Wednesday, April 30, 2008

• Thomas Merton: The Taming of the Nous

           

      In the gold-leafed sanctuaries of the Eastern Church, walls bricked up with saints and angels peering out from their silver frames, the old theologians, thoughtfully considering all the evidence before them, spoke of the nous. They called it the “eye of the soul,” the unmediated self the perceives the world without interpretation. It’s an old, old concept, borrowed most directly from Plato and Aristotle, but ancient enough for Anaxagoras, who considered it the ordering force of chaos, the machine of the cosmos. But for the Eastern Christians, it was the very “capacity to receive the Spirit…the senses and sensory perceptions” of man, as St. Thalassios wrote. It’s the heart, man’s self-aspect, part of the internal human trinity along with word and spirit.

  I don’t know if Thomas Merton ever thought too much about it; he tended to shift his eyes a little too far east to see what the Greeks were up to. He was, to a fault, a Westerner, and had the Westerner’s old longing gaze for India and the Orient that led men a hundred years earlier to dress like Turks for portraits. Always, Merton sought to incorporate any wisdom and insight he found into his life with the rushed enthusiasm of a twelve year-old, and that same enthusiasm is what drove him across the ocean to Bangkok where he died the humblest death. In a way, it was very appropriate.

  I think Merton would have appreciated the notion of the nous had he stumbled across it. Greek Orthodox writer Frederica Mathewes-Green called it “the living link to the Creator,” but like any untamed animal, can make trouble. Citing St. Isaac of Syria, she describes the nous apart from God as a fish out of water, confused and dying, and that the task of the Christian is to tame it, and “bring the mind down into the heart.” The untamed nous is weak, like a pasta noodle, and will barely raise a hand against temptation. It spouts and pours over itself but, unless strengthened and trained, will only walk along any road you set before it. The nous needs discipline to be an honest contributor to the collective that is the individual human.

  To me, it seems clear that Merton’s story is the story of a man and his nous. It’s been clear to me since The Seven Storey Mountain, which is the only work we read where he dealt explicitly and at length with his life and his life’s difficulties. The whole narrative is his wanderings back and forth, his mercurial spirit wending him along the road, in the churches of Rome and the Quaker houses, with women, with his brother. He danced around his attraction to Christianity for years before making any decisions, and his Christian life was then characterized by his ongoing struggle to extract some order from the chaos of his upbringing. Merton himself would later regret the book, but understood its place as a young, enthusiastic monk trying to place his life in some kind of coherent context. The context that makes the most sense to me, though, is some manner of noetic wandering. Merton’s struggles with his life’s chaos and his chaotic relationship both with himself and God speak to the difficulties of an unstraightened mind.

  Later works hint at his spiritual restlessness and his fidgety heart. We discussed in class his tendency to rove from topic to topic, less than able to fully assimilate its contents and message before some new idea caught his eye. Merton tended to float about intellectually throughout much of his life, quick to seize on new ideas or books. But what strikes me most about his ongoing mental and spiritual drifting was the honest consistency of his life. Inasmuch as he couldn’t keep his head on straight when it came to what he was interested about on a weekly basis, he understood well his own limitations and unbalanced desires, and pursued faithfully the sort of discipline of life that would allow him to correct those problems, which were primarily problems of the nous.

  

  Not long into his Catholic life, he seemed increasingly frustrated with his spiritual unfitness even as he thought more and more about the priesthood. His spiritual malaise could not abate what he understood to be a strong vocation, and with lupine tenacity he approached the Franciscans to join their order, only to be the cause of his own refusal when he disclosed certain unspecified issues. Eventually coming to Gethsemani, Merton initially rejoiced at the opportunity to place his life in a good context. His writing “Fire Watch” indicates he took some amount of pleasure with the chances to quiet his mind with good work, devoting much of the time to prayer and reflection instead of the mindless planning from which monastic life liberated him.

  
      This regimen of work and prayer is exactly the thing prescribed to begin taming the nous and developing spiritually. Frederica Mathewes-Green, citing Paul, uses the image of the athlete, comparing physical exercise for the development of muscles and dexterity to spiritual exercise to strengthen and fortify the nous, reminding us that the very image of the athlete is the principal image in Paul’s epistles for growth, rather than a swooning mystic. Merton’s dedication to the prayer of the Hours and the normal work of Gethsemani fits in to the basics of such exercise; his prayer was regular, his eating regular, his work regular, his fasting regular, all within the confines of the ordered liturgical year. His spiritual life was well-ordered by his community, and so he didn’t fall into the excesses of heart in which many of us more independently-minded Christians will often wind up. In the writings of the Desert Fathers, the first-millennium Christians who invented the sort of monasticism in which Merton lived, there is the story of a young novice who went to see an older monk about fasting, saying “Should I eat one loaf of bread every other day?” The older monk replied “It is better to eat one half-loaf every day.” The concern here is to avoid the overzealousness that can lead to spiritual pride and the valuing of the practice itself over the virtues fostered. In all of this, Merton seems fairly well-disposed, noetically speaking.

  So why did he go to the hermitage? Merton wrote increasingly of solitude, by which he meant less actual physical isolation as much as he did being spiritually alone and abject before God, and over time, he grew less comfortable with the structures and strictures of monasticism. It has been said of Gethsemani that after the community decides you’re a good fit and accepts you, it works you over. Gethsemani changes you, and often, you’re no longer right for it. I’d say that it’s God that does the changing, but the principle remains the same: something of the experience is transformative, and the difficulty is in remaining in your place when you’ve been cut to a new shape. For Thomas Merton, the key, the solution, was to disengage from the community while remaining a part of it by physically separating himself from the main body, and taking new work. While still going, at least most of the time, to his daily prayers, he took new work, and a new life. He did not dress like a monk. He did not do the normal work of the monks. He tended the trees. Merton delved into spiritual solitude by embracing physical isolation, and in doing so began, perhaps, the work for which he had been training his spiritual muscles, disciplining his nous. Here, he began his thinking on civil rights and the nature of monasticism, on spiritual activism and pacifism, on Buddhism and the need to integrate it into his Christianity, and his role, his vocation, as a monk and as a writer.

  

  Merton struggled with his nous his entire life, and never fully mastered it. As I wrote, he never could settle his attention in one area, and I’m inclined to think he overacted in isolating himself from his community. There, while capable, perhaps, of better prayer, he was more able to let his mind wander around his many books, and in a short period flirted with dozens of ideologies and ideas. In withdrawing from the monastery, he may have assumed a strength he didn’t yet possess. Merton’s writing has always had, to me, a tinge of arrogance. I don’t say this in contempt, as I confess that I’m a pretty arrogant guy myself, and he grew increasingly insular and incomprehensible and disconnected in his work in that hermitage. He began writing, in a sense, only to himself. It’s like the philosophy of art for art’s sake, which early 20th century literary and art critic Malcolm Cowley derides as useless and without referent to real life. In this, his nous ran wild, unable to contain the passions. It seems, in the end, he wasn’t able to rope it down as much as he would have liked. What I question is whether there, in Bangkok, it was really even on his mind.

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