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Jan van Ruusbroec, Mystical Theologian of the Trinity (review)

229 In addition to its organization, The Inner Experience is valuable for its comprehensiveness. It includes extensive reflections on the self, on culture, on technology, on solitude, on monastic renewal, on relations with Eastern religions, with existentialism, with Marxism, all within the context of union with God, and with other people and all creation in God. It provides a very helpful framework for showing how the writings of the following decade on all these topics are central not peripheral to Merton’s spirituality, rooted in his own contemplative awareness. If there is some residual reliance on a distinction between natural and supernatural orders from Merton’s earlier scholastic approach, and a tendency, always carefully qualified, to associate non-Christian contemplation with the natural order (cf. 8, 29), there is still evident in the work a trajectory toward the full appreciation of the presence of grace in all authentic human spiritual experience that will characterize his writings of the 1960s. The very last words of Merton in the volume, a passage quoted from a September 1959 letter to Czeslaw Milosz, provide an apt summary of its value, and a reason for regarding it as a major addition to the Merton canon: “I have just been finishing another book, The Inner Experience—a wider deeper view of the same thing, contemplation, with more reference to oriental ideas. There is to me nothing but this that counts, but everything can enter into it” (156). “Everything” may not have entered The Inner Experience, but the book perhaps shows better than any other of Merton’s works, certainly than any previous work, how there is a place for everything, for social and cultural and political commentary, for interreligious dialogue, for prophetic witness and sapiential awareness, for tradition and innovation, in a life oriented toward contemplative realization. In a statement written for the opening of the Merton Collection at Bellarmine College in Louisville in 1963, Merton summarized his work by saying, “Whatever I may have written, I think it all can be reduced in the end to this one root truth: that God calls human persons to union with Himself and with one another in Christ, in the Church, which is His Mystical Body,” and that “if I have written about interracial justice, or thermonuclear weapons, it is because these issues are terribly relevant to one great truth; that man is called to live as a son of God . . . to live in peace with all his brothers in the one Christ” (Thomas Merton Studies Center 14, 15). The Inner Experience is a signal expression of this “one root truth,” a major work available at last, thanks to a degree of luck, to the persistence of the Merton Legacy Trustees, and to the meticulous and illuminating editorial work of William Shannon, in a form at least close to what Merton would finally have intended.