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

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At the center of our being is a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lies, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship.⁸

Greatly influenced in his mysticism by the apophatic theology found in such people as Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo–Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, or John of the Cross, Merton claimed that God is me and that I am God, and that no word or image can contain God or me. In other words, God is neither a “what” nor a “thing,” it is not a being among other beings, but a pure “Who” or a pure “I” that cannot be apprehended by conceptualization but must be experienced directly in the darkness where God is “everything and nothing,” and where “I” am “everybody” and “nobody.” Throughout Merton’s poetic corpus, we are witness to his own experience of the dark night of the soul, characterized by strong inner contradictions: