Merton is tricked into reading a Catholic book . . .
There is a paradox that lies in the very heart of human existence. It must be apprehended before any lasting happiness is possible in the soul of a man. The paradox is this: man’s nature, by itself, can do little or nothing to settle his most important problems. If we follow nothing but our natures, our own philosophies, our own level of ethics, we will end up in hell.
This would be a depressing thought, if it were not purely abstract. Because in the concrete order of things God gave man a nature that was ordered to a supernatural life. He created man with a soul that was made not to bring itself to perfection in its own order, but to be perfected by Him in an order infinitely beyond the reach of human powers. We were never destined to lead purely natural lives, and therefore we were never destined in God’s plan for a purely natural beatitude. Our nature, which is a free gift of God, was given to us to be perfected and enhanced by another free gift that is not due it.
This free gift is “sanctifying grace.” It perfects our nature with the gift of a life, an intellection, a love, a mode of existence infinitely above its own level. If a man were to arrive even at the abstract pinnacle of natural perfection, God’s work would not even be half done: it would be only about to begin, for the real work is the work of grace and the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost.
What is “grace”? It is God’s own life, shared by us. God’s life is Love. Deus caritas est. By grace we are able to share in the infinitely selfless love of Him Who is such pure actuality that He needs nothing and therefore cannot conceivably exploit anything for selfish ends. Indeed, outside of Him there is nothing, and whatever exists exists by His free gift of its being, so that one of the notions that is absolutely contradictory to the perfection of God is selfishness. It is metaphysically impossible for God to be selfish, because the existence of everything that is depends upon His gift, depends upon His unselfishness.
When a ray of light strikes a crystal, it gives a new quality to the crystal. And when God’s infinitely disinterested love plays upon a human soul, the same kind of thing takes place. And that is the life called sanctifying grace.
The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it.
So the natural goodness of man, his capacity for love which must always be in some sense selfish if it remains in the natural order, becomes transfigured and transformed when the Love of God shines in it. What happens when a man loses himself completely in the Divine Life within him? This perfection is only for those who are called the saints—for those rather who are the saints and who live in the light of God alone. For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness. For as far as the light of God is concerned, we are owls. It blinds us and as soon as it strikes us we are in darkness. People who look like saints to us are very often not so, and those who do not look like saints very often are. And the greatest saints are sometimes the most obscure—Our Lady, St. Joseph.
Christ established His Church, among other reasons, in order that men might lead one another to Him and in the process sanctify themselves and one another. For in this work it is Christ Who draws us to Himself through the action of our fellow men.
We must check the inspirations that come to us in the depths of our own conscience against the revelation that is given to us with divinely certain guarantees by those who have inherited in our midst the place of Christ’s Apostles—by those who speak to us in the Name of Christ and as it were in His own Person. Qui vos audit me audit; qui vos spernit, me spernit.
When it comes to accepting God’s own authority about things that cannot possibly be known in any other way except as revealed by His authority, people consider it insanity to incline their ears and listen. Things that cannot be known in any other way, they will not accept from this source. And yet they will meekly and passively accept the most appalling lies from newspapers when they scarcely need to crane their necks to see the truth in front of them, over the top of the sheet they are holding in their hands.
For example, the very thought of an imprimatur on the front of a book— the approbation of a bishop, allowing the book to be printed on the grounds that it contains safe doctrine—is something that drives some people almost out of their minds with indignation.
One day, in the month of February 1937, I happened to have five or ten loose dollars burning a hole in my pocket. I was on Fifth Avenue, for some reason or other, and was attracted by the window of Scribner’s bookstore, all full of bright new books.
That year I had signed up for a course in French Medieval Literature. My mind was turning back, in a way, to the things I remembered from the old days in Saint Antonin. The deep, naive, rich simplicity of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was beginning to speak to me again. I had written a paper on a legend of a “Jongleur de Notre Dame,” compared with a story from the Fathers of the Desert, in Migne’s Latin Patrology. I was being drawn back into the Catholic atmosphere, and I could feel the health of it, even in the merely natural order, working already within me.
Now, in Scribner’s window, I saw a book called The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. I went inside, and took it off the shelf, and looked at the table of contents and at the title page which was deceptive, because it said the book was made up of a series of lectures that had been given at the University of Aberdeen. That was no recommendation, to me especially. But it threw me off the track as to the possible identity and character of Etienne Gilson, who wrote the book.
I bought it, then, together with one other book that I have completely forgotten, and on my way home in the Long Island train, I unwrapped the package to gloat over my acquisitions. It was only then that I saw, on the first page of The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, the small print which said: “Nihil Obstat ... Imprimatur.”
The feeling of disgust and deception struck me like a knife in the pit of the stomach. I felt as if I had been cheated! They should have warned me that it was a Catholic book! Then I would never have bought it. As it was, I was tempted to throw the thing out the window at the houses of Woodside —to get rid of it as something dangerous and unclean. Such is the terror that is aroused in the enlightened modern mind by a little innocent Latin and the signature of a priest. It is impossible to communicate, to a Catholic, the number and complexity of fearful associations that a little thing like this can carry with it. It is in Latin—a difficult, ancient, and obscure tongue. That implies, to the mind that has roots in Protestantism, all kinds of sinister secrets, which the priests are supposed to cherish and to conceal from common men in this unknown language. Then, the mere fact that they should pass judgement on the character of a book, and permit people to read it: that in itself is fraught with terror. It immediately conjures up all the real and imaginary excesses of the Inquisition.
That is something of what I felt when I opened Gilson’s book: for you must understand that while I admired Catholic culture, I had always been afraid of the Catholic Church. That is a rather common position in the world today. After all, I had not bought a book on medieval philosophy without realizing that it would be Catholic philosophy: but the imprimatur told me that what I read would be in full conformity with that fearsome and mysterious thing, Catholic Dogma, and the fact struck me with an impact against which everything in me reacted with repugnance and fear.
Now in the light of all this, I consider that it was surely a real grace that, instead of getting rid of the book, I actually read it. Not all of it, it is true: but more than I used to read of books that deep. When I think of the numbers of books I had on my shelf in the little room at Douglaston that had once been Pop’s “den”—books which I had bought and never even read, I am more astounded than ever at the fact that I actually read this one: and what is more, remembered it.
I remember books with the Catholic imprimatur sitting around the house when I was a kid. My mother was a voracious reader, and also devoutly Catholic. Therefore, on the table next to her chair, on top of The Thorn Birds and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, sat Purgatory by Father F. X. Schouppe and The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Unlike young Merton's reaction to books carrying the seal of Catholic approval, I found my mother's taste in religious literature endlessly fascinating. While my friends were sneaking looks the Penthouse magazines they found under their brother's beds, I was surreptitiously reading about lakes of eternal fire and Augustine's musings on sin.
I understood very little of what I read, the prose a little too lofty and full of "thou" and "thee" and Latin. But I adored the books about saints, especially ones with actual photographs of their subjects. Some of these texts contained pictures of saints' bodies, preserved for centuries. Called incorruptibles, the remains of these holy men and women, by some miracle, did not decompose. Saint Bernadette. Saint Theresa. Saint John Bosco. I would stare for hours at these pictures, thrilled and horrified at the same time. I felt like, by looking at the actual face of Saint Vincent de Paul, I was seeing something touched by God.
The thing that struck me most about these photos is that they were so . . . human. These men and women were old. Sometimes pudgy. Hooked nosed. Balding. The stories about them were full of accounts of visions, levitations, stigmata, healing. One picture I remember clearly was of a woman who had been martyred. Her face looked as if she was still suffering, her mouth a grimace, and, in the hollow of her throat, a knife wound with several drops of blood still visible on the skin. Yet, they all looked like people I saw in grocery stores and shopping malls every day.
If you can't tell, I was a morbid child. Loved Stephen King and John Saul novels. Watched midnight horror films. Read William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist when I was eleven after finding the paperback in a used book store. (That book scared the shit out of me and sent me to weekly confessions for the better part of a year.) My religious faith was a weird mixture of catechism and carnival sideshow.
I think that's why I was drawn to the writing of Flannery O'Connor when I was young. I loved her Southern brand of Catholicism that included close encounters with serial killers and Bible salesmen who stole glass eyes and artificial limbs from women. I recognized something inherently truthful in these stories. They said something mysterious about the human condition. (Plus, I was sure, O'Connor would have loved those pictures of the corpses of saints.)
I venture to say that those books my mother left around our house, perhaps on purpose, made me the writer and person I am today. God wasn't some Byzantine mosaic of an old man with a long grey beard and golden plate halo. Nope. I could actually look at the face of holiness--thin lips, sunken eyes, and waxy skin. There was great beauty in those faces, as well. The way there's beauty in sitting in a room with a dying person, participating in that moment of passing. It connects you to everything you don't understand about the universe.
And that is what Thomas Merton calls sanctifying grace. Flannery O'Connor called it grace, as well. Instances when the veil is lifted, and you can glimpse God, like sunlight in trees. Or splinters in your eyes. And it's beautiful. Terrifying. Compelling.
Saint Marty gives thanks tonight for his mother's books. They taught him how to be a poet.
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