Thomas Merton: Religious Critic and Apologist

Merton had the makings of a religious critic, although he was a queer mixture of critic and apologist. He knew that Christendom was a disaster, but believed that the Christian tradition itself had managed, in monasticism, to create within itself an antidote to its own poisoning.

Towards the end of his life, however, he may have grown restless with the prospect of permanent retreat. Merton had an insatiable mind and a remarkably positive and life-affirming spirit--qualities that monasticism may feed or starve, depending upon the individual monk and where a given monk might be in the arc of his particular life's journey.

In the Islamic tradition, Merton had a strong precursor in the figure of Hasan al-Basri (d. 728), a pietist and ascetic who was notable for possessing, in the words of Louis Massignon, a "realistic critical tendency" in contrast to the "idealistic tradition" that characterized other Muslim pietists [see Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press (1975), p. 31]. Al-Basri turned in disgust from the worldliness of the post-Prophetic Umayyad caliphate and envisioned the role of the dedicated Believer in a rapidly expanding and Islamicizing society in much the same way as the anonymous author of the Letter to Diognetes had envisioned the role of the Christian in late ancient polytheistic Mediterranean culture: as a kind of purifying element or "salt of the earth" [see post for 3-27-12 below]. Like Kierkegaard, Hasan understood the role of the Believer as one of contradiction and opposition, not conformity and compromise.

Merton's own studies of Muslim pietism have been collected in a single volume published by Fons Vitae: Merton & Sufism: The Untold Story: A Complete Compendium, edited by Rob Baker and Gray Henry (1999).