The Inner Experience: Thomas Merton's Unfinished Masterpiece on Contemplation, Bridging Catholic Monasticism and Eastern Meditation Traditions

by Thomas Merton

But a genuinely secular society is one which cannot be content with innocent escapes from itself. More and more it tends to need and to demand, with insatiable dependence, satisfaction in pursuits that are unjust, evil, or even criminal. Hence the growth of economically useless businesses that exist for profit and not for real production, that create artificial needs which they then fill with cheap and quickly exhausted products. Hence the wars that arise when producers compete for markets and sources of raw material. Hence the nihilism, despair, and destructive anarchy that follow war, and then the blind rush into totalitarianism as an escape from despair. Our world has now reached the point when, for the sake of diversion, it is ready to blow itself up. The atomic age is the highest point ever achieved by secularism. And this reminds us, of course, that the real root of secularism is godlessness.