| Date | Author | Title | Source | Quotation by Merton |
| 1939/05/11 | Benedetto Croce | Filosofia di G.B. Vico |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 4
| I suppose I am not reading Croce on Vico very carefully [Note 4: Vico's La Scienza Nuovo (1725) is a philosophy of history on which James Joyce based his Finnigans Wake (along with Giordano Buno of Nola and Nichlas of Cusa... Merton was reading Croce's La Filosofia di G.B. Vico at this time, also]. I am not getting the steps in the law of the reflux so well down. Yet as to Finnigan's Work [Note 5: A wordplay on Joyce's Finnigans Wake (Merton refers to it in one place as Finnigan's Work and another place as Vinnigan's Walk]: The very first sentence says it's Vico. So Finnigan is the history of the world, seen Vician |
| 1939/05/11 | Giambattista Vico | Scienza Nuova |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 4
| I suppose I am not reading Croce on Vico very carefully [Note 4: Vico's La Scienza Nuovo (1725) is a philosophy of history on which James Joyce based his Finnigans Wake (along with Giordano Buno of Nola and Nichlas of Cusa... Merton was reading Croce's La Filosofia di G.B. Vico at this time, also]. I am not getting the steps in the law of the reflux so well down. Yet as to Finnigan's Work [Note 5: A wordplay on Joyce's Finnigans Wake (Merton refers to it in one place as Finnigan's Work and another place as Vinnigan's Walk]: The very first sentence says it's Vico. So Finnigan is the history of the world, seen Vician |
| 1939/09/13 | Blaise Pascal | Provincial Letters, Pensees, Scientific Treatises. / translated by W.F.Trotter, in Great Books of the Western World |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 21
| A model sentence from Pascal. Maybe everyone who wants to write should, before he even starts, consider this sentence as much for its balance and its construction as for what it says: it is the beginning of all writing: "Il ne faut pas avoir l'ême fort elevee pour comprendere qu'il n'y a point ici de satisfaction veritable et solide, que tous nos plaisirs ne sont que vanite, que nos maux sont infinis, et qu'enfin la mort, qui nous menace à chaque instant, doit infailliblement nous mettre, dans peu d'annees, dans l'horrible necessite d'être eternellement ou aneantis ou Malheureux." ["We do not require a very lofty soul to understand that here is no real and lasting satisfaction; that our pleasures are only vanity; that our evils are infinite; and lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being for ever either annihilated or unhappy."] Pensees III. 194. [Note 14: Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters, Pensees, Scientific Treatises... p.207] |
| 1939/09/13 | Jean Jacques Rousseau | Confessions |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 21
| Because ambitious men are absurd, the same suspiciousness towards ambition literature has fallen upon confession literature. (By ambition literature - not Horatio Alger: Stendal.) That is upon all confession literature indiscriminately. Rousseau as well as Saint Augustine. The Confessions of Rousseau belong with ambition literature: these of Saint Augustine do not. The difference is that Saint Augustine confesses God. Rousseau proclaims himself. |
| 1939/09/14 | Blaise Pascal | Provincial Letters, Pensees, Scientific Treatises. / translated by W.F.Trotter, in Great Books of the Western World |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 22
| 2. Pascal - Pensees - VI.408. "Le mal est aise, il y en a une infinite; le bien, presque unique. Mais en certain genre de mal est aussi difficile à trouver que ce qu'on appelle bien, et souvent on fais passer pour bien à cette marque de mal particulier..." [Note 15: Great Books of the Western World, 207] 1. These two quotations are obviously not contradictory, but say exactly the same thing. 2. Neither compares absolute good and absolute evil - which cannot be compared because absolute evil does not exist and perfect good is only truly apparent to God. |
| 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. |
| 1939/10/14 | Aurelius Augustinus | Confessions |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 51
| About prayer... The past and the future, not real. Only the present is real. In eternity "all is present." (Saint Augustine, Confessions. XI. 11) "...my childhood, which is now no more, existeth in the time past, which now is not; but when I remember and recount it, I behold the image thereof in the present time, because that still remaineth in my memory."(XI. 18) "... it might be properly said that there are three times, a present time of things past, a present time of things present, and a present time of things future." (XI. 20) Prayer is a way of bringing man close to God. God is eternal: to him, all things are present. So, in prayer, therre is no past, properly speaking, no future. But in prayer, always present, is a present tense of things past - |
| 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. |
| 1940/01/04 | Henry Osborn Taylor | Medieval Mind: A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 122
| A New Year-it feels like a New Year: a new decade. In his book about The Medieval Mind [Note 27: Henry Osborn Taylor (1856-1941), The Medieval Mind: A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1911).] which I have been reading, Henry Osborn Taylor can tolerate practically everything in a Christian philosopher except the interest in numbers. Augustine, fascinated by the symbolic meaning of numbers, drives Taylor wild. Alcuin, or someone else, following after him, drivesTaylor crazy again. You could collect book-review blurbs about it: preoccupation over numbers gives us passages which represent, says Taylor, "Augustine at his worst." etc. |
| 1940/01/14 | Aristotle | works of Aristotle / Aristotle ; transl. into English under the editorship of W.D. Ross |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 138
| I guess if I want to I can work this down to the old familiar (to me) dilemma of Plato and Aristotle-which one looks at things from the right end. This dilemma can never mean anything to me until I read both Plato and Aristotle. I have never read either-except the Poetics and De Memoria of Aristotle and parts of The Republic and the Ion! |
| 1940/02/13 | Irwin Edman | Candle in the Dark: A Postscript to Despair |
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. |
| 1940/02/13 | 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. |
| 1940/11/02 | Bonaventura | Commentarius in secundum librum Sententiarum Petri Lombardi |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 247-48
| "Infinitum dicitur dupliciter, scilicet per privationem perfectionis; et sic materia dicitur infinita, et talis infiniti non est finire, sed potius finiri indiget, secundum quod est possible. Alio modo infinitum dicitur per privationem limitationis; et quod sic infinitum est, proprie habet finire quoniam ultra ipsum, cum non sit maius cogitare, non contingit aliquid appetere. Unde talis infinitas convenit ultimo fini, quae maxime habet finiendi rationem." ["Infinity is understood in two ways. First, through the privation of perfection. In this way, matter is called infinite, and of such infinity there is no end, since it is lacking an end, being only possibility. Secondly, infinity is understood as the privation of limitation; what is thus considered infinite, is already completed, since there is nothing beyond it. Since nothing greater can be thought of, it does not desire anything beyond it. It is this kind of infinity that is proper to the ultimate end, which has the greatest power to motivate."] Saint Bonaventure I. Sent. I. III.I. a3. |
| 1940/12/10 | Bonaventura | Itinerarium |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 275
| For Saint Bonaventure there is no distinction between charity and sanctifying grace. Charity is sanctifying grace considered as oriented from man to God. Grace is charity considered as oriented from God to man. Grace is the beginning; without grace man cannot pray for grace. Justitia [justice] is the directing and making use of charity, working in charity. For Saint Thomas-sanctifying grace an entitative habit of soul and charity is a habit of that distinct faculty the will. Without grace the habit of charity is worthless: but charity does not occupy the whole soul. There is need of grace. [followed by a long quotation from Bonaventura's Itinerarium 1.7] |
| 1941/02/11 | Bonaventura | Itineris Mentis in Deum |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 307
| Long quotation of S. Bonaventura Itineris Mentis in Deo. Cap. II.7. |
| 1941/03/11 | Bonaventura | Itineris Mentis in Deum |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 320-21
| Long quotations from S. Bonaventura Itin. Ment. in Deum. Cap III. |
| 1941/03/26 | Bonaventura | Commentarius in secundum librum Sententiarum Petri Lombardi |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 328
| Saint Bonaventure on the problem of the relation of the intellect, memory and will, to the substance of the soul. Are they three separate substances, of which the soul is made up? Can that be? No. Are they three accidents of one substance as Saint Thomas thinks? No. When he says they are accidents, he has to immediately qualify them as accidents in no ordinary sense, because the substance of the soul cannot be considered apart from them. Hereafter two quotations from I. Sent. 3.2. 1.3. Concl. T-I. p.86. and II. Sent. 21.1.2.1. ad 8th T.II. p.562. |
| 1941/04/09 | Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius | De Consolatione Philosophiae |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 339
| 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. |
| 1941/04/18 | Etienne Gilson | Spirit of Medieval Philosophy |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 356
| Leaving Gethsemani was very sad....I went to the Cathedral [of Louisville], then to the Public Library: there I read a chapter-the one on Free Will-in Gilson's Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. In the Public Library I didn't even feel like reading any of Evelyn Waugh's fine travel book They Were Still Dancing which I read between trains there before. |
| 1941/05/09 | P. Mandonnet | Dante le Theologien. Introduction à l'intelligence de la Vie, des Oevres et de l'Art de Dante Alighieri |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 364
| Then I was less happy reading Mandonnet's "Dante le Theologien." It makes you slightly unhappy to read a guy want to write in such a way about Dante and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and making so many smug statements about Saint Thomas being the Truth Itself; and if every line of Dante is not based on Saint Thomas, the only reason is he was not able to get hold of enough of Saint Thomas' books, and had to be content with theories from someone else |
| 1941/05/14 | Etienne Gilson | Spirit of Medieval Philosophy |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 366
| An argument I had with Bill Fineran in the Gold Rail Bar, in 1936; I was attacking the Church, and said the existence of God couldn't be proved at all. An extreme position, I took. But I had been reading Gilson's Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, without understanding it very well. I had heard, from that, of Saint Bernard; and mentioned him, but Fineran hadn't heard of him. |
| 1941/07/13 | Etienne Gilson | God and Philosophy |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 379
| "True metaphysics does not culminate in a concept, be it that of thought, of good, of one or of substance. It does not even culminate in an essence, be it that of Being itself. Its last word is not ens but esse; not being, but is. The ultimate effect of metaphysics is to posit an Act by an act, that is, to posit by an act of judging, the supreme Act of existing, whose very essence, because it is to be, passes human understanding. Where a man's metaphysics comes to an end, his religion begins." Etienne Gilson God and Philosophy, p. 143. [Note 11: This quotation is taken from the last paragraph of Etienne Gilson's God and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), which was originally the Powell lectures at Indiana University.] |
| 1941/08/21 | Leon Bloy | Invendable. |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 385-86
| I am not as sore at religious as the Baroness [is]-or Leon Bloy. No reason why I should not be except for the Trappists. Charlie-who worked for the Baroness and wore Maritain's cast off overcoat all winter-is going into the Trappists-and is a good, humble guy-but she kidded him a lot, too, probably because he was entering an order. Reading Bloy's L'Invendable it is quite clear to me that what he was doing was a kind of "lay apostolat" (a fancy term I don't like so much), he had a definite vocation to write what he wrote-nobody knows, or can measure, the tremendous value of his writing, as apostolate. If he only converted one man, it would justify his whole life. But he converted Maritain and a pile of others, and was crucified for how many? |
| 1941/09/30 | Aurelius Augustinus | De Beata Vita |
Jnl 1 ('39-'41) p. 417
| Where did all the rest of the time go-? I taught two classes, corrected some papers, read a few pages of [Christopher] Dawson's Progress and Religion, wrote a letter trying to sell the anthology, wrote four very stinking pages in the typewritten journal, discussed part of Saint Augustine's De Beata Vita which we are beginning to read with Fr. Philotheus-and said various prayers. This has filled up a lot of time and nothing valuable has been done. |
| 1941/10/08 | Søren Kierkegaard | Fear and Trembling |
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! |
| 1947/03/10 | Johannes Duns Scotus | Opus Oxoniense |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 43
| Since being in the monastery I have been hit that way by St. Theresa's Way of Perfection, chapter on distractions, etc. in the prayer of quiet, in the novitiate. [Pierre van der Meer de Walcheren's] Le Paradis Blanc about the Carthusians at La Val Saint"”the middle section called "Un Chartreux parle." Also the article on "Chartreux" in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualite [Tome II. Paris, 1937, 705-76]. Also four years ago on the feast of St. Joseph, in the novitiate-all that part of the third stanza of The Living Flame, where St. John of the Cross talks about the "deep caverns". The same way, in a different mode and degree, with Duns Scotus' 49th Distinction of the 4th Book of the Oxoniense, on beatitude, and parts of St. Bonaventure about desire. Then, too, in my second year in the novitiate, I was very struck by [Marie Michel] Philipon's book on Elizabeth of the Trinity, her prayer [La Doctrine Spirituelle de Soeur Elisabeth de la Trinite, 1947]. |
| 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. |
| 1949/02/09 | Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges | Vie Intellectuelle; son exprit, ses conditions ses methodes |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 279
| Into the middle of all this came [Antonin] Sertillanges' La Vie Intellectuelle [Paris, 1944] which might have what I need to cheer me up and keep me organized. I have glanced at it here and there and it has one me the effect that Dale Carnegie's "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" might have on a despondent salesman. Definitely, I have simply got to make time for this book and get at it and finish it, patiently, and not let myself be eaten up by fan mail or other chores that do not really count... |
| 1949/02/13 | Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges | Vie Intellectuelle; son exprit, ses conditions ses methodes |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 280
| Now"”about La Vie Intellectuelle-it would be a nice feat to prove that it is not diametrically opposed to St. John of the Cross. I bet no one can do it. Maybe Jacques Maritain can see how the two can be reconciled. Yesterday I got to the part where he says that solicitude for one's health is a virtue of the intellectual.... I wonder how the Abbe de Rance would like that book. He and Sertillanges are now capable of discussing it without undue heat in heaven, for Sertillanges died last year on the feast of St. Anne |
| 1949/02/13 | Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges | Vie Intellectuelle; son exprit, ses conditions ses methodes |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 281
| On the other hand there could be a way of being humble and following Sertillanges, and nobody can say whether Mabillon was not a greater saint than de Rance. [Note 38: Jean Mabillon (1632-1707), the great Benedictine Maurist scholar, wrote Traite des etudes monastiques (1691) in response to de Rance's denunciation of monks engaged in scholarship, like Mabillon and his Maurist community.] But I have long since given up the idea that working with the kind of intellectual steam prescribed by Sertillanges for his Dominicans would be any vocation of mine. |
| 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. |
| 1950/10/09 | Jean Danielou | Platonisme et theologie mystique. Essay sur la doctrine spirituelle de Saint Gregoire de Nysse |
Ltrs: SofC p. 24
| I wish I could give you some information on St. Bernard in his relation to the Greek Fathers. I have none of my own; the topic interests me but I have barely begun to do anything about it, since I know the Greek Fathers so poorly. However, I can tell you this much: in Danielou's Platonisme et T.M. on pages and 211 there are references to St. Bernard's dependence (?) on St. Gregory of Nyssa. The opening of St. Bernard's series of Sermons obviously reflects the idea of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa that the Canticle of Canticles was for the formation of mystics while Proverbs and Ecclesiastes applied to the beginners and progressives. I find Bernard's echo of this point an interesting piece of evidence that he considered the monastic vocation a remote call to mystical union"”if not a proximate one. Then, too, Gregory's homilies on the Canticle of Canticles are full of a tripartite division of souls into slaves, mercenaries and spouses. Gregory's apophatism is not found in St. Bernard, but in his positive treatment of theology Bernard follows Origen. I think Fr. Danielou also told me that Bernard's attitude toward the Incarnate Word is founded on Origen"”I mean his thoughts on amor carnalis Christi [carnal love of Christ] in relation to mystical experience. I may be wrong |
| 1950/12/06 | Henry David Thoreau | Walden or Life in the Woods |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 445
| After those beautiful pages on morning and on being awake, Thoreau writes in his Walden: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." He adds mysteriously, "nor did I wish to practice resignation unless it was quite necessary." I suppose he means he did not intend to be resigned to anythinglike a compromise with life, unless it could not be avoided. |
| 1953/05/20 | Max Picard | Flight from God |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 213
| Have you read Max Picard? I like his stuff very much and am currently in the Flight from God which is very pertinent. But that reminds me that I have not yet read the issue of Renascence with your article on Rilke "¦ |
| 1955/11/26 | Bruno Snell | Discovery of the mind: in Greek philosophy and literature |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 25
| The Snell book is here and I have begun it. I can see its great importance, and therefore i ask you to bear with me if I do not return it in a hurry. My time is rather sparsely protioned out and it takes time through such a book. |
| 1955/12/17 | Adolph Konrad Fiedler | Vom Wesen der Kunst |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 27
| And now, thank you so much for the Fiedler. It is intensely interesting and thougth provoking. As I had suspected, the arguments I tentavely put forth in my last letter had little realy to di with Fiedler whom I see to be just as "anti-academic" as I am. However, I do not think I have mastered his thougth well enough to discuss it, and as you say it would be far more fruitful simply to live in the light of some concrete embodiment of his doctrine put into effect. |
| 1956/02/05 | Bruno Snell | Discovery of the mind: in Greek philosophy and literature |
Ltrs: Hammer p. 29
| I finally have a chance to write you and tell you that I am sending the Snell book back - long after I had promised to do so. It is indeed an important book, and I regret that it is so far from my present context that Iwas unable to do it full justice. It is so difficult to follow all the avenues that open out before one, and I must of necessity leave the vistas of Greek thought somewhat misty, to my regret. I have no other choice, since my limited time for reading and study is now almost all taken up with scripture and mysticism and monastic history and whatnot - things necessary for myself and the novices. So I did not master all of Snell |
| 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]. |
| 1957/05/13 | Karl Marx | Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right' |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 89
| ""¦a clan in radical chains, one of the classes of bourgeois society which does not belong to bourgeois society, an order which brings the break-up of all orders, a sphere which has a universal character by virtue of its universal suffering and lays claim to no particular right because no particular wrong but complete wrong is being perpetrated against it"¦which cannot emancipate itself without freeing itself from all other spheres of society and thereby freeing all these other spheres themselves which, as it represents the complete forfeiting of humanity itself can only redeem itself through the redemption of the whole of humanity. The proletariat represents the disposition of society as a special order." Marx-1843. The perils of Marx's rhetoric. |
| 1957/05/13 | Karl Marx | Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right' |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 90
| Marx is, in some strange way, an heir of Ezechiel and Jeremias. Not that he is a conscious and willing instrument of God-but an instrument. We have to listen to his tune and understand it. Because it does not mean exactly what Marx himself thought it would mean or what the communists made it mean (for Marxism, in a sense, is dead. But the unintentional consequence of Marxism lives on and their work is terrible). |
| 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. |
| 1958/03/11 | Gabriel Marcel | Homo viator |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 179
| My day of recollection. Went to confession to Fr. John of the Cross in the vault, as usual. Had to wait a little for him and took down Gabriel Marcel's Homo Viator from the shelf as "spiritual reading"-haven't done much lately (except for my Lenten book, Ramon Lull, whom I find at times impossible, although on the first day I was exhilarated). In Marcel's book came at once upon the Essay on "Obedience and Fidelity." I am sure I had read it before but without too much attention. It clarifies much of my present struggle and confusion. |
| 1958/04/20 | Martin Buber | I and Thou |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 192-93
| Buber's I and Thou, in an execrable translation, very difficult to follow at first. An important book, in which I am confronted with the hollowness and falsity of my own life - yet the comfort that right here, this writing is an "I-Thou" writing - isn't it? But so much other writing which is nothing but a closed door. I close the door on Thee by giving Thee too many standard names, and hiding Thee with concepts - Then inviting everyone to stand in front of the door I have closed in their face. |
| 1958/04/20 | Martin Buber | I and Thou |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 193
| "How foolish and hopeless would be the man who turned aside from the course of his life in order to seek God; even though he won all the wisdom of solitude and all the powers of concentrated being, he would miss God. Rather is it as when a man goes his way and simply wishes that it might be the Way; in the strengths of his wish his striving is expressed." Buber's I and Thou, p. 80. |
| 1958/04/22 | Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev | Russian Idea |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 195
| Charmed and fascinated by everything Berdyaev says in "The Russian Idea" until suddenly I am brought up with a jolt by his statement that Proust is "France's only writer of genius!" An intuition that might possibly, from a certain point of view, have truth in it. And yet is not true. His insights, then, are brilliant and right but one must remember they are not always meant to be "tru" in the sense of "definitive." They are always tentative and that is a good thing. Perhaps this makes them in their way truer than those judgments which are sound and "tru" "for all men at all times." |
| 1958/04/28 | Martin Buber | I and Thou |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 195-96
| Fine climax to Buber's I and Thou. "Meeting with God does not come to man in order that he may concern himself with God, but in order that he may confirm that there is meaning in the world. "All revelation is summons and sending. But again and again man brings about instead of realization, a reflection to Him who reveals. He wished to concern himself with God instead of with the world. Only in such a reflection he is no longer confronted by a Thou, he can do nothing but establish an It - God in the realm of things, believes that he knows of God as of an It and so speak about him"¦ "God remains present to you when you have been sent forth; he who goes on a mission has always God before him: the truer the fulfillment the stronger and more constant his nearness. He cannot concern himself directly with God but Its apparent turning towards the primal source belongs in truth to the universal movement away from it"¦" These are among the wisest religious truths written in our century. |
| 1958/05/29 | Hannah Arendt | Origins of Totalitarianism |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 204
| The terrible insights of Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. Wrote notes here under the pine trees in bare feet. |
| 1958/05/31 | Nicolas Berdyaev | Slavery and Freedom |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 204-05
| An admirable book from the Louisville library. Berdyaev's Slavery and Freedom. I think it is useful to know what one man one tends most closely to sympathize with, to "agre" with in a general way (though by no means with all his individual statements)-to agree with in the whole of his doctrine though not in each particular fact by itself. He says, among other things: "The self-realization of personality presupposes resistance, it demands a conflict with the enslaving power of the world, a refusal to conform to the world"¦". Repeatedly, since last year, two years ago, this thought comes to me with all the power of a "message." And I still don't quite know what to do about it. In a sense, this was the reason for my entering the monastery, but that only shifted the problem to another level. It was not a solution. |
| 1958/06/10 | Nicolas Berdyaev | Slavery and Freedom |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 205-06
| "It need to be said that politics are always based on lies"¦(we ought to) demand the reduction of politics and of their fictitious power over human life to the very minimum. Politics are always an extension of the slavery of man. The astonishing thing is that politics have never been an expression even of intelligence, to say nothing of morality, or of goodness. The so-called great among statesmen and political figures have said nothing wise and intelligent. They have usually been men of ordinary, current ideas, of banalities adapted to the average man." "The majority of these great figures are distinguished by the same criminality, hypocrisy, craftiness, and intoleranc"¦An exception must be made in favor of social reformers who emancipated man from slavery." Berdyaev. Slavery and Freedom, p. 143. |
| 1958/10/23 | Vladimir Sergeyewich Solovyov | Meaning of Love |
Ltrs: CforT p. 90
| Am I right in surmising that the ideas in this book run closely parallel to those in [Vladimir] Soloviev's Meaning of Love? There is a great similarity. Both works remind us to fight our way out of complacency and realize that all our work remains yet to be done, the work of transformation which is the work of love, and love alone. I need not tell you that I also am one who has tried to learn deeply from Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, and I am passionately convinced that this is the most important of all lessons for our time. It is important here, and there. Equally important everywhere. |
| 1958/11/10 | Czeslaw Milosz | Captive Mind |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 230
| Reading Czeslaw Milosz The Captive Mind-a really interesting book. When you read something worthwhile in these days, you know it right away-and this is worthwhile-every line of it. The challenge it presents-very clear and sober. Who is there in the West that can write a book that will really be appreciated by someone who has lain on the cobblestones of the street with the machine gun bullets whizzing by him and re-arranging a pattern of upturned paving stones? |
| 1958/12/06 | Czeslaw Milosz | Captive Mind |
Ltrs: CforT p. 54
| Having read your remarkable book The Captive Mind I find it necessary to write to you, as without your help I am unable to pursue certain lines of thought which this book suggests. I would like to ask you a couple of questions and hope you will forgive this intrusion. First of all I would like to say that I found your book to be one of the most intelligent and stimulating it has been my good fortune to read for a very long time. It is an important book, which makes most other books on the present state of man look abjectly foolish. I find it especially important for myself in my position as a monk, a priest and a writer. It is obvious that a Catholic writer in such a time as ours has an absolute duty to confine himself to reality and not waste his time in verbiage and empty rationalizations. Unfortunately, as I have no need to point out to you, most of us do this and much worse. The lamentable, pitiable emptiness of so much Catholic writing, including much of my own, is only too evident. Your book has come to me, then, as something I can call frankly "spiritual," that is to say, as the inspiration of much thought, meditation and prayer about my own obligations to the rest of the human race, and about the predicament of us all. |
| 1959/02/24 | Czeslaw Milosz | Captive Mind |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 264
| Fine letter from Czeslaw Milosz in Paris. I had written about The Captive Mind. He replied at length about Alpha, Beta, etc. gave information about books, said he had translated some poems of mine into Polish. Sense of dealing, for once, with a real person, with one who has awakened out of sleep. There is no question that the world of the West and I in it, is involved in the deepest and most restless, and most stupid sleep. And how are we going to wake up? (The efforts which Western politicians imagine to be an awakening are only ways of tossing around in order to settle into an even deeper slumber.) |
| 1959/05/08 | Carl Gustav Jung | Undiscovered Self |
Ltrs: CforT p. 97-98
| How happy I am that [C. G.] Jung is doing an autobiography, and that Kurt is working with him. I recently read Jung's The Undiscovered Self and want to say how much I enjoyed it and agreed with it. He is one of the rare men who are helping us rediscover the true shape of our life, and the true validity of our symbols. |
| 1959/09/04 | Paul Tillich | Love, Power and Justice |
Ltrs: HGL p. 576
| For some time I have owed you this letter acknowledging your kind gift of Love Power and Justice with your own words and signature on the flyleaf. At the same time I want to thank you for the other books which Mrs. Leonard sent me. I will have more to say about them later on, when I have studied them more thoroughly. I have not yet finished The Theology of Culture, which in many respects is the most interesting"”but I want at least to give you my impressions of the moment and convey to you something of the gratitude I owe you for the enjoyment derived from the books. Love Power and Justice I found difficult at first. The book did not open up to me until your magnificent chapter on being and power with its, to me, central intuition that "the power of being is its possibility to affirm itself against the non-being in it and against it." From then on the book became an illuminating and exciting experience, and the concept you expressed has helped me to get much out of your other work too. |
| 1959/09/04 | Paul Tillich | Love, Power and Justice |
Ltrs: HGL p. 577
| Finally I want to tell you how happy I am with the earlier chapters of The Theology of Culture, in which I find all my Augustinian and Franciscan instincts vindicated. True, I have been subjected to the Thomist formation, which is de rigueur for every priest, and it has made me a little suspicious of technical ontologism, but what you are after is the Franciscan instinct for immediacy which is to me the supremely important thing in religious thought"”and experience. And the thing so easily frustrated, glossed over and rejected by the doctors of the law. |
| 1959/09/04 | Paul Tillich | Theology of Culture |
Ltrs: HGL p. 576
| For some time I have owed you this letter acknowledging your kind gift of Love Power and Justice with your own words and signature on the flyleaf. At the same time I want to thank you for the other books which Mrs. Leonard sent me. I will have more to say about them later on, when I have studied them more thoroughly. I have not yet finished The Theology of Culture, which in many respects is the most interesting"”but I want at least to give you my impressions of the moment and convey to you something of the gratitude I owe you for the enjoyment derived from the books. Love Power and Justice I found difficult at first. The book did not open up to me until your magnificent chapter on being and power with its, to me, central intuition that "the power of being is its possibility to affirm itself against the non-being in it and against it." From then on the book became an illuminating and exciting experience, and the concept you expressed has helped me to get much out of your other work too. |
| 1959/11/03 | Denis Rougement | Western Quest: the Principles of Civilization |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 339-40
| Denis de Rougemont: The Western Quest - seeking to resolve the antimony inherent in personal life-an antimony which came into conscious currency after Nicea. No solution in trying to combine individualism and collectivism in equal parts - Seeking refuge in one or other extreme = sabotage. Greek individualism and atomism-or Roman collectivism? Christian faith and vocation rose above both. A Crusoe, says DeR, has no real freedom because the tension, the antinomy is lacking. (But Crusoe is a myth.) Complete absorption in collectivity - also empty of freedom. Mixture of the two tendencies does not create personal tension. This point is important-and new for me. |
| 1959/12/10 | Josef Pieper | Leisure, The Basis of Culture |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 356
| I have finally gotten around to reading Pieper's fine little book Leisure, The Basis of Culture. It is very sound and no amount of guilt should make us treat his view of contemplation as "pagan" as if that were to exclude "Christian." One thing is sure-we do not in this monastery have any faith in the basic value of otium sanctum [sacred leisure]. We believe only in the difficult and the unpleasant. That is why we, in practice, hate the contemplative life and destroy it with constant activity. |
| 1959/12/31 | Frances M. Cornford | Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 364
| Interesting book by Paul Radin on Philosophy of Primitive Man. Also Merleau-Ponty and Cornford on the early Greek philosophers. |
| 1959/12/31 | Paul Radin | Primitive Man as Philosopher |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 364
| Interesting book by Paul Radin on Philosophy of Primitive Man. Also Merleau-Ponty and Cornford on the early Greek philosophers. |
| 1960/01/01 | Maurice Merleau-Ponty | Sens et non-sens |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 365
| From Merleau-Ponty on Pseudo-scientific Marxism (Sens et non-sens, p. 223). Most intelligent papers I have yet read on Marxism and religion (225-26) - and the most challenging. Religion a symbolic structure, not mere meaningless verbalism, symbolizing relations between men, communion which it "cannot attain" - and which the revolution can attain. This is the thesis that has to be judged and which is judged by history itself. Existential movement of history - not "scientific" laws or operations but the movement of alienated man "to take possession of himself and of the world." Quotes Marx as saying - one must above all avoid setting up society again as abstraction "face to face with the individual." Moving force of history "l'homme engag" - moteur de la dialectique. ["The engaged man - engine of the dialectic."] |
| 1960/03/03 | Bruno Snell | Discovery of the mind: in Greek philosophy and literature |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 377
| Walked in the snow after dinner and read a little about St. Bede. There are so many things to read! Snell on the Discovery of the Mind (in Ancient Greece) is enthralling but yet unsatisfactory. Too simplified. We have oversimplified Classical Greece. Only Cornford satisfies me as having approached its true complexity. |
| 1960/04/24 | Jacques Barzun | House of Intellect |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 385
| Reading Barzun's House of Intellect. Good criticism of the so-called educational "system" which is no system. A sane book about a sick society. I took to heart what was said about useless conferences and committees-Having written to the College of the Bible and Asbury Sem. about their coming "retreats." |
| 1960/05/08 | Jacques Barzun | House of Intellect |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 388
| Still reading Barzun. Finished Neumann on Amor and Psyche and returned it to the library. In the cell, here, Vonier's People of God and part of Initiation theologique. |
| 1960/05/13 | Hannah Arendt | Human Condition |
Ltrs: HGL p. 395
| I have been reading a fabulous book, The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, the one who wrote such a good one on [The Origins of] Totalitarianism. This is very fine, once one gets into it. And for once someone is saying something really new, though it is also really old. I recommend it. |
| 1960/05/13 | Hannah Arendt | Origins of Totalitarianism |
Ltrs: HGL p. 395
| I have been reading a fabulous book, The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, the one who wrote such a good one on [The Origins of] Totalitarianism. This is very fine, once one gets into it. And for once someone is saying something really new, though it is also really old. I recommend it. |
| 1960/05/14 | Hannah Arendt | Human Condition |
Jnl 3 ('52-'60) p. 389
| Hannah Arendt's Human Condition is another cardinal book, a hinge on which one's whole thought can turn. Whole new aspect of action and contemplation, public and private life, it offers a solution to the complex question that has plagued me with its ambiguity so long. As long as the conflict is between what is individual or intimate and what is social (this is the modern division) the issue never becomes clear and you can never get to grips with it. The social is simply a continuation of what is "privat" in the sense of "deprived," restricted, subject to necessity, the satisfaction of material needs. |
| 1960/06/01 | Hannah Arendt | Human Condition |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 5
| Hannah Arendt writes of the Greek πόλις‚ [polis] - "Before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place, the space being the public realm of the polis and its structure the law." [The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958)] |
| 1960/06/05 | Paul Louis Landsberg | Problèmes du personalisme |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 6-7
| Yesterday, under pressure, finished the galleys of Disputed Questions with my eyes stinging. Hot, I took a cold shower and went out and read a little of Paul Landsperg on Personalism and Lanza del Vasto on his pilgrimage to the sources of the Ganges. (How much better and more serious than Paul Brunton - Del Vasto's seriousness springs from the fact that he is a Christian, and this permits him to go deeper into yoga, get closer to it, and to the people who understand it. Del Vasto, as a religious man, is one of them. Brunton, an agnostic, remains comparatively a tourist.) Landsperg too is excellent. |
| 1960/06/05 | Paul Louis Landsberg | Problèmes du personalisme |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 8
| I have a natural tendency to become an escapist, a snob, a narcissist. (And my problems arise largely from guilt and attempts to cover up this guilt from myself and others.) [Paul] Landsperg says:"La fausse superiorite de ceux qui se mettent en dehors de tout est devenue une veritable peste dans notre monde, et la tolerance mensongère de ceux qui se contentent de tout expliquer paralyse l'esprit occidental." ["The false superiority of those who place themselves outside everything has become a real plague in our world, and the deceitful tolerance of those who are satisfied with explaining everything is paralyzing the Western spirit."] [Problèmes du personnalisme (Paris; 1952)] p 35 |
| 1960/06/10 | Hannah Arendt | Human Condition |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 10
| Finished Lanza del Vasto two evenings ago and am getting to the end of H. Arendt-The Human Condition. |
| 1960/06/10 | Joseph Jean Lanza del Vasto | Pelerinage aux Sources |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 10
| Finished Lanza del Vasto two evenings ago and am getting to the end of H. Arendt-The Human Condition. |
| 1960/06/12 | Hannah Arendt | Human Condition |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 11
| Finished the Human Condition today. It is the deepest and most important defense of the contemplative life that has been written in modern times. That covers a great deal of ground! I have pages of notes, just brief references and page numbers, and I don't know how to start organizing all this material for my own use. I mean for real use: for it is not enough just to have been exposed to such a book and to absorb, as one naturally does, something of its language and attitudes so that at times one may "sound lik" that. |
| 1960/10/03 | Andre Marie Jean Festugière | Contemplation et vie contemplative selon Platon |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 55
| After night office, long quiet interval, reading [Andre Marie Jean] Festugière on Plato. And that life of Dom Martène. In a way I admire Saint-Germain-des- Pres and in a way I don't. I admire their scholarship, not their rigidity. |
| 1960/10/10 | Plato | Phaedo |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 57
| After the Night Office. The superb moral and positive beauty of the Phaedo. One does not have to agree with Plato, but one must hear him. Not to listen to such a voice is unpardonable, it is like not listening to conscience or to nature. I repent, and I love this great poem, this "music." It is a purifying music of which I have great need. |
| 1960/10/24 | Andre Marie Jean Festugière | Contemplation et vie contemplative selon Platon |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 59
| Coffee after night office and the good long silence until Prime. Deliciae meae. [My delights.] This is something wonderful, and in this silence, reading Festugière, I have finally come to admit to what extent I have always been a Platonist. My reservations about Plato have gone, since the Phaedo (understanding of course always that one is not obliged to agree with every theory!). |
| 1960/11/14 | Pierre Teilhard de Chardin | Divine Milieu |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 65
| I have nothing but sympathy for his attempt to take a new view of things. I have not read anything but the Divine Milieu, but as far as I am concerned the book is generally healthier and more deeply, genuinely spiritual than anything that has ever emanated from the authoritarian mind of Dom Gabriel. |
| 1960/11/14 | Pierre Teilhard de Chardin | Divine Milieu |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 64
| Dom Gabriel [Sortais, the Abbot General], after consulting a professor in Rome, has refused permission to print an article I wrote on Teilhard de Chardin's Divine Milieu. A book in itself "harmless" they admit. But one must not say anything in favor of T. de C. One must "make the silenc" regarding T. de C. The decision means little to me one way or the other, and I can accept it without difficulty. Less easily the stuffy authoritarianism of Dom Gabriel, who cannot help being an autocrat, even while multiplying protestations of love. I rebel against being treated as a "property," as an "instrument" and as a "thing" by the Superiors of this Order. He definitely insists that I think as he thinks, for to think with him is to "think with the church." To many this would seem quite obvious. Is it not the formula they follow in Moscow? |
| 1960/12/05 | Pierre Teilhard de Chardin | Divine Milieu |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 237
| Did you mention something about Teilhard de Chardin? I have had some trouble there too. Ed [Rice] sent me a remarkable little book of T de C., the Divine Milieu. I liked it very much, and did a review article ["The Universe as Epiphany"] praising it. Of course I wanted to make clear that this was just a review of his book and not a general approbation of all T de C.'s work (and in any case I have not yet read the Phenomenon of Man). The censors of the order were true to form. They went into a panic, and the General took it up. Gave the article to some professor in Rome. The latter said there was really nothing wrong with the article but that Rome wanted Catholic magazines to keep silence about Teilhard de Chardin right now, and that it would be much better if I did not say anything. So it is not being published "¦ |
| 1960/12/24 | Werner Wilhelm Jaeger | Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture / Gilbert Highet (translator) |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 78
| Snow is melting a little. Quiet afternoon of Christmas Eve. Read a book of Newman's romantic but fundamentally sound essay on St. Benedict. Finished first volume of Paideia this morning. Must read Thucydides. All I can remember of it is the general with nephritis in Sicily. The total lack of perspective with which we read Greek authors, word by word, at school. |
| 1961/03/28 | Czeslaw Milosz | Captive Mind |
Ltrs: CforT p. 74
| This is just an added note to the longer letter I mailed this morning. Don't be perturbed about The Captive Mind. It was something that had to be written, & apart from the circumstances, it stands as a very valid statement by itself, irrespective of how it may be read & how it may be used. In any case no matter what a writer does these days it can be "used" for the cold war or for other purposes. Our very existence can be "used" by somebody or other to "prov" something that suits him. Such things are largely meaningless & we are wrong to be too affected by them. |
| 1961/04/07 | Nicolas of Cusa | Vision of God |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 106
| Trying to finish Nicholas of Cusa's Vision of God, but he verbalizes too much. Influence of Augustine. |
| 1961/05/19 | Lao Tzu | Tao Te Ching / Translated by John C.H. Wu |
Ltrs: HGL p. 617
| Paul Sih sent me your translation of Lao Tzu, and this I like very much. I am hoping to write an article on this and the Hsien Ching, which is a beautiful little book. Your translation of the Tao Te Ching seems to me to be the best I know. I have two questions about it. In #23 the word "loss""”is it loss in a good sense, or in a bad sense? Would you enlighten me? And in #12, "The sage takes care of the belly not the eye." What is meant by "belly"? Does it by any chance correspond to the "bowels" in Scripture, i.e., the inmost heart? I enjoyed very much your last etymologies. It is very important to me to get the wonderful differences of nuance and meaning, which have tremendous importance. It is so easy for the English reader to slur over "Superior Man" and "Heavenly Man" as if they were synonymous"”especially in Taoism!! |
| 1961/05/23 | Mary Lelia Makra | Hsiao Ching / transl. (from the Chinese) by Mary Lelia Makra ed. by Paul K. T. Sih |
Ltrs: HGL p. 549
| It has been a little while since I received your kind letter and later on the copy of the Hsiao Ching, for which I am deeply grateful. I have also heard from Jubilee and they are willing to have me review the two books. So I intend in due time to do an article on them. I enjoy the Hsiao Ching very much indeed. In its simplicity it has roots in the highest wisdom and one is surprised at the "modern" sound of some of its basic intuitions. I hope to study these two books carefully and am trying to write of them worthily. I hope I will myself grow in wisdom. |
| 1961/05/29 | Lao Tzu | Tao Te Ching / Translated by John C.H. Wu |
Ltrs: HGL p. 618
| I have carefully gone through your fine translation of the Tao Te Ching, and it is all superb. I really mean to get down to the article. I loved the Hsiao Ching too. It is so completely in tune with reality. The Zen books you speak of interest me, but my German is slow. I shall be eager to see if they appear in English translation. If I once reached Buddhahood and redescended to my present state, all I can say is that I made a really heroic sacrifice. But I don't regret it, as the other Buddhas seem to have done the same. Yourself for instance. Thus we go along gaily with littleness for our Mother and our Nurse, and we return to the root by having no answers to questions. Whatever I may have been in previous lives, I think more than half of them were Chinese and eremitical. |
| 1961/05/29 | Mary Lelia Makra | Hsiao Ching / transl. (from the Chinese) by Mary Lelia Makra ed. by Paul K. T. Sih |
Ltrs: HGL p. 618
| I have carefully gone through your fine translation of the Tao Te Ching, and it is all superb. I really mean to get down to the article. I loved the Hsiao Ching too. It is so completely in tune with reality. The Zen books you speak of interest me, but my German is slow. I shall be eager to see if they appear in English translation. If I once reached Buddhahood and redescended to my present state, all I can say is that I made a really heroic sacrifice. But I don't regret it, as the other Buddhas seem to have done the same. Yourself for instance. Thus we go along gaily with littleness for our Mother and our Nurse, and we return to the root by having no answers to questions. Whatever I may have been in previous lives, I think more than half of them were Chinese and eremitical. |
| 1961/07/18 | Placide Tempels | philosophie bantou |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 142-43
| I have thought and spoken... with Père Danielou whom, as theologian, I consider my director and who was here over the weekend. I had planned to go over the whole subject of the civitas Christiana but did not formally and expressly do so. But much was said that really covered that subject.... Recommended [Placide] Temples on Bantu philosophy, new novel of J[ulien] Green (we wrote Green a card in the car returning from Loretto), Corbin and the gnostics. Gnostics angry at Yaweh who deceived them. |
| 1961/08/12 | Chuang-tzu | Dschuang Dsi : das wahre buch vom südlichen Blütenland : Nan hua dschen ging / Chuang-tzu ; aus dem chinesischen verdeutscht und erläutert von Richard Wilhelm |
Ltrs: HGL p. 619
| The [Leon] Wieger [French translation of Chuang Tzu] is good to have. He is breezy and to some extent helpful, but above all it is fine to have the Chinese text. [Richard] Wilhelm [German translator of Chuang Tzu] has also arrived and I agree with you, he strikes one as very very solid and trustworthy. I like his work, and am glad to have this. With these translations I ought to be able to do something eventually. It will necessarily be slow and awkward, however. |
| 1961/08/12 | Zhuang Ze | Oeuvre de Tchoang-tzeu / translated into French by Leon Wieger |
Ltrs: HGL p. 619
| The [Leon] Wieger [French translation of Chuang Tzu] is good to have. He is breezy and to some extent helpful, but above all it is fine to have the Chinese text. [Richard] Wilhelm [German translator of Chuang Tzu] has also arrived and I agree with you, he strikes one as very very solid and trustworthy. I like his work, and am glad to have this. With these translations I ought to be able to do something eventually. It will necessarily be slow and awkward, however. |
| 1961/08/27 | Mircea Eliade | Mythes, rêves et mystères. English. Myths, dreams, and mysteries : the encounter between contemporary faiths and archaic realities / Mircea Eliade ; transl. by Philip Mairet |
Ltrs: HGL p. 131
| I have been reading a really remarkable book on Eckhart, by Vladimir Lossky, in French. It is very difficult in parts but it is one of the finest studies on the Meister. I highly recommend it. Published by Vrin. It is unfinished, as Lossky died. He was a great man, wrote a very fine book on the mystical theology of the Oriental Church which you should know. Also I just finished Mircea Eliade's Myths, Dreams and Mysteries. This too is very rich. He refers incidentally to Ananda and in the final pages has some very good things on Maya "¦ |
| 1961/10/27 | E.F. Osborn | Philosophy of Clement of Alexandria / and C.H. Dodd |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 174
| Calmed down to some extent this morning in the "sacred silence," reading, at peace. G. Ernest Wright on Biblical Theology. E. F. Osborn on Clement of Alexandria (dry). [Jules] Monchanin"¦ |
| 1962/02/10 | Erich Fromm | Marx's concept of man / Erich Fromm ; with a transl. from Marx's economic and philosophical manuscripts by T.B. Bottomore |
Ltrs: HGL p. 544-45
| At one point I would amplify and clarify what Fr. Tavard has said: where he discussed Marx. He does not make clear the inner spiritual potentialities hidden under the surface of the Marxian dialectic and the genuine pretensions of humanism that Marx himself expressed. The subordination of man to the technological process is not something that Marx accepts with unqualified satisfaction. On the contrary, it is, for him, the danger and the challenge of a technology based on profit. He thought that the ultimate challenge was for man to free himself of his machines and gain control over them, thus breaking the bonds of alienation and making himself the master of his history. The early essays of Marx recently published by Erich Fromm (Praeger) have some interesting possibilities in the way of the kind of dialogue Fr. Tavard suggests. For in these early essays, in which he concentrates on the problem of alienation, there is a very clear demand for the kind of dimension that can only be supplied by wisdom. Marx himself was uncertain and ambiguous in his treatment of this, but in any case he finds himself compelled to toy with the idea of a human nature on which to base his humanism. |
| 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.] |
| 1962/09/29 | Virgil | Georgics |
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]. |
| 1962/10/08 | 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. |
| 1962/10/11 | John Holberg (ed.) | Moralium dogma philosophorum |
Ltrs: SofC p. 148
| For some time I have been very interested in the 12th-century School of Chartres. The more I come to know of these Masters, the better I like them and the more I am convinced that I ought to work on them quite seriously. I have read a great deal of John of Salisbury in Migne, of course, but I am also getting into William of Conches, through the texts in Parent's book, La Doctrine de la Creation "¦ and also in Moralium Dogma (Holberg). I am acquainted with the more accessible sources, like R. L. Poole, Huizinga's "Essay on John of Salisbury," and so on. I can also get Clerval from a nearby Protestant seminary. |
| 1962/10/11 | Joseph Marie Parent | Doctrine de la Creation dans l'Ecole de Chartres. Etude et textes |
Ltrs: SofC p. 148
| For some time I have been very interested in the 12th-century School of Chartres. The more I come to know of these Masters, the better I like them and the more I am convinced that I ought to work on them quite seriously. I have read a great deal of John of Salisbury in Migne, of course, but I am also getting into William of Conches, through the texts in Parent's book, La Doctrine de la Creation "¦ and also in Moralium Dogma (Holberg). I am acquainted with the more accessible sources, like R. L. Poole, Huizinga's "Essay on John of Salisbury," and so on. I can also get Clerval from a nearby Protestant seminary. |
| 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. |
| 1962/11/24 | Boethius | De Hebdomadibus |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 267
| From Chartres back to BBoethius: De Hebdomadibus. Magnificent meditation on being and existence! |
| 1963/03/19 | Jacques Maritain | Dream of Descartes |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 304
| I read Maritain's essay on Descartes today (in connection with Fenelon, but it is revealing in relation to Zen). The task for Zen in the West is probably a healthy reaction on the part of people exasperated for four hundred years by the inane Cartesian spirit-the reification of concepts, the idolization of reflexive consciousness, the flight from being into verbalism, mathematics and rationalization. Descartes made a fetish of the mirror which Zen shatters. |
| 1963/04/02 | Hannah Arendt | Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 310
| Adolf Eichmann, in his last words at the foot of the gallows- Declared himself a Gottes[un]gläubiger-(one who did not believe in a personal god). And then addressed those present "After a short while, gentleman, we shall all meet again." "Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria; I shall not forget them." H. Arendt comments. "In the face of death he had found the cliche used in funeral oratory, but his memory had played him one last trick, he had forgotten that he was no Christian and that it was his own funeral. It was as though in his last minutes he was summing up the lesson that his long course in human wickedness had taught him-the lesson of the fearsome, word-and thought-defying banality of evil." |
| 1963/04/16 | Etienne Gilson | Unity of Philosophical Experience |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 314
| Reading [Etienne] Gilson's The Unity of Philosophical Experience [New York, 1948]-very lively and articulate. |
| 1963/05/11 | Louis Massignon | Parole donnee / Louis Massignon ; introd. de Vincent Monteil |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 319
| "La finalite bistorique doit devenir ‘interieurement' et librement intelligible, car elle concerne la personne qui degage à elle seule le sens de l'epreuve commune (et non l'individu, element differencie dependant du groupe social qui en demeure la ‘fin' naturelle." ["Historical finality ought to become ‘interiorly' and freely understandable because it deals with the person who brings out, all alone, the sense of the common trial (and not the individual, a fundamentally differentiated element, depending on the social group which remains its natural ‘purpose.'"] L Massignon, Parole Donnee, 135. He goes on to say each can find in the religion of his own life "interferences experimentaires [experimental interferences]" between his own inner spiritual time and his time of historical events. |
| 1963/05/26 | Werner Heisenberg | Physics and Philosophy |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 322
| Reading [Werner] Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy [New York, 1958], which is an exciting book. The uncertainty principle is oddly like St. John of the Cross. As God in the highest eludes the grasp of concepts, so in the ultimate constitution of matter there is nothing really there (except Aristotelian potency, perhaps- and H. is willing to admit this). Heisenberg and quantum theory-at least the Copenhagen interpretation-is the end of conventional 19th century materialism-and the joke is that this materialism is now unmasked as a faith. Soviet scientists now have to attack Heisenberg on purely dogmatic grounds, exactly as the Holy Office attacked Galileo. It is an article of Soviet faith that mechanical laws of motion, electronic activity etc. must be a confirmation of the religion of dialectical materialism. Ergo. Heisenberg shows that the naive objectivity of conventional physics is on the same plane as the ancient conviction that the sun revolved around the earth. |
| 1963/05/29 | Werner Heisenberg | Physics and Philosophy |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 324
| Heisenberg-on the impact of technical and scientific knowledge upon traditional cultures, etc. This "process"¦has gone far beyond any control through human forces. One may rather consider it as a biological process on the largest scale whereby the structures active in the human organism encroach on larger parts of matter and transform it into a state suited for the increasing human population." [Merton's emphasis] Physics and Philosophy, p 189 I think this is really a very practical way of looking at it, and far from reducing morality to determinism, it gives morality the only dimension in which it can really cope with our situation. One must first recognize reality, before he can deal with it. The traditional concept of nature is not opposed to this. It does not exclude grace. |
| 1963/06/18 | R.W. Southern | Life of St. Anselm, Archbisshop of Canterbury |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 334
| I finished my article on St. Anselm and the ontological argument but am still reading the R. W. Southern book, which is excellent, and very interesting with all its material on Canterbury. |
| 1963/06/26 | Anselmus of Canterbury | Proslogion |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 333
| Have read St. Anselm's Proslogion [A Discourse] and having for the first time considered the ontological argument, have come under its peculiar spell. It is certainly much more than a mere illogical confusion of orders, or an illicit transition from the level of words to the level of being. On the contrary, it begins and ends in being. It has extraordinary faults, impossible to define and describe because of the underlying spiritual experience which it suggests. |
| 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!" |
| 1963/09/20 | Jean Paul Sartre | Literature & existentialism / Jean Paul Sartre ; transl. from the French by Bernard Frechtman |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 17
| Sartre's Literature and Existentialism on the other hand is powerful and convincing, though his historical synopsis is contrived and pontifical as are his pseudo-marxist conclusions. |
| 1963/11/25 | Anselmus of Canterbury | De Casu Diaboli |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 38
| How close is the tricherie [trickery] of Sartre to the rectitudo of St. Anselm? Is there any correspondence between Chapter XI of De Casu Diaboli (on the meaning of "nothing") and Sartre's neant [nothingness]? |
| 1963/11/25 | Jean Paul Sartre | être et le neant : essai d'ontologie phenomenologique / par J.-P. Sartre |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 38
| How close is the tricherie [trickery] of Sartre to the rectitudo of St. Anselm? Is there any correspondence between Chapter XI of De Casu Diaboli (on the meaning of "nothing") and Sartre's neant [nothingness]? |
| 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. |
| 1963/12/17 | Maurice Merleau-Ponty | In Praise of Philosophy / transl. of Eloge de la philosophy et autres essays (Paris 1960) |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 47
| [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty says: "Nothing can be explained by way of man, for he is not a strength but a weakness in the heart of being, for he is not a cosmological factor but the place where all cosmological factors, through never ending change, alter their meaning and become history" (Eloge de la philosophie [In Praise of Philosophy, 1963]). In my Book Providence, [Note 11: "Book Providenc" is unclear, though this is what Merton wrote in his journal. He perhaps missed a word or words as he was writing. It could possihly read "Book [of] Providence," but that makes little more sense.] Merleau-Ponty is a radical and welcome discovery-he is like Zen, Herakleitos, much more radical and simple at the same time than Sartre, no need of any of Sartre's passion and programs, and no need of Nausea. Does not admit Descartes, radically anti-cogito, anti-Parmenides, anti-Plato. The anti-Plato in me has always been this and never Aristotle. The anti-Plato in me is Zen and Old Testament. His idea of metaphysical consciousness-aware that intelligibility is contingent fact, springing from man's existence and confrontation in history with being as pour soi [for oneself]. (The en soi [in oneself] is unintelligible.) This may seem radically antichristian (certainly anti-scholastic) yet I wonder if after all the Bible would not show it to be very Christian, cf. the approach of the W. G. Kümmel book. |
| 1963/12/22 | Maurice Merleau-Ponty | In Praise of Philosophy / transl. of Eloge de la philosophy et autres essays (Paris 1960) |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 48
| Merleau-Ponty says: "Je suis a moi au etant au mond" ["I am to myself as being in the world"]. And this would appear to be the exact opposite of what I have been saying for twenty years-that I am my own by withdrawing from the world. Actually I agree with him profoundly. Everything depends on the meaning you give to "monde." If it means the delusions and cliches that stand between a supposed autonomous "I" and the world of phenomena, well, one does not want to belong to this and struggle for existence in it, thinking oneself to be now free, now not free. Who is this self? But if it means one's own situation, then how else can one be anything except by being what he is, and how can he be what and who he is apart from all that goes with him? What is with me? What am I in? That is one reason for a Journal like this, to keep honestly situated. It is also a reason for taking pictures, for instance, yesterday, down at "The Point" in Louisville, with Jim Wygal, and along the river front. To withdraw from where I am in order to be totally outside all that situates me-this is real delusion. Hence the similarity between Merleau-Ponty and Zen. I am inevitably a dialogue with my surroundings, and have no choice, though I can perhaps change the surroundings. "L'interieur et l'exterieur sont inseparables. Le monde est font au dedans et je suis tous hors de moi." ["The interior and the exterior are inseparable. The world is created from within and I am always outside myself."] |
| 1963/12/27 | Herbert Spiegelberg | Phenomenological Movement: a Historical Introduction |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 51
| Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenology of man's unfinished business (Herbert Spiegelberg) [The Phenomenological Movement] for whom "projects are loved in ambiguity," in the subject-object gestalt, where the subject does not withdraw into a given clarity of his own, where, on reflection, he can find all the answers or at least all the principles laid out before hand. We start from our "being-inthe-world" and not from pure being and our business is freedom - up to a point: life an existential (not intellectual) project "a polarization of life against a determined-undetermined goal of which it has no explicit idea and which it does not recognize until it achieves it." I like his sage philosophy of ambiguity, more sober and better tempered than Sartre's. |
| 1964/01/03 | Harold John Blackham | Six Existential Thinkers |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 54
| [Martin] Heidegger's notion that the realization and acceptance of death is the guarantee of authenticity in life and existence is very close to Rance and probably a better formulation of what Rance himself saw and wanted to say. It is in short a very monastic intuition. And I find much in the existentialists that is monastic. In any case, Heidegger is also fully Socratic - (his idea of "Nothing"). "Knowledge is in its very validity a form of untruth because it conceals the ignorance which it does not abolish." ([Harold John] Blackham, Six Existentialist Thinkers, [1959], p. 104) |
| 1964/01/06 | Rudolf Bultmann | Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 55
| Bultmann's Essays have been a revelation to me, so powerful, so urgent, so important that every sentence stops me and I don't seem to get anywhere. I am snowed under by it. The extraordinary grasp of Greek thought which he has and which he always transcends in order to end in a Biblical and eschatological freedom. The seminal influence of Heidegger, whom he appropriates and develops in a fully New Testament and Kerygmatic way. Fantastically good. How many of my own old ideas I can now abandon or revise. He has revealed to me the full limitations of all my early work, which is utterly naive and insufficient, except in what concerns my own experience. He says: "Grace can never be possessed but can only be received afresh again and again." |
| 1964/01/07 | Karl Jaspers | Way to Wisdom |
Ltrs: HGL p. 364
| You ask about spiritual books. I have been reading all sorts of things, things which I find spiritual. Rudolf Bultmann's Essays is a challenging book, terribly interesting, and his anti-mysticism has a point. It is good to tussle a bit with something of this kind, in order to get down to the real foundation of everything, which is faith. I have also been reading [Karl] Jaspers. His Way to Wisdom has some good things in it. And a French phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty, who seems to me at times to get close to Zen, though I am sure he has no intention of doing so. Zwi Werblowsky (I think I told you he was here, Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) has sent a very interesting Spanish Jew of the eleventh century who has Moslem elements. Bahya Ibn Paquda. Then there is Martin Lings's book on a wonderful Moslem mystic, which I may have mentioned when I was in the hospital: Shaikh Ahmad Al-'Alawi. |
| 1964/01/11 | Harold John Blackham | Six Existential Thinkers |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 60
| Blackham, writing of Sartre, says wisely that "popular wisdom" easily accepts extreme views but not disturbing ones. The extreme view that to live well is impossible, and the other extreme, that to live well is easy: this they will accept. But Sartre's claim that to live well is difficult and possible they reject as despair. Sartre's courage is laudable, his stoicism is insufficient. His seriousness is the kind that makes possible the conflict and contact described by Bultmann. In hoc laudo. [Praise for this.] But his dogmatic humanism has no point except as a useful illusion. |
| 1964/01/13 | Karl Jaspers | Plato and Augustine / edited by Hannah Arendt |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 61
| Jaspers talks of the "Augustinian turnabout." At one moment Augustine is saying "let none of us say he has already found the truth. Let us look for it as though we did not yet know it on either sid" and then later he advocates using force against those who do not accept our faith. And apparently without feeling there is any problem. As the greatest of Catholic Doctors he has bequeathed this mentality to the entire Catholic Church-and to the Protestants as well, because he is as much their Father as ours! This is the mind of Western Christendom. |
| 1964/01/17 | Maurice Merleau-Ponty | Signes |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 62-63
| For Merleau-Ponty our body is not an apparatus which, directed by the Spirit, makes use of pre-existing signs to express a meaning which is "there." It is on the contrary a living instrument of its own life, making sense, by all its acts, of the world in which it is. The whole body is art and full of art. Corporeity is style. A deeply (religious) spiritual concept!! Corporiety-a sense and focus of intelligent convergences. "Le propre du geste humain"¦d'inau-gurer un sens." ["It is proper for human signs to make sense."] (Signes, p. 85) All gestures part of a universal syntax-the proportion of monograms and inscapes. History as "horizontal transcendenc" becomes a sacred cow (Signes, 88). That is to say an external power bearing down on us inexorably and demanding the immolation of the present, the recognition of our nothingness in the presence of what "Man" will "one day be." (For as yet he is not.) (Ibid.) He sees more rightly than most Christians that in fact Christianity abolished subordination and revealed a new mystery in relation of man to God that is not vertical only or horizontal only, for "le Christ atteste que Dieu ne serait pas pleinement Dieu sans epouser la condition d'homm" ["Christ gives witness that God would not be completely God without embracing the human condition"] in whom we find God as our other self "qui habite et au-thentifie notre obscurit" ["who lives and verifies our obscurity"]. (Ibid.) The whole mystery of the Ascension is here! |
| 1964/01/19 | Maurice Merleau-Ponty | Signes |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 65
| Merleau-Ponty again-from Husserl-"Penser n'estpasposseder des objets de pensee, c'est circonscrire par eux un domain à penser, que nous ne pensons donc pas encore." [To think is not to possess objects of thought; it is to use them to demarcate a domain of thinking that we never again think about.] (Signes, p. 202) |
| 1964/01/23 | Maurice Merleau-Ponty | Signes |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 66
| Magnificent ending of Merleau-Ponty's essay on Husserl ("Le Philosophe et son ombr"). Must translate and meditate [on] this. All is there-(I mean all of Merleau-Ponty). |
| 1964/01/25 | Maurice Merleau-Ponty | Signes |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 67
| "C'est la ruse majeure du pouvoir de persuader les hommes qu'ils gagnent quand ilperdent" ["The major trick or deception used by power is to persuade men that they are winning when they are losing," Signes, p. 272], says Merleau-Ponty, commenting on Machiavelli. And he commends the honesty of Machiavelli for admitting that social conflict is the basis of all power. Also that the prince must not become the prisoner of a virtuous image of himself that would obstruct action made necessary by a sudden new aspect of the struggle for power. "Veritable force d'Ame puisqu'il s'agit, entre la volonte de plaire et de defi"¦de concevoir une enterprise historique à laquelle tous puissent se joindr" ["True strength of soul is needed, since in between the will to please and defiance, it is necessary to conceive an historic enterprise in which all can join," Signes, p. 275]. On this historic magnanimity and altruism (everyone gets in on the power project) Merleau-Ponty bases his defense of Machiavelli as a realistic moralist. It establishes a genuine relationship, while the moralizing politician remains aloof. The realist accepts distance but mediates through it. |
| 1964/01/26 | Karl Jaspers | European Spirit |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 68
| "What makes us afraid is our great freedom, in face of the emptiness that has still to be filled." Jaspers. And again these concluding words from the arresting little pamphlet on The European Spirit. "The philosophically serious European is faced today with the choice between opposed philosophical possibilities. Will he enter the limited field of fixed truth which in the end has only to be obeyed; or will he go into the limitless open truth?"¦Will he win this perilous independence in perilous openness as in existential philosophy, the philosophy of communication in which the individual becomes himself on condition that others become themselves, in which there is no solitary peace but constant dissatisfaction and in which a man exposes his soul to suffering." |
| 1964/02/07 | Jean Paul Sartre | Baudelaire |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 71
| I emerge at the end of Sartre's involved meditation on Baudelaire [Eng. trans., 1950], like coming out of darkness underground into daylight with the last sentence: "La choix libre que l'homme fait de soi-même s'identifie absolument avec ce qu'on appelle sa destine" ["The free choice that man makes of himself is absolutely identified with what one calls his destiny"] (p. 224). This is really just what, to the superficial observer, Sartre's liberty seems not to mean. For those who think this liberty is arbitrary and subject to no restraint or limit, his portrait of Baudelaire is the most clinical and exact condemnation of a liberty misused, inauthentic, steeped in "bad faith." In fact, for Sartre, Baudelaire is guilty of the primal sin of forcing together en-soi and poursoi, willing the impossibility of their union. It is "original sin" in a very real sense for, in Sartre's philosophy, if en-soi and pour-soi could be identified their union would be God. To seek to identify them in oneself is to seek to be God-i.e., static (for Sartre) excuse, pure nature, subject as object for eternity. The sterility of Baudelaire's life ("going into the future backwards") is never for a moment justified by the beauty of his poetry. |
| 1964/02/10 | Simone Beauvoire, de | Ethics of Ambiguity |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 74
| Simone de Beauvoir has this to say, which corrects so many of the cliches about existentialism: "It is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom. To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future: the existence of others as a freedom defines my own situation and is even the condition of my own freedom." (Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 91) |
| 1964/02/11 | Simone Beauvoire, de | Ethics of Ambiguity |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 76
| An honest statement. "No action can be generated for man without its being immediately generated against men. This obvious truth, which is universally known, is however so bitter that the first concern of a doctrine of action is ordinarily to mask this element of failure that is inimical in any understanding"¦. In order to deny the outrage it is enough to deny the importance of the individual." (Simone de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 99) |
| 1964/03/19 | Heinrich Schlier | Eleutheros |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 91
| I am beginning to be glad I learned (barely) to read German in school, and regret that I have let it go for so long, because it is a very rich language. The perfect language for an existential theology. And how much language has to do with expressing a particular facet of reality? Things can be discovered in German, that can be perhaps reproduced afterwards in other languages. Deeply moved for instance by [Heinrich] Schlier's magnificent article "Eleutheria" [Freedom] in Kittel. A superb investigation of the relation of sin, death and works - which explains for one thing my disillusionment and exasperation with the proofs of my new book (The Black Revolution again). I am wrong, and wrong over again to expect some definitive meaning for my life to emerge from my works. All it points to is the end: death. It leads others to deception and hurries them along to their own death, yet even in this I must witness to life. Monastic implications of this fine article. |
| 1964/03/21 | Heinrich Schlier | Eleutheros |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 92
| Today I finished after several days of continuous work, Schlier's splendid article "Eleutheria" in Kittel. Amazing how much Zen there is in these insights which are nevertheless so far beyond anything Buddhist, or passive, or negative. The fullest and most positive concept of freedom from death in our death-forfeited dasein (!!) in which the Flesh slavishly works to attain Lordship over itself. Emphasis on the works of love and freedom, of self-forgetfulness, that show us as free from death because free from concern with self-assertion and selfperpetuation and entirely open to others. |
| 1964/04/17 | Vasilii Rozanov | Face sombre du Christ |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 97
| Reading [Vasilii] Rozanov-a new selection has come out in French. He is an important and dire voice, shocking and deeply convincing, completely opposed to the current optimisms and "humanisms," and one cannot help listening seriously to his warnings about structures which are without reservation. True, when he condemns the cosmic Joy of Dostoievsky's Zossima one need not entirely agree-and yet there is [a] point in what he says. Curious how convincing he is, how he compels assent-at least my assent-even though what he says is outrageous and exactly contrary to all the plans of Christians who have decided to convince the world that we are "nice people." |
| 1964/05/17 | Plato | Gorgias |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 104-05
| Yesterday, on the Vigil, a group of the Hibakusha [Note 29: Survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] on the World Peace Mission Pilgrimage came out here... People signed and marked by the cruelty of the age, signs on their flesh because of the thoughts in the minds of other men. They are an important indication of what certain "civilized" thinking really means. When we speak of "freedom" we are also saying that others like these good, charming, sweet, innocent people will be burned, annihilated, if and when we think we are menaced. Does this make sense? Is it not an indication that our thinking is absurdly flawed? True, our thinking is logical and makes war seem right and necessary when it is fitted into a certain context, starting from certain supposed "axioms." The trouble is with the context and the axioms, and the root trouble is the whole concept of man and indeed of reality itself with which man operates. The thinking has not changed because the "axioms" have not changed. They are the axioms of sophistry and sophistry as Plato knew spells tyranny and moral anarchy. An illuminating experience, to read the last pages of Gorgias and to meet the Hibakusha on the same day. I spoke to them briefly, was not expecting an interpreter and was a bit put out-he translated and explained enthusiastically and I think we were in good rapport but there was not much discussion. |
| 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? |
| 1964/07/12 | Rafael Squirru | Challenge of the New Man: A Cultural Approach to the Latin American Scene |
Ltrs: CforT p. 232
| Many thanks for your little book on the "New Man." I have read it carefully and with pleasure and want to congratulate you on it. I especially liked the essays on the poet and on the role of the intellectual. It seems to me that this little book represents a vitally important trend of thought, and you know of course how much I agree with it. The thinking of the public, especially in the "‘great powers," seems to me to be hallucinated by the unreal concept of what one might call an Atlantic gigantism (except that it would have to include Russia and even China). The belief that the only kind of thinking that is real and meaningful is that which is associated with European and North American thought patterns, extending this also to Chinese Marxism. But this cerebration leaves out most of the human race, most of its needs, most of its aspirations. It has proved itself completely incapable of really solving the problems of man and is now increasingly incapable even of defining them. |
| 1964/12/02 | Eugène Ionesco | Notes et contre-notes |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 173
| Hurray for Ionesco! He has some very good ideas, and here is one of them (against those obsessed with ideologies and with theories of history.) "Nous sommes pris tons dans une sorte de complexe historique et nous appartenons à un certain moment de l'histoire-qui cependent est loin de nous absorber entièrement et qui au contraire n ‘exprime et ne contient que le part la moins essentielle de nous mêmes." ["We are all of us caught in a kind of historical complex and belong to one special moment in history-which is, however, far from absorbing us entirely but rather expresses and contains only the least essential part of us."] (Notes et contre-notes [1962], p. 16) |
| 1964/12/08 | Stephane Lupasco | Logique et contradiction |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 177
| I am reading [Stephane] Lupano in the hermitage [Logique et contradiction, 1947]. |
| 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. |
| 1965/03/02 | Jacques Cabaud | Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 212
| I am reading a good biography of Simone Weil, which I have to review for Peace News. [Note 15: Merton reviewed Jacques Cabaud's Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love (1964) in Peace News, (April 2, 1965): 5, 8.] I am finally getting to know her, and have a great sympathy for her, though I cannot agree with a lot of her attitudes and ideas. Basically-I wonder what disturbs me about her. Something does. In her experience of Christ, for example. "Gnostic" rather than "mystical." But one had to admit, she seems to have seen this herself and she did not cling to it. "The attic" was a place she had to leave behind. Her mystique of action and "the world" is her true climate now familiar-and I think more authentic (though the other was not inauthentic). For a time I think Catholics were running to Simone Weil to learn this but now they have forgotten her and Teilhard de Chardin is the prophet of this cosmic Christianity (and yet what about St. Francis?). |
| 1965/03/04 | Kitaro Nishida | study of good / Kitaro Nishida ; transl. by V.H. Viglielmo |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 214
| Came briefly up to the hermitage after dinner to sweep, get the water bottle to fill, and also read a few pages of a new book, Nishida Kitaro's Study of the Good which Suzuki sent and which is just what I am looking for at the moment. Magnificent! |
| 1965/03/05 | Kitaro Nishida | study of good / Kitaro Nishida ; transl. by V.H. Viglielmo |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 214
| Nishida Kitaro-just what I am looking for. For example I see my objection to the cliche about "meaningful experienc" (as if it was "meaninglessness" that made experience somehow real and worth while. "Experienc" is made "meaningful" by being referred to something else, a system, or perhaps a report of someone else's experiences, and therefore its quality is diminished. So the ambiguity of meaningfulness is exposed. When experience is "meaningful" in this sense it is unreal-or less real. To live always outside of experience as if this were a fullness of experience: this is one of the basic ambiguities of written thought). |
| 1965/03/31 | Kitaro Nishida | study of good / Kitaro Nishida ; transl. by V.H. Viglielmo |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 223
| Yesterday morning finished Nishida Kitaro's Study of Good except for the appendix. One of the most remarkably helpful things I have read in a long time-and apart from his pantheistic concept of God, very close to home. |
| 1965/04/03 | Kitaro Nishida | study of good / Kitaro Nishida ; transl. by V.H. Viglielmo |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 223
| This morning I finished the appendix which gives some idea of the full scope of Nishida's thought. It is most satisfying. Happily there is at least one other of his books in English. The Study of Good is his first. The development from here is not linear but a spiral deepening of his basic intuition of pure experience which becomes "absolute nothingness as the place of existence," and "eschatological everyday lif" in which the person, as a focus of absolute contradiction (our very existence opening on to death is a contradiction), can say with Rinzai "wherever I stand is all the truth." This hit me with great force. My meditation had been building up to this (awareness for instance that "doubt" arises from projection of the self into the future, or from retrospection, and not grasping the present. He who grasps the present does not doubt). To be open to the nothingness which I am is to grasp the all, in whom I am! I have already written my review of Nishida. [Note 20: "Nishida: A Zen Philosopher," Zen + the Birds of Appetite (New York: New Directions, 1968): 67-70.] |
| 1965/04/16 | Lord Walter Northbourne | Religion in the modern world |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 229-30
| Marco Pallis had Lord [Walter] Northbourne send me his really excellent book Religion in the Modern World. Among many fine things he says this about tradition in art, religion, politics, sport, etc. The traditional constraints impose a vital unity, a hierarchical order of like with unlike, so that there is a final universality and wholeness in society and in the expression of man's spirit. Where this traditional principle is discarded, everything becomes individualized. But there has to be a semblance of unity nevertheless. This is sought by collectivization which, however, is not an order of like and unlike elements, but simply a grouping together of like with like. Or a seduction to superficial sameness, uniformity not unity. Within the superficial uniformity, civilization is segmented into "departments" out of contact with each other, but officially "interconnected." |
| 1965/04/17 | Lord Walter Northbourne | Religion in the modern world |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 231
| The last pages of Northbourne's book are remarkably good, and make clear the confusions that had given me trouble with the Schuon-Guinan line of thought. Northbourne is most insistent on not mixing up traditions, on not being syncretistic. On the great danger of pseudo-religious "nothingness" using a melange of Eastern and Western elements-worse still, disciplines. "The effectiveness of any single religion as a means of grace and a way of salvation is impaired or neutralized by its supplementation or dilution with anything that is alien to it" p. 101. He sees clearly that these pseudo-religious, pseudo-mystical movements, while claiming to be a reaction against materialism, are in fact only the last convolution of the profane spiral, and complete the whole work. "Anything that purports to be initiation and spiritual disciplines that have authentic spiritual roots and thus retain some of their power." Case of poor Joel Orent and his guru. Northbourne's last chapter is invaluable. |
| 1965/04/24 | Martin Lings | Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions |
Ltrs: HGL p. 453
| Your new book reached me this morning, and I must say it looks extremely interesting. I am not perfectly sure the review of our Order will want me to review it, this will depend on how germane it is to monasticism. But I think they probably will. On the other hand I have not yet done my review of [Frithjof] Schuon's book on Islam. I have a small pile of books on Sufism etc. building up and will probably do them all at once later on. |
| 1965/04/24 | Rene Guenon | Crisis of the Modern World |
Ltrs: HGL p. 454
| Meanwhile I am very happy to be in contact with you, as I am with Marco Pallis, whose books have also been a great inspiration to me. I am most indebted to him for sending good books my way, and am in the middle of his translation of [Rene] Guenon's Crisis, which is first-rate. Contact with your "school of thought," shall I say, is of great help to me in rectifying my own perspectives in this time when among Catholics one is faced with a choice between an absurdly rigid and baroque conservatism and a rather irresponsible and fantastic progressivism à la Teilhard. The choice is of course not so restricted, and I am glad of influences that help me to cling, as my heart tells me to, to a sane and living traditionalism in full contact with the living contemplative experience of the past"”and with the presence of the Spirit here and now. |
| 1965/05/26 | Kitaro Nishida | study of good / Kitaro Nishida ; transl. by V.H. Viglielmo |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 168
| You will certainly enjoy the Nishida book [Kitaro Nishida, A Study of Good]. My review is not yet published, as things move very slowly with our quarterly. When it does eventually appear I will be glad to send you an offprint, if you remind me. That will probably be toward the end of the year or early next year. [It actually appeared in Collectanea Cisterciensia in 1967 and in Zen and the Birds of Appetite in 1968.] |
| 1965/06/17 | Rene Guenon | Crisis of the Modern World |
Ltrs: HGL p. 470
| I have been wanting to tell you how much I have benefited by your translations of Guenon and Schuon. Not only the material, but also your own translations, which, I think, contribute much clarity to the originals. I meant to write you after Easter when I had finished the Guenon book on Crisis. Now I do so when I am in the middle of Schuon on the Language of the Self. The Guenon book is certainly a classic, and I appreciate Schuon more and more. The essay on Buddhism, for example, is most excellent. I am at one with him in his deep reverence for the spirituality of the North American Indian. Of that, more at some other time. The Indians of this country are a sign of the age, silent and frequently mistreated, at least in their legal rights. One feels that there is still, among some of them, a deep consciousness of their real calling, and a hidden hope. Yet there must also be much real despair among them. I have always had a secret desire to be among them in some way, and of course there is no fulfilling this, and it would tend to be highly ambiguous in any event. |
| 1965/06/26 | Karl Stern | Flight from Woman |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 260
| Reading Karl Stern's Flight from Woman. Some fascinating material (loaded word-mater!) especially in the chapter on Descartes. |
| 1965/07/07 | Karl Stern | Flight from Woman |
Ltrs: SofC p. 287
| Have you read Karl Stern's new book, The Flight from Woman? I think it is on the whole very good, and I think you would like it. But you are not the ones who need it "¦ |
| 1965/07/16 | Karl Stern | Flight from Woman |
Ltrs: HGL p. 148
| I was very glad indeed to get your letter. It came at a good time, I had just been reading and enjoying Karl Stern's new book, The Flight from Woman, which is excellent. And I am always very glad to hear from you. I think often of you and pray often for you and the CW. |
| 1965/0806 | Friedrich Nietzsche | Birth of Tragidy from the Spirit of Music |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 277
| Returned to hermitage today after a week in St. Anthony's hospital. In a way it was trying, at least a test of patience. Had to rest, take medicine and sit in a room with machinery going outside-and with an air conditioner on day and night. At least the even noise of the air conditioner neutralized the heavy traffic on Barret Avenue and I was astounded to find myself sleeping nine hours a night!! Evidently it was something I needed, that and the diet, because my stomach calmed down. And I suppose I enjoyed it in a way-saying the new Mass (we don't have English at Gethsemani yet except for the Brothers), reading a lot. (Finished the Tom Wolfe Kandy Kolored, etc. book, a Herman Wouk novel, some Bultmann on New Testament, a book on Buddhism, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, a couple of pages of Aeschylus, and Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris.) Got some work done-finished the galleys of Seasons of Celebration and made a few additions. |
| 1965/10/13 | Josef Pieper | In tune with the world : a theory of festivity / Josef Pieper ; transl. from the German by Richard and Clara Winston |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 302
| I finished Read's Icon and Idea-Monday finished [Josef] Pieper In Tune with the World: [A Theory of Festivity, 1965] and wrote a review. Brother Dunstan is typing the last of Conjectures. |
| 1965/10/14 | Plato | Symposium |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 303
| "When he comes toward the end he will suddenly perceive a beauty of wondrous natur"¦not fair in the likeness of face or hands or any other part of the bodily fram"¦but beauty absolute, separate, simple and everlasting"¦are you not certain that it will then be given him to become a friend of God?" Plato-Symposium. How little we think of the beauty of the Divine Light-and how drab life is in consequence. We do not let the beauty of earth remind us where we are to go. As a consequence, not even the earth is beautiful to us, or as beautiful as it might be. |
| 1965/10/18 | John Joseph Stoudt | Sunrise to Eternity: A Study in Jacob Boehme's Life and Thought |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 305
| [Jakob] Boehme-[Rainer Maria] Rilke. A new climate. Two people I have met in passing for years and never really talked with. Now I begin first Boehme because I have a book [J. J. Stoudt, Sunrise to Eternity: A Study in J. Boehme's Life and Thought, 1957] that treats of his life and work and gives all the most relevant passages of his work in clear English, so that I finally have some inkling of what he is really saying-and respond to it. How much I respond to it. At the same time I begin also to respond to a quite different quality in |
| 1965/11/07 | Pierre Teilhard de Chardin | Divine Milieu |
Ltrs: HGL p. 61
| There is great enthusiasm everywhere now over Teilhard de Chardin. I would be interested in your impression of him. I have not read him very thoroughly yet myself but his best book is The Divine Milieu, as far as I can see. Would you like me to get this for you, or do you have it already? "¦ |
| 1965/12/05 | Jacques Ellul | Illusion politique |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 322
| Last evening at supper I began [Jacques] Ellul's L'Illusion politique. It is some comfort to find someone who agrees with my position. I must be resolutely non-political, provided I remain ready to speak out when it is needed. However, I think this book too may turn out insufficient and naïve (philosophically weak perhaps. I am not far into it). But he is basically right in attacking the modern superstition that "what has no political value has no value at all"-"A man who does not read the newspapers is not a man." And to be apolitical is to be excommunicated as a sorcerer. That the deepest communion of man with man is in political dedication. |
| 1965/12/12 | Karl Stern | Flight from Woman |
Ltrs: WtoF p. 248
| At the moment I am trying not to be an authority on everything, so I am becoming silent on a lot of things I spoke of before and not speaking of new ones. I am getting out of anything that savors of politics, and I don't want to start talking about marriage since in any case I am not married and what I know of sexual love goes back to a rather selfish period of my life when I was thinking of getting and not of giving. I am not qualified to speak on this subject, but I recognize your rightness, especially the excellent point about the imaginary woman replacing the concrete flesh-and-blood ones. This is really the key to the whole thing. Do you by any chance know Karl Stern's latest book, The Flight from Woman? |
| 1965/12/25 | Edwin Arthur Burtt | In Search of Philosophic Understanding |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 327
| I made my thanksgiving quietly, said Lauds and had a snack and some wine (the last of what Brother Clement gave me a couple of months ago) and so went back to bed for a couple of hours. Got up again, said Prime and read E[dwin] A[rcher] Burtt's book [In Search of Philosophic Understanding, 1966] which he sent. It is clear and informative. And Schlier. Now I am going to get back to Rilke (volumes to be returned to University of Kentucky in a few days). It is the kind of day I like, and like Christmas to be too: dark, cloudy, windy, cold with light rain blowing now and then. |
| 1966/01/02 | Edwin Arthur Burtt | In Search of Philosophic Understanding |
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. |
| 1966/01/02 | Pierre Teilhard de Chardin | Hymne de l'univers / Pierre Teilhard de Chardin |
Ltrs: HGL p. 62
| "¦ If you have not sent The Phenomenon of Man, please do not send it as we have copies here. I have not read it yet, but I have read another book of Teilhard which I like very much, The Divine Milieu. I will see if I can send you something by or about him. The market is swamped with books of his now. You might like his Hymn of the Universe. I will see about getting a copy for you "¦ |
| 1966/01/06 | Kitaro Nishida | Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness: Three Philosophical Essays / Kitaro Nishida ; transl. and introd. by Robert Schinzinger in collaboration with I. Koyama and T. Kojima. |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 5
| Reading the [Robert] Schinzinger book of [Kitaro] Nishida's, [Intelligibility and the] Philosophy of Nothingness (almost unobtainable. Fr. [William] Johnston finally got a copy from Schinzinger himself) and a good study on Rilke and death by W[illia]m Ross. |
| 1966/01/06 | Kitaro Nishida | Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness: Three Philosophical Essays / Kitaro Nishida ; transl. and introd. by Robert Schinzinger in collaboration with I. Koyama and T. Kojima. |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 5
| Reading the [Robert] Schinzinger book of [Kitaro] Nishida's, [Intelligibility and the] Philosophy of Nothingness (almost unobtainable. Fr. [William] Johnston finally got a copy from Schinzinger himself) and a good study on Rilke and death by W[illia]m Ross. |
| 1966/01/10 | Kitaro Nishida | Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness: Three Philosophical Essays / Kitaro Nishida ; transl. and introd. by Robert Schinzinger in collaboration with I. Koyama and T. Kojima. |
Ltrs: HGL p. 441
| I was surprised and delighted to get the Shinzinger book on Nishida the other day, and am already well into it. It is really excellent. I am more convinced than ever that Nishida makes an excellent bridge builder between East and West. Thank you so much for taking so much trouble, and I am most grateful to Prof. Shinzinger. Is there something I can send him? Did you get my Chuang Tzu book? I might send him a copy of that. I hope you got one. And I hope you were not offended by a facetious remark I made about such and such a thing being "Jesuitical" in the introduction. I did not of course mean it seriously at all, I was just fooling, and using the popular idea ironically. |
| 1966/01/12 | Kitaro Nishida | Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness: Three Philosophical Essays / Kitaro Nishida ; transl. and introd. by Robert Schinzinger in collaboration with I. Koyama and T. Kojima. |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 6
| Great experience - reading Nishida's The Intelligible World. How like Evagrius, and yet better. Splendid view of the real (trans-conscious) meaning of Zen and its relation to the conscious and the world. |
| 1966/01/13 | Rainer Maria Rilke | Duino Elegies / translated into English by James Blair Leishman and Stephen Spender |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 6
| Nishida throws much light on Rilke. He makes clear and explicit what Rilke was reaching for in the Duino Elegies: the pure event. This must become a dimension in my own life - it is what the present transcends. |
| 1966/01/24 | Kitaro Nishida | Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness: Three Philosophical Essays / Kitaro Nishida ; transl. and introd. by Robert Schinzinger in collaboration with I. Koyama and T. Kojima. |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 11
| Finished Burtt and Nishida (Unity of Opposites). N. is certainly the one philosopher to whom I respond the most. Kranth in Monumenta Nipponica suggests comparison between Nishida and the generation of 1898 in Spain. [Miguel de] Unamuno and Ortega [y Gasset]. Don't know Unamuno but have him here. Try him maybe! |
| 1966/01/28 | Miguel de Unamuno | Agonia del cristianismo |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 12
| I still read a lot of Rilke and Unamuno - with questions and reservations. They are often unsatisfactory in much the same way. Sometimes their intuitions are brilliant, at others merely irresponsible. Both are utter individualists. This is their weakness and their strength. For Rilke: I have no questions about the value of the Neue Gedichte, or the real beauty of the Elegies and some of the Orpheus Sonnets. But I still do not know about the spiritual world of the Sonnets. For a Christian there is always a natural tendency to read such things in implicitly Christian terms and to ensure, therefore, that he understands. But this is lazy. And where the question is once raised - I wonder if I get anything that he says, really! Except that he praises poetry, in poetry, for being poetry. Which is OK. But if this implies a view of life itself "¦ it raises many questions. Yet Unamuno's Agonia is a fascinating, though sometimes unsatisfactory book. Many excellent points - and above all he has a fine sense of the insufficiency of Christian rationalism, activism etc. "Power Christianity." Is he truly Pauline? Was he unacceptable in Spain because he had protestant insights? Indeed in many ways he is like [Karl] Barth. |
| 1966/01/29 | Kitaro Nishida | Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness: Three Philosophical Essays / Kitaro Nishida ; transl. and introd. by Robert Schinzinger in collaboration with I. Koyama and T. Kojima. |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 355
| "The world where innumerable individuals, negating each other, are united, is one simple world which, negating itself, expresses itself in innumerable ways," Nishida [The Unity of Opposites]. Importance of contradiction: the contradiction essential to my existence is the expression of the world's present: it is my contribution to the whole. My contradiction and my conflict are my part in the whole. They are my "place." It is in my insight and acceptance that the world creates itself anew in and through my liberty - I permit God to act in and through me, making His world (in which we are all judged and redeemed). I am thrown into contradiction: to realize it is mercy, to accept it is love, to help others do the same is compassion. All this seems like nothing, but it is creation. The contradiction is precisely that we cannot "be creativ" in some other way we would prefer (in which there would be no contradiction). Here N[ishida] is talking only of our historical self in the world of action - history ("from the formed to the forming"). not - our physical being biological self. (no creative freedom, no action - intuition). "The individual is individual only in so far as it participates in the forming of the world." 191 "Intuition separated from action is either a merely abstract idea, or mere illusion." 208 But the acceptance means also work. (Poiesis - artistic creative intuition) "Our true self is there where our consciousness negates and unites [the singular acts]." Nishida. Yet the consciousness is not the whole self or the true self. The point is that the True Self neither is the conscious "I" nor is it the "not-I." But it is not elsewhere than the "I" (which would make it "not-I"). The true self is, acts, is expressed in the meeting of "I" and "not-I." But the "I" seeks to be the True Self by being, acting, expressing itself where there is no "not-I." Yet where there is no "not-I," there is no "I" for the "I" is aware of itself by negation as well as by position. |
| 1966/06/15 | Robert C. Tucker | Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 84
| A good morning, cool and free. I can at least read again. Finished [Robert C.] Tucker's excellent book Philosophy and Myth in K[arl] Marx [London, 1964] - material for conferences. Trouble with arm still makes typing hard but I will get at these notes. |
| 1966/06/15 | Søren Kierkegaard | Sickness unto Death |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 84
| "The self is the relationship to oneself," Kierkegaard. But not prescinding to relationship to the other seen as oneself. I need badly to hear from her and know how she feels - I can guess. It is inhumane to forbid even letters. |
| 1966/06/24 | Ira Progroff | Symbolic & the Real: A New Psychological Approach to the Fuller Experience of Personal Existence |
Ltrs: SofC p. 308-09
| Do you remember that some time ago you sent me a book of Ira Progoff, The Symbolic and the Real, and asked me to comment on it for one of your friends? I have no idea how long ago it was, but at the time I said I would write a comment if and when I got around to reading the book. Well, I am reading it now. So here is my comment, for what it is worth, and very late in the day too. Essentially I agree with your own idea. The principles given in the book are excellent. This is a very good approach, especially all he says about the negative and diagnostic type of analysis which just binds people more firmly to their obsessions. His idea of a positive therapy which loosens up the flow of psychic and living dynamism is fine. On this score the book is very worthwhile. The application of the principles is good too. The only problem I have is with the relative banality of the symbols of his patients, which seem to me to be rather a letdown. I have noticed this before with the Jungian approach. Exciting theories, and then stupid mandalas by the patients. It is true perhaps that they cannot connect with traditional archetypal material, but it would certainly be a good thing if they could. It is much richer than what these patients are digging out "¦ |
| 1966/07/20 | G. J. Warnock | English Philosophy since 1900 |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 98
| Reading Dostoievsky's The Idiot, a marvelous and fascinating book. What a world! And how he structures it, with what ease - from the very first chapter. Also [G. J.] Warnock on English Philosophy Since 1900 [London, 1963], a new area for me - I always assumed these people were complete squares. Need to know Wittgenstein. The book is well written. Finally also Nyanaponika Thera's excellent treatise on Buddhist meditation - the basic elements - so easily despised, but very practical indeed. There is a healthy empiricism in Buddhist ascesis! |
| 1966/07/25 | Josef Luk Hromadka | Gospel for Atheists |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 101
| Yesterday my chapter talk was on [Josef Luk] Hromadka's Gospel for Atheists [Geneva, 1965] and today I read an article on [Gabriel] Vahanian which deepened and perfected the same ideas (by Rosemary [Radford] Ruether in the Spring Continuum). Clear admission of a demonic element in the Church institution that is unfaithful to the Gospel (how can an institution be faithful completely to the Gospel) - and yet one must be nevertheless loyal to the church as the center where the word is proclaimed. Yet there seems to be "another eschatological" anti-group group "¦ all apparently ambiguous but underneath it I can hear the authentic voice of this time, in spite of the confusions. A remarkable - and dangerous!! - article. Its implications will work in me for a long time. First time I have seen the real point of this "God-is-dead" theology. |
| 1966/07/29 | G. J. Warnock | English Philosophy since 1900 |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 103
| Ludicrous chapter on Metaphysics in Warnock's English Philosophy Since 1900. True, there is no metaphysics in England. But to assume that all metaphysics is just a game without meaning - to have no sense of the need for metaphysical insight of any sort - this is the wonder! |
| 1966/08/01 | G. J. Warnock | English Philosophy since 1900 |
Ltrs: HGL p. 376
| I have a real repugnance for writing things that tell everyone specifically how to do something or other spiritual now. I suppose St. Ignatius was really much more flexible than we realize. As to Benet and your husband: I just finished a book by Warnock on English Philosophy since 1900, and in the chapter on metaphysics he manifested not a sign that such a subject could have any appeal to any philosopher: all right, in an atmosphere of logical positivism and all that, your husband (you give me the impression he is very commonsensical) has probably no inkling of what Benet could possibly be about. And no interest whatever in finding out. All the more reason why someone is needed to remind people that this exists. If you can't make it clear to everyone, so much the worse. Make it clear to some. |
| 1966/09/21 | Dietrich Bonhoeffer | Ethics |
Ltrs: HGL p. 498
| Thanks for your letter and for the essay on the Augustinian theology of sexuality which I liked very much. I don't know Bonhoeffer's Act and Being. I have read his Ethics and Prison Letters and have quoted the former here and there in my new book of which I will send you a copy "¦ Did your essay make Commonweal? |
| 1966/09/26 | Michel Montaigne | On Solitude |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 143
| In the U. of L. - read Montaigne's "On Solitude." I usually find him a bit disappointing. This was nice writing - but not much more. Glanced into Chateaubriand's Vie de Rance which I must certainly read. (It must be around here somewhere.) Could not find much poetry. Looked up [Ruben] Darío's poem on Whitman ["Walt Whitman"]. Glanced through a book by Albert Caraco which I had never heard of and did not quite know what to make of it, but it seemed to have possibilities. In the poetry room, read hastily [John] Berryman's "[Homage to] Mistress Bradstreet" which is a fine poem, and hard. Looked at some Charles Olson and made a real discovery - Laurie Lee - whom I like tremendously. |
| 1967/01/10 | Loren Eiseley | Firmament of Time |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 185
| Another "natural" for me - Loren Eiseley. Amiya Chakravarty spoke of him and sent two books, and Harcourt Brace is giving out a little privately printed lecture of his which I have just read. Perfect. And clicks perfectly with what I have had on my mind all morning. I hope to begin The Firmament of Time [New York, 1960] - seems to fit in with what I read in Guardini - Pascal on Nature. Perhaps another good start. |
| 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. |
| 1967/03/20 | Dag Hammarskjöld | Markings |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 346
| Thanks for your nice letter. I will give you what help I can. First of all, I have read Markings with great interest and sympathy. One of the greatest bonds between myself and Dag H. is a common interest in Meister Eckhart whom he quotes very frequently. I do not quote Eckhart as much but I use others of the same school, like Tauler, and I get the same sort of material from St. John of the Cross. In my latest book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander which you can probably get from your library, you may find other material similar to his. I would also suggest Seeds of Contemplation and the new edition of same, New Seeds. |
| 1967/05/07 | Gerald Syke | Cool Millennium |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 229
| In the evening I began reading Gerald Syke's book The Cool Millennium [Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1967] - with which I agree so completely that it can hardly be called something new. Yet it does have a good effect, because it makes one realize more than ever how fortunate I am in my life in the woods, and what a chance I have to be really free. That I don't need to prejudice my peace and freedom with recriminations against society. I am as out of it as one can be and still live in the USA. And there is no likelihood of my changing anything by my clamor. On the other hand I do have enough of a hearing to reach quite a few individuals and help them. (Yesterday another letter came from Smith [College] - another of those girls. They move and charm me with their understanding.) |
| 1967/06/10 | Pierre Teilhard de Chardin | Divine Milieu |
Jnl 6 ('66-'67) p. 247
| Still have not read Teilhard de Chardin and really have no intention of doing so - though sometimes I pick up the [Henri] De Lubac book on him [The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin (New York: Desclee, 1967)] and look at it. I have read only The Divine Milieu [New York, 1957] - and my review of it was stopped, though that article is now being published in Brazil I understand. |
| 1967/07/20 | Janheinz Jahn | Muntu: African Culture and Western World |
Ltrs: CforT p. 282-83
| It is good news to hear you can perhaps use Bantu philosophy in your new book, which sounds like a very good idea by the way. I hope you will keep at it, because that is something I will enjoy reading. The book I referred to is in French (from Dutch) by Pere Placide Tempels, CSSR, La philosophie bantoue, Presence Africaine (publisher). It is a rather old book and you may have to hunt through libraries for it. Also there is another, less good, but more varied (with Voodoo etc.) by Jahainz Jahn, called Muntu. Grove Press did that one, so it is more available. |
| 1967/07/20 | Placide Tempels | philosophie bantou |
Ltrs: CforT p. 282-83
| It is good news to hear you can perhaps use Bantu philosophy in your new book, which sounds like a very good idea by the way. I hope you will keep at it, because that is something I will enjoy reading. The book I referred to is in French (from Dutch) by Pere Placide Tempels, CSSR, La philosophie bantoue, Presence Africaine (publisher). It is a rather old book and you may have to hunt through libraries for it. Also there is another, less good, but more varied (with Voodoo etc.) by Jahainz Jahn, called Muntu. Grove Press did that one, so it is more available. |
| 1967/08/24 | Bengt Sundkler | Bantu Prophets in South Africa |
Ltrs: CforT p. 283
| You are much in my thoughts as I continue my explorations of Bantu ideas. I have on interlibrary loan an essential book: Bantu Prophets in South Africa by Bengt Sundkler, Oxford Press, 1961. The thing is not to distill "Bantu philosophy" out into pure speculative projects as we Westerners like to do. This particular book deals with the syncretism of Zulu religion and a kind of Evangelical Christianity in South Africa: prophetic cults (hundreds of them), nativistic and healing sects. Pursuit of health is a central theme. Joining you in your forecast I would say that in our coming Bantu society (is that accurate though, because our Negroes came from Dahomey, maybe that's a different bunch?) there will be considerable interest in medical diagnosis, psychosomatic illness, questions of potency, interesting treatments, resistance against nefarious influence of dead ancestors ("Uncle Toms" perhaps). |
| 1967/11/28 | Dorothy Emmett | Nature of Metaphysical Thinking |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 18
| Today my usual routine was turned upside down-lately I have been intellectually overfed and in the mornings I read less and less. Today I read almost nothing at all in the early morning, a bit of Dorothy Emmett's book, which is good, and a couple of pages of the Castelli volume-the symposium on hermeneutics. Like it, but I have to stop. I can't cover much ground. The piece by G. Fessard, S.J., seems to me absolutely insane. What kind of a joker is this? A lot of other stuff is good, though: H. Mt. [Mount Athos], Ricoeur, etc. |
| 1967/12/30 | George Steiner | Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 32
| I have [James] Mooney's wonderful Ghost Dance book finally and am reading the new George Steiner book [Language and Silence] which critics have to a great extent ignored or treated coldly. Very good. |
| 1968/01/05 | George Steiner | Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 34
| George Steiner's book Language and Silence is an important one and I can't read more than half a page without having to get up and walk up and down and let all the ideas sink in a little. Very much on my wavelength. Interesting criticism of F.R. Leavis"”both criticism and appreciation"”failure of the peculiar kind of integrity Leavis represents because it closes in on itself, refuses the future, refuses most of the present, and then becomes mere snobbery. I am now in the article on Levi-Strauss. The section on the Jews is harrowing, lucid, deep, everyone should know this! |
| 1968/01/08 | George Steiner | Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 35
| George Steiner on Marxist critics, etc. Still interesting, but not the best part of the book. Useful however. |
| 1968/02/14 | Alan W. Watts | Psychotherapy East and West |
Ltrs: SofC p. 365-66
| Actually I am getting a lot of questions about the discipline thing so I guess the best thing I can do is mimeograph some notes, but they won't be anything very new. Actually, what I am thinking of is a mixture of traditional monastic ascesis and some interesting ideas on psychoanalysis which have been thought up by existentialist analysts like Victor Frankl and a Persian who knows a lot about Sufism and is also an analyst. I hope to do a review of a book of his soon in Monastic Studies. Also Zen... R. H. Zaehner is good on comparative mysticism. Arberry on Sufism I like. A lot of the books on Zen are worthwhile. For example, Alan Watts' "Psychotherapy East and West," while not being anything special, has some useful ideas in it (he is not always very deep though). Victor Frankl's books are I think a must, even though they are not specifically about spiritual guidance "¦ |
| 1968/03/30 | B.F. Skinner | Walden Two |
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. |
| 1968/04/13 | Henry Corbin | Histoire de la philosophie islamique. Des origines jusqu'à la mort d'Averroës (595-1198) / In collaboration with Seyyed Hosseîn Nasr et Osman Yahya |
Ltrs: SofC p. 376
| Getting back to my own active life: one thing I can do for your ecumenical section is at least to review more books. It would be important to review the Histoire de la Philosophie Islamique by Nasr and Corbin (Gallimard, 1964). I have another book of Nasr I can review. If you would have someone keep a lookout for Buddhist, Islamic and other books in French and get them for me I'll do a bulletin. As to monasteries"”I am not in contact with any. But what I could do is this: possibly I may be sent to the AIM meeting in Bangkok. Dom Leclercq is most anxious for me to go. If you write to Dom Flavian and urge him to send me, and also suggest that I visit some monasteries of Buddhists, etc., to write a chronique for Collectanea, that might provide something interesting. However, all this is very uncertain "¦ |
| 1968/05/01 | Georges Poulet | Studies in Human Time |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 92
| Three dreams of Descartes are central in his philosophy. They have a religious importance. The God of Descartes is absolute reality, timeless, simple, instantaneous action, breaking through into the conscious like a thunder clap [Note 3: Merton's reference to Descartes comes from Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), 50-72.] |
| 1968/05/01 | Georges Poulet | Studies in Human Time |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 93
| Pascal said, "It is the joy of having found God which is the source of the sorrow of having offended Him." Pascal said, "He is not found except by the ways taught by the Gospel. He is not preserved except by the ways taught in the Gospel." "Thou wouldst not seek Me if thou hadst not already found Me." (cf. St. Bernard, Pascal) Of Pascal, Poulet says, "Lived time is for Pascal as it had been for St. Augustine. The present of an immediate consciousness in which appear and combine themselves with it retrospective and prospective movements which give to that present an amplitude and a boundless temporal density." [Note 5: Blaise Pascal (1623 62) was a child prodigy in mathematics and physics. From 1654 on, residing within the cloister of Port Royal, he concentrated on spiritual pursuits. His most famous literary works are the Pensees and Provincial Letters. The quotes here are from Poulet, Studies in Human Time, 74-95.] |
| 1968/05/06 | Alfred Stern | Sartre, His Philosophy and Existential Psychoanalysis |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 95-96
| A. Stern says of Sartre, "Each philosopher can only give the truth of his ownexistence. That is to say, philosophy is not a universal or impersonal science. Each individual perspective requires the others as its complements. The existentialist world view is determined by his actions and his means of action." [Note 7: Alfred Stern, Sartre, His Philosophy and Existential Psychoanalysis (New York: Dell, 1967). Merton's opening sentence is an exact quote: "Each philosopher can only give the truth of his existence." The rest of the quote is either Merton's own journal writing or from another, unknown source.] Unamuno said, "Philosophy is a product of each philosopher and each philosopher is a man of flesh and blood who addresses himself to other men of flesh and blood like himself, and whatever he may do, he does not philosophize with his reason alone but with his will, his feeling, his flesh and blood, with his whole soul and his whole body. It is the man who philosophizes in us." [Note 8: The Unamuno quotation is from Stern's Sartre Merton inserted the words "whol" and "in" in the last sentence. Stern lists both the Spanish originalof Miguel de Unamuno's Del Sentimiento trogico de la Vida (Madrid, 1913; New York, 1959) and the American edition, The Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1954) as his sources.] Contrast Hegel, who said, "The teaching of philosophy is precisely what frees man from the endless crowd of finite aims and intentions by making him so indifferent to them that their existence or nonexistence is to him a matter of no moment." Consistency. |
| 1968/06/05 | Herbert Marcuse | One-dimensional man : studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society / by Herbert Marcuse |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 125
| I am about finished with Marcuse's One Dimensional Man "” a good and important book. It was sent by the Asphodel Bookshop in exchange for some copies of Monks Pond. I agree with most of it except for the idea of a future in which science absorbs all metaphysics and final causes and means become ends in themselves. It seems to be a vicious circle. |
| 1968/06/29 | Frantz Fanon | Black skin, white masks / Frantz Fanon ; transl. by Charles Lam Markmann |
Jnl 7 ('67-'68) p. 134
| I am reading [Frantz] Fanon's Black Skins, White Masks"”a really extraordinary book. From every point of view"”as a piece of existentialist philosophizing, an analysis of the race question, as a work of literature (got it from Jim Lowell at the Asphodel Bookshop in exchange for Monks Ponds). |