Witness to Freedom: Letters in Time of Crisis, by Thomas Merton, edited by William H. Shannon (Farrar, Straus, 353 pp., $25)
Thomas Merton, monk, writer, and political activist, was among those interesting figures in the history of the Catholic Church who appear well on their way to becoming great masters of the spiritual life, maybe even saints, but don’t quite make it across the finish line. An astute prelate once observed that Merton’s love of solitude was too much like Thoreau’s—a remark in which there is much to ponder. Merton’s early writings, especially his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, will always provide nourishment. But somehow in the late Fifties every leftist virus that was floating in the air penetrated his Trappist cell in Kentucky. He became downright sophomoric on subjects such as pacifism and the Bomb, and much of his work from that time on makes the reader feel trapped inside a Joan Baez album. This final volume of Merton’s letters suffers from his political preoccupations. People you hoped never to hear about again—Miss Baez herself, Ernesto Cardenal, James Baldwin—parade across the pages. Merton had no illusions about the Soviet Union, but he thought the Cuban revolution the work of land reformers pushed into the arms of Marx and Lenin by American insensitivity. He must have gotten his information from the New York Times. Politics aside, these letters contain many fine passages about the interior life. And Merton’s critique of modern “bourgeois” Christianity—whose secularist accommodations are emptying the pews, Catholic and Protestant—is painfully on target.
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