February 4, 1964
Father Abbot got back on the first. Brother Finbarr made his profession on the [Feast of the] Purification. There were slight changes in the Liturgy (distribution of candles by Sacristan). I was late and was in the back–in fact in the Abbot’s Matin stall, with the brothers. The Abbot has said little or nothing about the Chapter. He arrived home ahead of a letter dictated on tape, which is coming by boat and contains all his news. It is evidently news at which he is immensely pleased and I know from other sources (Father Gregory Borgstedt, O.S.B., who has come from the Prairies Monastery in Manitoba) that the plan to put all the brothers in white habits exactly like the choir has gone through–or has gone through again. I am not exactly clear as to where these things go when they “go through.” Last time apparently it was “accepted” and now it is to be “presented to the congregation” or something. But in any event the cellar full of white habits which Dom James ordered two years ago will now be put on. And the brown habits which are falling to pieces will be put off and away. In my opinion this change is really silly.
In the first place many of the brothers themselves do not want it. And those who do, have perhaps a strange reason for wanting it. I do not really know where the idea originated and the reasons for it have never clearly been given, except the cliché about “all one family” which is used to explain anything that does not have a more specific explanation of its own. I have no objection whatever to the “one family” idea. On the contrary I think that in reality the white habit is going to defeat this purpose more than help it. It is simply resorting to blanket uniformity, a kind of totalizing, a reduction of differences, rather than an integration. In point of fact, I think the difference in habit, as the difference in schedule and manner of life between the two groups, had a profound importance for unity. Psychologically and spiritually the effect of “complementarity”–of two groups needing one another, completing one another by definite and useful functions, had and has a great deal of meaning both for brothers and choir. It made possible a sense of relationship, of mutual interdependence, which had great significance for unity. It produced an organic unity, living. It is being replaced by a juridical unity, a unity on paper. And it certainly seems that the whole thing will go further and that the two lives will be reduced to a uniform observance, with the brothers more and more involved in choir and withdrawn from work. This is what more of them, or more of the real brothers, actually want–quite the contrary. The impression I get is that the serious and very earnest desires of those who have genuine brothers’ vocations are being ignored, and that a very beautiful way of life–a very monastic way, perhaps a more authentic monastic life than that of the “choir monk”–is being quietly done away with.
February 7, 1964. St. Romuald
Cold wind, dark sky and sleet. 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 destinée” [“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 pour-soi, 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.
Sartre is right in seeing the puerility and unreality of Baudelaire’s supposed Catholicism. This is a very hard, honest and objective book. One has a hard time not agreeing with it–and I do whenever I understand it. It is tiresome in its sustained, uninterrupted intensity not even broken into chapters, barely into paragraphs. Existentialism and Zen are here at one in condemning subjectivity and self-contemplation and I am with them too. It remains to be seen how much of himself Sartre was analyzing in Baudelaire. A recent autobiographical piece of his may show. Show what? That we are all to some extent alike in our failure to be free. And some start more handicapped than others.
Curious that I have more (good) reactions to the article on the Shakers in the January Jubilee than to almost any such thing I have written. Also quite a few (well, three or four) references already to the letter on “Ecclesiastical Baroque” in this week’s Commonweal.19 One woman thought that because I was against covering priests with lace, I was attacking women.
3:15 p.m. Right on time the SAC plane from the base in upper New York flies low over the hills, slowly, ponderously and lightly as a shark in water, making the wide turn, in relative quiet, pretending we are God knows what city in Russia. Or whatever else it is they pretend to do. Perhaps they are looking for strange things in our afternoon sky where there are only a few pale grey and blue clouds (clouds as there used to be over the Channel at tea time when the Boulogne boat pulled into Folkestone).
Brother Alcuin with his frightened calf look ready to leave, ready to tear off into any field, has decided to try to make it in the Laybrothers and so took the brown habit today, and is more pleased, a little more relaxed, wandering about, hoping for approval. I hope he makes it.
Simone de Beauvoir in her ethic of ambiguity (a harsh ethic where faults are never expiable) sums up Christian ethics thus: “The divine law is imposed on the believer from the moment he decides to save his soul.” But that is exactly the opposite of the truth. Justis non est lex posita. [Laws are not made for those who keep them.] Let us see whether Paul is not as good an existentialist as she is! And do we “decide to save” anything? If we do we soon find out how much we are capable of saving. To save one’s soul (object) is in fact to seem to have it as an object to save (“He that would save his soul must lose it”). I find considerable moral beauty in the idea (if I have grasped it rightly) that man who seeks vainly to “be” in the fullest sense, and to exist in default of perfect being, merely coincides with himself in existence, in that his existence becomes a revelation of being for others. This is a very pure notion. It is the function of liberty to make this acceptance. There is a very Christian temper in this existential attitude. We would say in sacrificing his desire to be absolute, man reveals the world to itself as the place of man’s meeting with the glory of God in freedom. (The “glory of God,” the Shek inah, not as an object.)
February 8, 1964
When lists are being made of sheep and goats in present-day Catholicism, [Georges] Bernanos is always sheep and angel, at least if you are liberal and forward looking. But the trouble is that in politics one may doubt that he was at times more liberal than anyone on the right wing. Actually, he is complex, inconsistent, “un imaginatif” [“an imaginitive person”], and though his “grandes lumières” [“great lights”] are, certainly, against Franco, much of the time he is singing lamentations over the modern world and harking back to a medieval and monarchic Europe. I can certainly sympathize with his lamentations–I have sung a few myself–but lamentations are useless. They say nothing. They are laudable expressions of feeling but one gets tired of them if one does not share the exact woe: and Bernanos’ woes are all of ancient date, and have much concentrated on his will and daily manifestations of iniquity (real enough, if you like). I have here his Chemin de la croix des armes–written about France in World War II. It is often tedious. Perhaps something to refer to. So much vehemence, so much overflowing anger, over the daily misdeeds of a futile, deluded old man like Pétain. And yet he is right–and really on the side of the a
ngels in denouncing the impotence of the old guard who did not believe in man, after what man had sacrificed under him at Verdun (p. 139). His “goût du malheur” [“unfortunate taste”]–a fine analysis! After years of being passed over, he takes his bitterness for strength. Bernanos is accused of being merely anti-democratic. But is this true? This is not just lamentation, or archaism. Maybe his ideas of honor, etc. are not so crazy as they seem! It is a question of paying for things with ourself and not with one’s money–or someone else’s.
“Toute la liberté de l’homme est dans l’honneur, et c’est l’honneur qui nous faire libre.” [“All the liberty of man is in honor, and it is honor which makes us free.”] Is this just theater? Not at all. In the context ([Neville] Chamberlain and Munich) it is sober realism. And his criticism of the French hierarchy for supporting Vichy? It is aimed at Cardinal Suhard, remember!20 Bernanos may not be a great “liberal” but he is there to remind us of the complexity of life and the uselessness of labels. A couple of pages he wrote in January 1942, on General de Gaulle and on the whole situation are not only honest but prophetic. I am sure he would no more be a “Gaulliste” today than he was then, but he had the situation summed up as well as anyone could have done it. And in the very middle of it all he declares himself a royalist.
February 10, 1964
Thick wet snow-with occasional thunder of jet planes above the snow clouds. Forty hours. Some faculty and students from the College of the Bible [Lexington, Kentucky] were here last evening, and then I was up with the novices for night adoration–quiet, peaceful, an untimely mosquito in the dark, well-warmed church.
Simone de Beauvoir has this to say, which corrects so many of the clichés 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)
The question is the “open future” in Luther’s telling critique of religious vows. He is right, if the vows are not lived fully and freely. Simply to enclose oneself in the “given” is no glory to God.
February 11, 1964. Our Lady of Lourdes
Crisp snow, cold happy stars. Reading an ad about caffé espresso with rum in it, lured by delights! Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. Thought of caffé Ronricco is a Mardi Gras indulgence. Deliberate, too!
Brother Alcuin seems happier in the Brothers. Brother Denis unwillingly and under compulsion writes rather good book reviews. I learn more and more to respect the mystery of other people’s hesitations, so I will not push him to write more. He is translating a piece by [Irenée] Hausherr on Hesy–chasm. The other day I got a fine letter from Sister Prisca at Regina Laudis [Abbey, Bethlehem, Connecticut] about a visit she and another Sister had made to the Shaker Community at Sabbathday Lake in Maine. It was a very touching and beautiful meeting, full of authentic religious meaning and deep charity.
The warmth and beauty of Anselm’s early letters are most helpful and salutary to one. How I need such exempla [examples]. Yet how impossible ever to be quite even that any more. Our charity must have a different style, as warm, but with less amplitude I suppose, a simpler expression.
My own letters–the result of harassed efforts to respond to all kinds of strangers everywhere. Of course there are too many to write to, or even to get Brother Dunstan to write to. To some, and to friends, and to publishers, and to magazine people, I must write, but it is hard to make sense in every letter, and typing is difficult because of my numb left hand, and sleepy arm. All the people who send books. I have several books Etta Gullick sent from Oxford and have not got to any of them yet (except to look at the selection from Anglican texts by P[aul] E[lmer] More). Then there is the tract on ecstasy Zalman Schachter sent [Lou Jacobs, Tract on Ecstasy, 1963]. He wants me to mark it up and pass it on to Gerald Heard. I have not begun to read it and have a kind of distaste for the idea of it. I am glutted with books and with a million trifles besides–articles on this and that. I balk at reading about Panama. I have had enough. (Yet I will read it because I am obliged in conscience to know at least vaguely what is happening.) Panama, Zanzibar, Cypress (Costas Papademas wrote from there, he flew back at Christmas). Kenya (Joy French wrote from there today–first time I have seen the new stamp of the independent nation) and then “the freeze” (on nuclear weapons) and various iniquities in Washington, and nonsense in Viet Nam (new dictator), so on and so on. Does one read about all this? Enough! Thank God tomorrow is Lent. I am glutted.
However, we are having (at my suggestion) a good article on the miners at Hazard, Ky., read in refectory. Father Raymond does not read it seriously, hams it [up], is a bit foolish with it. But it is a good article, witty, objective, compassionate, and not deluded by the revival of myths out of the old days, the thirties. A much more sinister problem. Not the old simple forthright business of miners and operators and union. The union is on the side of big operators against small operators–and miners have everyone against them.
Father Gregory Borgstedt was here from Mt. Saviour last week and today a week ago I wrote out notes that Dom Damasus [Winzen] will take personally to Pope Paul. Dom Damasus asked me for them–ideas on monastic reform.
Today constant snow, ever so blinding, pale-bright-blue sky such as I have sometimes seen in England on rare days in East Anglia. All the trees heavy with snow, and the hills hanging like white clouds in the sky. But much of the snow has melted off the trees and there is a slight mist over the sunny valley. No jets, for a wonder! Only a train off towards Lebanon. Quiet afternoon! Peace! May this Lent be blessed with emptiness and peace and faith. (The woods echo with distant crows. A hen sings out happily at Andy Boone’s, and snow falling from the trees makes the woods sound as though they were full of people walking through the bushes.)
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)
February 13, 1964
St. Stephen of Grandmont today. A saint in whom no one is interested, and who will probably disappear from the new calendar.
One of the great discoveries and graces of this year has been Abbot Ammonas. A magnificent primitive spirituality, the best of the ancient Egyptians (with Anthony, whom he succeeded as Abbot of Pisgar). We have him in the Patrologia Orientalis, printed in 1913–no one has done anything with it. Ammonas is not even in the dictionaries (except Dictionaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques [Paris, 1912–]). Hausherr refers to him frequently, however. He should be translated and I might write an article on him. Grace of Lent. Thinking this morning of the meaning of covenant in my life. Ammonas on striving for the gift of the Spirit.
St. Anselm, to a monk–to meditate on death and then: “Ab inceptis ergo nulla lassitudine deficias, sed potius quae tibi expediunt et quae nondum es agres-sus, in spe superni auxilii pro amore beatipraemi incipias, ut ad sanctorum beatum consortium Christo ducente pervenias.” [“Do not let laziness stop you from what you have begun; rather, begin doing what you need to do, and what you have not yet done, out of love for a blessed reward, and in hope of divine help, so that, with Christ as your guide, you may arrive at the blessed fellowship of the saints.”] (Epistle 35.Schmitt III.143)
February 14, 1964
“Adeo namque vilis mens mea quasi quadam naturali arctatur angustia bonaeque voluntatis languet imbecilitate, ut uni quamlibet parvae curae ceteris exclusis tota non sufficiat, et cuislibet oneris tentationisque gravedine victa succumbat.” [“My poor mind is, as it were, shut up by some natural anguish and langui
shes in the weakness of good will, so that my entire mind does not suffice, all other things being neglected, even for those matters of small moment, and my mind has succumbed to the pressure of every burden and temptation.”]
(Anselm, Epistle 50, [Schmitt] p. 163)
I feel the same “naturalis angustia” [“natural tension”], not that I am as busy as Anselm. Fasting clears the head and lessens the angustia, also brings order into one’s life. I think I will try to work on Chuang Tzu finally, but all my resolutions about work go out the window. I never seem to do what I plan. Yesterday though, I finally finished going over the material to be typed for Seasons of Celebration. Don’t know whether it is good or not. About on a level with the New Man.
February 17, 1964
After a rainy weekend, warmer days (first week of heat). Yesterday there was a meadowlark in St. Edmund’s field (broad sweep of grass and alfalfa with a few oaks against the cloudy sky, on the distant hillside). Today, song sparrows around the beehives. (Daniel Rops book, another one, in the refectory, mentioned medicinal qualities of honey and its part in the diet of the promised Land). Wrote to Manuel Mantero in Madrid and Costas Papademas in Cypress–and Naomi Burton [Stone] in New York (she is worried about that World’s Fair text). I have been reading [Edward] Schillebeeckx and he is really remarkable! Best theologian writing today, I believe.
A group of students from Asbury [Theological Seminary] was here today and I saw them briefly before None.
February 18, 1964
“Ut apud te mens nostra tuo depiderisfuequat quae si carnis maceratione cangiat.” [Merton’s loose translation follows.] The desire and need to be clothed in the light of the Spirit when in fact I am clothed in shame (and yet I see the shame itself also as grace!!). The wonderful power of the Letters of Ammonas and his mystical doctrine. It is to me impressive, beyond all the others, beyond John of the Cross and [Meister] Eckhart, not to say the lesser ones. It is the pure doctrine of Christian monastic mysticism.
Dancing in the Water of Life Page 11
