Good letter from Amiya Chakravarty about Sally Donnelly’s essay and my introduction4 which he likes.
I am reading Ishi – which Doris Dana sent. A heartrending book about the last of the Yahi Indians – victims of genocide a hundred years ago. What a frightening past this country has – and yet people admire it. True, not all were vigilantes and a lot of Ranchers protested against the indiscriminate massacre. So later Vietnam today! An Indian war!
February 1, 1967
As I expected, the answer on going to France was “No.” And I do not in the least mind not going. But I was irritated and frustrated by the complicated mixture of emotionalism and hypocrisy of the answer. Dom J. could not simply forbid me to go – he started out saying his five page letter (all this was done by notes back and forth) was only his “humble advice.” But it quickly ran to a pitch of shrill reproach and recrimination. How could I dare to ask such a dreadful thing? It was obviously a temptation of the devil. This could not come from the Holy Spirit etc. etc. So by this logic Dom Columban, his higher superior, is the devil. Interesting!
With such emotionalism there is no argument and no discussion, so I simply let it drop. But really this note represents a progressive deterioration in the man. This is worse than it was before – more irrational, more emotional, more convinced of the utter infallibility of his own personal determination – and yet strangely insincere, shaken by departures of men like Finbar (whom he “loved” in his strange emotional and rather nauseous way) or Mark.
The thing that troubles me is that this man is really sick. I ought not to have thrown his note away – should have passed it on to Jim Wygal for his evaluation.
Another point: not only the high-pitched excitement and fury of the tone, but the literal repetition of all the same ideas he has uttered mechanically over and over for forty years – as if they were relevant discoveries applicable to this case.
I have to be careful of this man. And I can see where the case of Gethsemani is serious. The effect of someone like that – on top of the insanities of the past, can be fatal. I am surprised things are not far worse than they are. What is to be done? Higher Superiors can do nothing about him (he is shrewd to play his cards right with them and never give them an opening).
February 2, 1967. Purification
Dawn. It was a warm night – 60 when I got up. And now there is lightning, thunder, rain. Which means this is another day when Pee Wee McGruder will not come and start digging my well.
February 3, 1967
A bizarre thing. Ishi (the Yahi Indian about whom I am reading in the book Doris Dana sent) – liked the song “The Road to Mandalay.” I remember myself being shattered and heartbroken by it as a child. Now I realize that “Mandalay” must be somewhere around the Gulf of Tonkin – Hanoi, Haiphong etc. Disconcerting. The song itself is a bit stupid – British soldier – Asian woman, generous dose of sado-masochism etc. Still a sad song of loneliness and division. I remember being crushed too, at the age of 7 or 8, at a movie about this love of a westerner and an Asian (Japanese? Indochinese?) woman who eventually walked into the sea and committed suicide, and asking myself, “But why did it have to be like that?” For some inscrutable reason the westerner could not just love the Asian, he had to be for her a sign of death. And to me this spelled utter tragedy and uncomprehending despair.
Yesterday it got cold in the afternoon. Rain, sleet, snow. I walked in the woods, came home, built a fire, made tea, read a good urbane book of Viscount [John Julius] Norwich on Athos [Mount Athos (New York, 1966)]. He thinks Athos is in hopeless shape and doomed to end completely. I suppose he is right.
February 4, 1967
Finished Ishi. A moving book. The best and the worst in America comes out in it. The furious stupidity and violence of vigilantes and the warm, touching friendliness of scholars. And Ishi who is the “real America” – at least who has the valid claim to be the America that was created natural.
Had to go to town yesterday. A disappointing day. Dr. Mitchell will operate on my bursitis at the end of the month. Had lunch and sat around at Tommie O’Callaghan’s – worrying about Dan Walsh and her own relatives in trouble etc. Hoped to get in touch with M. but couldn’t, and I do see that it is time to stop fooling, finally, with letters and phone calls. Should have stopped months ago.
I picked up Faulkner’s Essays, Speeches and Pub[lic] Letters [ed. James B. Meriwether (New York, 1965)] at the library. Some of his worst writing is here. But I’ll still read anything and everything that’s his. In the Holiday [April 1954] essay on “Mississippi” he sounds sometimes like our Fr. Peter – vain, double and involved.
And I reflect on my own writing. Everyone now goes about declaring I have written too much and implying this is the last reason for not reading me – but in fact my own recent writing – the last three years – has been in some ways the best. I am sure there are plenty of people who read it (Amiya Chakravarty says the Smith girls do – and I also get letters about it). Still, there is no need whatever to go on churning out a book a year and sometimes two.
Yesterday in town, talking to Tommie, about all the current issues – the Pill, the Catholic Schools and all that – I realize how out of touch I am with what concerns married people trying to live in the city, which is all right. I am precisely supposed to be out of touch with those particular problems. But I need to be more definite in my mind: not imagining I have to try to “keep up” with everything. Stay moderately informed – and go on quietly doing my own job. People need me to be a contemplative and not a newspaper man.
Coming back from dinner at the monastery – under a very black and cold sky, with a black and cold heart. I realized again how much illusion there has been in me all these last months. The beautiful illusions – surrounding a core of reality – in my love for M. have not really made me happy – or her either (I feel her life is probably far more complicated and unhappy than mine). And though the love was real, yet it was (is) also full of unreality, deception and unhappiness. I have been desperately using it to give my life “value” – as if my worth consisted in loving her and being loved by her. But this is an illusion. Love is good, but only so far as it proceeds from a real person. What value I have does not come to me separated from the outside. And there is no sense trying to depend on this or that state of mind – whether human love or spiritual fervor – to make my life seem meaningful. The reality is quite other: my life is meaningful in itself, because it is life, quite apart from explanations and notifications – or appeals to what someone thinks of me, or what my work is supposed to mean. Being separated from her and trying to live on “love” is nothing more than living in imagination and memory. A dream. A source of deep unhappiness. I am beginning to see it clearly now.
Theokistos – a hermit who died on Patmos in 1917 – said, “When I was in the world I saw people trying to do good: but they were doing harm. Then I saw there was nothing left for me but to go off alone. In that way I would not harm anyone else. I pray God to pardon my sins and take me finally to heaven. I am going to die and I must appear before him.” This strikes me as very real and solid, as opposed to the confusion and vagueness of so many aspirations that are mistaken for realities now! A lot of fussiness with good intentions: and no awareness that this can do irreparable harm.
February 6, 1967
The community is on retreat. So am I in a different way (not going to conferences). Spoke with Fr. Claude Peifer, the retreat master, briefly last evening.
Yesterday (Sunday) was out in the woods – reading [Irenée] Hausherr’s Penthos [Rome, 1944]. A nice sunny, quiet afternoon. I find I can at last relax my desperate grip on the image of M. and of her love. Obviously I still love her, but there is no point in insisting that we are still “in love,” though maybe we still are, up to a point. Certainly things have changed very much since September (when I called her from the booth in Bardstown that afternoon everything was still charged with all the power of our love). But I see it is folly and infidelity
for us to try to keep it going even in my own heart now. I need simply to let go and move on. And that is what I am doing. Not kicking myself in the pants for being a fool, or resenting anything (I don’t – even the fact that she has a pile of utterly ridiculous letters from me!!) – and still retaining a warm and deep affection for her – (I can’t help doing that – my love has been far too deep to be abandoned). Not forgetting either my permanent responsibility to her. Certainly I can never go back to what I was before. I can never again be the person that did not know or love her in a deep, mysterious way, because we gave ourselves to each other almost as if we were married.
Monasticism. I see more and more the danger of identifying the monastic vocation and spirit with a particular kind of monastic consciousness – a particular tradition, however “authentic.” A monasticism limited to the medieval western – or worse still Byzantine – tradition cannot survive. It is utterly finished. I very much wonder how much of the Rule of St. Benedict can survive in practice. This is a very serious question. Maybe monasticism needs to be stated all over again in a new way. I have no way of knowing how to tackle this idea. It is just beginning to dawn on me.
I did a “graph” of my work – the biggest ups and downs were in the beginning.5 The lowest plunge was too “awful” in 1950 with What Are These Wounds? In the fifties the writing was consistently indifferent but got better in the end and most of my best work has been since 1957.
I would say I would be much better off if I had published only these:
Thirty Poems
Seven Storey Mountain
Seeds of Contemplation
Tears of Blind Lions
Sign of Jonas
Silent Life
New Man
Thoughts in Solitude
Wisdom of Desert
Disputed Questions
New Seeds of Contemplation
Seeds of Destruction? [inserted later]
Chuang Tzu
Emblems of a Season of Fury
Raids on Unspeakable
Conjectures of G[uilty] B[ystander]
That’s 15 – plenty. But yet the others too – some of them – had something in them that had to be got out of my system I guess.
February 7, 1967. St. [Romuald]. Shrove Friday
“The road from the preaching of Jesus to the Church might well, from a certain perspective, be called ‘history’s greatest anti-climax’: for it is a road from a moment of ecstatic eschatological expectation to its supposed appropriation but actual negation in an institutional and hierarchical system.”
[p. 52]
So Rosemary Ruether in her ms. [The Church Against Itself, 1967] on the Church which she has lent me. More or less following [Alfred Firmin] Loisy. I have to admit this is the big problem – the problem we Catholics have all dutifully and obediently refused to face: and now we have to face it. Facing it does not mean “leaving the Church” à la Charles Davis, but there must be a groping for unambiguousness somewhere. Every day the experience of life in the monastery under Dom James shows the equivocal nature of our “Church” experience. By God’s mercy there is a truth here in spite of all that is done against it in His Name. But the distortions, the evasions, the perversion of love into power and resentment, and all the virtues of mimicry and practice … All of these slowly strangling hope until in the end a final despair has to be embraced as the ultimate hope. True, one is driven to Jesus in desperation. The place imposes a dark night of inhumanity in which one is forced to cling to something beyond all this – or perish.
In her letter Rosemary challenges my solitude, but not understanding it, I think. She is very Barthian – which is why I trust her. There is a fundamental Christian honesty about her theology – its refusal to sweep evil under the rug and its “No” to phony incarnationalism. And above all she knows where the real problem lies: the Church.
My feeling is that we shall not solve this problem ourselves (how could we? We are too much a part of it!), but events will bring on a crisis that will smash all facades. Maybe in the ruins of the great institutional idol we will recover something of our Christian truth.
“The disparity between the original message of Jesus and its subversion by the institutional Church is the unsolved (and unsolved because chiefly unaccepted) dilemma of Church history.”
The problem includes in part the fact that the Resurrection and Outpouring of the Spirit were turned into historic rather than eschatological events (history-ending events) and became a big birthday of an institution.
And yet the fact of an historic “interval” invites an institutional salvation-machine to get in there and fill the gap – to meet the “threat of history.” Well, this frantic effort to “meet the threat of history” was never so frantic as today. The Church “handles history by expelling the Spirit.”
February 9, 1967
Yesterday, Ash Wednesday, after one of the coldest nights of the winter (down to about 10) the sun came out a little and in the afternoon when I came back from a walk in the woods I found four golden crocuses had come out of the ground in front of the hermitage.
Reading Rosemary Ruether’s ms. on the Church. One point she makes is completely convincing: when the “glory of the Spirit” becomes a purely historic event which underwrites all the Church’s institutional activities throughout the rest of history, when the Spirit becomes a “thing” owned and operated by the church, then the Spirit sits in judgment on the very Church that desires to be guided by it. Then you get the demonic parodies of power and holiness which make the institution of Church so frightening and repugnant: and yet the Spirit is there nevertheless for the well-meaning and the deluded. (This is more my own anxious paraphrase and formulation.) But this I think is true: “The historification of the Spirit and the Risen Lord as a past mandate for the historical institution spells the death of the Church’s freedom for grace.”
However, our struggle in and with this institution is a great grace.
When it comes to her christology – she is neo-modernist I guess – I wonder if after all she does not raise problems – or accept those which have been raised by Bultmann etc. – that have no solution in the terms in which she deals with them. There is something seemingly quite arbitrary about the Kerygmatic “Christ of Faith” and who is to say when there is and is not “faith”? And when the Christ of faith is present to faith? In the end doesn’t it all come down to pious hopes and devout imaginings?
I get more and more uneasy feeling that now we are being summoned to a decision for Christ on the basis of the fact that someone who says God is dead has also “decided for Christ” – and he is published each week in a different magazine. But five years from now he will be forgotten and someone else who has taken his plan will have decided for some other figure, or idea, or drug, or kick, or something.
Flannery O’Connor’s Hazel Motes was logical about all this. He started with a Church without Christ and then when nobody joined him he blinded himself and sat in silence – at least some kind of conclusion. The others evade this by a perpetual inconclusiveness – which means in the end perpetual motion and chatter.
The really big problem: the fact that when the apostolic generation died out, the Church had to completely re-interpret the primitive eschatology according to which the old eon was finished, the Kingdom had begun and the end of history has arrived. But history went on, and the Church found herself a place in it. And it eventually became a very definite and solid plan. But is all this the fruit of repeated unconscious acts of bad faith and semi-deliberate cheating? Rosemary R. says no, it was just a practical way of asking the best of things – of getting through an uncomfortable predicament. But she does not get away from the objection of a radical break in continuity between apostolic and post-apostolic theology when eschatological theology was abandoned, “tradition” became decisive, and a new incarnational theology put Christ in history in His Church – His institutional Church. According to this (Protestant) criticism, the supposed continuity of
Catholic faith with primitive apostolic faith is a pure fiction.
For her, monasticism is part of this fictional structure. It is true that monasticism was taken over rapidly by the anti-Arian movement and became an institutionalized radical elite.
Her solutions.
1. Acceptance of the breakdown of primitive eschatological Christianity.
2. Acceptance of fact that Catholicism tried to adjust by a metaphysical, incarnational, and classic world-view.
3. Acceptance of the fact that this has broken down.
4. A new tradition of primitive Christianity in existentialist-personalist terms – restoring the basic tension between history and eschatology.
5. But – this means to her in practice that eschatology becomes absorbed into history. It is no longer “literal” and “apocalyptic.” Hence there is no longer any question of life after death, of a Kingdom “as a once for all happening.”
6. She does realize that this new existentialist outlook is also “time-bound” just as the metaphysical one was … or is it the “ultimate Christian framework”?
Toward her solution – distinction between the changing doctrines and “The inner reality of Christianity (which) is apophatic because it does not lie in any deposit of knowledge, thought or historical information, but in the encounter between man and God.”
But then what is so special about the Christian message?
How is this new theology supposed to be “open to the Word of God”?
What does she mean, if anything, by this conception?
February 13, 1967
Lent is now under way. Yesterday was the First Sunday. A clear, cold afternoon. I went for a good long walk in the woods and sat for a while by that most lost and hidden pond where there are so many new pines and old fallen ones, and dead trees standing in the water.
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