A Course in Desert Spirituality Read online

  Cover design by Tara Wiese. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

  © 2019 The Merton Legacy Trust. All rights reserved.

  © 2019 Editor’s prologue, edited compilation, and backmatter, Jon M. Sweeney.

  Published by Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, except brief quotations in reviews, without written permission of Liturgical Press, Saint John’s Abbey, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, MN 56321-7500. Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Merton, Thomas, 1915–1968, author. | Sweeney, Jon M., 1967–editor.

  Title: A course in desert spirituality : fifteen sessions with the famous Trappist monk / by Thomas Merton ; edited by Jon M. Sweeney.

  Description: Collegeville, Minnesota : Liturgical Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018048539| ISBN 9780814684733 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780814684986 (eISBN)

  Subjects: LCSH: Desert Fathers.

  Classification: LCC BR67 .M467 2019 | DDC 271—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048539

  “The world pursues us into the desert and seeks to win us back. If we have anything in us belonging to the world, the world has a claim on us.” (Lecture 15)

  Contents

  Foreword

  Paul Quenon, OCSO

  Editor’s Prologue

  Preface

  Lecture 1: Early Christian Spirituality (First and Second Centuries)

  Spirituality in the Age of the Martyrs ♦ The Ideal of Virgins and Ascetes

  Lecture 2: Aberrations in the Early Centuries

  Hatred of the Flesh ♦ Montanism ♦ Neoplatonism ♦ Gnosticism

  Lecture 3: The Christian Teachers of Alexandria

  Clement of Alexandria ♦ Origen

  Lecture 4: St. Anthony of the Desert

  Enter St. Anthony ♦ The Doctrine of Anthony ♦ The Later Life of Anthony

  Lecture 5: St. Pachomius and the Cenobites

  Cenobites vs. Hermits ♦ St. Pachomius’s Life Briefly ♦ The Rule of Pachomius

  Lecture 6: St. Basil of Caesarea

  His Life Briefly ♦ The Writings of St. Basil ♦ Basilian Cenobitism

  Lecture 7: Other Cappadocian Fathers: The Two Gregories

  St. Gregory Nazianzen ♦ St. Gregory of Nyssa ♦ Gregory of Nyssa’s Writings

  Lecture 8: Palestinian Monasticism and St. Jerome

  St. Jerome ♦ Other Controversies in the Life of Jerome ♦ Jerome’s Monastic Doctrine

  Lecture 9: The Community of St. Melania

  St. Melania ♦ St. Melania the Younger ♦ Roman Monasticism in Palestine ♦ Her Monastic Life in the East

  Lecture 10: Monasticism in Mesopotamia and Syria

  The Stylites ♦ Hermits of Nitria and Scete ♦ Characteristics of Desert Spirituality

  Lecture 11: St. Macarius and Pseudo-Macarius

  St. Macarius ♦ Messalianism ♦ Pseudo-Macarius

  Lecture 12: Evagrius Ponticus on Prayer

  Importance of Evagrius ♦ What Does Evagrius Mean by Prayer? ♦ Degrees of Prayer Summary

  Lecture 13: Master of the Spiritual Life: Cassian

  Cassian’s Error ♦ Cassian’s Life and Background ♦ Abbot Pinufius ♦ The Desert of Scete—and Nitria ♦ The Origenist Conflict ♦ Constantinople and Gaul

  Lecture 14: The Conferences of Cassian

  Conference 1: “On the Purpose and Goal of the Monk” ♦ Conference 2: “On Discretion” ♦ Conference 4: “On the Desire of the Flesh and of the Spirit” by Abbot Daniel ♦ Conferences 9 and 10: “Abbot Isaac on Prayer”

  Lecture 15: Philoxenos of Mabbug

  Foundations of the Spiritual Life ♦ What Is Simplicity? ♦ Letter to a Converted Jew ♦ Letter to a Novice ♦ Vocation to the Desert ♦ On Fornication

  Group Discussion Topics, Questions, and Additional Readings

  Editor’s Notes

  Index

  Foreword

  Paul Quenon, OCSO

  The Desert Fathers were a special delight to Thomas Merton in his wide reading and research of the Church Fathers. One well-known photograph of him, by John Howard Griffin, shows him seated over a large tome, in a denim jacket, which was standard winter wear for all the monks; he is reading the volume and laughing at it. Upon closer inspection, you can discern the letters on the page were in a foreign language and one could easily conjecture it was the Migne Latin edition of the Apothegmata, the “Sayings” of the Desert Fathers.

  Among the variety of conferences I attended by Fr. Louis in the Novitiate, the funniest were those about the Desert Fathers. The hermits’ odd behaviors, their blunt, simple answers to spiritual seekers, were evocative of the short, salutary words of Jesus himself. Words practical, unexpected, maybe off-putting like: “Keep to your cell, and your cell will teach you all things.” Or, “Fuge, silere et tachere.” “Flee, keep quiet and be silent.” The exotic names of these peculiar men began to ring in our heads, as well: Paphnutius, Arsenius, Pachomius. We heard stories of their quasi-prophetic behavior, such as one hermit who walked into the gathering of monks as they deliberated on the eviction of one brother who had greatly sinned. Upon his shoulder this wise Father carried a bag of sand with a hole in the bottom, trailing sand across the floor. He declared: “I am another sinner and I leave a trail of sins behind me like this sand.” After that, they decided to forgive and receive the wayward monk back into their midst. Unforgettable.

  One of the chief concerns in this literature is “the discernment of spirits”; how do you know what inspirations come from God and what comes from the devil? John Cassian tells the sad story of Brother John who decided he would prove his faith by throwing himself down a well and show he suffered no harm. That he straightway did—and perished.

  Merton, in The Wisdom of the Desert, his translation of the “Sayings,” compared such tales to the Zen Buddhist masters, and one could as well include Shams Tabrizi, as recounted by Rumi. But one need look no further than the subsequent literature of the Greek and Cappadocian Fathers to see further flowering of that seminal inspiration of the desert monks: most remarkably Evagrius Ponticus, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and extending westward, John Cassian and St. Benedict. While much of this later writing wafted on lengthy wings of rhetoric rather than on cryptic, monastic brevity, at its core it came from men envious of the simple, rustic lives of these solitaries. Most of the authors found in this current volume were wannabe monks, and probably at heart they really were, while being caught up in the complexities and conflicts of a church suffering growing pains in a Hellenic culture.

  None of this history was unsuitable for us fledgling novices in a modern monastery, to sample and taste. St. Benedict, in his Rule for monks, recommends such readings in preference to his very own “little rule for beginners.” In today’s turbulent world many women and men in Europe, America, and Latin America are looking toward Benedictine and earlier traditions for a guide on how to live. They feel an urgent need for “discernment of spirits” on many fronts, personal, ecclesiastical, and political. How can we detect what is motivating people—myself, others, and those big faces on the TV screen? The path to “purity of heart,” to unselfish, authentic, and guileless intentions of the mind and will, were understood by these wise and simple men and women of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Here they are carefully spelled out again for our guidance.

  Editor’s Prologue

  As with this book’s predecessor, A Course in Christian Mysticism, the volume you are holding originated in talks Thomas Merton gave to the novices at the Abbey of G
ethsemani. And as with the earlier book, A Course in Desert Spirituality is redacted from previously published, scholarly editions.

  Both Courses are attractive to those of us who live outside monasteries because of Merton’s brilliant ability to survey the key figures and synthesize their writings, inspiring his listeners and readers with what it means for the spiritual life. But this Course is also attractive to non-monastics because of Merton’s belief—which comes through clearly in the presentation—that monastic wisdom and spirituality are applicable for everyone. As Merton once said:

  [T]here is a monastic outlook which is common to all those who have elected to question the value of a life submitted entirely to arbitrary secular presuppositions, dictated by social convention, and dedicated to the pursuit of temporal satisfactions which are perhaps only a mirage. Whatever may be the value of “life in the world” there have been, in all cultures, men [and women] who have claimed to find something they vastly prefer in solitude.1

  So if you are a person with the sort of “monastic outlook” that Merton describes so well, this book of fifteen lectures is for your benefit—even though, perhaps especially because, it began as talks in a monastery.

  In his first monastic decade, Merton began to struggle with life in community. This is one of the more intriguing narrative threads of every Merton biography. Books have been written specifically on this subject. We know how the dedicated Trappist sought greater solitude for himself, but also how he was one of the most loquacious spiritual writers of his generation. This irony and contradiction were not lost on anyone around Merton, not even on him.

  Merton was frequently asking his abbot for more solitude, just as he was writing letters to hundreds of friends in the United States and abroad about every new book, every trending spiritual movement and idea. He was also actively talking to many of his desire for a more contemplative way of living. We even know of his yearning, at times, to transfer religious orders. If he were a Carthusian, could he better become the monk God wanted him to be? His later attraction to the religions and monastic traditions of the East are often seen in this light as well. There were even rumors after he died in Bangkok that he wasn’t actually dead, but had faked his death in order to become a Buddhist monk and live in the East!

  It was while studying John Cassian (the most important figure and teacher of these lectures) that Merton first gained permission for periods of greater solitude—and there are many moments in this book when we hear Merton arguing with the texts and the tradition (and himself? and his abbot?) on cenobitism vs. eremitism. The first is monastic life in community with other monks; the latter is the monastic life of hermits. Merton’s abbot allowed him to make use of a wood shed on the monastery property for long afternoons and early evenings. Merton named the humble place “St. Anne’s,” and while maintaining his other commitments, he loved his time alone there. One early February in 1953, he wrote in his journal:

  It is a tremendous thing no longer to have to debate in my mind about “being a hermit,” even though I am not one. At least now solitude is something concrete—it is “St. Anne’s”—the long view of hills, the empty cornfields in the bottoms, the crows in the trees, and the cedars bunched together on the hillside. And when I am here there is always lots of sky and lots of peace and I don’t have distractions and everything is serene. . . .

  Here there seems to be less and less need even of books.

  Cassian has become tremendous, in a site which makes him irritable.2

  That last line in the entry is a bit confusing, since Cassian drew his spiritual guidelines for monks—captured in his book of Conferences, the focus of Lectures 13 and 14 here—from encounters with, and admiration for, the lives and sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, who were hermits. It was St. Benedict and his famous Rule, soon thereafter, that normalized cenobitism throughout Western monasticism. What do we make of that last line in the journal entry? I’m not sure. Perhaps it reveals some of Merton’s own ambivalence or unease with his desire for solitude, which were sometimes very strong in him.

  In these pages, you will discover much that is attractive, and some that’s occasionally odd and unfortunate, in the lives and teachings and characters of those who left cities such as Alexandria, Damascus, and Jerusalem to seek greater faithfulness and commitment in the way of Christ. Merton demonstrates over and over movement in these two directions (attractive and unfortunate), and each was interesting to him. Particularly in Lecture 2, on “Aberrations,” he shows how we have seen developments in our spiritual understandings since the days of the early church. Montanism, for instance, with its combined “false asceticism and false mysticism,” claimed an important Church Father (Tertullian) and is now understood as tragic. And the “hatred of the flesh” of Encratism, exhibited in heretical moments and occasionally in the genuine lives of Desert Fathers, isn’t something to be emulated. Merton points both to ways in which we need to recapture and rediscover what was practiced long ago, and to what we’ve thankfully left behind.

  I vividly remember encountering the treasure trove of lectures that Merton gave to the young men studying to become Trappist monks at The Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. I’m old enough that I recall this first encounter via cassette tapes in the college library. The recording wasn’t always clear, and I remember hitting stop, rewind, and play over and over to “catch” the wisdom in these nuggets. More than thirty years later, working with this material in written form has been a way of returning both to Merton and his sources, and to my own discovery of Merton—and that’s been a joy.

  For those who are interested in exploring Merton’s teaching on desert spirituality in more detail, the unabridged, fully annotated versions of Merton’s original novitiate conferences on this topic, accompanied by extensive introductions, are available in Cassian and the Fathers: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition, ed. Patrick F. O’Connell (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2005) and Pre-Benedictine Monasticism: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 2, ed. Patrick F. O’Connell (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2006).

  As O’Connell wrote in the introduction to that first volume: “While packed with factual and interpretive material, the conferences’ focus was on formation rather than information. Their purpose was not to have the novices master a body of knowledge but to immerse them in a tradition, to allow them to become acclimated to a way of life that reached back in a continuous line to the early centuries of the Church.” This is another way of explaining how and why these lectures are now relevant more than a half century after Thomas Merton’s death.

  There is the hope and possibility that the spirituality of the desert might form us—even those who have not taken monastic or religious vows—into better followers of Christ.

  As such, this is not a book to be read casually. What the Desert Fathers and Mothers did with their lives, and how they interpreted the meaning of the Gospel, was never trivial and was not simple. To pick up this book is to study—but more than to study, it is to listen, and carefully. That should be the intention of all who read beyond this point.

  As with A Course in Christian Mysticism, these are mysteries that you shouldn’t attempt to encounter until you are prepared to meet them with your life. These lectures are not meant to be merely interesting; they are meant to transform. That’s what Thomas Merton meant for them when they were first delivered, and his passion for that life and its relevance for life today comes through clearly.

  From this point on, other than footnotes and backmatter, everything you will read is by Thomas Merton.

  Jon M. Sweeney

  The Feast of St. Francis of Assisi

  __________

  1 Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu (New York: New Directions, 1997), 10.

  2 Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s True Life (The Journals of Thomas Merton, Vol. 3: 1952–1960), ed. Lawrence S. Cunningham (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 29.

  Preface

  If for some
reason it were necessary for you to drink a pint of water taken out of the Mississippi River and you could choose where it was to be drawn out of the river—would you take a pint from the source of the river in Minnesota or from the estuary at New Orleans? This example is perhaps not perfect. Christian tradition and spirituality certainly do not become polluted with development. That is not the idea at all. Nevertheless, tradition and spirituality are all the more pure and genuine in proportion as they are in contact with the original sources and retain the same content.

  Pius XII insisted that religious strive for renewal of their own authentic tradition, by a return to sources. Monastic spirituality is especially traditional and depends much on return to sources—to Scripture, Liturgy, Fathers of the Church.

  Monastic life is the earliest form of religious life. The monk by his vocation belongs to the earliest kind of Christian spirituality. The original monastic sources have contributed to the stream of spirituality that has branched out in all the other orders; but the monk should get the life-giving waters from his proper source and not channeled through other spiritualities of later date, which have in them elements that are alien to the monastic life.

  Besides renewal of our own tradition we must of course adapt ourselves to the needs of our time, and a return to tradition does not mean trying to revive, in all its details, the life lived by the early monks, or trying to do all the things that they did. It means living in our time and solving the problems of our time in the way and with the spirit in which they lived in a different time and solved different problems.

  The primary concern of the desert life is to seek God, to seek salvation. The salutation common among Desert Fathers was “sotheis”—mayest thou be saved. Many of the sentences [we have come to know as their Sayings] are simply answers to the question, “What ought I to do?”