Heretic Blood

By Jennifer Mains

Published December 1999

Heretics are-those who step outside our circle of beliefs. They are the outsiders, the rebels, the critics and the prophets who urge us towards a new vision. But western societies have had a long history of shunning heretics. We prefer to remain inside the circle of our beliefs, resistant to the voice of the heretics. In his book, Heretic Blood, a biography of Tho­mas Merton, Michael Higgins resur­rects the passion and the challenge of the heretic. Merton cannot be shunned. We are compelled to hear his critique of scientific logic and tech­nological society and we receive hope with his vision of the wholeness of creation. Thomas Merton is as prophetic today as he was forty years ago.

Higgins carries us on a journey, ex­ploring the life of Merton, the Trap­pist monk, the poet, the social critic and the religious visionary. He draws deeply on Merton’s affinity to William Blake, the 18th century artist, poet and kindred heretic. Blake’s influence threads its way through Higgins’s analysis of Merton. He sees Merton as “a disciple, an interpreter of Blake’s visionary approach to life.” In full Blakean robes, Merton argues against the dominance of scientific logic, de­nounces the dehumanizing role of technology and promotes the balanc­ing of contraries.

Merton shared Blake’s distaste for the legacy of the enlightenment, a legacy of scientific logic. He was dis­turbed that his world was framed by such limiting deductive logic. What did not fit in this logic could not ex­ist. This meant that empathy and compassion, which do not conform to the rules of logic, had no place or value. Such emotions do not spring from logic, from what Merton de­scribes as a “life affirming imagina­tion.” Without this “life affirming imagination,” Merton believed that his society was doomed to be governed by “abstract codes based on math­ematical reasoning” which would “bring about a vicious circle of oppres­sions and wars.” Reason had become separated from imagination. Merton recognized this as an opportunity for tyranny.

The tyranny of logic and its child, technology, found ample room to flourish during World War II. Merton’s poems and writings brimmed with indignation and sorrow. The Nazi furnaces which burned for the Jews, gypsies and others and the nu­clear bombing of Hiroshima became focal points for Merton’s denunciation of technology. Technology had been put to inhumane use. Logic was its only mentor. It was rational to de­stroy people who posed a threat or were deemed unproductive. It was also rational to drop a bomb of unim­aginable consequences to end a war. The supposed sanity of this world was without moral conscience. Merton was appalled. He believed that tech­nology had become a surrogate reli­gion, worshipped without question. It had its own hierarchy and language, which ensured the subservience of its user. The irony, which Merton notes, is that technology, in itself, is neutral. It has no ultimate value. We have sanctified technology. In awe of it we have become its servant.

In a time when logic and technol­ogy were pitted against spiritual im­agination, Merton sought balance. He was a poet, a spiritual seeker in a world that was broken and full of Blakean “Contraries” (attraction verses repul­sion, love verses hate). He searched for a visionary model that would ex­press the body of all ideas, contradic­tions included. The myth-dream emerged.

The myth-dream was a way to ex- press ideas and experiences that are drawn from the sensual, the intellectual and the spiritual. (It could be classified as positive or negative.) Merton’s own myth-dream was the creation of a new geography, where there would be moral and spiritual sharing amongst all peoples. An example of a negative myth-dream was the belief that everything must be logi­cal and scientific.

True to Blake, Merton did not at­tempt to eliminate the negative. In­stead he urged that we create a “mar­riage of heaven and hell,” a “Yin Yang palace of opposites.” This balance was necessary to begin the journey to wholeness.

A vision of wholeness could not come easily to Merton’s generation. They had been robbed of their spir­itual imagination by an imbalance of negative myth-dreams. This vision did become clearer to Merton in his last years. This was a time when he intensely studied ancient and eastern philosophies. Merton was on a quest to understand the wholeness of crea­tion. He accepted that the balance of the contraries and the complementarity of opposites were el­emental truths.

In Bangkok, Thailand, on Decem­ber 10, 1968, Thomas Merton was ac­cidentally electrocuted in his room. His quest ended. Amongst the huge body of work that survives is a most powerful image. Merton invites us (the monks, poets and marginal fig­ures) “to dance in the clarity of the contradiction.”

Today, we do not celebrate the per­fect contradiction. We are not good at balancing the contraries. Our im­aginations are increasingly enslaved by technology and our compassion con­stricted by our reason. Governments rationalize their cutbacks to those in need while increasing tax rebates to the wealthy. Who are our heretics? Who speaks with passion, challenging our understanding of the wholeness of creation? Who reminds us, as Merton did, not to destroy the common good? The heretics, the outsiders, those who do not conform within our circle are amongst us. They refuse to participate where there is no dignity. They tell us that the systems are dehumanizing. Their exclusion is a testimony to our failure to understand the wholeness of creation.

If we believe, as Merton did, that everything that lives is holy, we have turned our backs on what is holy. Merton’s heretical vision of the whole­ness of creation is still a myth-dream.