qdpd n 7.pdf - Collegio San Giuseppe - Istituto De Merode

Thomas Merton: una testimonianza sui generis QdPD 1 (2011)
on a firm refusal to participate in the worldly values and assumptions. His bestselling
autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) sent scores of disillusioned
World War II veterans, students, and even teen-agers flocking to
monasteries across the US, and was also featured as one of the 100 best non-fiction
books of the century. No man’s an island is one of his most famous essays.
Merton was a keen proponent of interfaith understanding: he pioneered dialogue
with prominent Asian spiritual figures, including the Dalai Lama, D. T.
Suzuki, the Japanese writer on the Zen tradition, and the Vietnamese monk
Thich Nhat Hanh. Divided into five parts, his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander is
full of personal reflections, metaphors, observations, insights, and critiques.
Texts (from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander)
1) The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental
and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social
life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless
we see, we cannot think 2 .
2) There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting
for peace by non-violent methods most easily succumbs: activism and
overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most
common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a
multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to
help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation
in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It
destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own
work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
3) The tactic of non-violence is a tactic of love that seeks the salvation and redemption
of the opponent, not his castigation, humiliation, and defeat. A pretended
non-violence that seeks to defeat and humiliate the adversary by spiritual
instead of physical attack is little more than a confession of weakness.
It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not “what he
ought to be.” If we do not first respect what he IS we will never suffer him to
become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether.
2 La maggiore necessità del nostro tempo è nello svuotamento di quell’enorme massa di sudiciume
mentale ed emozionale che ostruisce le menti e che trasforma la vita politica e sociale in
una malattia collettiva. Senza queste pulizie generali non potremmo iniziare a vedere. E se non
vediamo, come potremmo capire?
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