Merton undergoes his conversion . . .
And it was in the middle of all this that I discovered Scholastic philosophy.
The subject I had finally chosen was “Nature and Art in William Blake.” I did not realize how providential a subject it actually was! What it amounted to, was a study of Blake’s reaction against every kind of literalism and naturalism and narrow, classical realism in art, because of his own ideal which was essentially mystical and supernatural. In other words, the topic, if I treated it at all sensibly, could not help but cure me of all the naturalism and materialism in my own philosophy, besides resolving all the inconsistencies and self-contradictions that had persisted in my mind for years, without my being able to explain them.
After all, from my very childhood, I had understood that the artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive perception of reality through a sort of affective identification with the object contemplated—the kind of perception that the Thomists call “connatural.” This means simply a knowledge that comes about as it were by the identification of natures: in the way that a chaste man understands the nature of chastity because of the very fact that his soul is full of it—it is a part of his own nature, since habit is second nature. Nonconnatural knowledge of chastity would be that of a philosopher who, to borrow the language of the Imitation, would be able to define it, but would not possess it.
I had learned from my own father that it was almost blasphemy to regard the function of art as merely to reproduce some kind of a sensible pleasure or, at best, to stir up the emotions to a transitory thrill. I had always understood that art was contemplation, and that it involved the action of the highest faculties of man.
When I was once able to discover the key to Blake, in his rebellion against literalism and naturalism in art, I saw that his Prophetic Books and the rest of his verse at large represented a rebellion against naturalism in the moral order as well.
What a revelation that was! For at sixteen I had imagined that Blake, like the other romantics, was glorifying passion, natural energy, for their own sake. Far from it! What he was glorifying was the transfiguration of man’s natural love, his natural powers, in the refining fires of mystical experience: and that, in itself, implied an arduous and total purification, by faith and love and desire, from all the petty materialistic and commonplace and earthly ideals of his rationalistic friends.
Blake, in his sweeping consistency, had developed a moral insight that cut through all the false distinctions of a worldly and interested morality. That was why he saw that, in the legislation of men, some evils had been set up as standards of right by which other evils were to be condemned: and the norms of pride or greed had been established in the judgement seat, to pronounce a crushing and inhuman indictment against all the normal healthy strivings of human nature. Love was outlawed, and became lust, pity was swallowed up in cruelty, and so Blake knew how:
The harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave old England’s winding-sheet.
I had heard that cry and that echo. I had seen that winding sheet. But I had understood nothing of all that. I had tried to resolve it into a matter of sociological laws, of economic forces. If I had been able to listen to Blake in those old days, he would have told me that sociology and economics, divorced from faith and charity, become nothing but the chains of his aged, icy demon Urizen! But now, reading Maritain, in connection with Blake, I saw all these difficulties and contradictions disappear.
I, who had always been anti-naturalistic in art, had been a pure naturalist in the moral order. No wonder my soul was sick and torn apart: but now the bleeding wound was drawn together by the notion of Christian virtue, ordered to the union of the soul with God.
The word virtue: what a fate it has had in the last three hundred years! The fact that it is nowhere near so despised and ridiculed in Latin countries is a testimony to the fact that it suffered mostly from the mangling it underwent at the hands of Calvinists and Puritans. In our own days the word leaves on the lips of cynical high-school children a kind of flippant smear, and it is exploited in theaters for the possibilities it offers for lewd and cheesy sarcasm. Everybody makes fun of virtue, which now has, as its primary meaning, an affectation of prudery practiced by hypocrites and the impotent.
When Maritain—who is by no means bothered by such trivialities—in all simplicity went ahead to use the term in its Scholastic sense, and was able to apply it to art, a “virtue of the practical intellect,” the very newness of the context was enough to disinfect my mind of all the miasmas left in it by the ordinary prejudice against “virtue” which, if it was ever strong in anybody, was strong in me. I was never a lover of Puritanism. Now at last I came around to the sane conception of virtue—without which there can be no happiness, because virtues are precisely the powers by which we can come to acquire happiness: without them, there can be no joy, because they are the habits which coordinate and canalize our natural energies and direct them to the harmony and perfection and balance, the unity of our nature with itself and with God, which must, in the end, constitute our everlasting peace.
By the time I was ready to begin the actual writing of my thesis, that is, around the beginning of September 1938, the groundwork of conversion was more or less complete. And how easily and sweetly it had all been done, with all the external graces that had been arranged, along my path, by the kind Providence of God! It had taken little more than a year and a half, counting from the time I read Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy to bring me up from an “atheist”—as I considered myself—to one who accepted all the full range and possibilities of religious experience right up to the highest degree of glory.
It's an amazing thing when words bring about this kind of deep change in a person. Merton, in his research and preparation for the composition of his graduate thesis on William Blake, has stumbled his way from atheism to a full-fledged embrace of religious experience. It wasn't intentional on Merton's part. Rather, it seems like an accident, one book leading to one experience leading to another book leading to another experience.
Of course, I'm not a big believer in accidents. Accidents mean that the universe is a random place, without any kind of design. I've taken enough science and math classes, studied enough chemistry and biology, to know that--if everything that exists is arbitrary--we are the greatest cosmic coincidences ever.
As a poet, I accept mystery, or, to use Keats' term, negative capability. I don't need to know all the formulas and algorithms and reactions that have gotten me to where I am. It's enough to know that creation has conspired to stitch me together, bring me into being. This doesn't mean that I am anti-science. I believe in evolution and climate change. The pandemic is not a ploy of the Democratic Party to steal the election from Donald Trump, and the Big Bang isn't just a sitcom on television.
Like poetry, science is a way of trying to understand the mind of God. Not fully. That's impossible. To have all the answers would be the end of beauty and art. The world would become as exciting as Rice Krispies or saltines. Passable, but boring. Mystery is the thing that inspires everyone--from mathematicians to kindergarten teachers. Albert Einstein to Al Gore.
I've spent a good portion of my life trying to understand everything through words and language. That's my jam. My religion, if you will. Words aren't accidents or coincidences. They are put together in certain ways to create meaning. The Gospel of John: "In the beginning of was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." And, right now, words are all I have in this pandemic isolation. They are what get me through my days.
Words. A word from this morning: "Negative." As in, that's the result of my COVID test. Another word from this morning: "No." As in, the appliance repair guy refusing to come to our house to fix my stove until after we are out of quarantine. A word from this afternoon: "Amazon." As in, I ordered the baking element for my stove, and I'm planning on fixing the stove myself. A word from this evening: "Lasagna." As in, my sister dropped off a pan of lasagna for us. And a word from tonight: "Yesterday." As in, I'm watching the movie Yesterday while I type this post.
A few snapshots from today:
- My beautiful friend Gala dropped off some treats for my beautiful puppy.
- My beautiful daughter, while still without her senses of smell and taste, is feeling better today. But she's struggling with a person she once trusted and loved.
- My beautiful friend Helen did a Zoom yoga class for the library tonight, and then she and I talked for close to a half hour.
- My beautiful sister dropped off a wonderful pan of lasagna for our dinner tomorrow night.
- My beautiful friend Brian from New Zealand checked in on me just now. It's 7 p.m. there. Almost 1 a.m. here. I'm about to head to my beautiful bed.
