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Thomas Merton's Preface to The Wisdom of the Desert

Thomas Merton published The Wisdom of the Desert in 1960, his
contribution to short works collecting favorite sayings of the
Christian desert hermits, or Desert Fathers. While the selecting was
doubtless an enjoyable task, the Preface to the little ensemble
surprisingly emerges as a clear, precise and useful introduction to
eremitism as a whole.
Merton begins his introduction by asking what the hermits sought
in going to the desert, in abandoning the cities for solitude. In a
word, "salvation," he says. But Merton carefully notes that
abandoning the cities was not only abandoning the pagan character of urban life
but also abandoning their presumeably increasing Christian presence, "when the
'world' became unofficially Christian." Merton notes that
these men seem to have thought ... that there is really no such thing as a
"Christian state." They seem to have doubted that Christianity and politics
could ever be mixed to such an extent as to produce a fully Christian society
... for ... the only Christian society was spiritual and extramundane.
Merton argues that these hermits were ahead of their time, not behind it, that they
understood what was necessary -- and unnecessary -- for establishing a new society.
The line of Merton's thought may show its age in Merton's vocabulary,
describing the hermits as the new "axial" men, as "personalists" -- but the point is
important. The hermits were not pragmatic or negative individualists, not even
rebels against society. They might be seen as "anarchists," -- and "it will do no
harm to think of them in that light." They simply believed that their values were
sufficient for ruling themselves, and for providing for humane fellowship. While
acknowledging the titular authority of bishops, these were "far away" and had little
to say about the desert for at least a century.
The hermits sought their own self, rejecting the false self "fabricated under social
compulsion in 'the world.'" They accepted dogmatic formulas of the Christian faith,
but without controversy, in their simplest and most elemental forms. But while the
monks or cenobites living in nearby monasteries also conceived of formulas as
necessary scaffolding to their spiritual growth, the hermits were entirely free to
conform only to the "secret, hidden, inscrutable will of God which might differ very
notably from one cell to another!" Merton quotes an early saying of St. Anthony:
"Whatever you see your soul to desire according to God, do that thing, and you
shall keep your heart safe."
But the quote refers specifically to the perogative of the hermit, to one
who was very alert and very sensitive to the landmarks of a trackless
wilderness. The hermit had to be a man mature in faith, humble and
detached from himself to a degree that is altogether terrible.
None other than the hermit could abide within these apparent extremes. Hence the
prescribed maturity.
He could not afford to be an illuminist. He could not dare risk attachment to
his own ego, or the dangerous ecstacy of self-will. He could not retain the
slightest identification with his superficial, transient, self-constructed self.
The hermit, above any other person, had to lose himself to a transcendent and
mysterious yet inner reality. To Merton this reality was Christ. Clearly, this Christ
was not the popularized image of icons and evocations but a transcendent being
dissolved from society and convention. How, then, could the hermit not lead a life of
simplicity, compunction, solitude, labor, poverty, charity, purity of heart? The fruit
of this self-discipline was quies, "rest." This "rest" the world -- meaning society --
could not offer.
Merton notes that the desert hermits never spoke of this quies, never distinguished
it from their way of life. They did not theorize, philosophize, or theologize. "In many
respects, therefore," declares Merton rightly, "these Desert Fathers had much in
common with Indian Yogis and with Zen Buddhist monks of China and Japan."
As is well known to those familiar with his biogrphy, Merton always chafed with his
own monasteric life -- cenobitism -- while fulfilling a grand service to his readers by
writing, a privilege that monastic life afforded him, or rather was afforded to him by
his abbots. But he never shrunk from criticizing his contemporaries. Thus Merton
states that men like the desert hermits don't exist in monasteries. Though monks
leave the society of "the world," they conform to the society into which they enter,
with its own norms and conventions, rules and penalties. While many desert
hermits were once monks, they left monastic society and established a new path of
"fabulous originality," to which nothing contemporary in Christianity can compare.
The desert hermits
neither courted the approval of their contemporaries nor sought to provoke
their disapproval, because the opinions of others had ceased, for them, to be
matters of importance. They had no set doctrine about freedom, but they had
in fact become free by paying the price of freedom.
This price was the experience of solitude and simplicity. The words and sayings of
the desert fathers are a prompt to reflection, but it was the lived experience of
solitude that truly counted for them. Hence their sayings are plain, pithy, and
trenchant, born of the experience of solitude and wrestling with the ego. Merton
affirms their "existential quality." The hermits were humble and silent, with not
much to say, which makes reading them refreshing. The secrets to their lives are
thus revealed directly in their manner of living, expressed in it, and therefore
deducible indirectly from their sayings.
Today (as much as in the past), the desert hermits are too often portrayed as
ascetic fanatics. This is entirely the conclusion of one who has not read their sayings
and tried to penetrate their values. In fact, the hermits strike the careful reader as
"humble, quiet, sensible people, with a deep knowledge of human nature." Their
world seethed in controversy but they "kept their mouths shut" -- not because they
were ignorant or opinionless but because they became like the desert, offering
nothing to the worldly but "discreet and detached silence."
Merton notes that the desert hermits were mostly "on their way" and not boasters
of arrival. They were not passionless, bloodless, or "beyond all temptation." This is
what makes their sayings and their way of life so compelling. The were laborers,
and showed genuine concern for the welfare of their fellows in charity, exhibiting
the ideal virtue of Christianity.
Isolation in the self, inability to go out of oneself to others, would mean
incapacity for any form of self-transcedence. To be thus the prisoner of one's
own selfhood is, in fact, to be in hell: a truth that Sartre, though professing
himself an atheist, has expressed in the most arresting fashin in his play No
Exit (Huis Clos).
Ultimately, charity is love, and holds the primacy over everything else in the
spiritual life. Love in fact is the spiritual life, avers Merton, meaning not sentiment,
nor mere almsgiving, nor mere identification with one's brothers and sisters
because they are like oneself. Love here presents itself in all humility and with
reverence toward the other and the other's integrity, identifying with that which is
transcendent in both oneself and another. Love presumes a death of ego in order to
accommodate the needs of charity and of others. The work of the hermits, which is
the spiritual life, can accommodate the needs of others in this way, looking to the
shortcomings of self always, and taking up the proscription of Jesus to judge no
one. In this one is free, free to pursue one's own path without obligation.
By the end of the 5th century, the monasteries of Scete and Nitria, so close to the
desert, had become "the world." Merton notes how they had virtually become cities,
with laws and penalties. "Three whips hung from a palm tree outside the church of
Scete: one to punish delinquent monks, one to punish thieves, and one for
vagrants." To this the desert hermits would profoundly demur. Thehermits
represented the "primitive anarchic desert ideal." And in the desert, in solitude, all
transgressions eventually serve to enlighten the wayward soul.
Merton completes his preface with a sketch of some important names now familiar
to the reader of the sayings: Arsenius, Moses, Anthony, Paphnutius, Pastor, John
the Dwarf. Merton's book is brief but invaluable as a start, and worth revisiting for
the familiar.
Merton concludes with a telling paragraph that is every bit as relevant today as
when he wrote it in 1960:
It would perhaps be too much to say that the world needs another movement
such as that which drew these men into the deserts of Egypt and Palestine.
Ours is certainly a time for solitaries and for hermits. But merely to reproduce
the simplicity, austerity and prayer of these primitive souls is not a complete
or satisfactory answer. We must transcend them, and transcend all those who,
since their time, have gone beyond the limits which they set. We must
liberate ourselves, in our own way, from involvement in a world that is
plunging to disaster. But our world is different from theirs. Our involvement
in it is more complete. Our danger is far more desperate. Our time, perhaps,
is shorter than we think.
¶

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

Thomas Merton's The Wisdom of the Desert is published by New Directions (New
York, 1960), Sheldon (London, 1974), and Shambhala (Boston, 1994 and
reprinted 2004).

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