“God is where God isn’t”: Thomas Merton’s Letter to KC on Unbelief
[Thomas Merton’s letters, as improvised and grammatically
unkempt as they often are, reveal his “religious consciousness” at
certain periods of his life in ways his edited published works could
not. This letter is one of the most “revealing” of his private thought
under his published thoughts. One also notices how seriously he
connected with strangers who wrote to him. Merton virtuously and
exquisitely practiced “monastic hospitality”.]
November 10, 1966, To Katharine Champney
You ask a very relevant question which I probably cannot answer. If I
assure you that I am only thinking as I go along, improvising maybe,
you will understand that I am not really claiming to know much more
about it than you do, and am certainly not in a position to clean up
“problems”, religious or otherwise, with a wave of the hand. All I can
say is that I think I am looking at it from a vantage point which is not
yours and not that of your religious friends either. Whether I can make
that comprehensible or not, I don’t know. But let me say at the outset:
there are many reasons why I think the whole question of whether or not
one is a believer has become an impossible one to handle—and whether or
not it matters. Of course, in the abstract, it matters, it is crucial,
it is the question, etc., etc. (at least I know that the choice
is presented that way). But in the concrete, historically, there has
been much noise and confusion and the whole thing has become so
impossibly obscure (what with all the fighting and nonsense there has
been) that, to my mind, anyone who has never had serious doubts has
something the matter with him. You should doubt. When your
friends say they think you are a believer, they are paying you the
compliment of saying you respect the truth enough to be honest about it,
and, if you can’t see something, you don’t say you see it.
Now that is precisely it. That is precisely what I do, too. Believing is not only not seeing,
but it is also a staunch refusal to say you see what you don’t see. I
was a non-believer until the day it dawned on me that the absolute void
of nothingness, in which I could not possibly see anything or hear
anything, was also the absolute fullness of everything. This was not so
much a religious insight as a metaphysical or Zen-like one, and the
religious implications followed later, without changing the essentially
negative view (since there cannot possibly be an adequate idea of God).
To put it crudely, your “unnamed something”, without ceasing to be pure
Nothing, suddenly ran over me like a truck. The trouble with saying this
is that it may just confuse things more: so let me make it clear that I
am not suggesting that you have to wake up one morning feeling
that way. I am just saying that this is the way it is metaphysically
(being is structured like this) and some people may have a special
capacity for realizing it, which maybe I have, being a poet, a person
able to cope with religious myth, familiar with religious and literary
traditions, etc., etc., etc. But that doesn’t mean anything, and it does
not change the fact that, if you don’t see it, it doesn’t matter.
“Alone.” But I am utterly alone in the Void. God is not an “object” I
am “with” and it is useless to listen to “hear him”—just as useless as
trying to see the eyes you see with. You just see, and everything falls
into place. Again, if you don’t, it doesn’t matter. You obviously have
some other way of getting at it. Your formulation “unnamed something
that at once binds us together…” is the same as the “ground of my-our
being.” It is a philosophical rather than a religious insight, okay.
Now, you will be irritated with me and I think I have got away with
the dirty trick I promised I would not play: that I am insidiously
robbed you of your unbelief. That I have elevated you in spite of
yourself to the cozy level of believers. No, I have not. You are an
unbeliever. The only thing is that I am also, but in a different way.
You will come back at me, and of course, if you read some of my (early)
books, you will point out that I have given evidence of a whole
superstructure of religious ideas, meditations, experiences, and so on.
What people don’t seem to notice is that in the same breath, as I say
all these things, I also say “but that is not it”.
So the position where I am is different from yours only in this: that
I am perfectly happy with traditional religious concepts, I can use
them, I see how far they go, and—I also see that they really go nowhere.
No matter what you say, no matter what you experience, no matter how
often you “hear” God, etc., etc., it is all zero. It is nothing. It is
misleading. It is a bum steer, except for those who understand it in the
right way. In the end we all get back more or less to where you are in
the first place, “un-named something…” Of course, there is Christ. But
“He emptied Himself taking the form of a servant…the death of the
Cross…” This is the same reduction of the whole thing to zero, to
unnamed something, you don’t know what it is, you have no control over
it, you can’t call out and be answered at will, you have no right to
expect an answer anyway (“you” now means me too). In a word, the fact
that I am a believer does not give me in any way the kind of advantage
you assume: that I am entitled to voices and consolations which are
denied you.
All I am entitled to is my particular direction, which is a straight
line into the void and the wilderness without having to look over my
shoulder and see whether anyone else is coming along. I know plenty of
people are coming along: people like you, who are in the same
wilderness, but who can’t quite understand it in the same way. And
honestly, I don’t think it matters. The “consolations of religion” are
something that, in your concrete case, you are just as well without—if
they are going to mislead you into thinking you have got something when
you have them.
That is my quarrel with religious people. They are selling answer and
consolations. They are in the reassurance business. I give you
reassurance whatever except that I know your void and I am in it, but I
have a different way of understanding myself in it. It is not that much
more delightful. But it does to me make a great deal of sense—for me. I
will say this, that it is to me after all reassuring to be able to run
into Zen people and Moslem masters and so on and realize we understand
each other perfectly. And I hasten to say that you don’t have to feel
all that alone either. Incidentally, in an earlier and less chastened
version of that article, I said that really I felt much more at home
with unbelievers than with believers.** In a sense I do. But I can’t
that easily evade the embarrassment that Church people cause in me
perpetually.
So, friend Katherine, I am not Father Merton inside the warm Church
calling you to come and sit by the fire of positive thinking or
something. I am out in the cold with you because (forgive the flip
saying) God is where He isn’t. And maybe that’s where the Church is, too
(when all the miters are off and the vestments are hung in the closet).
I won’t run on anymore, but I think I have said enough to make clear
that I think the whole business of faith and the message of faith is in
the process of finding a whole new language—or of shutting up
altogether. Hence the answer to your question: if God does not speak to
you, it is not your fault, and it is not His fault, it is the fault of
the whole mentality that creates the impression that He has to be
constantly speaking to people. Those who are the loudest to affirm they
hear Him are people not to be trusted. But, nevertheless, there is a way
of understanding that non-hearing is hearing. Maybe it is all too
subtle.
**See Merton’s articles “The Unbelief of Believers” and “Apologies to an Unbeliever” in the collection Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968)
[Thomas Merton Witness to Freedom: Letters in Times of Crisis. William H. Shannon, editor (New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994): 327-329]
