Contemplating New Seeds of Contemplation

I've been reading New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton. I had picked it up out of curiosity; I've been reading some stuff on Indian philosophy for a course with Dr. Corduan, and I was interested in seeing how some of the things that one sees in East Asian mysticism play out in a Christian setting (I'm not sure to what extent Merton has borrowed from Eastern sources. I know that he has been interested in Christian-Buddhist dialogue and has done some stuff with Eastern meditation practices, but I think this book stems more from the Western tradition of St. John of the Cross, whom I haven't read). I had been expecting to find a book that was full of fluff and/or semi-pantheism. While Merton does at times delve into flowery pietistic prose, and there are a couple passages that raise eyebrows, I think that overall he does a better job than expected at giving a genuinely theistic expression of contemplation based on Christian values. I don't think he focuses nearly enough on Christ and the trinitarian nature of God for me to say that his work is the best example of Christian thought on the subject. However, he generally does keep a distinction between God and human beings (except for one paragraph, where he says that God is identical with a person's true self, but this seems at odds with other stuff that he says and so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he picked a bad way of phrasing his thought).

His connection between the typically East Asian idea that we need to go beyond what we think of as our self in order to find the true self and the Christian idea of sin I think is particularly interesting. At first, I thought this was rather new-agey and rolled my eyes, but he gives a plausible explanation that our false selves are who we try to be when we seek to put ourselves in God's place and live for ourselves, while our true identity is in God. This reminds me of Revelation 2:17 ("...and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.") along with other verses about our new life and new identity in Christ (although, unfortunately, Merton does not mention much about Christ's part in forming the new identity). So, in the end it is more like a reformulation of a traditional view of sin. He also stresses the role of God in the contemplator's life; one doesn't choose to contemplate God, God calls him. I appreciate this focus on the work of God, although again I don't think he gives enough attention to the Holy Spirit's role. The goal of contemplation is to see things as God does and to will as he does; that is, to see everything God made is good, especially as it does what he meant it to do (though our desires can be evil - he is not advocating antinomianism), and that we should live our lives loving God. This love and will of God are not merely feelings (Merton emphasizes in his preface that contemplation is not about calm and pleasant feelings), but do actually result in practical results in how we live with others. In addition, he makes the point that God is, fundamentally, a "Who", not a "What". This point in particular separates Merton from pantheistic ideas of "Brahman", the impersonal absolute, as well as from trends in theology and philosophy to "deanthropomorphize" God and make him into merely a "ground of being", or identifying him with the possibility of eternal love, or some similar abstract concept (I'm still trying to figure out what Kierkegaard meant by saying "God does not exist, he is eternal.")

In the end, I think what has made what I have read interesting to me is that it almost seems to be a "translation" of ideas (and being the language geek that I am, taking something from one language, whether of sounds or concepts, and putting it into another interests me). He takes Christian ideas, which many times in Western Christianity are formulated in almost legal concepts, and translates them into his scheme of the contemplative life. It is more than mysticism with a Christian veneer, though as I have mentioned I don't think it goes far enough. It has helped me to look at things from a different angle, though I wouldn't say that I've had any profound insights. I think that the best and most orthodox example of Christian mysticism, though, would be in the Eastern Orthodox concept of Theosis (or Divinification). I'll probably blog about that in a couple days.