When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature

by Thomas Merton

It has been said, “We will not save what we do not love.” It is also true that we will neither love nor save what we do not experience as sacred.

Bonaventure and Duns Scotus, with whom Merton explicitly identified.

“Paradise is all around,” he heard the dawn deacon say: all we need do is enter in.

Man can know all about God's creation by examining its phenomena, by dissecting and experimenting and this is all good.

What you observe is really as much the product of your knowledge as its cause. You take the thing not as it is, but as you want to investigate it.

I want not only to observe but to know living things, and this implies a dimension of primordial familiarity which is simple and primitive and religious and poor. This is the reality I need, the vestige of God in His creatures. And the Light of God in my own soul.

What a miserable bundle of foolish idiots we are! We kill everything around us even when we think we love and respect nature and life. This sudden power to deal death all around us simply by the way we live, and in total “innocence” and ignorance, is by far the most disturbing symptom of our time.

8Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich, full of inexhaustible interest, opening out into infinite further possibilities for study and contemplation and interest and praise.