Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Monks and Monasticism

  • Somebody Else’s Faith

    Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. III, p. 251, from the entry of 25 January 1959: He entered the monastery on somebody else's faith and lived there on somebody else's faith and when finally he had to face the fact that what was required was his own faith he collapsed.

  • Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thomas Merton

    An activist judge wants to play the legislator. An activist monk wants to play the worldling.  Neither quite understands the nature of his 'job.'

  • A Part-Time Monk’s Solution to Suggestibility

    We are too open to social suggestions.  We uncritically imbibe dubious and outright wrong views and attitudes and valuations and habits of speech from our environment.  They don't appear wrong because they are in step with what most believe and say.  'Normal' beliefs and patterns of speech become normative for people.  This is the way…

  • At the Hermitage

  • Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment

    Thomas Merton and Jean van Heijenoort were both studies in youthful idealism. Both made drastic life decisions early on, and both sacrificed much for their respective ideals. Van joined Leon Trotsky to save the world rather than attend the prestigious Ecole Normale in pursuit of a bourgeois career. While Van was motivated by a desire…

  • The Trick

    The trick is to maintain one's equanimity in the face of the samsaric storm. It's easy to be a monk in a monastery, but difficult ex claustro. The trick is to be in the world, and active in it, but not of it. Not easy, and perhaps impossible. Withdrawal and Weltflucht are perhaps all that…

  • Merton on the Monastic Journey

    Thomas Merton, The Monastic Journey, p. 155: If a solitary should one day find his way, by the grace and mercy of God, into a desert place in which he is not known, and if it is permitted to him by the divine pity to live there, and to remain unknown, he may perhaps do…

  • Synchronicity, Alain, Monasticism, Sense of Life, and the Unseen Order

    The other morning I recalled the passage in Alain where he recorded his boyhood visit to the abbey at La Trappe and his visceral revulsion at the life of the monks. So I pulled his On Happiness from the shelf and to my surprise opened right to the passage in question. Coincidence, or synchronicity? I'll…

  • A Monk and His Political Silence

    Mary Gordon, On Thomas Merton (Boulder: Shambala, 2018, 118): By the late fifties Merton was deeply disturbed about his political silence. Should he have been? This world is a passing scene. The temporal order is next to nothing compared to eternity. That is the old-time Roman Catholic teaching that justifies the world-flight of monks and…

  • Equanimity

    It is quite a moral challenge these days to maintain one's equanimity while doing one's quotidian bit to battle the lunacy of the destructive Left.  It's easy to be a monk in a monastery. It is rather more difficult to be one in the world.

  • Monastic Poverty: Too Easy?

    The monk takes a vow of poverty, but he lives well, comfortably, securely, often amidst great natural beauty. The typical monk in the West is not poor materially but poor in a spiritual sense. Or at least he aspires to be such. The monastery's wealth is his usufruct — he has the usus et fructus,…

  • The Monastery Sign

    The sign reads, 'Peace.' It neglects to say that the desert is a place of unseen warfare.  The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in il combattimento spirituale. They felt…

  • Rod Dreher’s Monastic Vision

    An article in The New Yorker. 

  • The New Monastics of the Mind

    My man Hanson with another fascinating column.  Excerpts: Monasteries of the mind are an effort to reconnect with the past and disengage psychologically from the present. For millions of Americans, their music, their movies, their sports, and their media are not current fare. Instead, they have mentally moved to mountaintops or inaccessible valleys, where they…

  • The Benedict Option

    Rod Dreher interviewed. Related: Rod Dreher on Critics of the Benedict Option. Excerpt: Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that…