A 'Fully Human Solution' to War: Thomas Merton on Christian Nonviolence

An interesting online article by Gregory K. Hillis is Associate Professor of Theology at Bellarmine University.

Excerpts:

“…Merton's understanding of his relationship to the world begins to change in the mid-1950s. Such rethinking is on full display in a November 1957 journal entry:

"Politics vital - even for monks ... To live in a monastery as if the world had stopped turning in 1905 - a fatal illusion."

Chief among these issues was the problem of war and the Christian response to it. Compelled by a strong sense of the dignity of all human life, Merton reacted with incredulity, not only to the possibility that humanity would doom itself to annihilation through nuclear war, but that American Catholics - including bishops - supported American use of its nuclear arsenal in a first strike against Russia.

Given this situation, he saw no alternative but to devote himself fully to the task of peace. As he wrote in a letter from 1961:

"I feel that the supreme obligation of every Christian, taking precedence over absolutely everything else, is to devote himself by the very best means at his disposal to a struggle to preserve the human race from annihilation and to abolish war as the essential means to accomplish this end."

And writing to Dorothy Day in that same year, Merton writes:

"I don't feel that I can in conscience, at a time like this, go on writing just about things like meditation ... I think I have to face the big issues, the life-and-death issues."

A month after this letter, Merton ventured into the anti-war waters by sending a chapter from his forthcoming book, New Seeds of Contemplation, to The Catholic Worker for publication. The title of the chapter was "The Root of War is Fear," and the chapter itself had been censored and approved by the Order. Not censored, however, were the three paragraphs that he added to the beginning of the version he sent to The Catholic Worker designed to "to situate these thoughts in the present context."

You’ll find the article here. For more on Merton and this theme, well worth reading is Jim Forest’s 2016 publication: The Root of War Is Fear: Thomas Merton's Advice to Peacemakers.