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

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My tenet is that the entire body of Thomas Merton’s poetry can be thought of as a poetics of dissolution: the dissolution of the old corrupt world full of pointless slaughters in favour of an apocalyptic vision of a new world; abstract categorizations of the supernatural giving way to a more direct, humanized and intimate experience of the sacred at home in the world; and above all, a fading away of the false self in the light of the true self in Christ: “O flaming Heart/unseen and unimagined in this wilderness,/You, You alone are real, and here I’ve found You.” Indeed, Merton has been regarded as a prophet and poet of transformation, and his transformative metaphors may help us celebrate the best and most universal of our human civilization’s achievements by bringing forth the most regenerative radiance from deep inside the heart of contemplation.

Through the eight chapters in which this book has been divided, Merton invites us to live a contemplative life. Such contemplation is “the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life,”⁴ “a listening in silence, an expectancy,”⁵ “a simple intuition of the truth” (simplex intuitus veritatis),⁶ and above all the capacity to see beyond the idols and masks of the ego into the “mystery in which God reveals Himself to us at the very center of our own most intimate self.”⁷ As he beautifully wrote: