| Author Quoted | Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius |
| Title Quoted | De Consolatione Philosophiae |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1941/04/09 |
| Imprint | |
| Quotation | The process may take days-or years. We think we possess some idea; then, by a series of accidents, through a long desert of difficulties, we come upon little scraps of intuition and dialectic with great labor, and all these are only part of the same old idea. But we never begin to understand the idea really well until this arduous and discouraging process also is under way. And in this, we are really living that idea, working it out in our lives, in the manner appropriate to our own sad contingent and temporal state where nothing is possessed but in scraps and pieces, imperfectly, successively. Yet we always long to possess truth as it is eternally in God's Divine Mind-"tota, perfecta, simul" ["complete, perfect, together"] (Boethius), and sometimes He gives us intuitions that, in a flash, resemble heavenly intuitions with a kind of image of completeness. But it is not real completeness. |
| Quotation Source | Run to the mountain: The Story of a Vocation. The journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 1, 1939-1941.; Edited by Patrick Hart, O.C.S.O. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1995, p. 339 |
| Letter to | |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
(If there is a link above showing up as a number, click it to open another window with a full text version.) |