Author2Author: Pankaj Mishra & Paul Elie, pt. 4

After sharing details of their own writerly backgrounds, Paul and Pankaj close by considering the case of another writer who grappled with spiritual concerns. (But keep an eye out this weekend for Paul's coda to the entire conversation...)

Pankaj Mishra: I wonder if someone like Thomas Merton had an advantage over someone like Naipaul (see yesterday's exchange) in that he could work within a spiritual tradition that had not been as damaged by its encounter with modernity or colonialism (which are often experienced as the same thing in Asia and Africa) and use its resources to question the ways of the modern world and also open himself without bringing in stern value judgements to other traditions, as he did when he went to India in the last year of his life and met Buddhists and Hindus.

Paul Elie: Doesn't every serious writer need to see himself as apart or alienated from society? I suspect so, even though I don't like the look of those particular words on the screen. Maybe this is why worldly success has been a problem for writers from Tolstoy to Naipaul, and why the second act of so many literary lives is the story of the writer's struggle to make sense of success, to recast the original alienation so as to accommodate the ways in which he or she is now joined through words to thousands of strangers.

Success was one of Thomas Merton's biggest problems, as a monk and as a writer. The success of The Seven Storey Mountain--something like 600,000 copies sold in the first few years after publication in 1948--seemed to contradict the yearning at the heart of the book: the yearning to lose himself in Gospel fashion behind the walls of a Trappist monastery. Success challenged Merton to sound the depths of his monastic calling, to test his notions of what a Trappist monk is against circumstances again and again.

You suggest in your message that Merton had an advantage over the rest of us, in that the Trappist tradition had not been damaged by its encounter with modernity, and so served as a kind of base camp for a critique of the modern way of life he had left behind. What you say is in a few words the "program" of Merton's monastic life from a certain point of view. The power of Merton's work, by this way of thinking, is found in the ways in which he makes the Trappist critique attractive for people who aren't Trappists--people who feel something more like the generalized "longing for rest, silence, and solitude" that you felt come over you in San Francisco a few years ago. And yet Merton's monasticism is paradoxical: even as he drew on Trappist tradition to criticize modernity, he drew on his life as what he derisively called "the complete twentieth-century man" to criticize some hidebound aspects of the Trappist way of life.

Merton's approach to life as a monk has some correspondences with the points about Buddhist monasticism that you make toward the end of An End to Suffering, especially how firmly he held to the notion of the monastic calling as a lifelong commitment, in which the monk left the world not simply geographically but existentially, once and for all. Because Merton died abroad and outside the four walls of the Abbey of Gethsemani, it is often supposed that he was on his way out of the Trappists and that "the third half of life" (as Buddhists have it) would bring him away from monasticism and toward some more direct form of engagement with the world. That may be the case; we will never know. But it's often forgotten that he set out on his "Asian journey" in order to encounter other monks and other approaches to monasticism, rather than to escape monastic life. It seems to me likely that, had he lived, he might have sought to resume life as a Trappist monk in America in something like the manner of your friend Helen in San Francisco, "dressed in maroon robes in the middle of the busy shopping district, amid a flamboyantly diverse California crowd."

In the years leading up to the Asian journey, Merton was tempted to leave the Trappists again and again. Again and again he stayed. This fixity at the far side of restlessness seems to me to go to the root of his calling, and of the Trappist critique of modernity. I have written in the past about the appeal of Buddhism's willingness (as I understand it) to see monastic withdrawal as a stage on life's way, and not necessarily as a once-and-for-all lifelong commitment. I think the Catholic monastic orders need to consider how they might reorient themselves in such a way, so as to attract men and women at the stages of life when they seem most drawn to be monks: in early adulthood and then at the far end of life.

In this sense, your Helen may be a precursor to Catholic monks of the future, the way Merton was a precursor half a century ago. Monasticism is preparation for re-entry into the world on a deeper level of awareness. I find that very attractive. And yet I can't set aside Merton's conviction that his vows were lifelong and not to be broken--that they were a response to a call that came from God, which, phrased in the language of the Trappist tradition, held that the Trappist monk had literally and figuratively "died to the world." His fidelity to those vows, and to the Christian faith at the root of them, is to me the source of his dynamism for us. The Trappist tradition was and is meant to be an elaboration of the Gospel, and Merton's response was an ongoing elaboration of the biblical challenge to find oneself by losing oneself. His Christian faith challenged him to "set out into the deep," as a Gospel passage has it, and he did so--and never turned back.