Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн

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grapes. Take them, they will refresh you.”

Then Macarius was very glad to see the worth of those men

Who lived hidden in the Desert at Scete.³

It is obvious that the aforementioned lines are evoking the words pronounced by Jesus two or three times during the Last Supper: “This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). The four evangelists insist on this law and St. John in his Gospel develops it in detail, a sort of invitation to community. The new commandment of love confirms this community, (Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor) which means abandoning the particularity or personality of each of us in favour of the formula “love one another,” with this impersonal “one” at which the English language points. In this regard, the symbol of the grapes might represent the death of the individual which precedes the resurrection of the community or the resurrection of Lógos, a death which for Merton implied a fierce fight against his own biased world views, a destruction and oblivion of his self, his mask, his disguise, the worst of miseries.⁴ It is utterly impossible to define the nature of communal space, he will tell us. “We all add up to something far beyond ourselves. We cannot yet realize what it is. But we know […] that we are all members of the Mystical Christ, and that we all grow together in Him for Whom all things were created.”⁵ Let us thus go to the desert among the hearts devoted to God, beata solitudo, not in search of a narcissist dialogue but to engage in compassionate clarity, hearty friendship, and secret philia⁶