I’m not sure when I first met Tom Merton. It was probably in the middle of my college years at Columbia. Merton had graduated a few years before (1938), but as a part-time English instructor and half-serious graduate student he continued to hang out with other former and current editors of Jester, the college’s humor magazine, in their office on the fourth floor of John Jay Hall. The “Jester crowd” included the poet Robert Lax; Robert Gerdy, later an editor at the New Yorker; and Edward Rice, who created Jubilee. Robert Giroux, who went on to the publisher Farrar, Straus, later published Merton’s Seven-Storey Mountain. Together this lively, fun-loving crowd liked to clown around in John Jay and do “stunts” they could write about in Jester. We shared a strong enthusiasm for the jazz then thriving in nearby Harlem—at the Apollo Theater, the Savoy Ballroom, in midtown at the Roseland, and in the Village at Nick’s. The college quad echoed to the jazz emanating from Rice’s phonograph in the first floor of Livingston Hall.
I was of a somewhat different sort—active in the debate council and later one of its presidents and active also in student government. In that connection it was Bob Gerdy, as a leader of the Fusion Party and my political mentor, who listed me on the Jester masthead even though I did not actually write for it.
In this group, what probably recommended me as a freak along with the other Jester clowns was the fact that I had started learning Chinese, one of just two undergraduates in a Chinese language class that included two missionaries, the singer Paul Robeson, and a German spy who used her studies at Columbia as a cover for her espionage. This was in one of the few American colleges that offered Chinese in the 1930s. It was only much later that Merton got around to studying Chinese—and then mostly the mystics.
What Merton and I shared early on was an admiration for Dorothy Day, the editor of the Catholic Worker, a religious, communitarian, pacifist, and anti-industrialist supporter of the craft movement (à la Gandhi). In high school, I had already been active as a young Socialist, participating in antiwar demonstrations in New York’s Union Square. Merton, as everyone knows, was a longtime pacifist. I might even say he was a diehard pacifist, but after he committed himself to the monastic life (and thus was not subject to the military draft), it became only a theoretical issue.
In 1939–1940, when the peace movement was disrupted by the deal Stalin made with Hitler, dividing Europe between them and leaving Hitler free to make an all-out attack on Britain, I was persuaded by the likes of Reinhard Niebuhr at Union Seminary, whom I had known in my Young Socialist days, and by Carlton J. H. Hayes, a leading Catholic historian at Columbia, who was active in the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, to abandon the “Neutrality” movement and support Britain in its resistance to Hitler. My sympathies for this cause led me in 1940 as chair of the Student Governing Board to respond to a request from Eleanor Roosevelt (long a friend of youth movements) to join in a meeting at the White House in support of the Lend-Lease program, by which FDR provided aid (short of war) to the defense of Britain (during the so-called Battle of Britain.) Later, after the Pearl Harbor attack, I was recruited by Naval Intelligence for my Chinese and Japanese language skills (such as they were in those early days) and then was sent to the Pacific for three years. As you know from the Seven-Storey Mountain, Merton followed a very different path—the mystical and eremitical—engaged only in nonviolent struggle.
Nevertheless, after having taken a vow of silence as a Trappist, Merton found a way to be highly articulate, and though not engaged directly in a political or social sense, he managed to express himself on many issues that touched upon his own religiosity, especially the forms of Asian mysticism identified with Hinduism, Daoism, and Zen.
Whether Merton’s interest in other religions arose from an ecumenical impulse is a real question. He did not pay much attention to the distinctive characteristics of other religions in their ritual, doctrinal, ecclesiastical, or social forms, and he did not engage them too much on other levels than the contemplative. In the introduction to the Japanese edition of his The New Man, his first words bespeak his singular focus: “You must be born again.”1
Merton goes on to explain this in terms that reflect his earlier starting point in the English version of the essay, titled “Rebirth and the New Man in Christianity.”
These mysterious and challenging words of Jesus Christ reveal the inner meaning of Christianity as life and dynamism. More than that, spiritual rebirth is the key to the aspirations of all the higher religions. By “higher religions” I mean those like Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, that are not content with the ritual tribal cults rooted in the cycle of the seasons and harvests. These “higher religions” answer a deeper need in man: a need that cannot be satisfied merely by the ritual celebration of man’s oneness with nature.… Man seeks to be liberated from mere natural necessity, from servitude to fertility and the seasons, from the round of birth, growth and death. Man is not content with being a slave to need: making a living, raising a family, and leaving a good name to his posterity. There is in the depths of man’s heart a voice that says: “You must be born again.”2
There can be little doubt that being reborn is central to the theme of crucifixion and resurrection in Christianity, and Merton goes on to explain how this theme can be understood in those religions he identifies among the “higher religions.” These “higher” religions are defined by their supernatural character, their capacity for spiritual freedom from the limits of natural life, in most cases through a meditative or contemplative praxis such as that to which Merton had very early committed himself.
The essence of this is conveyed in his comments when contemplating the monuments of archaic Buddhist civilization at Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka. Merton said,
I don’t know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together…. I mean I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and got beyond the shadow and the disguise. This is Asia in its purity, not covered over with garbage—Asian, European or American—and it is clear, pure and complete.3
The question of which religions qualify among the “higher” ones is already prefigured by the titles of the books in which he expresses these views: Seeds of Contemplation, The Ascent to Truth, and Introductions East and West, and by his frequent references to “Asian religions” as a coherent class. To a degree, these are an understandable response to the fact that his early bestselling works were quickly translated into Asian languages, and he felt called upon in the Introductions to explain how his ideas related to his Asian audiences.
Among the “higher” religions of Asia, however, and among the major systems of Asian thought to be so classed there is one striking omission: Confucianism. One could explain this as simply a matter of definitions. Many people think of Confucianism as a worldly or secular teaching, merely a social ethic. Indeed, there are some grounds for this, insofar as Confucianism does not fit the conventional notion of religion as a cult of devotional worship in the Indo-European or Semitic mold. But that would not be enough to explain Merton’s failure at this point to discuss Confucianism as a prominent alternative to the systems he included approvingly among the “higher religions” of Asia, and one that other Christian writers had felt a need to reckon with.
Before proceeding with this other reckoning, however, I feel that in Merton’s case there is at least one particular circumstance that leads him in this direction: his obsession with the evil of “modernity.” The world he sought to liberate himself from was a world of modernization—thoroughly corrupted by industrialization, capitalism, and war, from which he sought to liberate himself. I believe this was a powerful element in his turning from his revulsion over a thoroughly corrupt modern world toward a life of contemplation, a turn that he saw as the common characteristic of the “higher religions.” This same characteristic he did not recognize in Confucianism, however, which for him did not measure up to this lofty liberating ideal.
Indeed, much of Confucianism he saw as devoted to satisfying those “natural necessities”—“making a living, raising a family, leaving a good name”—from which Merton says we should be liberated.
But there is more …
For modern man the old is often paradoxically that which claims to be new. Man in modern, technological society has begun to be callous and disillusioned…. The specious glitter of newness, the pretended glitter of a society in which youthfulness is commercialized and the young are old before they are twenty, fill some hearts with utter despair.4
In this respect Merton anticipated the Beats, who followed him at Columbia, “beaten” by a corrupt world and driven by revulsion with it into revolt and escape.
In the midst of this Merton says:
Yet in the deepest ground of our lives we still hear the insistent voice which tells us “You must be born again. …” We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. In modern secular life men resort to many expedients. If you can … find a good psychiatrist, it is possible that you may appreciate a psychological breakthrough and liberation…. But in reality psychoanalysis and psychiatry tend toward more workable compromises which enable us to function without having to undergo an impossible transformation. We are not born again. We simply learn to put up with ourselves….
More usually the desperation of modern man drives him to seek a kind of new life and rebirth in mass movements.… In these he tries to forget himself, in dedication to a more or less idealistic cause. But he is not born again.5
It is directly against this predicament of modern man and modern society that Merton poses the need for a radical spiritual transformation, which finds a parallel in Asian religions that put spiritual liberation ahead of any reform of human society. One can understand, then, why for him Confucianism fails to qualify as a higher religion: it sees self-improvement as integrally bound up with this-worldly social obligation and social melioration. Whether this actually precludes spiritual or religious transformation is another matter, to be discussed in what follows.
In judging this question, it is significant for us that Merton relies on scriptural evidence, directly interpreted in terms congenial to his own conception of modern man’s spiritual dilemma. While denying Confucianism a place among the “higher religions,” he cannot be unaware of the prominence of Confucianism among the major Chinese traditions. He knows that Confucianism is widely referred to both in China and abroad as among the “Three Teachings” (san jiao) of China, often referred to as the “Three Religions of China.” Merton is quick to dispute this latter characterization because it does not sufficiently differentiate Confucianism from Daoism and Buddhism and tends to treat it on a par with the latter. On the other hand, he cannot deny that Confucian texts recognized as canonical do have definite religious aspects.
Although Merton’s writings on the whole have almost nothing to say about Confucianism, he does attempt to deal with this seeming contradiction in a short section squeezed into a book otherwise broadly and loosely entitled Mystics and Zen Masters. Here, he refers to major Confucian texts under the headings of “The Great Traditions of China” and “The Sources of Classical Thought,” which lead him into a consideration of texts generally considered “classic” that define that early classical tradition.6
These are recognized as “authoritative” but nonetheless competing alternatives in early Chinese thought. They include Daoist and Legalist writings, but the main focus is on what Merton calls the “Four Confucian classics,” including the Great Learning, the Mean, and Mencius, along with the Analects of Confucius. Merton’s section also includes the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiao jing), which he renders as “Filial Love” (not without some justification, since it combines both love and piety).
Taking these texts as representative of classical Confucianism, Merton has some extraordinarily positive things to say about the Confucian classics themselves, along with other things that would explain why Confucianism as an organized teaching succumbed ultimately to negative forces.
First, some of the strong positive evaluations: Speaking of “Confucian humanism” as found in the classics, he says: “The foundation of the Confucian system is first of all the human person and then his relations with other persons in the society…. Confucianism is therefore a humanist and personalist doctrine, and this humanism is religious and sacred.” Moreover, “Confucianism is not just a set of formalistic devotions which have been loosely dismissed as ‘ancestor worship.’ The Confucian system of rites was meant to give full expression to that natural and humane love which is the only guarantee of peace and security in society. For Merton, the true and essential Confucianism was seen in the Analects and Mencius, which “continued to be the most vital and effective spiritual force in China.”7
If this is so, however, one naturally asks: why did or does Confucianism not qualify as one of the “higher religions”? Why does it not stand on a par with the other two of the “Three Teachings”? Merton does not address this question in the essay under consideration here, but we get clues along the way as to how, despite this enduring, vital essence of Confucianism as seen in the classics, the teaching came to be vitiated by powerful decadent forces.
As I say, we get only clues, not a full explanation, but these clues fall into a pattern. Explaining a crucial historical development in the third century b.c.e., the unification of China by the totalitarian Legalist movement, Merton says of the latter “that they brought the most vital and productive age of Chinese thought to a close and perhaps did more than anything else to create a society that would guarantee the formalization and even the ossification of Chinese thought for centuries to come. At any rate by the third century the really great development of Chinese philosophy ceased.”8
So stated, the increasing decadence of Confucianism is explained in terms of external forces and circumstances, but there are also hints that the teaching itself acquiesced in or succumbed to this “ossification” process in the longer run, when a Confucian ideal that had been basically personalistic yielded to “the rigid formalism of Confucian ethics and became, over two thousand years, a suffocating system.” Against this, we have contrasting assertions in the same essay. “But in spite of this corruption, the iniquity, the pessimism of human nature that were able to flourish in this climate of official cynicism, [Confucian] scholars remained untouched by what was around them and the Confucian tradition remained pure.”9
What are we to make of this juxtaposition of two thousand years of decadence and suffocation with Merton’s affirmation of the surviving purity of Confucian tradition? I believe what he means is that the institutionalized forms of Confucianism, especially as sponsored by the state, were corrupted by the systemic process, yet individual Confucians, drawing directly on the inspiration of surviving classics, remained true to the original teaching.
These relatively isolated and exceptional cases, however “spirited” they might be, still did not qualify as a “religion,” much less as a “higher religion.”
At this point, one begins to wonder if this contradictory representation of Confucianism reflects not just the “facts” but some common assumptions in modern Western thought. One of these sees religions in general as tending to fall away from their original inspiration and succumb to a process of inevitable corruption in the all-too-human hands of those who claim its sanction for their own self-interested uses. The other tendency draws from this the further conclusion that organized religion is inherently corrupt as compared to personal “spiritualities” that rely on direct intuitive experience through forms of contemplative praxis that transcend religious dogma and sectarianism. Fortunately, we have more than such suppositions to help us in arriving at a fair judgment, and these appear in the same collection of disparate thoughts collected under the upside-down umbrella of Merton’s Mystics and Zen Masters.
Under that same heading, we find a section called “The Jesuits in China.” Here, drawing mostly on the work of George H. Dunne,10 Merton credits the early Jesuit missionaries to China in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century with a remarkable accommodation to Chinese culture, including most notably the sympathetic efforts of Matteo Ricci to achieve a genuine understanding of Confucianism.
Merton’s title, “The Jesuits in China,” is right in drawing attention to the large contributions of the Jesuits as a group—including other Jesuits in China, such as Adam Schall von Bell (1592–1669), and also those who performed a similar mission, such as Roberto DiNobile (1577–1656) in India and Alexandro Valignano (1539–1606) in Japan—who led in a similar adaptation of Christianity to the native cultures, different as these were from each other, to Hinduism in India and to a Zen Buddhism already much adapted to Shinto and Japanese culture.
Spectacular as each of these cases was in their own local setting, together they could also be seen as an outgrowth of a fundamental impulse in the founding of the Jesuit order in the wake of the European Renaissance, which from the start sought to harmonize Judeo-Christian piety with the classical culture then being revived from Greece and Rome. Jesuits in each of these different cultural settings produced distinctive results, yet this success was not just in adapting Christianity to native cultures but in creatively reviving some of the essential elements in native philosophy and religion itself.
Merton’s high estimate of Ricci in these respects is confirmed by the eminent European sinologue Wolfgang Franke (unknown to Merton):
Looking back with our present understanding of Chinese civilization of the late Ming period, we find it almost incredible that a foreigner—however well educated and intelligent he might be—without any previous knowledge of the Chinese language and civilization was able within less than twenty years to take up residence in the capital, become a prominent member of this society, make friends with a number of the most eminent scholar-officials of the time, and even convert some of them to his Christian faith.… This accommodation included a thorough Chinese literary education in order to carry on discussions with Chinese scholars and to talk to them on the achievements of European science and development of thought in their own terms. Ricci himself was particularly able to master a highly sophisticated form of accommodation, and was therefore accepted by the Chinese scholar-officials as one of their own.
Ricci’s ingenious, gentle and kindly nature conformed to the highest Chinese standards…. It inclined him to appreciate and value the essence of Chinese culture. All in all Ricci may be considered the most outstanding cultural mediator of all times.11
Ricci’s achievement in this respect is typified by his extraordinary effort to learn and master classical Chinese (simply as a missionary he would have had plenty to do just by learning vernacular Chinese so as to communicate with and convert ordinary people). But Ricci recognized the importance of educated Chinese leadership, and he did not just dismiss or sidestep them in the way that Merton tends to do when he denigrates Confucian scholars as in the following: “All China, at least all the ruling class of China, was supposed in theory to be educated along Confucian lines, but many and not the least successful of Chinese statesmen were men who with the outward facade of Confucianism, were inwardly either pedants, rigid and heartless conformists, or unprincipled crooks.”12
Ricci himself could easily have taken Confucianism at this low level and used it to his own advantage in converting people from a debased Confucianism to an unsullied Christianity. As a post-Renaissance man, however, and like Erasmus a Christian humanist, Ricci was disposed to take the classical Chinese tradition at its own best professions and attempt to reconcile Confucianism with Christianity at the highest level.
That Ricci was successful in this is attributable not only to his own openness of mind but to a similar openness of many Confucian scholars whom he sought to engage in active dialogue. Reciprocity was at work here, not just solitary genius being impressed on credulous others. And this openness of his Chinese partners (so much in contrast to Merton’s characterization of the Confucians as rigid, heartless pedants) reflected something in the Confucians’ own background that contrasts with Merton’s routine characterization of them.
This new element is to be seen in a revival of Confucianism that had started in the eleventh century. It has been called Neo-Confucianism because it was not only a revival of the old but a reformulation of it to meet the new needs of Song-dynasty China. History was not just to be seen as a tired repetition of ancient platitudes by entrenched bureaucrats but a concerted response by thoughtful Neo-Confucians to the challenge of a new situation.
In the eleventh century, this new situation arose from the need of the new Song dynasty both to stabilize society, after years of civil war, and to address the economic and social problems of a society that had developed and expanded to a new level. Hu Yuan (993–1059) was one of a generation of Confucian scholars who responded to this new need by his formula of “substance, function, and literate discourse.” By “substance” he meant enduring truths in the Confucian classics still relevant to the solution of contemporary problems (their “function” or “application”), and by literate discourse he meant the need for open, public discourse by which people could arrive at common agreement or consensus on what to do about their shared problems. The test of timeless truths was their adaptability to the needs of human society. These could be based on shared natural feelings, but they had to be expressible, communicable, or they would be as unavailable for practical use as the wordlessness of Laozi or the koans of Zen Buddhism were in dealing with the rampant civil war and suffering that had prevailed in the ninth and tenth centuries, while Buddhism and Daoism were flourishing (except for a prohibition on Buddhism in 845 engineered at court by the rival Daoists).
Politically in the eleventh century, this new Confucian reform movement called for a “restoration of the ancient order” (here in an idealized form), and its political and economic program was called the New Laws or New System (Xin fa). (In the twentieth century, it is sometimes analogized to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.) Although the success of this movement waxed and waned in time, its institutional ideals continued to inspire successive generations of new reformers. But among these ideals the most enduring (yet also much conflicted) was a new ideal of “classical” education based on a new curriculum.
By the end of the twelfth century, this new curriculum had been shaped for the long term by the great Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who was no less an educator than a metaphysician and who provided Confucianism with a curricular core that far outlasted and outdistanced the reformers’ limited success in achieving universal schooling. Despite the failure of at least nominal attempts to implement universal schooling in China, the new core curriculum made its way in different parts of East Asia and on different levels down into the twentieth century.
Zhu Xi’s core curriculum was identified by what were called the Four Books and Five Classics, of which the key and crucial components were the Great Learning, the Analects of Confucius, the text of Mencius, and the Mean (Zhong yong). Since together with the Five Classics the Four Books came to be known as “the classics,” it is important to recognize that actually they were a very select group of texts, singled out for special attention by Zhu Xi. The Great Learning and the Mean were separate chapters drawn from a traditional classic known as the Record of Rites (Li ji), a large collection of materials dealing with ritual under many diverse headings, both theoretical and practical. Zhu Xi, following up on an earlier trend among his Song predecessors, singled these out because they provided a brief compact formulation of the basics of all learning, here made to serve as a guide to one’s reading of the other classics. Indeed, Zhu Xi’s formulation was so succinct and focused that it readily became the heart of a new Confucian education. First adopted on the local level in Song private academies, next under the Mongol Yuan dynasty in the curriculum of the Imperial College, then in the civil-service examination system, ultimately it reached beyond the borders of China into the schools of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. In fact, so succinct, manageable, and memorable was this core formulation that it persisted even in the household instruction of many families not able to afford formal instruction.
I have already spoken of the enormous outreach of Zhu Xi’s “core” in chapter 9, but let me offer just one recent example of its perduring influence: In 1989, when the Chinese Communist regime reversed Mao’s anti-Confucian campaign (the Cultural Revolution), I was invited to speak on Confucianism at a state-sponsored celebration of Confucius’s birthday in Beijing. On that occasion, I had a conversation with the president of the People’s Republic of China, Jiang Zemin, who fondly recalled his childhood education, before he became caught up in the Chinese Communist revolution, when his father instructed him at home in the Four Books. These homespun lessons stayed with him through the years and were no doubt part of the underlying sensibility that led Jiang, Deng Xiaoping, and other moderates to recoil from the excesses of Mao Zedong and the so-called Gang of Four.
The relevance of all this to Thomas Merton is that so widely had the Four Books become accepted as the essential Confucian classics, when Merton chose to talk about the Confucian classics in his Mystics and Zen Masters, he referred to these same core texts as representative of classic Chinese thought, calling them not the Four Books but “the Four Confucian Classics.”13 Classic texts they were indeed, but Merton reads them as speaking for the original pure Confucianism, not the later “corrupt” and “decadent” Confucianism he so readily dismisses (as compared to Daoism and Zen Buddhism). He can appreciate these particular “classics” without recognizing them as neoclassical, Neo-Confucian texts because they speak to him personally and directly and are amenable to his own form of higher spirituality.
Another new feature of “Neo”-Confucianism was its development of a method of contemplative praxis (unacknowledged by Merton) to match Daoist and Zen meditation. It was called “quiet-sitting” (jing zuo). Since no such explicit practice appears in classical Confucianism, there cannot be much doubt that quiet-sitting was adapted from something like Zhuangzi’s “sitting in forgetfulness,” in which one was supposed to “forget humaneness and rightness.” Mencius’s rejoinder to Zhuangzi was that one should “neither forget (natural moral impulses) nor try to abet (or force) them willfully.” Neo-Confucians associated this new/old contemplative practice with a holistic experience of “the humaneness that forms one body (including the bodily feelings) with Heaven-and-Earth and all things.”
Zhu Xi explained this further in his commentary on the Great Learning’s dictum of ge-wu, often translated as the “investigation of things,” a rendering that appeals to the modern preference for objective investigation but that is better understood as “the recognition of things,” which combines both the subjective and objective aspects of knowing or learning. Zhu Xu explains ge-wu as follows:
The teaching of the Great Learning insists that the learner, as he comes upon the things of this world, must proceed from principles already known and further fathom them until he reaches the limit. After exerting himself for a long time, he will one day experience a breakthrough to integral comprehension. Then the qualities of all things, whether internal or external, refined or coarse, will all be apprehended and the mind in its whole substance and great functioning will all be clearly manifested.14
Quiet-sitting became a widespread practice in Neo-Confucianism and accompanied it to the rest of East Asia. Some schools in Korea and Japan even considered it orthodox praxis. Though obviously this could not be part of any official-examination “orthodoxy” that emphasized measurable objectivity, it satisfied the more personal and subjective side of Cheng-Zhu learning. Its place and status in the whole system is indicated by the fact that while some of Zhu Xi’s predecessors went so far as to speak of “spending half the day in reading (study) and half in quiet-sitting,” Zhu himself wondered how one could do this and still meet his essential social obligations.
In his section on “The Jesuits in China” (part of what goes under the title of Mystics and Zen Masters), Merton dwells not on these developments in Song Confucianism but on the undoubted achievements of Jesuits like Matteo Ricci in coming to terms with the Confucians of that day.
The legend of the subtle Jesuit diplomatist who always has an ace up his sleeve (otherwise known as “Jesuit casuistry”) has obscured the true meaning and profound importance of Ricci’s originality. He not only made an intelligent diagnosis of a totally unfamiliar condition, but also, by implication diagnosed his own condition and that of western Christian civilization as a whole. Like a true missionary, he divested himself of all that belonged to his own country and his own race and adopted all the good customs and attributes of the land to which he had been sent.15
(So much for the typical “colonialist” view of Christian missionaries.)
Merton has much more to say about the Jesuits that need not detain us here. Suffice it for me to quote these lines: “Here were men who three hundred years ahead of their time, were profoundly concerned with issues which are now seen to be so important that the whole history of the church and Western civilization seems to be implicated in their solution.”16 Merton is right, even though he does not himself go as far into the issues (especially the Neo-Confucian ones) as we might like. We can offer two more illustrations of Ricci’s accomplishments that confirm what has just been quoted from Merton. The first is Ricci’s phenomenal effort to learn classical Chinese and apply it to a pioneering translation into Latin of the Four Books. To this extent Ricci extended the process of spreading Zhu Xi’s influence, already felt throughout East Asia, to the West and even to Merton himself.
The second example is Ricci’s translation into Chinese of a version of Cicero’s De Amicitia in response to the ready interest shown by his Confucian scholars in the fundamental and universal value of friendship. Not only did this satisfy a need of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Neo-Confucian scholars for whom human association was the key to “self-cultivation and human governance” (as Zhu Xi had put it), but it at the same time expressed a strong impulse in the post-Renaissance religious humanism of Erasmus (1466?–1538), shared by Ricci’s Jesuits.
From this we can see how these historical developments in both the West and China converged on an enduring universal value—friendship and the virtue of trust or trustworthiness it depended on. From the Renaissance interest in Roman civility to Erasmus’s sixteenth-century religious humanism and on to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, there was an unceasing focus on the key human elements in a civil society. This appealed to sixteenth-century Neo-Confucians who, instead of simply succumbing to the corrupt, despotic tendencies referred to by Merton, were eager to learn from Ricci whatever he could bring from the West that would help them remain true to their principles of civility.
In “The Jesuits in China,” Merton is highly appreciative of what Ricci and the Jesuits did, but he has little to say about their Confucian counterparts. Because he does not pay that much attention to Chinese history (except as recurring decline) and does not recognize the much broader significance of Neo-Confucianism and Zhu Xi’s core curriculum as it spread to the rest of East Asia, he is in no position to recognize the continuing vitality of Confucianism inside and outside of China. His own “Confucianism,” the true kind, is one he can draw directly from a personal reading of “timeless” classics, like the Analects and Mencius, not from history.
Nevertheless, the original Confucian classics themselves included history, poetry, and much else, and it was only Merton’s early initiation into the Four Books that allowed him to take a foreshortened “timeless” view of Confucianism. Another way to look at it, however, is to note that Merton was, from the start, more of a poet than a historian. As a poet, he could resonate with nature—earthly, human, and divine—but he would have had to be more of a historian and perhaps somewhat less of a pure contemplative in order to be brought truly “down to earth” in a Confucian sense. But then, few Confucians themselves were both good poets and historians. And I myself was no poet, despite my association with Lax and Merton (and even being listed on the masthead of Jester!)
At least this is my thought or, rather, the open question that I leave with you in conclusion. Perhaps it is more than I could reasonably expect of Merton, the poet, considering all that he did accomplish in his all-too-brief lifetime. Except for his premature death, he might well have caught up with the history—or better yet, since he was not out looking for it, history would probably have caught up with him.
As for myself, since those early days with Merton, I have spent my life rather differently. Instead of listening for the Zen sound of one hand clapping, I have looked for two hands clapping or clasping in support of humanistic learning, liberal education, and humane governance of the university, combining as best I could spiritual cultivation with public service—as a teacher in a collegial core curriculum, as a scholar in the Asian humanities, and as a university administrator, while at home cultivating my organic garden in a suburban cooperative community. Merton, I think, would not have objected to any of that.
Thank you.