Thomas Merton

In Merton’s writings we have many insights into his lifetime of seeking God, and the changes to his perceptions of what that seeking meant. It was his perception of what it means ‘to know God’ that changed and became purified.

In the early years Merton showed a great interest on the role of human reason in coming to know God, and that to accept God’s existence was intellectually acceptable. The word ‘aseitas’ in the book by Etienne Gilson – a book that awakened the seeking of God in Merton, leapt out at him. This is Merton’s definition of what aseitas means:

‘… the power of a being to exist absolutely in virtue of itself, not as caused by itself, but as requiring no cause, no other justification for its existence except that its very nature is to exist. There can be only one such Being: that is God.’

In other words, God exists whether you or I believe in him or not! Taking on this God of reason released Merton from what he had long thought, which is that God is a mere projection of people’s fears and desires and ideals. God was real. Moving to the monastery Merton continued with this scholasticism, and the idea of ‘the reasonableness of Christian faith in God’, but soon there emerges a different emphasis in his journals which is on a more simple, existential approach to the reality of God. As William Shannon writes:

‘… it was not proving the existence of God that mattered so much as experiencing God’s presence … he sought a God to whom his heart could respond…. All his life Merton remained faithful to this intuition. In talking about God we have to rely on experience and we must not be afraid to trust that experience.’

Merton is up for relationship with God who is experienced as present, and who calls for a response. This is the God of revelation who speaks to people perhaps through the Scriptures, meditative reading, and events. Merton’s God, is one involved in a personal relationship, and so this is also the God of the mystic.

William Shannon writes how Merton understood the true God as ‘One who is present’ – through the Scripture and through the Name, but also how Merton was drawn to the theology of the Face. In a letter to Abdul Aziz – a Sufi friend Merton describes his prayer life as:

‘centred on attention to the presence of God … it is not “thinking about” anything but a direct seeking of the Face of the Invisible which cannot be found unless we become lost in Him who is invisible.’

Merton in a journal had written twenty years earlier how his one desire was for solitude and ‘to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of his Face.’

Shannon notes that Merton’s thinking moves consistently towards nondualism and a holistic understanding of reality where God is the centre of that reality: ‘that center Who is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’

This searching for the true God is part of our nature and all of God’s creation – the ‘hidden Ground of Love’ – the One from whom we all come, all are sustained and in whom we all live. And Merton reminds us God cannot be explained: ‘His presence cannot be verified, as we would verify a laboratory experiment.’