Remembering Barth and Merton
I have younger colleagues who speak with fondness of their graduate school days. Mine I prefer to forget. I studied at Yale during a time of intense turmoil in Society, in Church, and in University. The Religious Studies Department was in disarray. And my last “public” act was as a student marshal on the New Haven Green in May 1970, while the National Guard patrolled the streets and tear gas made the air acrid.
The nadir, of course, was 1968 with the assassinations of King and Kennedy. But two deaths, in December of that year, also caused great grief. Karl Barth and Thomas Merton died on this day, worlds apart physically, but sharing much spiritual kinship.
To my mind, on December 10th 1968, they appeared symbolically as spokesmen for God’s transcendent mystery, in a culture that was fast trivializing that sense. They also spoke realistically about the human plight when such talk seemed to run counter to a facile celebration of human potential.
I was taking that semester a reading course on Barth with Hans Frei, later to go on to fame as a stellar member of the “Yale School,” but then an aspiring Associate Professor. Frei, who together with George Lindbeck was later to be one of the readers for my doctoral dissertation, insisted that Barth was the Protestant theologian that Catholics, in the wake of Vatican II, should most read. When I asked “why?”, he replied: “lest they repeat in 20 years all the mistakes that it took Protestant liberalism 200 years to make!”
Here is a quote from Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation that I think Barth might second:
Trees and animals have no problem. God makes them what they are without consulting them, and they are perfectly satisfied.
With us it is different. God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please.
We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them.
If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it!
A positive sign of the times: both Barth and Merton are commemorated in today’s edition of L’Osservatore Romano.
I have learned that no one calls something beautiful without
asserting at the same time that she or he are attracted to it. This
doesn’t mean that statements about beauty refer solely to one’s
subjective feelings. If someone considers something beautiful and
says so, one is also asserting their attraction to that beautiful
object.
People do not usually let themselves be argued into recognizing that
something is beautiful; rather it is normally a matter of seeing it
or hearing it or not. It is not about arguing but about showing.
People who love and are familiar with Mozart’s music would understand
John Updike’s forward to theologian Karl Barth’s book “Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart”:
“Above all, it is the *dialectical* character of Mozart’s music that
Barth admires. In this music, everything comes to expression: ‘heaven
and earth, nature and man, comedy and tragedy, the Virgin Mary and
the demons’. Mozart simply *contains* and *includes* all this within
his music in perfect harmony. This harmony is not a matter
of ‘balance’ or ‘indifference’ – it is ‘a glorious upsetting of the
balance, a *turning* in which the light rises and the shadows fall …,
in which the Yes rings louder than the ever-present No.’ “
Today is also the 100 anniversary of the birth of Olivier Messiaen. I have seen a beautiful photo of Messiaen sitting in the mountains reading Thomas Merton. For those familiar with Merton’s poetry, you can hear 22 of his poems set to music. Baritone Chad Runyon and my pianist friend Jackie Chew recorded The Niles-Merton Songs, Opus 171 & 172 on CD, titled “Sweet Irrational Worship” (MSR Classics). Jackie is a Benedictine (Camaldolese Benedictine) Oblate of New Camalodoli Hermitage in the Big Sur. She tell us that God used both Messiaen and Merton to form her.
http://www.overgrownpath.com
“Beware also of the temptation of the ‘omnipotent choice’. Choice
alone is not magic, and the power to choose is no guarantee that any
choice, provided only that it is a deeply convinced choice, will
always be the right choice. Here choosing in not obedience to the
law of love. One may choose not to love. One may choose to love in
a way that defeats and frustrates love. Love does not seek its own
defeat. Nor does it seek mere victory in conquest. Love is beyond
conquest, beyond victory and defeat. Hence the law of love is not
the mere law of will. Development is not the mere development of
will. Mere wilfulness, pretending to be love, has no power except
the power of delusion and madness.
“The law of love is the law that commands us to add new values to the
world given us by God, through the creative power that God has placed
in us – the power of joy in response, in gratitude, and in the giving
of self.”
~Thomas Merton, “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”
Jim Martin has an interesting essay at BustedHalo on the paradox of Merton’s acceptance outside the church and the suspicions many Catholics still harbor about him:
http://www.bustedhalo.com/features/the-belly-of-a-paradox
Another aspect of that paradox is the esteem with which many Catholics (JPII and B16 chief among them, I think) hold Barth.
Barth’s theology, and his rejection of “natural theology,” is based on a confidence in Revelation that I simply do not share and find to be unwarranted. That is one reason why I pursue natural theology. Nonetheless, I still find Barth to be quite a good read.
Fr. Imbelli: On multiple occasions, I have used the third paragraph that you cite. A professor once told me that ethics is a subset of theology. A quote like Merton’s leads me to believe that ethics is the inclusive category. Maybe that’s why I do ethics.
Thanks for providing the chance to turn our minds these two figures.
Thank you for forcing me to stop and remember the passing of these two great disciples of Christ. I will admit that I might otherwise have overlooked the import of this day in the rush of other events.
I ‘d call myself a Merton Catholic inspite of the fact that he sounds as heretical as Terrsa of Avila at times. Yes, he had his flaws, but he oh so obviously loved God and his fellow humans.
When is he going to be put up for canonization ?
Bob,
Merton was a crucial figure in my own conversion to Catholicism some 25 years ago, and my discovery of Barth (also while studying at Yale with Frei and Lindbeck) 20 years ago had a profound and continuing effect on how I frame theological issues. I always thought that it was one of providence’s happier acts that I could commemorate the homecoming of these two great Christians on the same day.
Fritz Bauerschmidt,
only 20 years ago? you know how to make a guy feel old!
would you be willing to say a bit about what you found in Merton at the time?
At the time I began reading Merton, I was living and working in a poor, predominantly African-American section of Atlanta and just beginning to wonder about the connection between social justice and the spiritual life. Someone recommended reading Merton and Dorothy Day. What appealed to me about both of them was that they gave me a sense that there were options out there other than the standard Democrat-Liberal vs. Republican-Conservative ones with which I had grown up (though I grew up in South Carolina, where even the Democrats were pretty conservative, so the liberal option was a pretty exotic species). This realization that being a Catholic requires thinking outside the American political box has remained with me to this day, and made me a perpetual political malcontent (killjoy that I am, I keep grumbling to my friends who are euphoric over Obama’s election, “Just wait”). At the same time it showed me that there are resources in the Catholic tradition for a different way of seeing issues of justice.
More immediately, the night I made the decision to become Catholic I was reading about Merton’s decision to convert, which occurred while he was reading an account of G. M. Hopkins’s decision to convert — so there was a kind of “literary” chain running from Hopkins via Merton to me. Though I know that the later Merton poo-pooed the romantic enthusiasm of the Seven Storey Mountain, it really was just the thing for the young convert (the author himself being a young convert). There has been plenty of time for me to get jaded and cynical about the Church in the subsequent years, but there was something true about that initial starry-eyed love that I found in the young Merton, something that remains true for me to this day, under the layers of cynicism. And I suspect it remained true for Merton as well, since he was to the end of his days nothing if not a romantic.
Merton’s impact on American Catholicism is legendary. His “Seven Storey Mountain” drew so many to the RCC and the monasteries entertained boom times. It is a true irony that the right and left claim him as their own. That is likely due to the evolution in his thought. He started out quite orthodox and ended up on the other side of the spectrum. Hopefully, he can help everyone meet.
Barth is an interesting case with reference to Catholicism in the 20th century. At first a vocal critic of Rome he mellowed with the help of his dealings with Hans Kung whose landmark thesis on justification Barth found reconcilable with his view of the subject. This led to the joint declaration on justification between Lutherans and the Vatican. http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/documents/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_31101999_cath-luth-joint-declaration_en.html
But good old Romanita would not acknowledge the assiduous and groundbreaking work that Kung did. In its mantra of “damnatio memoria” it manages to destroy its prophets even if it begrudgingly learns from them. http://books.google.com/books?id=AT48-nPbbagC&pg=PA144&lpg=PA144&dq=hans+kung+on+vatican+lutheran+statement+on+justification&source=web&ots=ZxA0i9wv0_&sig=7IbFGWCDAh_Y9ZyjhUk4BB2WKbI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result
Barth is obviously the greatest theologian of the last century. He was able to recycle vast amounts of biblical and Christian tradition in beautiful prose and in such as way as to make it persuasive to the modern mind.
However, there is a limit to Barth’s immense achievement, and that is its traditio-centrism. The vision it projects of Scripture, of Christ, and of God remains Eurocentric and restorationist in a subtle way. Today Christianity seeks to understand itself afresh in dialogue with other cultures and religions, and as it does so the residue of ecclesiastical stuffiness that still hovers in the Barthian air begins to evaporate. Taking the historical, literary and cultural critical retrieval of the scriptural authors and their world far more seriously than Barth ever did, theologians are breaking the bread of Scripture in new ways, so that it nourishes the real life struggles of living human beings is a more vital manner.