith and of Christian civilization." This assumes - and I think not incorrectly - that Xtian civilization has not yet been completely undermined. But yet when we see the means he suggests, and see how they have been neglected"¦It is certain that Christian civilization and the capitalist economy are by no means the same thing, and the confusion of the two is what has done more than anything else to promote communism and corrupt Christian civilization. |
| 1961/07/28 | Pieter Meer de Walcheren, van der | Paradis Blanc |
Ltrs: SofC p. 139
| It was a joy to receive your book with the very cordial dedication which you inscribed there. I am convinced that you speak the truth, because when I read your pages, a feeling sweeps over me which takes in all of your love for "our spiritual family." I feel an extraordinary affinity with that wonderful brilliance of Leon Bloy. This has been going on for twenty years, ever since the days when I took out all his books from the Columbia University Library. I noticed that Raissa Maritain and I were the only ones who read them. (One can tell this from the library cards which you have to sign: sometimes I preceded her, other times she arrived before me, but we went through all the volumes together without my ever running into her.) The part on Leon Bloy is wonderful. All "my" France comes back to me, with the mystery of my own vocation which my sojourn in France had prepared. The part about Raissa and Christine and Dom Pieterke is very moving: in the case of the latter two, it's my first acquaintance with them. There's no need to tell you that I have known you for a long time, because the Paradis Blanc is one of my favorite books"”especially the beautiful conference (in the style of Cassian) with Dom Porion. Is he well? I have not written him in a long tim"”since the "debacl" of my Carthusian leanings. But looking back, I have to say that my Father Abbot permits me, all the same, a substantial amount of solitude. |
| 1961/07/28 | Pieter Meer de Walcheren, van der | Rencontres: Leon Bloy, Raïssa Maritain, Christine et Pieterke |
Ltrs: SofC p. 139
| It was a joy to receive your book with the very cordial dedication which you inscribed there. I am convinced that you speak the truth, because when I read your pages, a feeling sweeps over me which takes in all of your love for "our spiritual family." I feel an extraordinary affinity with that wonderful brilliance of Leon Bloy. This has been going on for twenty years, ever since the days when I took out all his books from the Columbia University Library. I noticed that Raissa Maritain and I were the only ones who read them. (One can tell this from the library cards which you have to sign: sometimes I preceded her, other times she arrived before me, but we went through all the volumes together without my ever running into her.) The part on Leon Bloy is wonderful. All "my" France comes back to me, with the mystery of my own vocation which my sojourn in France had prepared. The part about Raissa and Christine and Dom Pieterke is very moving: in the case of the latter two, it's my first acquaintance with them. There's no need to tell you that I have known you for a long time, because the Paradis Blanc is one of my favorite books"”especially the beautiful conference (in the style of Cassian) with Dom Porion. Is he well? I have not written him in a long tim"”since the "debacl" of my Carthusian leanings. But looking back, I have to say that my Father Abbot permits me, all the same, a substantial amount of solitude. |
| 1961/08/12 | Paul K.T. Sih | Decision for China |
Ltrs: HGL p. 619
| I am reading Paul Sih's book about China at the moment. It is very clear and informative, and tells me a lot of things about which I knew nothing. When we are up against a monster propaganda machine, the task is discouraging, but we must nevertheless stick to the truth. The trouble is that there is also a monster ambiguity to deal with at the same time, as though the propaganda machine had not only changed the "truths" but even changed the "truth" itself. As if it had somehow created a new kind of truth, in the face of which all former truths, however true, become irrelevant. This is the problem. |
| 1961/08/16 | Paul K.T. Sih | Decision for China |
Ltrs: HGL p. 549
| It is already a long time since your letter of July 26th and the arrival of the two books, which I was so happy to receive. I began your autobiography [From Confucius to Christ], and then one of the novices needed a book of this type as a change so I lent it to him (he enjoyed it very much), while I myself proceeded with your Decision for China. The latter is clear and illuminating. I have not yet quite finished it but it is a very meaningful book to me "¦ |
| 1961/08/16 | Paul K.T. Sih | From Confusius to Christ |
Ltrs: HGL p. 549
| It is already a long time since your letter of July 26th and the arrival of the two books, which I was so happy to receive. I began your autobiography [From Confucius to Christ], and then one of the novices needed a book of this type as a change so I lent it to him (he enjoyed it very much), while I myself proceeded with your Decision for China. The latter is clear and illuminating. I have not yet quite finished it but it is a very meaningful book to me "¦ |
| 1961/08/27 | Vladimir Lossky | Theologie negative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart |
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 "¦ |
| 1961/10/09 | Gaston Brillet | Meditations on the Old Testament |
Ltrs: SofC p. 140
| There is a rather good book by Brillet, Meditations on the Old Testament . In fact it is in four volumes. As a meditation book it is not extraordinary but it does tie up meditation with the reading of the Scriptures. Since the Scriptures are the word of God they are certainly the ideal way of opening up a meditative approach to Our Lord, dialogue, response and communion with Him in faith, hope and love. And that is what meditation is. Since there is so much richness and solid meat in the Scriptures, and since reading of the Scriptures tends to be objective and simple, meditation on them can also preserve us from too much self-conscious and reflexive activity. |
| 1961/12/02 | Walter Stein (ed.) | Nuclear Weapons: a Catholic Response |
Ltrs: HGL p. 405
| The English book on Nuclear Weapons [Walter Stein, ed.] is without any doubt the best thing I have read for a long time. I am anxious to get the whole thing and use it in the paperback I told you about, if I possibly can. I may also write an article about it [Merton reviewed it in the Catholic Worker, November 1962], which you can use, but I am at present discussing the possibility with The Nation. It is really a splendid book, well thought out and well written "¦ |
| 1962/03/00 | Gordon C. Zahn | German Catholics and Hitler's War: A Study in Social Control |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 45
| I have been reading Gordon Zahn's book [German Catholics and Hitler's War] which you published. It is a most important and very welldone job of work. It deserves far more than the obvious platitudes which spring to mind about any good new book. To say that it raises a vitally important issue is so far short of doing it justice that it is ridiculous. It raises an issue that most of us are frankly incapable of understanding or even thinking about intelligently. It goes terribly deep, and much too deep for the average Catholic, the average priest, the average bishop. Zahn is objective with scientific innocence. There is no guile in his approach. He just says what he says, and overstates nothing. Where the impact comes is in the delayed action after one has read a chapter or so. Then all of a sudden one comes to with a jolt and says to himself: "This really means that something very dreadful is happening and has been happening, and that the bottom is dropping out of what we have been accustomed to regard as a fully satisfactory and complete picture of Christianity, or Christian civilization. Perhaps it has already dropped "¦" That is a mixed metaphor no doubt. The bottom drops out of a bucket, not out of a picture. But perhaps one tends to feel that the picture itself has just dropped out of a frame. |
| 1962/03/00 | Hans Küng | Council, Reform and Reunion |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 45
| Then the Hans Küng book, The Council, Reform and Reunion. This too is splendid. One's reaction is more hopeful and more positive. But the sense of urgency remains the same. This Council has got to fulfill great hopes or be a disaster. It is absolutely no use reaffirming the disciplinary and juridical positions that have been affirmed one way or another for a thousand years. This is not reform, not renewal. That is what comes out of those two books, with great force. This is not the world of Gregory VII or Innocent III or Pius V, or even Pius X. To be a perfect Christian, even a saint according to their pattern, is no longer enough. On the contrary, it is apt to be terribly dangerous, even fatal. |
| 1962/03/00 | Karl Rahner | On the Theology of Death |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 47
| I am most grateful for the books. Rahner's Theology of Death was the first thing I grabbed, and I finished it quickly. It is superb. Funnily enough, my reaction would shock him, but besides clarifying my Christian faith it threw immense light on the real nature of Buddhism. He would be horrified. But that is precisely the Buddhist approach: that death can and should be an act of complete liberation, a going forth, an act by which one freely and completely leaves behind all that is not definitive, and the affirmation of the meaning hidden in all one's other acts. He of course tries to dismiss Buddhism as a spiritual sin, and he may be right of certain aspects of it. But I have been studying it a bit, and I think this is the real meaning of nirvana, and it has absolutely nothing whatever to do with a quietist ecstasy. The other books came yesterday and I shall enjoy them, bit by bit. |
| 1962/03/04 | Thomas Aquinas | Commentary on Timothy |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 207
| "The secret which is hidden in the heart of the Father, has become Man." -St Thomas Comm[entary] On Tim[othy] That Christ is not a human nature conscious of Himself as (human) subject. To say He is natura humana sui conscia [human nature with self-consciousness] would be saying He was a Human Person (subject). Hence Nestorianism. So some distinguish two consciousnesses, divine and human, but there is only one (divine) subject. What does Buddhism attempt to do with the natura humana sui conscia? What happens to it in mysticism? Implications? Difficulties? |
| 1962/03/09 | Hans Küng | Council, Reform and Reunion |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 209
| Reading Hans Küng on The Council, Reform and Reunion [New York, 1961]. If I wanted to start copying bits of it I would end by copying page after page, because I am so glad these things are at last said. Yet they are after all only obvious-even trite. That this Church is stuffy, dusty, narrow, that the hierarchy has been immobile, stupid, passive, repressive, etc. etc. The closed mind of the Churchman today! What I fear is that this will only engender a lot of intense activity and legislation, decrees, "reforms" etc. which will authoritatively impose a lot of new obligations and change all the burdens from one shoulder to the other. Without freeing the heart to receive the H[oly] Spirit in abundance. |
| 1962/03/10 | Hans Küng | Council, Reform and Reunion |
Ltrs: HGL p. 178
| You must by now have had a look at the new Hans Küng book, The Council, Reform and Reunion. If you have not, then do by all means get it as fast as ever you can. I think it is not out but I have a review copy. It will really gladden your heart. It is one of the most forthright, direct and powerful statements of our actual condition and problem that I have ever seen. It is a most remarkable book and it will have a terrific impact. What the results will be, no one can say, but it is in a lot of ways a portent "¦ |
| 1962/03/17 | Walter Stein (ed.) | Nuclear Weapons: a Catholic Response |
Ltrs: HGL p. 572
| "¦ I wanted to assure you that I knew the book edited by Walter Stein. At first I planned to use all of it in the anthology of essays I have been editing [Breakthrough to Peace], then we had to cut down "¦ so that in the end I have only one of Stein's essays left. But this book will contain much very interesting material, some of the best that has been done in this country "¦ If you have seen Fellowship, you will see that they did some rather intelligent cutting of "Red or Dead" and I will be happy if you do the same. I am glad you like it. Not everyone will. Yet it is only common sense. |
| 1962/04/00 | Alacantara Mens | Oorsprong en betekenis van de Nederlandse begijnen - en begardenbeweging. Vergelijkende studie XII-XIII eeuw |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 49
| When Rev. Dom Edward was here I did indeed speak to him about my interest in the Beguines in the Low Countries and their relation both to the Cistercians on the one hand and to the Rhenish mystics on the other. He advised me to write to you, but as I had little or no time to pursue the study further, I failed to do so. But now it is a great pleasure to receive your letter, which came several weeks ago, I regret to say"”I am behind with all my correspondenc"”and then the splendid book of Fr. Mens on the Beguines. I have never tried reading a whole book in Flemish before and this will be a kind of challenge. But I am most grateful for your gift and deeply appreciate it "¦ |
| 1962/06/00 | Bonaventura | Collectiones in Haexemeron |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 245
| You might find interesting leads in Bouyer's new book Seat of Wisdom. And of course there is always Berdyaev "¦ His "Sense of Creation" (if that is the English title, I read it in French) is full of wild ideas, but a few good ones also. Have you by the way read Traherne's Centuries of Meditations, published recently by Harper's? He has delightful insights on this subject. As to the Scholastics, I would say try St. Bonaventure's Collationes in Haexemeron. (In general all the Patristic treatises on the work of the six days would offer interesting material.) I am on and off reading Clement of Alexandria and will try to keep you in mind if I run across more material. Then there is Gregory of Nyssa. A new collection of texts by Danielou and Musurillo should offer a few possibilities. |
| 1962/06/00 | Louis Bouyer | Trône de la sagesse |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 245
| You might find interesting leads in Bouyer's new book Seat of Wisdom. And of course there is always Berdyaev "¦ His "Sense of Creation" (if that is the English title, I read it in French) is full of wild ideas, but a few good ones also. Have you by the way read Traherne's Centuries of Meditations, published recently by Harper's? He has delightful insights on this subject. As to the Scholastics, I would say try St. Bonaventure's Collationes in Haexemeron. (In general all the Patristic treatises on the work of the six days would offer interesting material.) I am on and off reading Clement of Alexandria and will try to keep you in mind if I run across more material. Then there is Gregory of Nyssa. A new collection of texts by Danielou and Musurillo should offer a few possibilities. |
| 1962/07/04 | Dietrich Hildebrand, von | In Defense of Purity |
Ltrs: SofC p. 145
| Transformation in Christ is a difficult book, and I let the novices read it without however pushing them. On the other hand Von Hildebrand's Defense of Purity is, it seems to me, a superbly spiritual treatment of chastity. There is a lot about marriage in it, but I feel the novices ought to appreciate the married state which they are renouncing. What good to renounce it if they do not know its dignity? For a retiro however the needs might be different. |
| 1962/07/04 | Dietrich Hildebrand, von | Transformation in Christ |
Ltrs: SofC p. 145
| Transformation in Christ is a difficult book, and I let the novices read it without however pushing them. On the other hand Von Hildebrand's Defense of Purity is, it seems to me, a superbly spiritual treatment of chastity. There is a lot about marriage in it, but I feel the novices ought to appreciate the married state which they are renouncing. What good to renounce it if they do not know its dignity? For a retiro however the needs might be different. |
| 1962/07/04 | Ida Friederieke Görres | Hidden Face: A Study of St. Therese of Lisieux |
Ltrs: SofC p. 145
| Bouyer on the Meaning of the Monastic Life we regard as standard. In an older context, there is Dom Marmion, always safe and solid. Bouyer's new Introduction to Spirituality is a bit advanced, but I should think you might be able to use it. A perfect biography of St. Therese which is very useful for all religious is the Hidden Face by [Ida] Goerres. We always like Guardini here. To my mind he is one of the most important and articulate Catholic authors of the moment. He has good things on prayer, faith, and so on. Prayer in Practice comes to mind as excellent. Fr. Danielou is liked by the novices and I like him too. Also Hubert Van Zeller. |
| 1962/07/04 | Louis Bouyer | Meaning of the Monastic Life |
Ltrs: SofC p. 145
| Bouyer on the Meaning of the Monastic Life we regard as standard. In an older context, there is Dom Marmion, always safe and solid. Bouyer's new Introduction to Spirituality is a bit advanced, but I should think you might be able to use it. A perfect biography of St. Therese which is very useful for all religious is the Hidden Face by [Ida] Goerres. We always like Guardini here. To my mind he is one of the most important and articulate Catholic authors of the moment. He has good things on prayer, faith, and so on. Prayer in Practice comes to mind as excellent. Fr. Danielou is liked by the novices and I like him too. Also Hubert Van Zeller. |
| 1962/07/04 | Romano Guardini | Prayer in Practice |
Ltrs: SofC p. 145
| Bouyer on the Meaning of the Monastic Life we regard as standard. In an older context, there is Dom Marmion, always safe and solid. Bouyer's new Introduction to Spirituality is a bit advanced, but I should think you might be able to use it. A perfect biography of St. Therese which is very useful for all religious is the Hidden Face by [Ida] Goerres. We always like Guardini here. To my mind he is one of the most important and articulate Catholic authors of the moment. He has good things on prayer, faith, and so on. Prayer in Practice comes to mind as excellent. Fr. Danielou is liked by the novices and I like him too. Also Hubert Van Zeller. |
| 1962/07/28 | Eucherius | Contemptus Mundi |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 234
| Antigone and stoical tropes of St. Eucherius in his contemptus mundi, [rejection of the world]: the beauty of his prose. How the heavens observe the laws of God when they have been once commanded and we, with volumes of laws, do not obey Him. |
| 1962/08/04 | Hilarius | Sermo de Vita Sancti Honorati Episcopi Arelatensis |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 235
| If I have the sense to keep to the writers of Christian antiquity, for the moment, for the next few months at least, I think it will mean a great deal. Perhaps, though I have no real obligation to specialize, I ought to specialize in them: not neglecting the Medieval writers For instance, today, had to resist a real madness, and stick to Vol. 50 of the PL [Patrologia Latina] and found much light and interest in the Vita S. Honorati by St. Hilary of Arles. His style, his manner of approaching his subject, his classical topoi, all might seem corny; actually it represents a real culture and a very different one from that of, say, Peter of Celle, whom I was also reading, but for work's sake, the other day. |
| 1962/09/11 | Gordon C. Zahn | German Catholics and Hitler's War: A Study in Social Control |
Ltrs: HGL p. 579
| Fortunately there are laymen speaking up, and I think you continue to be among them. In Canada, Leslie Dewart has been writing good things (a professor at St. Michael's in Toronto). Do you know Gordon Zahn's book [German Catholics and Hitler's Wars]? "¦ Then there is also the anthology I put out, which got by (my articles got by, and I did not bother to explain that I had edited a whole anthology to go with them). I am waiting to get some more copies, and will send you one. It is called Breakthrough to Peace. Walter Stein is one of those represented, and also there is what I thought a very solid essay by Herbert Butterfield, at Cambridge. Others were Americans, and some of the best minds we have, I believe. You ought to be fairly pleased with the book. |
| 1962/09/20 | Hans Küng | Council, Reform and Reunion |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 242
| [Hans] Kung of course I read as soon as I could get my hands on him. I thought it a noble, straight and courageous book [The Council, Reunion and Reform]. The vigor and honesty of the message was tremendous. But such books raise vain hopes, perhaps. The Council cannot possibly measure up to all he suggested. Yet precisely for that reason we must doggedly hope that it will "¦ |
| 1962/09/29 | John of Salesbury | Metalogicon |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 251-52
| This morning, in John of Salisbury, ran across a quote from the Georgics which has entered into the deepest part of my being since I learned it thirty years ago at Oakham-and was moved by it then, studying I think one June morning before the Higher Cert[ificate Examination], by a brook behind Catmose House. Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari. [Happy is he who can have known the causes of things, and has placed under his feet all fears and inexorable fate and the rumbling of greedy Acheron.] Inexhaustible literary, spiritual, moral beauty of these lines: the classic ideal of wisdom. What a gift to have lived and to have received this, as though a sacrament, and to be in communion of light and joy with the whole of my civilization-and my Church. This is indestructible. Acheron (whose strepitus [rumbling] was never so full of ominous rumblings) has nothing to say about it. And John of S[alisbury]-glossing this with words about faith as a way to the highest truth, adds: Impossibile est ut diligat et colat vanitatem quisquis et toto corde quaerit et amplectionem veritatis. [Merton's emphasis] [It is quite impossible for someone to seek and foster vanity and wholeheartedly at the same time seek also for the embrace of truth.] |
| 1962/10/07 | Joseph Marie Parent | Doctrine de la Creation dans l'Ecole de Chartres. Etude et textes |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 254
| A book has come (from the U. of Minnesota library, borrowed for me by Ray Livingston) La Doctrine de la Creation dans l'Ecole de Chartres. I am really fascinated by these people. I have been trying to read the Timaeus and find it sometimes impossible. Yet what they have made of Plato, these men of Chartres! Also reading the II Book of the Summa Contra Gentiles [St. Thomas Aquinas]. |
| 1962/10/07 | Thomas Aquinas | Suma Contra Gentiles |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 254
| A book has come (from the U. of Minnesota library, borrowed for me by Ray Livingston) La Doctrine de la Creation dans l'Ecole de Chartres. I am really fascinated by these people. I have been trying to read the Timaeus and find it sometimes impossible. Yet what they have made of Plato, these men of Chartres! Also reading the II Book of the Summa Contra Gentiles [St. Thomas Aquinas]. |
| 1962/10/08 | William of Conches | Moralium Dogma Philosophorum |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 254
| The Moralium Dogma Philosophorum of Wm. of Conches is an utterly delightful book. Clear, full of wisdom, full of strength. Magnificent structure of moral virtues in a unity built on justice. I think he is a great man, too long unknown. |
| 1962/10/10 | R.L. Poole | Masters of the Schools at Paris and Chartres in John of Salisbury's Time |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 256
| After dinner-reading about Abelard, in R. L. Poole. I have an enormous amount of sympathy and pity for Abelard. And a profound admiration for the human greatness of Heloise (not brought out in Poole, but evident in Gilson). Abelard suffered far more than Bernard ever did (if one can estimate such things!). If suffering makes the greater saints then, perhaps"¦oh, what have I nearly said! But it is true, dear diary. After all these years I have a greater liking for Abelard than for St. Bernard. I understand him better, am closer to him. His weaknesses were great, his character had terrible flaws, he was vain and impressive. He did not control his vanity as Bernard did. It ruined him. |
| 1962/10/30 | Thierry of Chartres | Hexameron |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 262
| I have been having good discussions in the evening, once a week with Dan Walsh, on the School of Chartres, using such texts as are available. And quite a few are. Wm. of Conches on the Timaeus and Boethius, Thierry of Chartres on the Hexameron, and so on. I think Wm. of Conches is a real discovery: his tremendous philosophy of nature and emphasis on secondary causes, an anticipation of Thomism. Or perhaps an inspiration of it. But more than that, his contemplative sense of esse in his doctrine on formal causality and "wisdom." |
| 1962/10/30 | William of Conches | Moralium Dogma Philosophorum |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 262
| I have been having good discussions in the evening, once a week with Dan Walsh, on the School of Chartres, using such texts as are available. And quite a few are. Wm. of Conches on the Timaeus and Boethius, Thierry of Chartres on the Hexameron, and so on. I think Wm. of Conches is a real discovery: his tremendous philosophy of nature and emphasis on secondary causes, an anticipation of Thomism. Or perhaps an inspiration of it. But more than that, his contemplative sense of esse in his doctrine on formal causality and "wisdom." |
| 1962/11/13 | William of Chonces | Philosophia Mundi |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 264
| Finishing Wm. of Conches' Philosophia Mundi [Philosophy of the World]-the plan is interesting, and having discussed the world, then man's body, then the soul, he ends with man's education. Beautiful little chapter on the Teacher. I was very moved by it. I usually ignore this element in my own vocation, but obviously I am a writer, a student and a teacher as well as a contemplative of sorts, and my solitude etc. is that of a writer and teacher, not of a pure hermit. And the great thing in my life is, or should be, love of truth. |
| 1962/11/16 | Ignace Lepp | Christian Failure |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 265
| Am reading Ignace Lepp's The Christian Future, which concerns me deeply. I have never had any doubts about my Christian faith or about the Church as the Body of Christ. But the more I see of a certain organizational and social aspect of Christianity, the more I agree with Fr. Lepp. In a certain sense I am scandalized by my own Catholicism. |
| 1963/01/18 | Thomas Aquinas | De Divinis Moribus |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 290
| Cleaned out the room yesterday. What a relief! That even the order of my room-is pleasing to God (as well as to myself and to those others who benefit by it) I am encouraged to believe by St. Thomas' De divinis moribus [On the Divine Customs]. What a perfect little treatise! What moral beauty! It is short and easy and needs to be translated, and really I think I must do it. How far it is from the confusion and moral squalor of our time, and from our peculiar problem of truth. Such an agonizing problem because potentially good and really gifted people, revolting against the standardized lies of our society, seek truth in evil and perversion, and thus defeat themselves, confirming all in evil and in lies. This because God has entirely disappeared from all our mental vision. |
| 1963/02/19 | Ignace Lepp | Christian Failure |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 244
| Good job, moving up Ignace Lepp to the front of the shelf in the book mart. I did a review of the book [The Christian Failure], under a pseudonym (Benedict Monk) in the January Catholic Worker "¦ |
| 1963/03/27 | François de Salignac de La Mothe Fenelon | Lettres Spirituelles |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 306
| "Ecoutez Dieu et point vous-même: làest la vraie liberte, paix et joie du Saint Esprit." ["Listen to God and not yourself: in that lies true freedom, peace and the joy of the Holy Spirit."] Fenelon The ms. of Fenelon's letters has arrived-of course only a selection. Well translated, very appealing. "Les pecheurs veulent toujours ce qui leur manque, et les ames pleines de l'amour de Dieu ne veulent rien que ce qu'elles ont." ["Sinners always want what they don't have, and souls full of the love of God don't want anything except what they already have."] (Fenelon) |
| 1963/03/27 | Patrick Dolan | Unity and Reform: Selected Writings of Nicholas of Cusa |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 306
| After dinner began a book on Nicholas of Cusa recently requested by the library-(Dolan, introduction and selections). He is someone to whom I am much attracted. I have only read the De Visione Dei and that only in translation, and found it dry. Nevertheless something tells me to keep trying. His manly idealism fascinates me. And there are so many conflicting judgments about him that I want to arrive at one of my own! |
| 1963/03/28 | Raïssa Maritain | Notes sur le Pater |
Ltrs: CforT p. 37
| Did I ever tell you how much I liked Raïssa's Notes sur le Pater? It is a really precious book, a perfect commentary, and so unassuming. I have quoted from the last pages in a book of mine which is to appear next year, on prayer "¦ |
| 1963/04/20 | Aelred Graham | Zen Catholicism |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 314
| I received a letter from Dom Aelred Graham in answer to a card about his book on Zen Catholicism, which I have reviewed (for America). |
| 1963/05/01 | Aelred Graham | Zen Catholicism |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 244
| Correspondence gets bigger all the time, and things one must answer right away, very often. For instance, this will please you, Dom Aelred Graham and I are now great friends, and I am glad. I reviewed his new book on Zen [Zen Catholicism], after first sending him a letter about it, and we agree thoroughly. He even invited me to come up and have a vacation and rest at Portsmouth Priory. Some chance I'd ever have of getting that permission. But I would really enjoy it. However I hope he may stop by here one day. I think we really look at things very much in the same way. The Zen book certainly showed it. |
| 1963/05/08 | François de Salignac de La Mothe Fenelon | Lettres Spirituelles |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 317
| Finished the preface to Fenelon's letters the other day. |
| 1963/05/10 | Gordon C. Zahn | German Catholics and Hitler's War: A Study in Social Control |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 286
| Your manuscript has arrived and I am about halfway through it. The book is terrific. You are very clear, convincing, and as far as I can see quite fair. I think it is a very important study of the Cuba affair, and in many ways it is more important even than Zahn's study of Germany [German Catholics and Hitler's War, Sheed and Ward, 1962]. |
| 1963/05/10 | Leslie Dewart | Christianity and Revolution |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 286
| Your manuscript has arrived and I am about halfway through it. The book is terrific. You are very clear, convincing, and as far as I can see quite fair. I think it is a very important study of the Cuba affair, and in many ways it is more important even than Zahn's study of Germany [German Catholics and Hitler's War, Sheed and Ward, 1962]. |
| 1963/06/00 | Leslie Dewart | Christianity and Revolution |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 288
| Your manuscript on the Cuban revolution and on the ambivalence, hesitations, and withdrawal of the Cuban Church is a very perceptive and exciting political meditation and there is good reason for us to meditate politically when the moral and spiritual crisis of man at the end of an era of his history comes out in political conflict. I believe that the great religious temptation of our time, the apocalyptic temptation, will be (and already is) in the realm of politics. What do I mean by apocalyptic? I mean quite simply "final" and decisive as a manifestation of the secret of God in history and of the Christian capacity"”or failur"”to act according to His love. We are in the time of "the end""”not that everything necessarily has to blow up tomorrow. But we have certainly passed a point of no return and we live now in a world of fantastic perspectives, most of them, as I say, apocalyptic. To none of them are we yet adjusted. Your text is a good beginning. It shows the way we must attempt to seek some kind of clarity and understanding in the events of our time which ought to be supremely relevant to the Church insofar as these events all have Christian or "post-Christian" implications, either for us or against us. In these events we, and the Christian centuries, are now, at this very moment, being judged. |
| 1963/06/02 | Gregorius the Great | Homiliae in Evangelia |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 326
| Redite parvuli fili ad sinum matris vestrae aeternae sapientiae, sugite larga ubera pietatis Dei; transacta plangite, imminentia vitate. [Return, little children, to the bosom of your mother, eternal wisdom, suck from the abundant breasts of the love of God; beat your breast for what is past, and avoid what will weaken you.] St Gregory, Hom. XXV no 10 |
| 1963/06/24 | Dorothy Day | Loaves and Fishes: The Inspiring Storey of the Catholic Worker Movement |
Ltrs: HGL p. 276
| I read the proofs of Dorothy's book [Loaves and Fishes] and gave it a good boost for Harper's "¦ |
| 1963/07/14 | Karl Rahner | Mary, Mother of the Lord |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 337
| We have now the new photocopied edition of Erasmus, and I am reading the Ratio Verae Theologiae. I admit I am charmed by him. He reads so well, speaks with such clarity and sense, and is so full of the light of the Gospel. I am also reading K. Rahner's new little book on Mary [Mary, Mother of the Lord (New York, 1963)] and I am struck by the similarity-the same kind of clarity, simplicity and breadth of view. It is the same mutual climate without the subdued passion and the humor of Erasmus. |
| 1963/07/19 | Anselmus of Canterbury | Proslogion |
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. |
| 1963/07/19 | Benedict of Nurcia | Rule |
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. |
| 1963/07/19 | Desiderius Erasmus | Ratio Verae Theologiae |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 340
| I am halfway through the Ratio Verae Theologiae of Erasmus, loving the clarity of his style, his taste, his good sense, his faith, his Evangelical teaching. If there had been no Luther, Erasmus would be one of the greatest doctors of the Church-officially I mean. He is perhaps anyway, though he is very simple. I like his directness and his courage. These qualities were all canonized in [Thomas] More. Humble Erasmus is content to be sainted in his friend. But that's it: how can one be anything but a friend to such men? |
| 1963/07/19 | Desiderius Erasmus | Ratio Verae Theologiae |
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. |
| 1963/07/19 | P. Ladeuze | Essai sur le cenobitisme pakhômien |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 340
| Diligebat autem anachoresios plurimos, frequenter expetens solitudinem. Et illic dies in oratione persistens dominum supplicabat ut a tantis se fraudibus clementer eriperet. [He loved to go far into the desert, often seeking solitude. And there he spent his days in prayer, asking the Lord that in his mercy he would be delivered from all deception.] Vita S. Pachomii, C. II Charmed by the life of Pachomius-and have found much useful material in Ladenji's "Essai." Too many generalizations have falsified our view of Pachomian Cenobitism. |
| 1963/07/19 | Thomas a Kempis | Imitation of Christ |
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. |
| 1963/07/19 | Thomas Aquinas | Summa Theologiae |
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. |
| 1963/07/22 | Karl Rahner | Mission and Grace: Essays in Pastoral Theology |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 342
| I am reading Karl Rahner's essays on grace-at least those available in translation, as I do not have time to struggle with the German. They seem clear and obvious. I sometimes wonder why Rahner is considered so dangerous. Perhaps because he is too clear and not involved in the technical mumbo jumbo that makes others unreadable. In a word: a readable theologian is dangerous. |
| 1963/07/28 | R.W. Southern | Life of St. Anselm, Archbisshop of Canterbury |
Ltrs: HGL p. 361
| I have been reading a very fine book of R. W. Southern on St. Anselm. I suppose you must know Southern. I think he did a very good job. I took this occasion to get into St. Anselm a little, too. I had always been put off him by the standard philosophy textbooks, but I find him fascinating. And am reading Erasmus too, since we have his collected works in one of those photo-offset editions of the old folios. This all doesn't sound much like Canfield, does it? Well, I do have a humanist and philosophical side. And Anselm was a mystic, certainly. I don't believe in being professionally anti-intellectual, as though the mind as such were an obstacle to contemplation. I think this is a big mistake, and the effects of it are unfortunate. |
| 1963/08/03 | Anselmus of Canterbury | De Libertate Arbitrii |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 3
| Finished St. Anselm's dialogue De Libero Arbitrio today with great enjoyment. Clarity and strength of his dialectic. I have the sense that there is much more below the surface: a whole consistent doctrine and attitude in which this simple treatment of a definition is rooted. "Potestas servandi rectitudinem voluntatispropter ipsam rectitudinem." ["The power of preserving the rectitude of the will on account of rectitude itself."] |
| 1963/08/09 | Anselmus of Canterbury | De Veritate |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 5
| I am reading St. Anselm's De Veritate and the delight of the book is mysterious, clear, contemplative. It is very simple, deceptively so, and one is tempted to think he is arbitrary with his debere esse [ought to be] until one sees that the root is esse [to be] and not debere [ought (to be)], or that it is both, and he traces them both to the esse [being] of God which is the debere esse of everything else. The idea of debere-devoir-debt has been so wrung out and exhausted and so divorced from esse that for us it is a tired authoritarian command that has nothing to say but "You must because you must." Anselm is saying "You must because you are, and being what you are you must say what you are, by being and action, and whether you like it or not you must say you are in God and from Him and for Him, and for no other!" |
| 1963/08/10 | Augustine Baker | Inner Life and the Writings of Dame Gertrude More / dom Benedict Weld-Blundell, ed. |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 6
| Have borrowed [Augustine] Baker's Life of Dame Gertrude More [The Inner Life and the Writings of Dame Gertrude More, 1910] from Stanbrook [Abbey] and like it very much. An important and original book. |
| 1963/08/20 | Owen Chadwick | From Bossuet to Newman: the Idea of Doctrinal Development |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 11
| Reading William Owen Chadwick's excellent essay From Bossuet to Newman - idea of doctrinal development. Disturbed by the realization that since the late Middle Ages the Church has apparently lost her power of really creative assimilation (of non-Christian cultural values) and has on the contrary tended to let heresy be assimilated by secular forces. Reasons for this? And what does it mean? |
| 1963/08/21 | David Knowles o.s.b. | Historian and Character and other Essays |
Ltrs: SofC p. 181
| Years ago you recommended that I get to know Newman, and I did not see your point. I certainly do now, not that I can compare my griefs with his in this matter of censorship. Have you read a very interesting book, From Bossuet to Newman by Owen Chadwick? It is excellent and you would like it. (Cambridge Press"”you ought to review it for Monastic Studies, Berryville, and thus save the trouble and expense of buying a copy.) Another thing you would immensely enjoy is David Knowles' biographical memoir of Dom Cuthbert Butler. It is in Knowles' new book, The Historian and Character (again Cambridge Press). This book by the way gives a curriculum vitae of Knowles and helps to clear away some of the misgivings people have. It also has some good essays on Cistercian topics. |
| 1963/08/21 | Owen Chadwick | From Bossuet to Newman: the Idea of Doctrinal Development |
Ltrs: SofC p. 181
| Years ago you recommended that I get to know Newman, and I did not see your point. I certainly do now, not that I can compare my griefs with his in this matter of censorship. Have you read a very interesting book, From Bossuet to Newman by Owen Chadwick? It is excellent and you would like it. (Cambridge Press"”you ought to review it for Monastic Studies, Berryville, and thus save the trouble and expense of buying a copy.) Another thing you would immensely enjoy is David Knowles' biographical memoir of Dom Cuthbert Butler. It is in Knowles' new book, The Historian and Character (again Cambridge Press). This book by the way gives a curriculum vitae of Knowles and helps to clear away some of the misgivings people have. It also has some good essays on Cistercian topics. |
| 1963/08/23 | Augustine Baker | Inner Life and the Writings of Dame Gertrude More / dom Benedict Weld-Blundell, ed. |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 12
| However, I had a good morning (yesterday) working on Baker's life of Dame Gertrude More-a very wise and beautiful book, and strikingly original. A fine, free, courageous spirituality, so unlike the hidebound continental manuals of piety. And really "monastic." |
| 1963/09/01 | Anselmus of Canterbury | Orationes et Meditationes |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 14
| Tu ipse elementer dispone me et omnes cogitatus et actus meos in beneplacito tuo, ut fiat a me et in me et de me tua semper sola voluntas. [Do you yourself in kindness dispose of me, my thoughts and actions, according to your good pleasure, so that your will may always be done by me and in me and concerning me.] (St. Anselm, Orationes 1) |
| 1963/09/10 | Augustine Baker | Inner Life and the Writings of Dame Gertrude More / dom Benedict Weld-Blundell, ed. |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 16
| Spent an hour or more on Baker's Inner Life of Dame Gertrude carefully reading the chapters on "Divine Inspiration" (or part of them). I can see clearly how much I have failed in this attention where my active life is concerned-especially in my eagerness to publish, to make contacts, to spread messages. How wrong I have been! |
| 1963/09/20 | Morris West | Shoes of the Fisherman |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 17
| Wasted my time reading Morris West's Shoes of the Fisherman. Superficial and naive. A Ukranian Pope falls in love with Teilhard de Chardin! They talk earnestly. Teilhard de Chardin says: "You know, Holy Father, I think we are no longer reaching people!!" etc. Actually, this book is a nonentity. A pious, baseless hope for a renewal that would be comprehensible to Time magazine, and which indeed has already been dreamed of by it. Is this the best the Church can hope for? This folksy myth with its soap opera characters and its changes that change nothing. Here is the kind of prophecy that glorifies the status quo, and works only for a little glory in the Vatican. |
| 1963/09/23 | Anselmus of Canterbury | Cur Deus Homo? |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 19
| Tonight at the grotto, after saying office, read some of the fabulous chapters of [St. Anselm's] Cur Deus Homo? (End of Book I, beginning of Book II). Now this is what seems to me to fit best the patterns of my life-that I should love such theological harmonies. Yet perhaps objectively this is less significant than I think. The rectitudo [rectitude] which I am capable of seeing in my life is far from being that which images in me the freedom of that divine mercy which is His iustitia [justice]. His fidelity to the reality which is His creation and reflectsHis hidden Being. |
| 1963/10/03 | Morris West | Shoes of the Fisherman |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 246-47
| I read the Shoes of the Fisherman in the hospital & thought it rather naive & after all timid & passive. Pope Paul is really much more energetic than the tense Pope of that novel! The recent pronouncements have been fine. Did I tell you he wrote me a personal letter & sent me an autographed picture? I expect great things from Pope Paul & this session of the Council "¦ |
| 1963/10/07 | Ida Friederike Görres | Broken Lights: Diaries and Letters of Ida Görres 1951-1959 |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 22
| Yesterday began Ida Göerres' diaries which are very lovely. She is one of the most alert and honest Catholic minds, not at all conformist, and very true. I am glad of course that she likes The Sign of Jonas. |
| 1963/10/17 | Zoe Oldenbourg | Massacre at Monsegur: A History of the Albigensian Crusade |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 24
| The last time I was in Louisville to see the Doctor I got two books on the Albigensians by Zoe Oldenbourg [Destiny of Fire and Massacre at Montsegur: A History of the Albigensian Crusade]. I have just finished Massacre at Montsegur-a deeply disturbing and moving book. One could find fault with it, in details, I suppose. But what would be the point? In general it is very honest and convincing and I think serious statement about the Church and the Inquisition, made without rancor, by someone whose real love for the Cathars makes her no doubt a bit partial. Is there any getting away from the fact that the Dominicans invented the methods of the modern police state? The secret trial, with secret evidence, making it profitable for the witness to save his life by accusing as many other people (secretly) as possible-retaining his anonymity, etc. The denunciations that remain anonymous-same complaint today against the Holy Office. |
| 1963/10/21 | Augustine Baker | Inner Life and the Writings of Dame Gertrude More / dom Benedict Weld-Blundell, ed. |
Ltrs: HGL p. 25
| I have been reading Dame Gertrude More. Will send you a thing about her and also some other mimeographed booklets. Please overlook innumerable mistakes! |
| 1963/10/22 | Zoe Oldenbourg | Destiny of Fire |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 25
| The book Destiny of Fire, a novel, is far more powerful and "bouleversant" ["upsetting"] than the history. A fantastic religious Eros is at work there: this is her genius. It is her own self that is in the book, the beauty and fascination of her own religious aspirations. Really, there is all this passion-and nothing much after all of God: this sounds like an invidious judgment. Yet what you have is the beauty of religious passion in people hunted to death for heresy. And I have the feeling that God is very remote from that whole war, from either side of it. What mattered were the different kinds of passion. God was gone from it. Or no? |
| 1963/10/23 | Raïssa Maritain | Notes sur le Pater |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 26
| The other day I finished a short preface to Julie Kernan's translation of Raïssa [Maritain]'s Notes sur le Pater [Notes on the Lord's Prayer, 1964]. |
| 1963/10/28 | Anselmus of Canterbury | Cur Deus Homo? |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 28
| I have suddenly grasped the magnificent Chapter I.9 of Cur Deus Homo? [by St. Anselm]. Read it in the hospital and marked some of the right lines, but they had not struck deep. Here again, as in the Proslogion, Anselm's argument means little without an inner light that is spiritual rather than dialectical. Here it is a question of realizing that the Father did not drive the Son to death. Jesus was not "commanded to di" or "condemned to death" by the Father. He came into the world, was made man in order to love as man, to do all that was right. And to save His brothers. In doing "all justice," he comes to be condemned unjustly. |
| 1963/10/28 | Anselmus of Canterbury | Proslogion |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 28
| I have suddenly grasped the magnificent Chapter I.9 of Cur Deus Homo? [by St. Anselm]. Read it in the hospital and marked some of the right lines, but they had not struck deep. Here again, as in the Proslogion, Anselm's argument means little without an inner light that is spiritual rather than dialectical. Here it is a question of realizing that the Father did not drive the Son to death. Jesus was not "commanded to di" or "condemned to death" by the Father. He came into the world, was made man in order to love as man, to do all that was right. And to save His brothers. In doing "all justice," he comes to be condemned unjustly. |
| 1963/10/29 | Raïssa Maritain | Notes sur le Pater |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 132
| Jacques [Maritain] cabled me today that he was happy with a preface I had written for Raissa's Notes sur le Pater. I have wanted to stop all prefaces, but this one last one for him was, I thought, necessary. He is such a great person and responds with such wonderful warmth to the least glimmer of truth, or friendship, or humanity. I think I owed it to him and Raissa. (When I say "last" preface it is perhaps exaggerated because I can see I am committed to a couple more, but I am going to have to say "no" a lot more often.) "¦ |
| 1963/11/05 | Eadmer | Life of St. Anselm / ed. R.W. Southern |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 31
| There is a wonderful therapeutic atmosphere about Eadmer's life of Anselm [The Life of St. Anselm, ed. R. W. Southern, 1962] because of the healing, tender, "motherly" quality of Anselm's concern. The dying monk who hated him found himself "in the arms of two wolves with their teeth at his throat." It is a grotesque medieval manuscript illumination! The two human wolves are dispelled by Anselm who is called from the cloister where he was correcting books while others were at their siesta. |
| 1963/11/20 | Anselmus of Canterbury | De Casu Diaboli |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 36
| Began Anselm's De Casu Diaboli - not because of yesterday, but I have been interested to get to it for a long time. Very profound book on freedom, grace and sin. |
| 1963/11/21 | Dietrich Hildebrand, von | In Defense of Purity |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 309
| By the way, there is a book ostensibly for nuns, etc., but which besides virginity also treats married love quite sensibly: it is Dietrich von Hildebrand's In Defense of Purity. As you would not have picked that in a thousand years, I might as well mention it, as married people would not realize it also concerned them. The great thing in marriage is not an impossible ideal of fulfillment and exaltation but a mature rational Christian acceptance of the responsibilities and risks of human love. There is no harm in discussing all this frankly with your children, with the idea that you might learn on both sides from a frank exchange. Easy for me to suggest this, I suppose. It might be worth trying |
| 1963/12/01 | Anselmus of Canterbury | De Casu Diaboli |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 41
| The seventeenth chapter of De Casu Diaboli brings up a very modern question - our creativity, that is, the creative power of our liberty is perhaps, as far as we ourselves [are] concerned, a non-destructiveness. If we can accept creation we concur in creating because we have the "power" to destroy. Our power to create is a power to consent in creation, or to work in common with the creative will that transcends both our freedom and our world. Our power to destroy seems more ours (and it is so) and more of a power. What is happening now is that we concentrate more and more on the power which is a rejection. Yet paradoxically, to have the power to destroy and not destroy is to "make." In this sense, by not destroying the world we seem to be creating it. We are said to make something "cum possumus facere utnon est et non facimus" ["when we could make something not be, and we don't do it"]. |
| 1963/12/03 | Anselmus of Canterbury | De Casu Diaboli |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 42
| I finished De Casu Diaboli. If a first reading can be said to finish such a book. Must go through it again. Especially for the difference between real freedom and mere determination. Perhaps the devil's sin was after all merely to substitute (arbitrarily and out of his own will) one for the other. Freedom is God's. He wills us to share it by rectitudo-willing according to the principle that is in reality itself-but the devil willed to have it regardless of rectitudo and reality, by his own arbitrary fiat. |
| 1963/12/12 | Rolf Hochhuth | Deputy / Translation from the German Der Stellvertreter |
Ltrs: HGL p. 585
| I have been asked to write some notes on a notorious play [Hochhuth's The Deputy] which treats Pius XII as a renegade for not having openly protested against the mass murder of Jews by Hitler. The play is mediocre and heavy-handed, and there is obviously an air of resentment and prejudice everywhere in it, and yet after all one can see something of a justification for this viewpoint, in its essence. The idea that a Pope should put first of all the "duty" of retaining political advantage and power, and that the "good of souls" depends on this, is something that we cannot deny exists in Rome, and furthermore the play makes a great point of the fact that the whole Catholic notion of obedience and authority has come to be something dependent on this concept of power. In other words, obedience is something that ultimately has a political use: it makes the members of the Church pliant instruments of policy. This can be seen to have utterly shocking consequences. And amusing ones, for instance, in the curial indignation over the mere idea of reform... Obviously for the Curia obedience means nothing outside the context of their own power. They obey a Pope as long as he plays their game. |
| 1963/12/13 | Rolf Hochhuth | Deputy / Translation from the German Der Stellvertreter |
Ltrs: HGL p. 651
| As to Hochhuth: yes, I have read the play [The Deputy] and have dashed off some notes on it which George Lawler says he wants to include with some other notebook excerpts in Continuum. I am sending you a Xeroxed copy of the notes "¦ As to the play, I think it is awful: at least to read. Hochhuth strikes me as somewhat sick, not that I blame him for that. However, the question he raises is an important one, and though he has been grossly unjust to Pius XII (after all, there is no hint whatever of the real greatness of the man in the play), yet I think that the Vatican is at fault, and the hierarchy too, for favoring that kind of abominable and moss-grown concept of authority and of obedience. Here Hochhuth has something to be said for him. When such a temptation is presented to him, how can one blame him for taking it? There has been so much sickening nonsense about Pius XII, and such obviously interested efforts to promote him as a saint, that no one can blame this man for saying he does not agree. |
| 1964/01/18 | Anselmus of Canterbury | Opera Omnia / ed. by Franciscus Salesius Schmitt o.s.b. |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 63-64
| I wonder if anyone reads the monastic letters, etc. of Abelard. They are full of fine traditional material, in the manner of Jerome, clear, precise, and among the best monastic writings of the twelfth century. I am reading them now for the course on Bernard, in connection with De Conversione. Ought to do an article on them but I don't have time. Unable to buy [Franciscus Salesius] Schmitt's edition of Anselm. We have two volumes on interlibrary loan from West Baden-I have them until Easter and went to work on some of his letters too. A question of order, and of making time. |
| 1964/01/19 | Anselmus of Canterbury | Orationes et Meditationes |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 65
| Then this morning in Anselm's Meditations and Orations-I find his "Digne, certe, digne!" ["Fitting, certainly, fitting!"] (Med. 2). Anselm's meditations and prayers are musical compositions. He can use his themes without inhibition. Themes on which we are condemned to be inarticulate, for if we tried to say what he says we could not be authentic. Those forms have been worn out by tired monks and no longer say what he wanted them to say. Yet how close he comes to existentialist nausea for instance in prayer 8 (on St. John Baptist!). Yet there is always the hope, the presence of the compassionate Christ (not permitted to the existentialist!). I love Anselm. I love these prayers, though I could never attempt to use such language myself. |
| 1964/01/25 | Caesarius of Arles | Epistolae |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 67
| Still on Anselm's Letters-and now too Caesarius of Aries. |
| 1964/02/13 | Anselmus of Canterbury | Opera Omnia / ed. by Franciscus Salesius Schmitt o.s.b. |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 76
| St. Anselm, to a monk-to meditate on death and then: "Ab inceptis ergo nulla lassitudine deficias, sed potius quae tibi expediunt et quae nondum es agres-sus, in spe superni auxilii pro amore beatipraemi incipias, ut ad sanctorum beatum consortium Christo ducente pervenias." ["Do not let laziness stop you from what you have begun; rather, begin doing what you need to do, and what you have not yet done, out of love for a blessed reward, and in hope of divine help, so that, with Christ as your guide, you may arrive at the blessed fellowship of the saints."] (Epistle 35.Schmitt III.143) |
| 1964/02/14 | Anselmus of Canterbury | Opera Omnia / ed. by Franciscus Salesius Schmitt o.s.b. |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 76-77
| "Adeo namque vilis mens mea quasi quadam naturali arctatur angustia bonaeque voluntatis languet imbecilitate, ut uni quamlibet parvae curae ceteris exclusis tota non sufficiat, et cuislibet oneris tentationisque gravedine victa succumbat." ["My poor mind is, as it were, shut up by some natural anguish and languishes in the weakness of good will, so that my entire mind does not suffice, all other things being neglected, even for those matters of small moment, and my mind has succumbed to the pressure of every burden and temptation."] (Anselm, Epistle 50, [Schmitt] p. 163) I feel the same "naturalis angustia" ["natural tension"], not that I am as busy as Anselm. Fasting clears the head and lessens the angustia, also brings order into one's life. |
| 1964/02/16 | Edward Schillebeeckx o.p. | Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God. |
Ltrs: HGL p. 365
| Just a brief letter to thank you for the big book Crucible of Love. I have not got into it because I am swamped with books on interlibrary loan that I have to return at definite times, and at the moment I am not too keen on reading Carmelites for some reason. I have had so much of them in the past, and I am discovering new things, for instance Abbot Ammonas, the successor of St. Anthony at Pispir. He is marvelous and so far completely neglected. The best texts have been edited in the Patrologia Orientalis since before the First World War, but no one has done anything with them except Hausherr (who has been doing good stuff on Oriental spirituality) "¦ Also I am reading this great new Dutch Dominican, Schillebeeckx. (Isn't that a mouthful? But it is not as bad as it looks.) |
| 1964/02/22 | Joseph Lortz | Reformation: A Problem For Today |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 80
| Is [Joseph] Lortz too severe on Erasmus? Reading him after dinner today I wondered about this. Erasmus was "hardly a Christian," etc. A scholar, an individualist, not enough sense of the Church, etc. Yet his piety is so clean, so simple and so real. It is a breath of fresh air after so much of the late M. G[ilmore]. In a way I like it even better than Thomas More's "Moralism." But was this not needed at this time? And it is completely Evangelical. Erasmus is perhaps one sided, perhaps lacking in the full Catholic spirit, was perhaps a danger in many ways, but how can one read him today without joy and agreement? Heis a splendid writer and to my mind a deeply pious one. And his satires, are they after all too bitter, too extreme? One feels that his Catholic critics almost begrudge him his fidelity to the Church, as if, to satisfy them, he ought to have apostatized and given them an open and shut case against him. |
| 1964/02/23 | Karl Rahner | Christian Commitment: Essays in Pastoral Theology |
Ltrs: HGL p. 80-81
| Have been reading and reviewing Rahner's latest book and agree with him about what he calls the diaspora situation. It is what we have to face, especially where we think we are not in it. Even the Church is to some extent its own diaspora. Though the fact that I often feel alien in the Church is no new thing and proves nothing about the Church, I suppose. |
| 1964/03/03 | Rolf Hochhuth | Deputy / Translation from the German Der Stellvertreter |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 142-43
| A letter from the new Abbot General [Dom Ignace Gillet] came in concerning the articles on peace in Seeds of Destruction. [These articles were part of a manuscript Merton wrote in 1962 called Peace in a Post-Christian Era.] I was sure, since these had been cleared before by the previous Abbot General, with difficulties, but yet cleared and published, that I had the right to go ahead with them. However, the new Abbot General dug out all the correspondence, had a meeting with the definitors, and said that these articles are not to be "republished" in book form and implicitly in any other form... Naomi, frankly I must say that this whole thing leaves me a bit dizzy. And sick. I can't say exactly that it constitutes a temptation against my "vocation," but it certainly raises some pretty profound questions indeed. I know, one must just take it on the chin and shut up, etc., etc. But with all the attention that has been drawn to the obedience of an Eichmann and now even the question of Pius XII [the reference is to Hochhuth's play The Deputy], the props given by the conventional arguments don't offer much support. One is faced with the very harrowing idea that in obeying one is really doing wrong and offending God. I know of course that my conscience tells me that this is by no means certain and that the only thing is to trust Him and hope for the best. But it certainly wrings all the last drops of alacrity out of one's obedience and one's zest for the religious life. |
| 1964/03/04 | Anselmus of Canterbury | Opera Omnia / ed. by Franciscus Salesius Schmitt o.s.b. |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 90
| I finished the letters of St. Anselm this morning (volumes of Schmitt to go back to West Baden). |
| 1964/03/16 | Karl Rahner | Christian Commitment: Essays in Pastoral Theology |
Ltrs: HGL p. 496-97
| I do not know whether you read English but I thought you might be interested in an article which took, as its starting point, your diaspora idea in the new book The Christian Commitment. I have also done a review of the book, which I will send you if and when it gets published. But meanwhile I wanted to let you have a copy of this article. Reading your book from the monastic point of view, I was especially happy with your discerning insistence on the person as opposed to the rather naive and sweeping collectivism that sometimes passes for pastoral theology today. Needless to say, I am in hearty agreement with your book and share with you the deep concern for a new and less rigidly institutional view of the Church, the concern that has been raised by the situation of the Church in her true "diaspora," the countries where unpleasant realities must be faced (and are not always faced). |
| 1964/04/13 | Henri Perrin | Priest and Worker: The Autobiography of Henri Perrin |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 95
| This would be the fiftieth birthday of the Worker Priest Henri Perrin if he were alive. The publishers have sent me proofs of his autobiography (actually a collection of fragments of letters) [Priest and Worker: Autobiography of Fr. Henri Perrin, 1964]. The fact is that he was driven to despair by the stolid conservatism of the Church-her refusal to become detached from sterile commitment to a society that is finished. As a matter of fact the whole question is perhaps less complicated than it may seem. So much of the class consciousness-(left wing or right wing)-in France is just bourgeois anyway. The guilt at not being a worker is a bourgeois guilt. |
| 1964/05/14 | William Du Bay | Human Church |
Ltrs: HGL p. 167
| Thanks for your book which, it seems to me, does not need to be safely publishable, only to be used. It can be used in its present state, or in some other such form, can't it? After it has been used a while and after adjustments have been made, maybe someone will publish it. Naturally with the liberty you have displayed you will meet opposition and publication might mean giving up something somewhere. That is normal. We have to be content with humanity as it is, even though we recognize that we must be helping to change things. We change by pressing on what is there. |
| 1964/05/24 | Jacques Maritain | Moral Philosophy |
Ltrs: CforT p. 44-45
| It was very good of you to ask Scribner's to send me your great newly translated book on Moral Philosophy. Actually it is just what I have been wanting and I am reading it with avidity. It fills an immense gap and the mere appearance of such a book draws attention to the awful poverty of most moral theology, as well as the need for totally new perspectives. I am convinced for example that it has been the lack of such thought as this that has permitted Catholic thought and law to take such absurdly legalistic and anti-human positions about things like war (though of course Pope John and some of the bishops have said what needed to be said, or have begun to). Much moral theology is simply bad moral philosophy. So your clarification is providential. If we have a good moral philosophy, who knows, perhaps someday we may get a moral theologian. (I do not want to sweep them all aside: I do like Fr. Bernard Haring.) Also I think this book is a wonderful companion volume to Raïssa's journal! How is the second volume coming? |
| 1964/06/30 | Hans Küng | Council, Reform and Reunion |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 122
| Bob Giroux sent M. Serafian's The Pilgrim. I have read about twenty-five pages of it and find it great. So much finer than X. Rynne's gossip column. The most serious book about the Council I have read since Küng's book (the one before the Council [The Council, Reform and Reunion, 1961]; I have not read any others). Simply clarifies and confirms what is already obvious: the ghastly problem that all through the Church the "will of God" can and does resolve itself into "the will of an Italian Undersecretary in the Holy Offic" and that in fact the conservative Vatican bureaucrats think they have the right to contradict the Pope himself-they are the ones who are infallible. |
| 1964/06/30 | Michael Serafian | Pilgrim: Pope Paul VI, & the Church in Time of Decision / pseudonym of Malachi Martin |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 122
| Bob Giroux sent M. Serafian's The Pilgrim. I have read about twenty-five pages of it and find it great. So much finer than X. Rynne's gossip column. The most serious book about the Council I have read since Küng's book (the one before the Council [The Council, Reform and Reunion, 1961]; I have not read any others). Simply clarifies and confirms what is already obvious: the ghastly problem that all through the Church the "will of God" can and does resolve itself into "the will of an Italian Undersecretary in the Holy Offic" and that in fact the conservative Vatican bureaucrats think they have the right to contradict the Pope himself-they are the ones who are infallible. |
| 1964/06/30 | Michael Serafian | Pilgrim: Pope Paul VI, & the Church in Time of Decision / pseudonym of Malachi Martin |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 122
| How badly we need a real spirit of liberty in the Church, it is vitally necessary and the whole Church depends on it. Thank God "Serafian" has had the courage and good sense to admit and state frankly that so far the Council has dealt in relative trivialities! The problems that are largely irrelevant to the world at large, problems that are generated by gratuitously adopted and formalistic attitudes of the Church herself-incrustations of her own history. "The irrelevancy of the problems which Catholicism considers fundamental and over which it has consumed itself in two long, expensive sessions is an offshoot of the Church's attitude to humanity." Bull's eye! |
| 1964/06/30 | Michael Serafian | Pilgrim: Pope Paul VI, & the Church in Time of Decision / pseudonym of Malachi Martin |
Ltrs: HGL p. 82
| I just finished The Pilgrim by Serafian, on the Council. It is really a smasher, much better than the gossip columns of Xavier Rynne, much deeper, much more serious and much more sobering. I had not realized what a beating [Cardinal] Bea took at the last session and what this really represented. This curial thing is really disastrous, and it threatens the whole structure of the Church, and maybe, one thinks, this is providential "¦ I wonder if we are really going to have to get along without a structure one of these days. Maybe that will be good, but Lord it will be rough on most people. Maybe less rough on you and me, with all the welts we have acquired in the machinery. More and more I come to think we are living in one great big illusion. Centuries of triumphalist self-deception. The late Middle Ages, with all their sores, were more real "¦ Everything is all twisted up and the worst thing is the façade of smoothness over all the busted iron and the fragments of a building that has perhaps fallen in. But where it has fallen God will build and is building. The front is man's work and that will really cave in. Who worries about that? We must learn not to, and even, when necessary, give it a good shove. Mitres, croziers, rings, slippers, baubles, documents, seals, bulls, rescripts, indults "¦ Have a good time on your trip. |
| 1964/07/01 | Michael Serafian | Pilgrim: Pope Paul VI, & the Church in Time of Decision / pseudonym of Malachi Martin |
Ltrs: HGL p. 218
| One book you must read if you have not already is The Pilgrim by Serafian, about Pope Paul and the Council. Thesis that Pope Paul's curial instincts took over and he sacrificed Bea and the Johannine drive to the conservative pressures against them, then went on pilgrimage as a surrogate for the non-achievements of the second session. In a way it is a curious parallel to The Deputy, though not of course as rough. What impresses me is that wherever we turn we come back to this baroque image of the Papacy, more than an image, an idol, of which curial power is an essential element. The conservatives see it better than the liberals. The thing is now so constructed that perhaps the Papacy has come to depend to a great extent on machinery like that of the H. Office, and the Office crowd is serenely convinced that it has to arrogate to itself all the powers of the Pope even against the Pope himself, becoming in the end the real seat of infallibility. This means of course that infallibility becomes organized and to some extent anonymous (no longer a charism but an institution) and of course that means one thing: totalism and the monolith. |
| 1964/07/01 | Rolf Hochhuth | Deputy / Translation from the German Der Stellvertreter |
Ltrs: HGL p. 218
| One book you must read if you have not already is The Pilgrim by Serafian, about Pope Paul and the Council. Thesis that Pope Paul's curial instincts took over and he sacrificed Bea and the Johannine drive to the conservative pressures against them, then went on pilgrimage as a surrogate for the non-achievements of the second session. In a way it is a curious parallel to The Deputy, though not of course as rough. What impresses me is that wherever we turn we come back to this baroque image of the Papacy, more than an image, an idol, of which curial power is an essential element. The conservatives see it better than the liberals. The thing is now so constructed that perhaps the Papacy has come to depend to a great extent on machinery like that of the H. Office, and the Office crowd is serenely convinced that it has to arrogate to itself all the powers of the Pope even against the Pope himself, becoming in the end the real seat of infallibility. This means of course that infallibility becomes organized and to some extent anonymous (no longer a charism but an institution) and of course that means one thing: totalism and the monolith. |
| 1964/07/02 | Michael Serafian | Pilgrim: Pope Paul VI, & the Church in Time of Decision / pseudonym of Malachi Martin |
Ltrs: HGL p. 652
| I am very much tempted to write a parallel between The Deputy and the new Serafian book, The Pilgrim. Starting with the titles, there is soon seen to be a deeper analogy. Only in one chapter does the Serafian come out as a real hatchet job on Paul VI, the rest balances it off and makes nicer noises and gestures, and it is not as blatantly prejudiced as the Hochhuth. Yet at the same time it reinforces the justice in Hochhuth's accusation, and does so by dimming the focus that is too crudely and too insistently fixed on Pius. Actually, the great question is the Papacy itself in its post-Tridentine and post-medieval, indeed post-Constantinian shape. The thing that really hits me hardest of all is that at this very moment the same issue of the Jews is right in front of our noses, just as much as it ever was before any German under Hitler, perhaps more so. And of course the Jewish schema [Note: Preparatory document: part of what became Vatican II's Declaration on Relationships with Non-Christian Religions], or part of that schema, is central in The Pilgrim. Once again, when John brought up the obligation to make some kind of amends, the same old machinery that Hochhuth tries to show at work in the one man and mind of Pius is in full operation in the whole "Papacy," i.e. Curia and all. |
| 1964/07/02 | Rolf Hochhuth | Deputy / Translation from the German Der Stellvertreter |
Ltrs: HGL p. 652
| I am very much tempted to write a parallel between The Deputy and the new Serafian book, The Pilgrim. Starting with the titles, there is soon seen to be a deeper analogy. Only in one chapter does the Serafian come out as a real hatchet job on Paul VI, the rest balances it off and makes nicer noises and gestures, and it is not as blatantly prejudiced as the Hochhuth. Yet at the same time it reinforces the justice in Hochhuth's accusation, and does so by dimming the focus that is too crudely and too insistently fixed on Pius. Actually, the great question is the Papacy itself in its post-Tridentine and post-medieval, indeed post-Constantinian shape. The thing that really hits me hardest of all is that at this very moment the same issue of the Jews is right in front of our noses, just as much as it ever was before any German under Hitler, perhaps more so. And of course the Jewish schema [Note: Preparatory document: part of what became Vatican II's Declaration on Relationships with Non-Christian Religions], or part of that schema, is central in The Pilgrim. Once again, when John brought up the obligation to make some kind of amends, the same old machinery that Hochhuth tries to show at work in the one man and mind of Pius is in full operation in the whole "Papacy," i.e. Curia and all. |
| 1964/07/14 | Michael Serafian | Pilgrim: Pope Paul VI, & the Church in Time of Decision / pseudonym of Malachi Martin |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 127
| Heschel is convinced that Serafian's Pilgrim is perfectly right. We both look at this book in the same way, as crucially important. Heschel thinks the Jewish Chapter will never be accepted, in the Council. We spoke of how symbolic this fact was! In my opinion the acceptance of this chapter and the consequent at least implicit act of repentance is necessary for the Church and in reality the Church stands to benefit most by it. Heschel said, "Yes, but when I was a child I was beaten up often (by Catholic Poles) for being a Christ-killer, and I want to see that fewer Jewish children are beaten up for this reason." He thinks [Cardinal] Bea is really finished, that he suffered a crushing defeat in the Second Session (obvious). The envy aroused by his American trip brought him many enemies, and he had plenty before that. Heschel very impressed by Willebrands, now a bishop. Has much hope in him. Scorns Monella and the new Secretariat for Non-Christian Religions (in which I have no interest!). |
| 1964/07/21 | Graham Greene | Burnt-Out Case |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 130
| Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case-takes this up a bit savagely and very well. The complete burning out of Christianity in the official, clerical sense, is the subject of the book. Not a great book, but still timely, urgent, convincing. Greene knows what he is saying. Burning out of the appetites of the bourgeois world, sexual, cultural, religious: the appetite for life: Pfft! |
| 1964/07/23 | Graham Greene | Burnt-Out Case |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 130
| The Burnt-Out Case is not much of a book, really. It is competent, but is itself a bit burned out and silly. Yet one reads it with interest. It is the same problem as in Honest to God but turned around. The priests who insist that Querry is not an atheist but is really in the Dark Night. All of a sudden one realizes that this approach has perhaps become usual. Indeed, it is Greene's own mainspring. I mean that of most of his novels. Here it is very tired but still works. |
| 1964/09/01 | Hans Urs von Balthasar | Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Ästetik. |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 140
| This morning I began [Hans Urs] Von Balthasar's Herrlichkeit-a long book to try to read in German, but the first pages are very promising and I respond to them completely. Perhaps this is the theology we have been waiting for. And I was reminded also of my studies on the School of Chartres two years ago (looked briefly again at my notes. I must write them up). |
| 1964/09/27 | Hans Urs von Balthasar | Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Ästetik. |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 149
| Slowly plugging at Von Balthasar's Herrlichkeit. Certainly this one central thing: all theology is a scientific doctrine and originates at the point where the act of faith (in God acting and revealing Himself in history) becomes understanding. This sounds trivial, but is extremely important. Here our theology actually contacts all the primitive revelations including Zen, though the contrary might seem true. (Wonderful article of Cardinal Suenens was read in refectory based on a principle laid down by John XXIII in Candlemas talk, 1963-that in all religions there is trace of a "primitive revelation"). The true beauty of Theology is then in the wisdom and grace that apprehend salvation in the act of belief in an anticipation of the eschatological fulfillment promised by God-i.e., in Augustinian fructio [fruition]. |
| 1964/09/27 | Hans Urs von Balthasar | Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Ästetik. |
Ltrs: SofC p. 241
| The wonderful package of books has arrived, and I am reading the first volume of Herrlichkeit, not without a little difficulty, but I think I am getting most of it. At any rate there are parts that make me very happy, even though I have to read slowly and can only do a few pages a day. Really I am most grateful, as this is exactly what I have been looking for: a truly contemplative theology, for which we have been starved for so many centuries (though of course there have been little intervals of refreshment and light with people like Scheeben). I think I am going to enjoy your second volume even more. I am so grateful to you for daring to launch out into this fruitio [enjoyment] and intellectus [understanding]. How can there really be any other theology? Actually, I see that the attraction of things like Buddhism today resides in the "hidden" sapiential quality which is absent from our purely "scientific" theology and Scripture study. Underneath all the apparent ambiguities of Buddhism about suffering (they do in some cases seek to avoid it) there is actually a deep wisdom and admiratio [wonder] at the mystery of truth and love which is attained only when suffering is fully accepted and faced. |
| 1964/10/17 | Hans Urs von Balthasar | Word and Revelation. Essays in Theology I |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 155-56
| Von Balthasar's Word and Revelation excellent. One fine passage where he says substantially what Juliana of Norwich says about "all manner of things shall be well." Namely that Christ judges and separates good from evil in order to reveal the truth about man in this separation, but the "rejected" will turn out to have been those "chosen" with a greater and more mysterious mercy. Can there be a limit to the mercy of Christ, who has fully satisfied forever all God's justice, and now has the world in His hand to do with it according to His merciful Love? |
| 1964/10/31 | Hans Urs von Balthasar | Skitzen zur Theologie |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 160
| An impressive passage in Balthasar's "Verbum Caro"-a deep and poignant essay. I will use part of it perhaps in conferences to novices and juniors on poetry and human experience. But I cannot help seeing it rather in its reference to my own vocation at the hermitage. These nights I have spontaneously been remembering the days when I first came to Gethsemani twenty-three years ago: the stars, the cold, the smell of night, the wonder, the Verlassenheit [abandonment] (which is something else again than despondency) and above all the melody of the Rorate coeli [Drop down dew, heavens]. That entire first Advent bore in it all the stamp of my vocation's peculiar character. The solitude inhabited and pervaded by cold and mystery and woods and Latin liturgy. It is surprising how far we have got from the cold and the woods and the stars since those days. |
| 1964/11/22 | Jean Leclercq o.s.b. | Otia Monastica: Etudes sur le vocabulaire de la contemplation au Moyen âge |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 168-69
| Adam the Carthusian (Scotus) in a fine text on quies claustralis [quiet of the cloister] (published by Leclercq in Otia Monastica) sums it all up, simply and adequately, the need for quies, not bothering with concerns foreign to our life. I want to give up the retreats. Yet already a letter has come from the Baptist Seminary begging me not to stop my talks. I was touched by it. No one could be more sincere and less political than Glenn Hinson, who wrote it. |
| 1964/12/10 | Daniel Callahan | Honesty in the Church |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 178-79
| Scribners sent Daniel Callahan's book Honesty in the Church in proof. I will not make a statement on it, as it would tend to mislead people if I did. (That is to say a lot of readers who lack the maturity and sophistication to understand such a book might get in trouble reading it.) However, it is a very outspoken, even indignant, criticism of all the doubletalk, maneuverings and pretenses that are too characteristic of the Church's official acts sometimes. |
| 1964/12/13 | Daniel Callahan | Honesty in the Church |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 250
| You mention Daniel Callahan. I have just got through reading proofs of his book, Honesty in the Church. You must absolutely read it. It is really explosive. It strikes directly at the abuses you so often mention, the manipulating and politicking and the system that guarantees that the superiors are never wrong, no matter how they get around the law of the Church or violate the rights of their subjects. It is a book that is very timely, but brutal, and I am afraid that some readers will put it down with everything shattered. Still, it is time for such things to be said. If they are not, there is no hope for a real renewal of the Church. And it becomes repeatedly more clear that renewal begins at the top "¦ |
| 1965/01/10 | Karl Jaspers | Nietsche and Christianity |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 190
| Jaspers says (and this is analogous to a basic principle in Jacques Ellul also): "Once I envision world history or life's entirety as a kind of finite totality I can act only on the basis of sham knowledge, in distortion of actual possibilities, far from reality, vague about facts, achieving nothing but confusion and advancing in directions altogether different from those I wanted" (Nietzsche and Christianity, p. 58). And this applies also to monastic reform. |
| 1965/02/17 | William Du Bay | Human Church |
Ltrs: HGL p. 168
| The book idea sounds fine. I am glad you are writing on war and peace. With the present mess in Vietnam the subject needs treatment, and it is very ambiguous indeed. It seems to me that what needs treatment is something more than nuclear weapons or total warfare, but above all the fact that now Catholic moralists are to a great extent accepting a completely pragmatic and unprincipled moral code in international affairs. There could be no clearer and more obvious example of immoral and aggressive action than the bombing of North Vietnam recently in reprisal for raids carried out by South Vietnamese rebels. The trouble is that the truth of the situation is consistently distorted, and it is to the interest of the Pentagon and the arms manufacturers to see that it is distorted because a bigger war is to their advantage. They are obviously not getting anywhere with the guerrilla kind "¦ "¦ You have to be careful that you don't handle the issue in such a way that it can be easily discredited by right-wing types. From that point of view, you have to be especially careful since they have got you typed. You are already a stereotype of the rebel priest, and that puts any cause you defend at a disadvantage since it will be prejudged every time. I would say be as objective and as straight as you can, and don't be unnecessarily provocative, in the interests of truth and peace "¦ |
| 1965/04/27 | Jacques Maritain | Carnet de notes / Jacques Maritain |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 235
| I received a copy of Jacques Maritain's Notebooks, from Paris, and have already read the interesting (and sometimes funny) chapter on La Salette and his attempts to get his manuscript on it approved in Rome in 1918. Some very fine pages on the nature of prophetic language, the language of heavenly revelations. What comes out most of all of course is the simplicity and probity of Jacques himself and his evident loyalty to the Church. It is very edifying. I love the pictures of Raïssa and Vera [Oumansoff ]. Though I never actually met them, I know they are two people who loved me-and whom I have loved-through our writings and the warmth and closeness that has somehow bound me to Jacques and to them. It is really a kind of family affection, which also reaches out to good Dom Pierre (Van der Meer) who wrote (through Dame Christine [Van der Meer]) about the article concerning [Georgio] La Pira's visit to America-and his (somewhat over enthusiastic account of Gethsemani). |
| 1965/08/10 | Anselmus of Canterbury | De Casu Diaboli |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 278
| (I am frightened by the awful clarity of Anselm's argument in De Casu Diaboli. A view of liberty that is essentially monastic, i.e., framed in the perspective of an entirely personal vocation and grace.) The need to pray-the need for solid theological food, for the Bible, for monastic tradition. Not experimentation or philosophical dilettantism. The need to be entirely defined by a relationship with and orientation to God my Father, i.e., a life of sonship in which all that distracts from this relationship is seen as fatuous and absurd. How real this is! A reality I must constantly measure up to, it cannot be simply taken for granted. It cannot be lost in distraction. Distractedness here is fatal-it brings one inexorably to the abyss. But no concentration is required, only being present. And also working seriously at all that is to be done-the care of the garden of paradise! By reading, meditation, study, psalmody, manual work, including also some fasting, etc. Above all the work of hope, not the stupid, relaxed, self-pity of acedia [sloth]. |
| 1965/08/11 | Catherine of Siena | Dialogo breve sulla consumata perfezione / Saint Catherine of Siena ; ed. di Aldo Buonomini |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 278-79
| "When you are serving others you are apt to be a hypocrite; but when you are serving heaven it is difficult to be a hypocrite." This is Suzuki paraphrasing a line of Chuang Tzu. It applies perfectly to the solitary life. However, I have been completing this kind of view with others, the clear, reasonable, logical yet mystical little tract of Catherine of Siena, Dialogo Breve sulla Consumata Perfezione (which actually comes to the same thing-seeking nothing but to do God's will in everything, to please Him alone, to be perfectly united to Him in love by the renunciation of our own will). And Anselm's rectitudo-stare in veritate [standing in the truth]. It all comes to the same, but the approach is different, and I am still strongly devoted to medieval reason and wisdom. |
| 1965/09/05 | Jacques Maritain | Carnet de notes / Jacques Maritain |
Ltrs: CforT p. 45
| It has been a terribly long time since I have written to you or heard from you, and I am not sure whether or not I ever thanked you for the Carnets. Perhaps I did not. But I am very delighted with them, and they form an admirable companion to Raïssa's Journal. Thank you very much. |
| 1965/09/25 | Jacques Maritain | Carnet de notes / Jacques Maritain |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 299
| Last evening began again reading parts of Maritain's Carnets de notes-good things on the layman and a plea to be left unorganized! |
| 1965/09/26 | Jacques Maritain | Carnet de notes / Jacques Maritain |
Ltrs: CforT p. 46
| I have been reading your Carnets [de notes] "¦ Everything you say is quite true & even prophetic. Our mania for organization will be judged & all will be burned except love and friendship. The small groups united by genuine love will remain everywhere & the rest will go, even in monasticism. I want to quote you in the book I am writing now. |
| 1965/11/11 | Raïssa Maritain | Grandes Amities: Souvenirs |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 315
| At supper-read a few pages [in Les Grandes Amities: Souvenirs, reprinted 1965] of Raïssa Maritain on [Ernest] Psichari and his conversion. His delight at his progress toward Catholicism in the desert. All that is so familiar and comforting. Before World War I, written during World War II when all the issues were clear. And now nothing is clear-and as for Psichari himself, his love of the army and so on-it is seen to be an illusion. Was all that was clear equally an illusion? It is so comforting to read of him coming back to Mother Church, and to the continuity of centuries of Christendom. But where is all that now? What a void! We need a grimmer faith than he did! |
| 1966/01/02 | Robert Adolfs | Grave of God: Has the Church a Future? |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 3
| Reading E. A. Burtt's book, sent by him from Cornell - and galleys of a good book on the Church trans[lated] from Dutch [The Grave of God: Has the Church a Future? New York, 1967]. The author is an Augustinian, R. Adolfs. Still have Endo Mason's excellent book on [Rainer Maria] Rilke and England. |
| 1966/02/12 | Jean Pierre Caussade, de | Abandonment ot Divine Providence |
Ltrs: HGL p. 527
| Have you ever read Caussades's Abandonment to Divine Providence? At times it is a bit overlogical, but still it is a good book. |
| 1966/02/21 | Romano Guardini | Rilke's 'Duino Elegies': An Interpretation |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 20
| Rilke again. Rereading the II Elegy and [Romano] Guardini about it. It seems to me that Guardini, while right in many judgments about R., takes too seriously R's own "passionat" rejections of Christianity in letters etc. For passionately one should understand emotionally. For subjective reasons beyond his control (his mother) R. simply could not be at peace with conventional Christian language and even with the idea of Christ as Mediator. I do not minimize this - objectively a failure of faith. Yet G. does not see that R. was also struggling with a false religious problem imposed on him by 19thcentury Christianity. The problem of finding wholeness (ultimate truth etc.) in God by denying and excluding the world. The holy is the non-secular. Feeling himself called upon to deny and exclude what he saw to be in reality necessary for "wholeness," "holiness," "openness," he finally refused this denial, and chose his "open world." In a sense he does come up with a cosmology that seems a parody of Christianity - but is it really as G. thinks, a "secularization" in the sense of a degradation? Is he not really reaching for the kind of Pleroma revealed in Colossians? Yes, his choice of angels is in a sense a failure, acc[ording] to Paul - yet was it entirely his fault? Was it forced on him by a manichean type of Christianity? |
| 1966/06/24 | Hans Urs von Balthasar | Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Ästetik. |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 343
| Got up, and during my meditation (having killed an enormous centipede on the wall of the front room - would not like that to crawl down my neck while I was sleeping) thought about the letter from Urs Von Balthasar yesterday. His complaint of being theologically isolated from the people in fashion ([Karl] Rahner, [Hans] Küng, etc.). Realized to what extent my own theology goes along with that of Balthasar, and I should read him more deeply. (I now have his Herrlichkeit [The Glory of the Lord] in French, so I can handle it.) He has been very friendly, is writing a preface to the German selection of my poems, is happy about Bro. A.'s translation of his article on vows etc. |
| 1966/06/29 | Hans Urs von Balthasar | Gloire et la croix. Vol 1: Apparition |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 91
| I don't read German well enough to read Von Balthasar in the original, and in French he is fogged and confusing (one can't come to grips with it easily). Yet if something looks interesting in French and you go to the original you are likely to get a real flash of light. See the correctness of this: "Der Glaubensakt wesentlich existenzial ist, das heisst die ganze Wirklichkeit des Glaubenders als Gehorsamsopfer einfordert [The act of believing is essentially existential, that is to say, the entire reality of the believer is put forward as a sacrifice of obedience]." Much more real than French, "le don de tout son être [the gift of all his being]" etc. |
| 1966/06/29 | Hans Urs von Balthasar | Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Ästetik. |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 91
| I don't read German well enough to read Von Balthasar in the original, and in French he is fogged and confusing (one can't come to grips with it easily). Yet if something looks interesting in French and you go to the original you are likely to get a real flash of light. See the correctness of this: "Der Glaubensakt wesentlich existenzial ist, das heisst die ganze Wirklichkeit des Glaubenders als Gehorsamsopfer einfordert [The act of believing is essentially existential, that is to say, the entire reality of the believer is put forward as a sacrifice of obedience]." Much more real than French, "le don de tout son être [the gift of all his being]" etc. |
| 1966/07/21 | | Perfectae Caritatis |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 98
| Revising some notes on monastic life - read through the Council Decree Perfectae Caritatis ["Of perfect charity," "Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of the Religious Lif"]. Deeply impressed by these lines: Through the profession of obedience, religious offer to God a total dedication of their own wills as a sacrifice of themselves; they thereby unite themselves with greater steadiness and security to the saving will of God. Very clear and helpful - and I have been evading this. I need to hear and take it to heart. No doubt my love for M. entails certain obligations to her, but I have been too willing to disobey in order to contact and console her. But I have been ordered to break off contact and sooner or later this will have to be final. I have to take it more seriously perhaps than I have. I am still committed to see her once more before she leaves, but really that should end it. Extremely difficult! |
| 1966/09/02 | | Au coeur même de l'Eglise. Une recherche monastique: les frères de la Vierge des Pauvres |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 120
| Still using P. Erwin's Directory for his Brothers of the Virgin of the Poor - Au coeur même de l'Eglise [At the Very Heart of the Church]. It is very good. I need it. |
| 1966/09/20 | Jacques Maritain | mimeographed conference in December 1964 |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 137
| In the pile of things I have lying around waiting to be read, I picked out today the mimeographed conference of Jacques Maritain (in December 1964) to the Little Brothers of Jesus on their vocation. The best thing I have seen on the "apostolate of contemplatives.".... He speaks of the Little Brother "present" in a Moslem city being a good enough reason why a Moslem lives and dies in Christ without ceasing to be a Moslem. But would it ever be the other way around too? A strange question: but a very real one to me!) So important: this presence is not a "pre-apostolat" simply "softening up" the unbelievers for the coming of the missionary! "La mouise confessionnelle des vocations religieuses - la mouise rêvee aux manies et aux particularites du monde catholique." ["The confessional poverty of religious vocations - the dreamed of misery with the obsessions and peculiarities of the Catholic world."] Freely Catholic = without Catholic provincialism (which is of course un-Catholic. The official and forced universalism and centralism of Post Trent Catholicism has made the Church provincial). etc.. |
| 1966/10/04 | Karl Rahner | The Dynamic Element in the Church (Quaestiones Disputatae) |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 145-46
| "If we had real humility and goodness we would see far more marvels of goodness in the Church. But because we are selfish ourselves we are only ready to see good, good brought about by God where it suits our advantage, our need for esteem, or our view of the Church." Since my retreat I have been reading this very good book on and off. More off than on I am afraid. But this statement, read this morning, clicks with what I have been realizing lately. Sunday afternoon, out walking in the sun and looking at the monastery without its phony and pretentious ancient steeple, and thinking of all that has been going on there, I realized how much good there really is in this community - not only in so many individuals (this I have never doubted or questioned), but in the community itself as it isorganized. I know this is a "good community" and a fortunate place in which to be today. But I count myself lucky to be here. There is really no other place in the Church now where I would rather be. I see so evidently that my hermitage is my true place in the Church. And I owe this to my community. Also, let's face it, to my Abbot, of whom I am so easily critical. |
| 1966/10/04 | Karl Rahner | The Dynamic Element in the Church (Quaestiones Disputatae) |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 146
| K. Rahner shows why the Church is justified in being suspicious of those who claim charismatic privileges: "She knows that only too often, as far as we can see, ultimate fulfillment and maturity is denied to such charismatic enthusiasm, that the holy venture of voluntary poverty, of a holy renunciation of earthly fulfillment, of contemplation in silence and obscurity is only blessed with meager fruits "¦." p. 60-61 This is a passage where he defends the Church's right to "administer" the charismata and set bounds on claims to exercise them. [Then some other quotes from this book by Rahner] |
| 1966/10/13 | Jacques Maritain | paysan de la Garonne : un vieux laïc s'interroge à propos du temps present |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 148
| On the evening of the 6th - Jacques Maritain, John H. Griffin, Penn Jones and Babeth Manual arrived. A wonderful visit. On the morning of the 7th they came to the hermitage (bright, cool). I read some poems for them. In the afternoon we went out to the woods. Late Mass for them all in the temporary exterior chapel which I liked. It was a beautiful mass, which as a matter of fact, to please Jacques, I said all in Latin and all in the old way. He was delighted. Began then reading his book - the new one - which he gave me in page proofs, Le Paysan de la Garonne [The Peasant of the Garonne]. It is perhaps a bit self-conscious: he is very aware of himself as "Le vieux [the old] Jacques" and half apologetic, but says I think some very telling things about the novelty hunters and the superficial advocates, change in a naively progressive way ("anything is good as long as it's something new"). The morning in the hermitage was good because they liked the bits of "Edifying Cables" I read to them. That was encouraging. Jack Ford and Dan Walsh were also there, and they came in the afternoon too. |
| 1966/11/18 | Jacques Maritain | paysan de la Garonne : un vieux laîc s'interroge à propos du temps present |
Ltrs: SofC p. 322
| Jacques Maritain was here in October and we had a fine visit. He is very much a hermit now, and his latest book has added a hermit voice to the contemporary harmony (or disharmony). Le Paysan de la Garonne is I think very fine. I think you would like it. I have heard from your friend Dom Gregory in Tanzania and will write to him soon. Also we had a true Sufi master from Algeria here. A most remarkable person. It was like meeting a Desert Father or someone out of the Bible. He invited me to come and talk to his disciples in Algeria but I told him this would be quite impossible. Yet I would love to talk to them in fact, and also to see some monasteries in Africa. But I suppose that will never be allowed. No matter. The woods are all I need. |
| 1966/12/29 | Augustin Hideshi Kishi | Spiritual consciousness in Zen from a Thomistic theological point of view |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 175
| Finished Fr. [Augustin] Kishi's book on Zen and St. Thomas [Spiritual Consciousness in Zen from a Thomistic Theological Point of View (Osaka, 1966)] - good on Zen and dutiful on Thomas and not really pulling the two together. |
| 1967/01/10 | Romano Guardini | Pascal for Our Time |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 184
| Pascal is my kind. The [Romano] Guardini work on him [Pascal for Our Time (New York, 1966)] is fine - one of G.'s best, at least for me. Whole thing so full of ideas they rush in from all sides and I have to stop and walk around. Yes, I know, the world is full of people who will want me to know that my reading of Pascal is vicious - like taking LSD. Fatal pessimism and all that. Jansenism. |
| 1967/01/20 | Romano Guardini | Pascal for Our Time |
Ltrs: CforT p. 210
| I have just read a beautiful book by [Romano] Guardini on Pascal [Pascal for Our Time]: this same Pascal who so fascinated and repulsed Camus. Yes, there might be too much bitterness and pessimism in Pascal's solitude and yet he is so right and so acute. Also, I have reread his remarkable discourses on the passions of love. But I am the one who is too talkative. |
| 1967/01/22 | Romano Guardini | Pascal for Our Time |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 96
| I have in fact just been reading Romano Guardini's excellent little book on Pascal [Pascal for Our Time]. He analyzes the "demon of combativeness" in Pascal"”a demon which is no prerogative of Jansenists. At times one wonders if a certain combativeness is not endemic in Catholicism: a "compulsion to be always right" and to prove the adversary wrong. A compulsion which easily leads to witch-hunting and which, when turned the wrong way, hunts its witches in the Church herself and finally needs to find them in Rome. There are always human failures which can be exploited for this purpose. Pascal nearly went over the falls completely but he recognized the destructiveness of his own inner demon in time, and knew enough to be silent and to believe. And to love. The story of his death is very moving. |
| 1967/02/07 | Rosemary Ruether | Church Against Itself |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 194
| So Rosemary Ruether in her ms. [The Church Against Itself, 1967] on the Church which she has lent me. More or less following [Alfred Firmin] Loisy. I have to admit this is the big problem - the problem we Catholics have all dutifully and obediently refused to face: and now we have to face it. Facing it does not mean "leaving the Church" à la Charles Davis, but there must be a groping for unambiguousness somewhere. |
| 1967/02/09 | Rosemary Ruether | Church Against Itself |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 195-96
| Reading Rosemary Ruether's ms. on the Church. One point she makes is completely convincing: when the "glory of the Spirit" becomes a purely historic event which underwrites all the Church's institutional activities throughout the rest of history, when the Spirit becomes a "thing" owned and operated by the church, then the Spirit sits in judgment on the very Church that desires to be guided by it. Then you get the demonic parodies of power and holiness which make the institution of Church so frightening and repugnant: and yet the Spirit is there nevertheless for the well-meaning and the deluded. (This is more my own anxious paraphrase and formulation.) But this I think is true: "The historification of the Spirit and the Risen Lord as a past mandate for the historical institution spells the death of the Church's freedom for grace." However, our struggle in and with this institution is a great grace. |
| 1967/02/14 | Rosemary Ruether | Church Against Itself |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 198
| Finishing the Ruether ms. Really a question of getting new bearings. The book is important - at least for me. And explosive. Where it is important for me is that it forces me to reexamine the whole question of my conversion, and to distinguish in it the action of God's word and the attraction of a sacral and traditional and stable culture. This was important especially in my vocation. Now that the stability of these structures is really shaken - and I have done my own part in shaking them - I have to live really by God's word and by a "tru" Christian community (where?) and not cheat by relying on past cultural props which keep me comfortable. The whole Church-world argument in my work has been ambiguous because I bought the idea of a sacred and unworldly Christian culture and set that up against the wicked world. We tried hard to be therefore modern, technological. Technology is certainly able to be even more demonic than, say, the Papacy (see R.'s book) - but the division is too easy. |
| 1967/04/08 | Jacques Maritain | paysan de la Garonne : un vieux laïc s'interroge à propos du temps present |
Ltrs: HGL p. 111
| As for Maritain's book [Le Paysan de la Garonne, 1966], yes, I will speak to him about it. His criticism bears, above all, I believe, on philosophy not on politics, since he continues to remain in agreement with his radical friends, such as Saul Alinsky. Concerning Cardinal Roy [Archbishop of Quebec City], I am not as well informed as you think, since I do not know what it is about. But I did write to Dorothy Dohen, because her book has been criticized unfavorably by a writer who is nevertheless himself a liberal. |
| 1967/05/04 | Louis Massignon | Peasant of the Garonne |
Ltrs: HGL p. 198
| I am terribly sorry to hear of the sufferings AAL has had to go through. I will keep him and all his family in my prayers. I am glad he is not angry with Jacques Maritain's book [The Peasant of the Garonne, English edition, 1968]. Progressive Catholics in this country are already furious even before the book is out. But after all, Maritain has some valid criticisms, and if we are such mature and adult Catholics as we claim to be, then we ought to be able to listen to them with equanimity. What irritates me about the reaction here is that it does not fit in with all the noisy claims that these people make about themselves. If they are supposedly fair-minded, then let them demonstrate the fact. |
| 1967/06/10 | Jacques Maritain | paysan de la Garonne : un vieux laïc s'interroge à propos du temps present |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 248
| Then there is the ms. of the English translation of Maritain's Le Paysan de la Garonne. It is painful. I am sorry I told him I liked the French edition - for it does have some good insights no doubt, but it is not a good book. In its own way it, too, is tedious journalism. Why did he have to feel bound to get involved in this utterly stupid controversy? I made the same mistake (less controversially) with Redeeming the Time. As if I too had to be "heard." (Fortunately I let it be published in England, only then changed my mind.) |
| 1967/06/21 | Jacques Maritain | paysan de la Garonne : un vieux laïc s'interroge à propos du temps present |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 135
| I don't know how you are, but I am hoping you are well enough to read this and the enclosed and to give it a little thought. I am not saying that the translation of Le Paysan is bad but I do not really think it comes up to Jacques' [Maritain] standards and he would want to work it over meticulously: and perhaps he shouldn't. I don't know what to do about it. Of course, as I mention in my letter to [Joseph] Cunneen, when I read this in English it becomes for me an embarrassing book. Jacques is not himself in it, he is so upset. His style is involved, but in French something of his tone remains. In English it is just weird. I think they have tried hard to make it natural and smooth. I think Cunneen had worked effectively in that respect, though in doing so he has tended to get away from the original. I think the translation is passable, no more, and I think Jacques himself would not be satisfied with it. |
| 1967/06/30 | James W. Douglas | Non-Violent Cross: A Theology of Revolution and Peace |
Ltrs: HGL p. 166
| I am returning the two chapters with thanks. The one on the Council is really first-rate, one of the best things in the book full of valuable information and perspectives. And it is really sobering to read! For the first time I have clearly felt to what an extent the Constitution on the Church in the World is an admission that the Church cannot pretend to talk to the world in that way: that she just can't claim to have answers the world really needs to listen to. The efforts of those people to tell everybody what God's mind about the bomb is are just a little shocking, though so many of them did try hard. They were honest and so on. It is getting clearer and clearer that the institutional Church does not measure up to the tasks that she believes and proclaims to be hers, and it is a wonder more people are not fully aware of that. I guess a lot are "¦ |
| 1967/07/03 | James Kavanaugh | Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 136
| I hope you have not written to Anne Ford about sending me the galleys of your reader. I am very glad that she did so, and I would not have wanted it to be otherwise. I certainly don't feel obligated to get out a blurb at any cost. I am sufficiently used to this routine to take or leave the things that are sent in and to write something if I happen to have time, can give it some thought, and feel like it. If I can't I don't and I don't push myself to oblige anyon"”except in a rare case like the recent Fr. [James Joseph] Kavanagh book [A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church] which has become rather a "caus" and is perhaps more of a "caus" than a book "¦ |
| 1967/08/09 | Carl Amery | Capitulation: The Lesson of German Catholicism |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 274
| Reading Carl Amery's excellent book on the German Church. Capitulation [New York, 1967]. Instructive for everybody. A lot of what is said applies here too. Very much so! |
| 1967/08/11 | Carl Amery | Capitulation: The Lesson of German Catholicism |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 275
| Finished Carl Amery's Capitulation. One of the best things I had read on modern Catholicism as it is - in its identification with bourgeois material establishment, its inclination to favor the bomb and war (against Communism), to frown on pacifists and radicals, but at the same time to triumphally present "progressiv" images of itself - Mercedes-Benz churches - streamlined liturgy conducted by boy Sergeants etc. And (as in Germany) its serene capacity to eat its cake and have it: to celebrate in the same breath [Franz] von Papen, who lined the Church up with Nazism, and the [indecipherable] resistance fighters - all five or six of them, who were destroyed by the Nazis while abandoned and excluded by their fellow Catholics ([Fr. Alfred] Delp, [Fr. Max Josef] Metzger, [Franz] Jägerstätter etc. Even unknown to fellow Catholics). The book reinforces my conclusion that there is nothing to be looked for from Church officialdom. Any good that I will ever do for the people of my time will be done, if at all, in spite of my Superiors rather than with their help. |
| 1967/09/03 | Rosemary Haughton | Transformation of Man |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 174
| Yes, I like the Rosemary Haughton book [The Transformation of Man]. I think it will really help. You are right that I am swamped by such requests, and each time I respond to one I am likely to get more. But one acquires a certain independence in these matters. If I like a book and have time to say so, I'll say so. Historians of theology will quite possibly look back on our age as the "Age of Rosemarys" (at least in English-language theology). Or perhaps the "Age of the Mothers of the Church." Some of the more interesting theological insights today are coming from women and mothers. Evidently there is an aspect of theology which is not revealed to you until you have a baby, or several, and tried to bring them up. This is an admirable book, an existential theology of love and encounter, a fundamental statement and witness to the salvation event in daily life and in areas where, to an exclusively clerical theology, it was not previously visible. |
| 1967/10/3 | James W. Douglas | Non-Violent Cross: A Theology of Revolution and Peace |
Ltrs: HGL p. 166
| I am doubly sorry for having delayed about your chapter"”the last one ["Christians and the Stat"] ... This last chapter is one of the best and makes some splendid points. You have stated better than anyone recently the whole point of the "render under Caesar" business and I think your final sentence caps it perfectly. It is a very good chapter, but I do have one complaint about it. It seems to me that there is one very thin patch, around p. 21, when you slide over the Constantinian transition with the greatest of ease. A thousand and two thousand years of history are it seems to me dismissed with little hint of their enormous complexity. I don't say "dismissed" fairly, of course, because you cannot be expected to go into all that. Yet it is central to your argument. At the same time, do we really yet know what really went on, what kind of a shift really took place in the thinking of the Church, when "Christendom" went into business? I think it yet remains to be studied. And then too there are so many subtleties about the Dark Ages, about the "truce of God" in the tenth century, about the First Crusade as a means of peace, by uniting warring Westerners not in an attack on Jerusalem but in defense of Byzantium (thus helping reunite the two Churches then breaking apart). And all that. I think your treatment needs to at least hint at all these complexities which make the thing more mysterious and more real at the same time. |
| 1968/03/26 | Hugo Rahner | Theology of Proclamation / Translated from the German: Eine Theologie der Verkündigung |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 72
| And then Hugo Rahner. I have read bits of a new book (Theology of Proclamation). But I come to this: "Through the historical visibility of the Papacy our faith must experience the divinity of the Church and seek it with anxious lov"¦. Loving faith will discover there hidden divinity"¦surrendered to the human element. Only in this most bitter visibility does the invisible become comprehensible." [Note 15: See The Theology of Proclamation by Hugo Rahner, S.J., translated from the German, Eine Theologie der Verkundigung, by Richard Dimmler, S.J., William Dych, S.J., Joseph Halpin, S.J., and Clement Petrick, S.J., (New York: Herder & Herder, 1968)] Quite apart from the Church doctrine on the Papacy"”the tone of the statement, the manner, the resonances, make me impatient and suspicious. Most of the time I don't bother about the Papacy one way or another. I accept it and hope for the best. This kind of writing tempts me to active questioning and to doubt. So anyone who does not experience the invisible divinity by looking at Pope Paul is a "gnostic"? Especially if he claims to experience the presence of God somewhere els"”in his own heart for example? How can I believe this does not reflect in Rahner an unconscious bad faith, bred of his Jesuit hangups? A willful effort to convince himself? And to use me to help him do it! The kenoticism of Altizer seems to me more open and more honest. (The Blake book.) But is this whole kenotic thing too much of a mannerism? |
| 1968/03/26 | Thomas J.J. Altizer | New Apocalyps: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 72
| And then Hugo Rahner. I have read bits of a new book (Theology of Proclamation). But I come to this: "Through the historical visibility of the Papacy our faith must experience the divinity of the Church and seek it with anxious lov"¦. Loving faith will discover there hidden divinity"¦surrendered to the human element. Only in this most bitter visibility does the invisible become comprehensible." Quite apart from the Church doctrine on the Papacy"”the tone of the statement, the manner, the resonances, make me impatient and suspicious. Most of the time I don't bother about the Papacy one way or another. I accept it and hope for the best. This kind of writing tempts me to active questioning and to doubt. So anyone who does not experience the invisible divinity by looking at Pope Paul is a "gnostic"? Especially if he claims to experience the presence of God somewhere els"”in his own heart for example? How can I believe this does not reflect in Rahner an unconscious bad faith, bred of his Jesuit hangups? A willful effort to convince himself? And to use me to help him do it! The kenoticism of Altizer seems to me more open and more honest. (The Blake book.) [Note 16: Thomas J. J. Altizer's The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake was published by Michigan State University Press (Ann Arbor) in 1967. Merton wrote a review article that appeared in the Sewanee Review 76 (Autumn 1968) and was later included in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, edited by Patrick Hart (New York: New Directions, 1982).] But is this whole kenotic thing too much of a mannerism? |
| 1968/03/30 | Hugo Rahner | Theology of Proclamation / Translated from the German: Eine Theologie der Verkündigung |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 74
| I have given up on Hugo Rahner's Theology of Prodamation and on Skinner's Walden Two"”I see the "importanc" of the latter but it bores me. I forget the dozen other books I have given up on lately. But last evening I was reading The Essential Lenny Bruce and almost blew my mind. Completely gone in laughter, the kind that doubles you up and almost makes you roll on the floor. Surely that is some indication of the healthiness, and sanity of this satire which so many people regarded as "obscene." In reality, it is much more pure than the sinister doubletalk of the "moral" murderers and cops. Lenny Bruce was one of the few who were really clean. |
| 1968/04/09 | Carl Amery | Capitulation: The Lesson of German Catholicism |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 365
| I think you are right when you say that Catholic spirituality has been too individualistic. That is just another way of saying that it has been the product of a middle-class environment. Carl Amery's book Capitulation has plenty to say about this kind of "milieu Catholicism" in Nazi Germany. We are about to have the same problems here. Though perhaps not quite in the same way. Unfortunately, I am not sure that a more revolutionary Catholicism cast in the mold of a socialist society is going to be much help either. We can't just go on fitting into somebody else's mold. |
| 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. |
| 1968/07/09 | Gordon Leff | Heresy in the Later Middle Ages: The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent c.1250 - c.1450 |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 140
| Strange thing, this morning: after Mass (St. Albert"”hermit) [Feast Day], and coffee and light breakfast and article on Panama Canal inBulletin [of the] A[tomic] Scientist, tried to work on Gordon Leff and the Franciscan poverty business (Heretics in Late M[iddle] A[ges]) and couldn't keep my eyes open. Fell asleep on it. Went and lay down dopey for ½ hour, then got up and looked for something new. |
| 1968/08/20 | Father Raymond Flanagan O.C.S.O. | Relax and Rejoice |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 156
| I regret less some of the recent poetry, and especially Cables and Lograire. I wish I had done more creative work and less of this trivial, sanctimonious editorializing. Easy enough to see that Fr. Raymond's new book [Relax and Rejoice] is a sick joke. (Half the community is laughing at it-he could not even sell it to Bruce and Co., and had to print it privately-but now claims this was due to a "liberal plot" to suppress the "truth" which he alone reveals!) But is my stuff any less ridiculous? I wonder. Of course one has a duty to speak out. But as soon as you attach yourself to a "caus" your perspective gets distorted. |