A Global Cultural Paradigm

doi:10.7109/HKJELL.200707.0143
Hwa Kang Journal of English Language & Literature, (13), 2007
華岡英語學報, (13), 2007
作者/Author： 吳樹德(John Wu Jr.)

頁數/Page： 143-145
出版日期/Publication Date：2007/07
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 A Global Cultural Paradigm

John Wu, Jr.

“One is shocked by the awful secularism of our day which has become a pestilence of the
spirit.” ---Merton to Abdul Aziz, Nov. 17, 1960

William Apel, Signs of Peace: The Interfaith Letters of Thomas Merton,

New York: Orbis Books, 2006, xx + 202 pp.

William Apel’s Signs of Peace: The Interfaith Letters of Thomas Merton, is more a
labor of love than a scholarly tract. It adds much to the ever-growing number of books
that continue to bring insight into the life and writings of Thomas Merton (1915-1968), the
poet/monk who was one of the best-known Trappists * of the 20th century. In his lifetime
and posthumously, Merton left behind some 60-plus works that, in addition to collections
of poetry, included the best-selling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain,
acknowledged as a classic in its genre. He also penned a substantial body of literary
essays covering, among others, Albert Camus, William Blake, James Joyce, William
Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, William Styron, Boris Pasternak, Nabokov, D. H. Lawrence,
and Aldous Huxley.
In addition to his enormous output of books, Merton wrote over 10,000 letters to
some 2100 people mostly during that last decade when the diverse elements of his life and
thought came together as he hit his literary and spiritual stride. It is very possible that the
volume of his letters may have actually exceeded his formal writings. A cursory reading
of the letters (collected in five large volumes) indicates the care which Merton took in
writing to both friends and strangers. One is struck in finding so little repetition, least of
all, formulaic missives, writing merely to answer a letter.
The only correspondent who Merton sought out ostensibly for the sake of learning
the Chinese language—which never materialized for the ever busy Merton—and the

*
According to Webster’s III: “A Trappist is a member of a reformed branch of the Roman Catholic
Cistersian Order established in 1664 at the monastery of La Trappe in Normandy and united with
the Cistersians since 1892”; “A Cistersian is a member of an austere order founded on the
Benedictine rule…at Citeaux, France, in 1098.” Merton’s community, the Abbey of Gethsemani
near Bardstown, Kentucky, established in 1848, belongs to the Cistersians of the Strict Observance
(O.C.S.O.). Its rule still maintains silence, isolation, fasts, restricted diet, and manual labor, but
many of its former austerities have been somewhat relaxed in recent years. (See glossary, pp. 408-9,
The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton: A New Directions Book, New York)
________________________________________________________________________________
Hwa Kang Journal of English Language & Literature, No. 13 (June 2007) 143-145
144 John Wu, Jr.

Chinese Classics, but specifically on a project to rework the thoughts of Chuang Tzu, the
most famous Taoist after Lao Tzu, is John C. H. Wu (the reviewer’s father). The result
was an extraordinary book The Way of Chuang Tzu, which only Merton was capable of
putting together. As their correspondence attests, John C. H. Wu was more of a catalyst
than collaborator in the creation of the book. There is a factual error when Apel writes
that the two exchanged over 30 letters when, in fact, according to the collection at
Louisville’s Bellarmine College where their two-way letters are housed, there are at least
74 items in all, making it by far the largest exchange among the interfaith letters.
Among those who contributed to philosophical understanding and harmony between
East and West, no one seems to have been more existentially involved in living the
synthesis on a deeper and broader basis than Merton himself. The monk threw himself
into dialogue with much joy and Zen-like abandonment and seemingly without an agenda
or a chip on the shoulder. William Apel does a fine job in situating the monk’s crucial
role historically: it is in his letters to these interfaith friends that Merton truly shows up.
In his missives and lived existence he becomes the ecumenist and future cultural paradigm
par excellence. One truly admirable feature in Merton is that, before he commenced
writing, not only to interfaith correspondents but generally to writers, he took great care to
read at least their major works; hence he was always abreast of their ideas and the
particular areas and nuances from which he felt dialogue could bear fruit.
One exceptional feature in the letters between Merton and his interfaith friends is the
openness and generosity of spirit that informs them. To Thich Nhat Hanh, Merton writes,
“A new mentality is needed, and this implies above all a recovery of ancient and original
wisdom.” Then, as if perfectly either echoing or anticipating the theme of mindfulness,
central to the thought and life of this Vietnamese monk—who suffered at the hands of both
North and South Vietnam—he adds, “And a real contact with what is right before our
eyes” (p. 142). In nearly all cases, there is the theme of returning to sources in order to
forge into the future, return being a concern in classical times when, for example,
Confucius sought both solace and new beginnings in the cruel times he lived with his own
insistence in seeking renewal of the present by recovering what he wisely perceived as the
perennial virtues of the past.
In a thoroughgoing review of the book, Christopher Pramuk asks rhetorically,
“Would Merton have been able…to forge these interfaith friendships had his religious
imagination not been profoundly shaped by the twin doctrines of Creation and Incarnation,
two sides, really, of the same coin?” (see “A Vocation of Unity,” Merton Seasonal, vol. 32,
no. 1, Spring, 2007)
Pramuk goes on to give support to George Kilcourse’s well-founded contention that
occasionally Merton “bailed out” or “retreated” from a “necessary theological project…to
 A Global Cultural Paradigm 145

an embarrassing degree.” Judicious as much of Pramuk’s critique is, and much as we

would prefer that the monk indeed had become more involved in “theological
investigations,” from an Asian point of view—for we must not forget that most of the
interfaith friends had their roots in East Asia and its cultures—what remains significant is
that which Kilcourse regards as Merton’s natural penchant for the “sapiential approach,”
the seeking after wisdom in a world, both East and West, which had forgotten such
traditions.
As for his “theological investigations,” the monk left a goldmine of speculations in
New Seeds of Contemplation, Raids on the Unspeakable, Conjectures of a Guilty
Bystanrde, and, especially the magnificent, free-wheeling The Inner Experience, which
includes some of Merton’s deepest and most luminous writings, surely an indispensable
groundwork for any future interfaith dialogue. Though the monk had stipulated that the
manuscript not be published in its original form, yet we should be most glad that the
Merton trustees thought otherwise for its pages are the culmination of some of his richest
thoughts.
Perhaps the real appeal of Merton was his very instinctive and intuitive grasp of an
all-encompassing link between virtue and intellectual learning, the perfect balance of daily
action and contemplation.
The trouble with the present enterprise to globalize is that it is almost entirely
commercially and economically-driven, threatening to undermine long-standing social
practices and make mirror images of all cultures by flattening out values under the
superficial or false rubric of one global village. Diversity, a quality so endemic to the
richness of past cultures, is quickly becoming antiquated and enervated items of history
whose importance now lies at the periphery rather than the vital center of cultures and
societies. Those who are most intent in preserving their traditional ways often become
unnaturally entrenched in their most conservative aspects that such practices threaten to
muffle, even to still entirely what is most dear in them because the original framework
from which such practices spring has been lost to them and possibly never to be recovered.
The chapters in the book are short—no more than 20-21 pages—and one would wish
for greater length and more meaty introductions. Yet, each chapter is suggestive and
well-constructed enough to whet our appetite and to encourage other scholars to go into
greater depth in their future research. One agrees demonstrably with Apel in his
contention that “Merton remains most alive to future generations of readers in his
correspondence,” and that the monk’s “uncanny ability to get to the heart of a matter
causes his letters, and those of his correspondents, to transcend time and space.” I do not
think this to be hyperbolic.