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

by Thomas Merton

The common level of inferior religion is situated somewhere in the collective subconscious of the worshipers, and perhaps more often than not in a collective exterior self. This is certainly a verifiable fact in modern totalitarian pseudo-religions of state and class. And this is one of the most dangerous features of our modern barbarism: the invasion of the world by a barbarity from within society and within man himself. Or rather, the reduction of man, in technological society, to a level of almost pure alienation in which he can be brought at will, any time, to a kind of political ecstasy, carried away by the hate, the fear, and the crude aspirations centered about a leader, a propaganda slogan, or a political symbol. That this sort of ecstasy is to some extent “satisfactory” and produces a kind of pseudo-spiritual catharsis, or at least a release of tension, is unfortunately all too often verified. And it is what modern man is coming more and more to accept as an ersatz for genuine religious fulfillment, for moral activity, and for contemplation itself.

It is important at all times to keep clear the distinction between true and false religion, true and false interiority, holiness and possession, love and frenzy, contemplation and magic. In every case, there is an aspiration toward inner awakening, and the same means, good or indifferent in themselves, may be used for good or evil, health or sickness, freedom or obsession.

As religion loses its fervor and becomes stereotyped, the worshiper lives and moves on a level where faith is too weak and too diffuse to lead to any inner awakening. Instead of appealing to the inmost self, religion that has thus grown tired is content to stir up the unconscious emotions of the exterior self. In this case there is no real inner awakening, and the reassurance conceived in ritual worship is no longer spiritual, personal, and free.

This example offers us much food for meditation today, as we fall back into collective barbarism in which the individual and his freedom once again lose their meaning and each man is only an expendable unit ready to be immolated to the political idols13 on which the prosperity and power of the collectivity seem to14 depend.

The religion of Abraham indeed was primitive, and it hovered, for a terrible moment, over the abyss of human sacrifice. Yet Abraham walked with God in simplicity and peace, and the example of his faith (precisely in the case of Isaac) furnished material for the meditations of the most sophisticated religious thinker of the last century, the father of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard.15

Whatever may be the philosophies and theologies behind these forms of contemplative existence, the striving is always the same: the quest for unity, a return to the inmost self united with the Absolute, a quest for Him Who is above all, and in all, and Who Alone is Alone.

#Sermon Illustrations

The Gita, an ancient Sanskrit philosophical poem, preaches a contemplative way of serenity, detachment, and personal devotion to God, under the form of the Lord Krishna, and expressed most of all in detached activity—work done without concern for results but with the pure intention of fulfilling the will of God. It is a doctrine of pure love resembling in many points that preached by St. Bernard, Tauler, Fenelon, and many other Western mystics. It implies detachment even from the joys of contemplation, as from all earthly and temporal achievements. What we have to say later about “masked contemplation”19 may perhaps be something like the doctrine of contemplation-hidden-in-action, which seems to be the very heart of the Bhagavad Gita. The contemplative recognition of the inmost self, or rather peace in the “unknowing” which emanates from the inmost self, is what the Gita knows as yoga. See:

It may be remarked in parentheses that theologians generally regard the spiritual experiences of oriental religion as occurring on the natural rather than on the supernatural level. However, they have often admitted, with Jacques Maritain and Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange,20 that truly supernatural and mystical contemplation is certainly possible outside the visible church, since God is the master of His gifts and wherever there is sincerity and an earnest desire for truth, He will not deny the gifts of His grace. As we grow in knowledge and appreciation of oriental religion we will come to realize the depth and richness of its varied forms of contemplation. Up to the present, our judgments have been too vague and too undocumented and have borne witness chiefly to our own ignorance. However, this statement is not intended as an encouragement to the foolish and equally ignorant infatuation with oriental cults which tends to be fashionable in certain circles today.

The great practitioners of contemplation who were the Desert Fathers of Egypt21 and the Near East did their best to dispel the illusion. They went into the desert not to seek pure spiritual beauty or an intellectual light, but to see the Face of God. And they knew that before they could see His Face, they would have to struggle, instead, with His adversary. They would have to cast out the devil subtly lodged in their exterior self. They went into the desert not to study speculative truth, but to wrestle with practical evil; not to perfect their analytical intelligence, but to purify their hearts. They went into solitude not to get something, but in order to give themselves, for “He that would save his life must lose it, and he that will lose his life, for the sake of Christ, shall save it.” By their renunciation of passion and attachment, their crucifixion of the exterior self, they liberated the inner man, the new man “in Christ.”

In the Christian tradition, as we have already observed, contemplation is simply the “experience” (or, better, the quasi-experiential knowledge) of God in a luminous darkness which is the perfection of faith illuminating our inmost self. It is the “meeting” of the spirit with God in a communion of love and understanding which is a gift of the Holy Spirit and a penetration into the Mystery of Christ. The word “contemplation” suggests lingering enjoyment, timelessness, and a kind of suave passivity. All these elements are there, but they smack rather of pagan theoria.

The important thing in contemplation is not enjoyment, not pleasure, not happiness, not peace, but the transcendent experience of reality and truth in the act of a supreme and liberated spiritual love. The important thing in contemplation is not gratification and rest, but awareness, life, creativity, and freedom.

In fact, contemplation is man’s highest and most essential spiritual activity. It is his most creative and dynamic affirmation of his divine sonship. It is not just the sleepy, suave, restful embrace of “being” in a dark, generalized contentment: it is a flash of the lightning of divinity piercing the darkness of nothingness and sin. Not something general and abstract, but something, on the contrary, as concrete, particular, and “existential” as it can possibly be. It is the confrontation of man with his God, of the Son with His Father. It is the awakening of Christ within us, the establishment of the Kingdom of God in our o...

The story of Adam’s fall from Paradise says, in symbolic terms, that man was created as a contemplative. The fall from Paradise was a fall from unity.

Since he was now dependent entirely on exterior and contingent things, he became an exile in a world of objects, each one capable of deluding and enslaving him. Centered no longer in God and in his inmost, spiritual self, man now had to see and be aware of himself as if he were his own god. He had to study himself as a kind of pseudo-object, from which he was estranged. And to compensate for the labors and frustrations of this estrangement, he must try to admire, assert, and gratify himself at the expense of others like himself. Hence the complex and painful network of loves and hatreds, desires and fears, lies and excuses in which we are all held captive. In such a condition, man’s mind is enslaved by an inexorable concern with all that is exterior, transient, illusory, and trivial. And carried away by his pursuit of alien shadows and forms, he can no longer see his own true inner “face,” or recognize his identity in the spirit and in God, for that identity is secret, invisible, and incommunicable. But man has lost the courage and the faith without which he cannot be content to be “unseen.” He is pitifully dependent on self-observation and self-assertion. That is to say, he is utterly exiled from God and from his own true self, for neither in God nor in our inmost self can there be any aggressive self-assertion: there is only the plain presence of love and of truth.

So man is exiled from God and from his inmost self. He is tempted to seek God, and happiness, outside himself. So his quest for happiness becomes, in fact, a flight from God and from himself: a flight that takes him further and further away from reality. In the end, he has to dwell in the “region of unlikeness”—having lost his inner resemblance to God in losing his freedom to enter his own home, which is the sanctuary of God.

But man must return to Paradise. He must recover himself, salvage his dignity, recollect his lost wits, return to his true identity. There is only one way in which this could be done, says the Gospel of Christ. God Himself must come, like the woman in the parable seeking the lost groat. God Himself must become Man, in order that, in the Man-God, man might be able to lose himself as man and find himself as God. God Himself must die on the Cross, leaving man a pattern and a proof of His infinite love. And man, communing with God in the death and resurrection of Christ, must die the spiritual death in which his exterior self is destroyed and his inner s...

The Christian life is a return to the Father, the Source, the Ground of all existence, through the Son, the Splendor and the Image of the Father, in the Holy Spirit, the Love of the Father and the Son. And this return is only possible by detachment and “death” in the exterior self, so that the inner self, purified and renewed, can fulfill its function as image of the Divine Trinity.

(The Father is a Holy Spirit, but He is named Father. The Son is a Holy Spirit, but He is named Son. The Holy Spirit has a name which is known only to the Father and the Son. But can it be that when He takes us to Himself and unites us to the Father through the Son, He takes upon Himself, in us, our own secret name? Is it possible that his ineffable Name becomes our own? Is it possible that we can come to know, for ourselves, the Name of the Holy Spirit when we receive from Him the revelation of our own identity in Him? I can ask these questions, but not answer them.)

But, as a matter of fact, the intricacies of Christology and of the dogma of the hypostatic union were by no means a mere authoritarian web devised to capture the minds and to keep in subjection the wills of the faithful, as rationalism glibly used to declare. Both the theologian and the ordinary believer, in the Patristic age, realized the importance of the correct theological formulation of the mystery of the Incarnation, because dogmatic error would in fact imply disastrous practical consequences in the spiritual life of each individual Christian.

One of the main reasons why St. Athanasius2 so stubbornly defended the divinity of Christ against the Arians, who at one time outnumbered the orthodox Christians by a vast majority, was that he saw that if Christ were not God, then it followed that the Christian hope for union with God in and through Christ was a delusion.

It may perhaps not be clear at first sight what this belief in the Resurrection might have to do with contemplation. But in fact the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, the New Adam, completely restored human nature to its spiritual condition and made possible the divinization of every man coming into the world. This meant that in each one of us the inner self was now able to be awakened and transformed by the action of the Holy Spirit, and this awakening would not only enable us to discover our true identity “in Christ,” but would also make the living and Risen Savior present in us. Hence the importance of the Divinity of Christ—for it is as God-Man that He is risen from the dead and as God-Man that He is capable of living and acting in us all by His Spirit, so that in Him we are not only our true personal selves, but are also one Mystical Person, one Christ. And thus each one of us is endowed with the creative liberty of the Son of God. Each one of us, in some sense, is able to be completely transformed into the likeness of Christ, to become, as He is, divinely human, and thus to share His spiritual authority and charismatic power in the world.

As a result of this union of God and Man in the one Person of Christ it was possible for every man to be united to God in his own person, as a true son of God, not by nature but by adoption.

If the “Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost,” this was not merely in order to reestablish man in a favorable juridical position with regard to God: it was to elevate, change, and transform man into God, in order that God might be revealed in Man, and that all men might become One Son of God in Christ. The New Testament texts in which this mystery is stated are unequivocal, and yet they have been to a very great extent ignored not only by the faithful, but also by theologians.

If in Christ the assumed human nature, which is in every respect literally and perfectly human, belongs to the Person of the Word of God, then everything human in Christ is by that very fact divine. His thoughts, actions, and His very existence are the works and existence of a divine Person. In Him, we see a Man in every respect identical with ourselves as far as His nature is concerned, thinking and feeling and acting according to our nature, and yet at the very same time living on a completely transcendent and divine level of consciousness and of being. For His consciousness and His being are the consciousness and being of God Himself.

#Sermon Illustrations

The very first step to a correct understanding of the Christian theology of contemplation is to grasp clearly the unity of God and man in Christ, which of course presupposes the equally crucial unity of man in himself. For the soul and body are not divided against one another as good and evil principles; and our salvation by no means consists of a rejection of the body in order to liberate the soul from the dominance of an evil material principle. On the contrary, our body is as much ourselves as the soul, and neither one without the other can claim to exist purely in its own right, as a true personal being. It was the same also in Christ, in Whom the life, being, and actions of His Body were just as much His own, and just as much divine, as the thoughts and aspiration of His soul.

In the words of St. Maximus the Confessor:5 The superessential Word, clothing Himself at the time of His ineffable conception with all that is in our nature, possessed nothing human that was not at the same time divine. . . . The knowledge of these things is indemonstrable, being beyond understanding and perceptible only to the faith of those who honor the mystery of Christ in the sincerity of their heart. (Ambigua, Patrologia Graeca, 91.1053) And again: The mystery of the Incarnation of the Word contains in itself all the meaning of the enigmas and symbols of Scripture, all the significance of visible and intelligible creatures. He who knows the mystery of the Cross and the Sepulchre knows the reason (logos) of all things. He who is initiated into the hidden meaning of the resurrection, knows the end for which, from the beginning, God created all things. (Centuriae Gnosticae, Patrologia Graeca, 90.1108)

The fact that since the Incarnation God and Man have become inseparable in the One Person of Jesus Christ means that the “supernatural order” has not just been somehow imposed from without upon created nature, but that nature itself has, in man, become transformed and supernaturalized so that in everyone in whom Christ lives and acts, by the Holy Spirit, there is no longer any further division between nature and supernature.

Of course, Christ has taken possession of our souls and bodies, and we are already divinized, in the roots of our being, by Baptism. But this divine life remains hidden and dormant within us unless it is more fully developed by a life of asceticism and charity and, on a higher level, of contemplation. We not only passively receive in us the grace of Christ, but we actively renew in our own life the self-emptying and self-transformation by which God became man.

This does not mean the sacrifice or destruction of anything that really belongs to our human nature as it was assumed by Christ, but it means the complete, radical cutting off of everything in us that was not assumed by Him because it was not capable of being divinized. And what is this? It is everything that is focused6 on our exterior and self-centered passion as self-assertion, greed, lust; as the desire for the survival and perpetuation of our illusory and superficial self, to the detriment of our interior and true self.

At the moment it is sufficient to say categorically that this contemplation is a deep participation in the Christ-life, a spiritual sharing in the union of God and Man which is the hypostatic union. This is the whole meaning of the doctrine of divine sonship, of our being sons of God in Christ and having the Spirit of Christ.

If Christ came into the world as the Son of God, and if the Father was present in Him: if Christ has left the world and gone to the Father, how do we “see” Him, or bridge the gap that remains between us and the transcendental remoteness of His mystery in heaven? The answer is that the Word, in the Father, is not only transcendentally removed at an infinite distance above us, but also and at the same time He is immanent in our world, first of all by nature as the Creator of the world, but then in a special dynamic and mystical presence as the Savior, Redeemer, and Lover of the world. The point is, then, to know how we enter into contact with this special presence of the Lord in His cosmos and in our hearts.

The answer is, by faith: and this means not simply by an intellectual assent to certain authoritative dogmatic propositions, but, more than that, by the commitment of our whole self and of our whole life to the reality of the presence of Christ in the world. This act of total surrender is not simply a fantastic intellectual and mystical gamble; it is something much more serious: it is an act of love for this unseen Person Who, in the very gift of love by which we surrender ourselves to His reality, also makes Himself present to us. The union of our mind, spirit, and life with the Word present within us is effected by the Holy Spirit.

It is evident, then, that the Holy Spirit is given to us as a true and literal gift of God: Donum Dei altissimi.8 He is truly, as St. Thomas says, our possession, which means to say He becomes, as it were, our own spirit, speaking within our own being. It is He that becomes, as it were, our spiritual and divine self, and by virtue of His presence and inspirations we are and we act as other Christs. By Him and through Him we are transformed in Christ.

The life of contemplation is, then, not simply a life of human technique and discipline; it is the life of the Holy Spirit in our inmost souls. The whole duty of the contemplative is to abandon what is base and trivial in his own life, and do all he can to conform himself to the secret and obscure promptings of the Spirit of God. This of course requires a constant discipline of humility, obedience, self-distrust, prudence, and above all faith.

By virtue of this hidden presence of the Spirit in our inmost self, we need only to deliver ourselves from preoccupation with our external, selfish, and illusory self in order to find God within us. And the Lord has explicitly said that this discovery, a sublime gift of His grace, normally implies some form of spiritual experience.

Contemplation is the conscious, experiential awareness of the mission of the Son and of the Spirit, a reception of the Word Who is sent to us not only as life but also as light. But the full knowledge of the Word “sent” to us and “received” in us is subjective rather than objective. We know Him as the “other,” as the divine “Thou” to Whom we turn the whole being of our spirit, and yet He is “in us” and is intimately united to our own inmost “I,” so that He is more truly our self than we are.

The seeds of this sublime life are planted in every Christian soul at Baptism.10 But seeds must grow and develop before you reap the harvest. There are thousands of Christians walking about the face of the earth bearing in their bodies the infinite God of Whom they know practically nothing.11 They are themselves sons of God and are not aware of their identity. Instead of seeking to know themselves and their true dignity, they struggle miserably to impersonate the alienated characters whose “greatness” rests on violence, craftiness, lust, and greed.

#Sermon Illustrations

The seeds of contemplation and sanctity, planted in those souls, merely lie dormant. They do not germinate. They do not grow. In other words, sanctifying grace occupies the substance of their souls, but never flows out to inflame and irrigate and take possession of their faculties, their intellect and will. The presence of God never becomes an intimate reality. God does not manifest Himself to these souls because they do not seek Him with any real desire.

St. Thomas Aquinas, commenting on the words of St. John’s Gospel (chap. 14), explains the difference between the two. Contemplation will be denied to a man in proportion as he belongs to “the world.” The expression “the world” signifies those who love the transient and unimportant things of this world. They cannot receive the Holy Spirit Who is the Love of God. As St. John of the Cross says: “Two contraries cannot coexist at the same time in the same subject.”13 You cannot serve God and Mammon.

But desire is the most important thing in the contemplative life. Without desire we will never receive the great gifts of God. Dona spiritualia non accipiuntur nisi desiderata.17 St. Thomas adds: nec desiderantur nisi aliqualiter cognita.18 There could be no desire where there is not at least a little knowledge. We cannot desire union with God unless we know that such a union exists and have at least some idea of what it is.

#Sermon Illustrations

Our adjective “secular” comes from the Latin saeculum, which means both “world” and “century.” The etymology of the word is uncertain. Perhaps it is related to the Greek kuklon, or “wheel,” from which we get “cycle.” So originally, that which is “secular” is that which goes around in interminably recurring cycles. That is what “worldly society” does. Its horizons are those of an ever recurring sameness:

Now all our existence in this life is subject to change and recurrence. That alone does not make it secular. But life becomes secularized when it commits itself completely to the “cycles” of what appears to be new, but is in fact the same thing over again. Secular life is a life of vain hopes imprisoned in the illusion of newness and change, an illusion which brings us constantly back to the same old point, the contemplation of our own nothingness. Secular life is a life frantically dedicated to escape, through novelty and variety, from the fear of death. But the more we cherish secular hopes, the more they disappoint us. And the more they disappoint us, the more desperately do we return to the attack and forge new hopes more extravagant than the last. These too let us down. And we revert to that insufferable condition from which we have vainly tried to escape.

In the words of Pascal:22 Nothing is so unbearable to a man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his falseness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness . . . (Pensées, 131)

#Sermon Illustrations

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.

The secular and sacred reflect two kinds of dependence. The secular world depends upon the things it needs to divert itself and escape from its own nothingness. It depends on the creation and multiplication of artificial needs, which it then pretends to “satisfy.” Hence the secular world is a world that pretends to exalt man’s liberty, but in which man is in fact enslaved by the things on which he depends. In secular society man himself is alienated and becomes a “thing” rather than a person, because he is subject to the rule of what is lower than himself and outside himself. He is subject to his ever increasing needs, to his restlessness, his dissatisfaction, his anxiety, and his fear, but above all to the guilt which reproaches him for infidelity to his own inner truth. To escape this guilt, he plunges further into falsity.

#Sermon Illustrations

In the sacred society, on the other hand, man admits no dependence on anything lower than himself, or even “outside” himself in a spatial sense. His only Master is God. Only when God is our Master can we be free, for God is within ourselves as well as above us. He rules us by liberating us and raising us to union with Himself from within. And in so doing He liberates us from our dependence on created things outside us. We use and dominate them, so that they exist for our sakes, and not we for theirs. There is no purely sacred society except in heaven.

#Sermon Illustrations

The truly sacred attitude toward life is in no sense an escape from the sense of nothingness that assails us when we are left alone with ourselves. On the contrary, it penetrates into that darkness and that nothingness, realizing that the mercy of God has transformed our nothingness into His temple and believing that in our darkness His light has hidden itself. Hence the sacred attitude is one which does not recoil from our own inner emptiness, but rather penetrates into it with awe and reverence, and with the awareness of mystery.

This is a most important discovery in the interior life. For the external self fears and recoils from what is beyond it and above it. It dreads the seeming emptiness and darkness of the interior self. The whole tragedy of “diversion” is precisely that it is a flight from all that is most real and immediate and genuine in ourselves. It is a flight from life and from experience—an attempt to put a veil of objects between the mind and its experience of itself. It is therefore a matter of great courage and spiritual energy to turn away from diversion and prepare to meet, face-to-face, that immediate experience of life which is intolerable to the exterior man.

This is only possible when, by a gift of God (St. Thomas would say it was the Gift of Fear, or sacred awe) we are able to see our inner selves not as a vacuum but as an infinite depth, not as emptiness but as fullness. This change of perspective is impossible as long as we are afraid of our own nothingness, as long as we are afra...

What we need is the gift of God which makes us able to find in ourselves not just ourselves, but Him: and then our nothingness becomes His all. This is not possible without the liberation effected by communication and humility. It requires not talent, ...