| Author Quoted | Leslie Dewart |
| Title Quoted | Christianity and Revolution |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1963/06/00 |
| Imprint | New York : Herder & Herder. 1963 |
| Quotation | 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. |
| Quotation Source | Witness to Freedom: The Letters of Thomas Merton in Times of Crisis.; Selected and edited by William H. Shannon. / New York : Farrar Straus Giroux. 1994, p. 288 |
| Letter to | Leslie Dewart |
| 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.) |