97 - A Search for Wisdom and Spirit: Thomas Merton's Theology of the Self

A Search for Wisdom and Spirit: Thomas Merton's Theology of the Self
By Anne E. Carr
Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. 171 pp. $16.95.

Thomas Merton anniversaries abounded in 1988. Merton had entered the Catholic church in 1938. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, took the publishing industry by surprise in 1948, and in 1968, the same year in which Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, this Trappist monk died at the age of fifty-three in Bangkok. However, Merton's death did not mean that he would be forgotten. Writings published during his lifetime are still widely available. Materials not yet published at the time of his death have appeared since that time and there is more to come. One volume of Merton's extensive correspondence has been published with at least three more volumes planned. Has any monk from any age been more widely read than Thomas Merton? Not surprisingly dissertations and studies of his life and writings are increasing rather than abating. In 1987, the International Thomas Merton Society was founded. Merton and his writings are phenomena to be reckoned with at the end of the twentieth century.

It is to be expected that not all of the publications about Merton do him credit or do his readers a favor. However, during the same year that she has made a substantial contribution to feminism with her Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women's Experience, Anne Carr has published a significant study of the theme of the self in the writings of Thomas Merton. She explores this lifelong theme of Merton in the eight texts of his that she considers to be the places where he is clearer and more explicit about the search for the self, the true self. One

98 - A Search for Wisdom and Spirit: Thomas Merton's Theology of the Self

does not have to read very far in Merton to realize that this theme is always close to the surface when not explicitly stated.

Thomas Merton has to be one of the most influential explorers of the inner terrain of the human person. He is, for instance, among the authors studied in a course taught at Harvard College by Robert Coles and a colleague of his. Coles calls the genre of writings in this course "A Literature of Soul-Searching" (see THEOLOGY TODAY, July, 1988, for Coles' essay on this course). Merton, in fact, could not "cease from exploration" of the modern soul. He relentlessly searched for the true self and for ways to unmask and discard the false self. Merton was saved from blatant narcissism by the connection that was always front and center for him, the relationship between the search for self and the search for God. Carr points out that Merton's search would have been enriched by recent "thought about the story of Jesus of history," and others would add by advances in Christology. She maintains that Merton's thought on the self "remains rooted in the personalist theory of Jacques Maritain." She does not discuss Imperato's demur on this topic in Merton and Walsh on the Person.

Anne Carr, a systematic theologian well-grounded in the theological anthropology of Karl Rahner, reads the texts of Merton carefully, precisely, and perceptively. Her disciplined study of Merton gives credence to the deep appreciation that her students at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago have for her teaching. Carr's book on Merton will have a place on my bookshelves near the texts of Merton himself.

Keith J. Egan

Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, Indiana