| Date | Author | Title | Source | Quotation by Merton |
| 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! |
| 1950/04/08 | Louis Bouyer | Mystère Pascal: meditation sur la liturgie des trois derniers jours de la Semaine Sainte |
Jnl 2 ('41-'52) p. 429
| Louis Bouyer has a marvelous chapter on the connection between the Resurrection and the founding of the Church. Now that the Humanity of Christ is fully divinized, a mysterious spiritual gravitation draws all humanity to Him as to its natural center (Myst. Pasch). Then, too, by His risen Humanity, the Savior communicates Himself to all men and feeds them with His Body in order that they might all grow up into the fullness of His Mystical humanity, into a perfect man (Eph. 4:13). Our destiny is to be deified by the vision of the divinity in the Risen Christ. Through His Soul and in His risen Body He reveals and communicates to us the Godhead, Essential Light. The means He has chosen for this is the Sacraments, that we may be transformed from glory to glory by the Spirit of the Lord. |
| 1960/09/16 | Karl Barth | Christmas / translated by Berhard Citron |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 48
| From Karl Barth-Christmas 1931 [translated by Berhard Citron, London, 1959]. (That Christmas I was in Strasbourg, as also in 1930, and on one of these occasions I went to a Lutheran church where all was in German and did not understand.) "Suppose a person living in Germany today had faith, then the comfort and direction he received (from the Christmas light) in all humility, would consist in the permission and command to continue without those fixed ideas which at present he cannot avoid"¦ [Merton's emphasis]. Not only should man be able to live with principles but he must also be able to live without them.... [etc.] |
| 1960/09/16 | Karl Barth | Christmas / translated by Berhard Citron |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 49
| Opposites: Karl Barth and Gemistus Pletho.15 I do not mean to be facetious. Gemistus (who attended the Council of Florence, from Greece) also wanted to revive the Olympian gods-who anticipated the Positivist Pantheon of A[uguste] Comte, who will doubtless be loved by magicians since he sounds like on"¦Pitiful, symptomatic, symbolic figure of the humanist renaissance. But Barth with his earnest, reforming Christianity, and his insistence that the Incarnation makes it impossible to invent even a Christian god-or to reach into "the infinit" to select our own concepts (idols) of them. Two extremes, but Barth is salutary. There is so much truth there, so much of the Gospel. |
| 1960/09/23 | Karl Barth | Against the Stream |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 51
| Moving words of K. Barth preached on Good Friday 1948 in Hungary at Debrecen, the great Calvinist center. "For in His meekness which we remember today, He achieved the mightiest of all deeds ever fulfilled on earth: In His own person He restored and reestablished the violated law of God and the shattered law of man. In this meekness the grace of God appeared in His person, and the obedient man, at peace with God and in whom God has pleasure, was revealed. In this meekness of His, Jesus Christ, nailed to the cross as a criminal, created order in the realm of creation, the order in which man can live eternally as the redeemed, converted child of God." Against the Stream [London, 1954], p 55 |
| 1960/09/29 | Gordon Harland | Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 53
| Politics-at last I think I am beginning to come out of my stupor. Excellent book on [Reinhold] Niebuhr (by G. Harland). A great and lucid mind and profoundly Christian. One of the most hopeful signs in America. I must examine the superficiality of my European prejudices. There is a great deal wrong with my instinctive tendency to think in a French way about America. Certainly it is the easiest way. It gives me the impression of being independent, but it is only another form of passivity. The sentimental, out of date moralism and shallow self-righteousness of most American thought is too self-evident for comment. It is a tragedy of great dimensions. But But for me to reject all American ideas would be another tragedy. We know we need something better. The courageous thing is not to be negative but to seek, like Niebuhr, to build something solid. Even to fail in this would be nobler than a total rejection. |
| 1960/11/07 | Charles Harold Dodd | The Bible Today |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 63
| Read sermons of St. Faustus of Rieg the other day, and liked them. Curious about the monks of Lerins. Reading Heschel, God in Search of Man [New York, 1955] and [C. H.] Dodd (very good), The Bible Today [Cambridge, 1956]. |
| 1960/11/14 | Charles Harold Dodd | The Bible Today |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 65
| C. H. Dodd - in a remarkable book (The Bible Today): "We shall get at the truth of our present situation only by exposing ourselves to the judgement of God in it"¦. I mean (by) an effort to recognize our own behaviour as contributory to the corporate actions and reactions which have brought us to this pass, and to assess it by given moral standards." p 137 |
| 1961/01/28 | Reinhold Niebuhr | Christian Realism and Political Problems |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 91
| I respect more and more the intelligence and integrity of Reinhold Niebuhr. His is one of the few authentically Christian voices that have something to say that is relevant for our time. And also an American voice, with a clarity, a sobriety, an objectivity, a lack of despair that should be ours. We do not have to speak with sick voices, as France does. "There is so little health in the whole of our modern civilization that one cannot find the island of order from which to proceed against disorder." (Xtian Realism and Polit[ical] Problems [New York, 1953], p 117) |
| 1961/03/28 | Robert McAfee Brown | American Dialogue: A Protestant Looks at Catholicism |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 103
| Deeply impressed by this statement of Robert McAfee Brown: "All of the great movements of reform and renewal in the history of the Church have grown out of a rediscovery of the Bible, and there is every reason to believe that the present [contemporary] rediscovery of the Bible (both by Catholics and Protestants) may create a situation full of possibilities beyond our power to predict." [The American Dialogue: A Protestant Looks at Catholicism (New York, 1960), p 80] |
| 1961/10/29 | Paul Tillich | Protestant Era |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 174
| "The key to the interpretation of history is historical activity," says Tillich. One of the statements that reflects a Marxist influence. But I agree. |
| 1963/07/28 | A.M. Allchin | Silent Rebellion: Anglican Religious Communities 1845-1900 |
Ltrs: HGL p. 362
| Talking about Cowley, Fr. A. M. Allchin, of Pusey House (I suppose you must know him), is coming here next week. He has sent his book about the Anglican religious communities [The Silent Rebellion: Anglican Religious Communities 1845-1900] and I find it quite interesting. I am so happy that your friend [Brother Raymond] was ordained: yes, you did tell me that, I think. I shall remember him occasionally in my Mass, and may he rest in peace. |
| 1963/07/29 | A.M. Allchin | Silent Rebellion: Anglican Religious Communities 1845-1900 |
Jnl 4 ('60-'63) p. 347
| There are some very stirring quotations on religious life, from Anglicans, in A. M. Allchin's Silent Rebellion, especially R. M. Benson. There is a special quality and excellence in the Anglican view of monasticism, with a very genuine touch of protest, of "witness against" the torpor of the Anglican establishment. Yet how much does it mean? Is it merely a precious indulgence of a very small minority? I am singularly moved and disturbed by this book, and am certainly glad to be a Roman, as emphatically as Newman was. |
| 1963/09/20 | Karl Barth | Fides quaerens intellectum : la preuve de l'existence de dieu d'après Anselme de Cantorbery / Karl Barth ; trad. francaise de Jean Carrère |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 17
| I have been able to do a lot of reading. Some on Barth's view of St. Anselm (very penetrating explanation of Anselm's religious sense of God in "the argument"). |
| 1963/09/30 | Karl Barth | Dogmatics in Outline |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 20
| A magnificent line from Karl Barth. "Everyone who has to contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously. Only faith is to be taken seriously, and if we have faith as a grain of mustard seed, that suffices for the devil to have lost his gam" (Dogmatics in Outline, p. 20). What stupendous implications in that! Always the old trouble, that the devil and our nature try to persuade us that before we can begin to believe we must be perfect in everything. Faith is not important as it is "in us." Our faith is "in God," and with even a very little of it, God is in us. "To believe is the freedom to trust in Him quite alon" (and to be independent of any other reliance) and to rely on Him in everything that concerns us. |
| 1963/10/04 | Frithjof Schuon | Comprendre l'Islam |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 22
| Two minds more different than those of Karl Barth and Frithjof Schuon would be hard to imagine, yet I am reading them both. Barth with his insistence on "God in the highest": completely unattainable by any human tradition and Schuon with his philosophia humanis [humanistic philosophy] (am reading his excellent book on Islam [Comprendre l'Islam, 1961]). True, Barth is a greater mind and there is an austere beauty in his Evangelical absolutism (closer to Islam than one would think!!) but there is another side to him-his love of St. Anselm and of Mozart. Schuon naturally oversimplifies his "contrast" between Islam and Christianity. One has to know what he's really doing! I wrote this morning to Marco Pallis (who sent the Schuon book) about his Way and the Mountain (the other night I dreamed about the way). |
| 1963/10/24 | Karl Barth | Dogmatics in Outline |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 26
| "To be a man means to be situated in God's presence as Jesus is, that is, to be a bearer of the wrath of God." Barth [from Dogmatics in Outline, 1949]. We need the shock of this sentence-which is of course immediately qualified by Barth himself. And the qualification is implicit, for Jesus bears that wrath and lives. But the wrath is on us! And the Calvinist catechism: "What understandest thou by the little word ‘suffered'?" "That He all the time of His life, but especially at the end thereof hath borne in body and soul the wrath of God against the whole human race." How powerful and how serious! |
| 1963/10/29 | Karl Barth | Dogmatics in Outline |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 29
| Again. Barth's bestiary. This time the Church is not a snail. "The Church runs like a herald to deliver the message. It's not a snail with a little house on its back and is so well off in it, that only now and then it sticks out its feelers and then thinks that ‘the claim of publicity' has been satisfied"¦" Dogmatics in Outline, p. 147. Of the dog. Pilate is a dog. "How does Pilate come into the creed?"¦Like a dog into a nice room!" but the meanness is not toward Pilate but toward politics-the dog in the room is politics in the Church! Sometimes the Christian in the Church is like a bird in a cage, beating against the bars (trying to make the whole Gospel reduce itself to our own rite or our own preachments). "If you do not know this oppression, you have certainly not seen the real dynamic in this matter!!" (p. 147). But this invitation is to be patiently endured. We wait for the Kingdom "recognizing each other in longing and humility in the light of the divine humor" (148). |
| 1964/01/01 | Rudolf Bultmann | Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 52-53
| Sense of God all day. Now Bultmann's idea of God (evening, before Night Watch). Our care meets Him at the end of its capacity. He limits our care and cuts it short. Our love of beauty, our need for love, our desire to work, etc. Bultmann's God is the power who limits, who "sets a terminus" to all this. "It is God who makes man finite, who makes a comedy of man's care, who allows his longing to miscarry, who casts him into solitude, who sets a terminus to his knowing"¦etc. Yet at the same time it is God who forces man into life and drives him into care, etc." Curious? But it is a Biblical notion of God, and very real! (Essays [Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research, 1962], p. 5). Not Christian yet! It could equally well be the devil! Yet belief is a "Nevertheless" embracing this power and the limits it imposes, with love and confidence. And it is not a weltanschauung [general idea]! "Real belief in God always grows out of the realization that being is an unknown quantity, which cannot be learned and retained in the form of a proposition but of which one is always becoming conscious in the ‘moment' of ‘loving'" (Essays, p. 7). "Real belief in God is not a general truth at my disposal which I perceive and apply; on the contrary it is what it is only as something continually perceived afresh and developing afresh"¦Not a general cosmic purpose, etc." (p. 7). This will lead him back to say that there is no valid knowledge of God outside of Christian revelation (all other knowledge of Him is weltanschauung). But is this true? Are they merely "general ideas"? (We can see in the longing for a weltanschauung, an escape from the enigma and from the decisive question of the moment"¦etc. But he has apparently not learned the religious and existentialist quality of Buddhism, Taoism, etc.) |
| 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 | Rudolf Bultmann | Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research |
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 | Rudolf Bultmann | Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 59
| Much as I disagree with some of Bultmann's statements on non-Christian religions I cannot help being swayed and moved by his basic argument which is completely convincing-and most salutary. "God's grace is to man grace in such a thoroughgoing sense that it supports the whole of man's existence, and can only be conceived of as grace by those who surrender their whole existence and let themselves fall into the unfathomable, dizzy depths without seeking for something to hold on to" (Essays, p. 136). The great hope of our time is, it seems to me, not that the Church will become once again a world power and a dominant institution, but on the contrary that the power of faith and the Spirit will shake the world when Christians have lost what they held on to and have entered into the eschatological kingdom-where in fact they already are! |
| 1964/02/22 | Joseph Lortz | Reformation: A Problem For Today |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 80
| Is [Joseph] Lortz too severe on Erasmus? Reading him after dinner today I wondered about this. Erasmus was "hardly a Christian," etc. A scholar, an individualist, not enough sense of the Church, etc. Yet his piety is so clean, so simple and so real. It is a breath of fresh air after so much of the late M. G[ilmore]. In a way I like it even better than Thomas More's "Moralism." But was this not needed at this time? And it is completely Evangelical. Erasmus is perhaps one sided, perhaps lacking in the full Catholic spirit, was perhaps a danger in many ways, but how can one read him today without joy and agreement? Heis a splendid writer and to my mind a deeply pious one. And his satires, are they after all too bitter, too extreme? One feels that his Catholic critics almost begrudge him his fidelity to the Church, as if, to satisfy them, he ought to have apostatized and given them an open and shut case against him. |
| 1964/03/15 | François Biot | Rise of Protestant Monasticism |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 90-91
| Two dogs yesterday worrying a dead woodchuck in the fields, disturbed me when I was writing a review (book on Protestant Monasticism) [François Biot, The Rise of Protestant Monasticism, 1963] |
| 1964/04/25 | Charles James Stranks | Anglican Devotion |
Ltrs: HGL p. 26
| Meanwhile I have been getting on with other Anglican reading. Thornton on English Spirituality was of course attractive for its thesis that emphasized Benedictine, Cistercian and Victorine bases for Anglican spirituality. I did not agree with some of his rather oversimplified judgments but liked the book as a whole. I am reading Stranks on Anglican Devotion, which is informative. Also McAdoo on the Moral Theologians. |
| 1964/04/25 | E.L. Mascall (ed.) | Blessed Virgin Mary: Essays by Anglicans / co-editor: H.S. Box |
Ltrs: HGL p. 26
| Have I yet thanked you for the remarkable little book of essays on the Blessed Virgin [The Blessed Virgin Mary: Essays by Anglicans, edited by E. L. Mascall and H. S. Box]? I particularly liked your essay on the seventeenth-century divines and am interested in all the other quotes from Anglican sources throughout the book. I liked the whole tone of the book very much, and was especially interested in the balanced and sensible approach of H. S. Box on the Assumption and Immaculate Conception. |
| 1964/04/25 | Henry Robert McAdoo | Structure of Caroline Moral Theology |
Ltrs: HGL p. 26
| Meanwhile I have been getting on with other Anglican reading. Thornton on English Spirituality was of course attractive for its thesis that emphasized Benedictine, Cistercian and Victorine bases for Anglican spirituality. I did not agree with some of his rather oversimplified judgments but liked the book as a whole. I am reading Stranks on Anglican Devotion, which is informative. Also McAdoo on the Moral Theologians. |
| 1964/04/25 | Martin Thornton | English Spirituality: An Outline of Ascetical Theology according to the English Pastoral Tradition |
Ltrs: HGL p. 26
| Meanwhile I have been getting on with other Anglican reading. Thornton on English Spirituality was of course attractive for its thesis that emphasized Benedictine, Cistercian and Victorine bases for Anglican spirituality. I did not agree with some of his rather oversimplified judgments but liked the book as a whole. I am reading Stranks on Anglican Devotion, which is informative. Also McAdoo on the Moral Theologians. |
| 1964/07/12 | John A. T. (John Arthur Thomas) Robinson | Honest to God |
Ltrs: RtoJ p. 249
| Honest to God is causing a bit of a stir in Protestant circles. He [John A. T. Robinson] gives the impression when he is all over that there is no God left to be honest to. I think that is an exaggeration. He is just catching on to the truth that God cannot be expressed in adequate concepts. He is also strong on the new morality and such things. Good will, sincere, naive I think, earnest about getting through to "the world." The people he rests on are stronger than he is. I am currently reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Protestant executed under Hitler: magnificent. Wasn't the Commonweal Los Angeles issue a smasher? I had a letter a couple of months ago from Fr. [William] DuBay incidentally suggesting that he and I form a priests' union. I pointed out that I was not in a very good position to organize unions. |
| 1964/07/21 | Dietrich Bonhoeffer | Letters and Papers from Prison |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 129
| I sent the article on "Honest to God" to the Commonweal yesterday. Really Bonhoeffer is far deeper than Robinson would lead one to think. I am reading Bonhoeffer's prison letters [Letters and Papers from Prison, 1953], which are very "monastic" indeed-in fact I mean to make a collection of some of the "monastic texts" there. His "worldliness" can only be understood in the light of this "monastic" seriousness, which is however not Platonically "inward." It is not a withdrawal, a denial, it is a mode of presence. |
| 1964/07/21 | John A. T. (John Arthur Thomas) Robinson | Honest to God |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 129
| I sent the article on "Honest to God" to the Commonweal yesterday. Really Bonhoeffer is far deeper than Robinson would lead one to think. I am reading Bonhoeffer's prison letters [Letters and Papers from Prison, 1953], which are very "monastic" indeed-in fact I mean to make a collection of some of the "monastic texts" there. His "worldliness" can only be understood in the light of this "monastic" seriousness, which is however not Platonically "inward." It is not a withdrawal, a denial, it is a mode of presence. |
| 1964/08/09 | Dietrich Bonhoeffer | Letters and Papers from Prison |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 134
| La Peste-understandable in the light of Bonhoeffer's admirable prison letters. In connection with Camus and people like him-see this line of Bonhoeffer: "I often ask myself why a Christian instinct frequently draws one more to the religionless than to the religious, by which I mean not with any intention of evangelizing them but rather, I might almost say, in ‘brotherhood.'" (p. 165) |
| 1964/08/31 | Edward Deming Andrews | Religion in Wood: A Book of Shaker Furniture |
Ltrs: CforT p. 174
| It has been a hot and busy summer, in which I have tried to get some work done. Possibly I have undertaken too many short things, like prefaces. But sometimes the chances are too good to miss, for instance a preface to a marvelous book on the furniture and art of the Shaker sect [Religion in Wood: A Book of Shaker Furniture by Edward Deming Andrews]. Do you know of them? I think Ernesto does. I will try to get copies for you and for him. Also copies of New Directions' new anthology. |
| 1964/12/09 | Jacob Boehme | Confessions of Jacob Boehme |
Ltrs: HGL p. 60
| Recently I sent you two small books on Boehme, his confessions and another. I like his confessions. Unfortunately his work is so full of abstruse terminology borrowed from alchemy, etc., that I find it hard to follow him. But when I do make contact with his mind, I like his spirit very much indeed. |
| 1965/05/22 | Lancelot Andrewes | Preces Privatae |
Ltrs: HGL p. 27
| I "¦ have been using Andrewes Preces [Privatae] at night in the hermitage. |
| 1965/07/17 | John Maccquarrie | Extentialist Theology: a Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 271
| "An important part of the witness of the Church, or in other words an important way of proclaiming the Word must be simply a manifestation within the Christian community of a spirit of fellowship and love which cannot be found outside it," writes McQuarrie in his critique of Bultmann (Existential Theology, p. 221). He recognizes organization as a "problem." Love is least in evidence when the Church is most organized, perhaps most in evidence when Christians were driven into deserts or catacombs. (This is a concession he makes.) He also admits the Church can usurp what rightly belongs to the person and make all his decisions for him (or try to). (Why the question of the bomb is an "exposed nerv" in the whole problem of renewal.) Here is where the Bishops (especially American) want to decide the whole question of war, etc. beforehand, instead of letting the faithful come to their own conclusions as the situation develops. |
| 1965/07/25 | Søren Kierkegaard | Present Age |
Jnl 5 ('63-'65) p. 275
| Reading [Søren] Kierkegaard-selections from The Present Age. Very fine and completely prophetic. One of the best and in some sense most hopeful treatments of the individual in mass-society. "It is in fact through error that the individual is given access to the highest if he courageously drinks it"¦" The communication of the "cosmic" in the naked exposure of the individual, without mediation, to "pure humanity." (Can lead to liberation in naked exposure to word of God.) With regard to myself I seek only to pay this high price (far from doing it, we are trained in this!!). And for others-not to "help" them to escape it. |
| 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? |
| 1966/09/21 | Dietrich Bonhoeffer | Letters and Papers from Prison |
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? |