Tag / Thomas Merton

by James Ross Kelly

Thomas Merton— from Theology of Creativity


thomas merton

Excerpted from an essay which first  appeared in 1960 in  The American Benedictine Review. 

The creativity of the Christian person must be seen in relation to the creative vocation of the new Adam, mystical person of the “whole Christ.” The creative will of God has been at work in the cosmos since he said: “Let there be light.”  This creative fiat was not uttered merely at the dawn of time. All time and all history are a continued, uninterrupted creative act, a stupendous, ineffable mystery in which God has signified his will to associate man with himself in his work of creation. The will and power of the Almighty Father were not satisfied simply to make the world and turn it over to man to run it as best he could. The creative love of God was met, at first, by the destructive and self-centered recusal of man: an act of such incalculable consequences that it would have amounted to a destruction of God’s plan, if that were possible. But the creative work of God could not be frustrated by man’s sin. On the contrary, sin itself entered into the plan. If man was first called to share in the creative work of his heavenly Father, he now became involved in the “new creation,” the redemption of his own kind and the restoration of the cosmos, purified and transfigured, into the hands of the Father. God himself became man in order that in this way man could be most perfectly associated with him in this great work, the fullest manifestation of his eternal wisdom and mercy.

The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton,  New Directions

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by James Ross Kelly

Thomas Merton, The New Man


All men were united in Adam. All were “one image” of God in Adam. “Adam is in us all.” We all sinned in Adam. Adam is saved and redeemed in us all. What does all this mean? It means simply, as St. Bernard says, that man’s creation in the image of God (ad imaginem) constituted all men as created “copies” of the Word Who is the eternal and uncreated Image of the Father. The potentiality in the human soul which makes man capable of being drawn to God is nothing else than a capacity to become more and more like the Word of God, and thus to participate in God’s own vision of Himself. St. Gregory of Nyssa says: thomas merton“The whole of human nature, from the first man to the last, is but one image of Him Who is.” When Adam was created in the image and likeness of God, we all were created in him, with a nature capable of being conformed to the Word of God. Therefore Adam, who contains all human nature in himself, and is therefore “humanity,” is created in the image of the Image of God, Who has already decided, from all eternity, to become man in Jesus Christ. Hence in his very creation, Adam is a representation of Christ Who is to come, and we too, from the very moment we come into existence, are potential representations of Christ simply because we possess the human nature which was created in Him and was assumed by Him in the Incarnation, saved by Him on the Cross and glorified by Him in His Ascension.

Thomas Merton, The New Man (Kindle Locations 1203-1214). Macmillan. Kindle Edition.

by James Ross Kelly

Thomas Merton—The New Man


thomas merton

Thomas Merton 1915-1968

In those who are most alive and therefore most themselves, the life of the body is subordinated to a higher life that is within them. It quietly surrenders to the far more abundant vitality of a spirit living on levels that defy measurement and observation. The mark of true life in man is therefore not turbulence but control, not effervescence but lucidity and direction, not passion but the sobriety that sublimates all passion and elevates it to the clear inebriation of mysticism. The control we mean here is not arbitrary and tyrannical control by an interior principle which can be called, variously, a “super-ego” or a pharasaical conscience: it is the harmonious coordination of man’s powers in striving for the realization of his deepest spiritual potentialities. It is not so much a control of one part of man by another, but the peaceful integration of all man’s powers into one perfect actuality which is his true self, that is to say his spiritual self. Man, then, can only fully be said to be alive when he becomes plainly conscious of the real meaning of his own existence, that is to say when he experiences something of the fulness of intelligence, freedom and spirituality that are actualized within himself. But can we really expect a man to attain to this kind of consciousness? Is it not utterly cruel to hold before his eyes the delusive hope of this “fulness” of life and of “realization?” Of course, if the nature of the hope is not understood, it is the cruelest and most mocking of delusions. It may be the worst of all spiritual mirages that torments him in his desert pilgrimage. How can a man, plunged in the agonia, the wrestling of life and death in their most elemental spiritual forms, be beguiled by the promise of self realization? His very self, his very reality, is all contradiction: a contradiction mercifully obscured by confusion. If the confusion is cleared away, and he fully “realizes” this tormented self, what will he see if not the final absurdity of the contradiction? The “real meaning of his existence” would then be precisely that it has no meaning. In a certain sense, that is true. To find life we must die to life as we know it. To find meaning we must die to meaning as we know it. The sun rises every morning and we are used to it, and because we know the sun will rise we have finally come to act as if it rose because we wanted it to. Suppose the sun should choose not to rise? Some of our mornings would then be “absurd”—or, to put it mildly, they would not meet our expectations. To find the full meaning of our existence we must find not the meaning that we expect but the meaning that is revealed to us by God. The meaning that comes to us out of the transcendent darkness of His mystery and our own. We do not know God and we do not know ourselves. How then can we imagine that it is possible for us to chart our own course toward the discovery of the meaning of our life? This meaning is not a sun that rises every morning, though we have come to think that it does, and on mornings when it does not rise we substitute some artificial light of our own so as not to admit that this morning was absurd. Meaning is then not something we discover in ourselves, or in our lives. The meanings we are capable of discovering are never sufficient. The true meaning has to be revealed. It has to be “given.” And the fact that it is given is, indeed, the greater part of its significance: for life itself is, in the end, only significant in so far as it is given. As long as we experience life and existence as suns that have to rise every morning, we are in agony. We must learn that life is a light that rises when God summons it out of darkness. For this there are no fixed times.

Merton, Thomas (1999-11-29). The New Man (Kindle Locations 72-100). Macmillan. Kindle Edition.