New Seeds 1: What is Contemplation?
This is part of an ongoing, occasional series of essays offering commentary on Thomas Merton’s classic book New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)
The Development of a Book (or Books?)
The development of what would become New Seeds of Contemplation is fascinating for a number of reasons. First, the manuscript went through several iterations. Donald Grayston, in his magisterial study of the writing and redactions of the text, notes five self-contained editions. The first, an unpublished typescript, is dated to 1947 or 1948, contemporaneous with other important texts like Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) and the texts that would become The Sign of Jonas (1953). The second is what became the book published as Seeds of Contemplation (March 1949). The third is the revised edition of Seeds of Contemplation (December 1949), which included some edits and the inclusion of a new preface.
It’s worth pausing to mention the new preface begins with the acknowledgement: “This book was never intended to be popular. The fact that it has become so leaves the author happy, no doubt, but embarrassed. Because a book like this, which is a collection of unconnected and rather compressed reflections on the spiritual life, can easily be misunderstood” (8).
Clearly Merton did not expect such interest in this volume. Perhaps because it was drafted and prepared for publication slightly before the release of The Seven Storey Mountain, which went on to surprise astronomical success, there was no immediate sense of such a possibility. Alas, Merton explained in the preface to the December 1949 “revised edition” what he intended to do: “To make a book like this perfectly clear, [sic] would require rewriting from beginning to end. Instead of doing that, the author has made a few minor corrections and now contents himself with issuing a warning to the reader” (8).
It is clear that in the decade that followed, Merton continued to feel discomfited by what he viewed as the inadequacies and lacunae of his earlier text. This brings us to the fourth edition, which is an unpublished typescript developed between 1950 and 1961 that includes everything from minor redactions to major additions made to the December 1949 text of Seeds of Contemplation. The fifth edition is the final volume published as New Seeds of Contemplation (1961).
Grayston asserted that Seeds of Contemplation and New Seeds of Contemplation ought to be read as one text. This approach is theoretically appealing, giving emphasis to the ongoing, dynamic, and emergent creation of a singular work that spans more than a decade of reflection and revision. And yet, as appealing as such an hermeneutical approach may be at first, it does not resolve all the questions of literary boundaries, authorial intent, and the identity and meaning of each edition of the text (or minimally that of Seeds and New Seeds) as whole works in their own right. How to approach and interpret these texts in light of their rich and complex histories is a question for another time.
For our purposes in this commentary series, I am prescinding from engaging in this specific question about whether to read Seeds and New Seeds as one, singular, dynamic text, in order to focus on the ultimate edition published as New Seeds and still in print today. It is my intention to occasionally reference earlier material when relevant, whether to highlight contrast or illustrate development of thought. Let’s turn now to the text itself.
Preface and Author’s Note
One of the most striking aspects of the preface to New Seeds is Merton’s immediate disclaimer that what is contained in this volume is, at least in his estimation at this point in the project’s development, “in many ways a completely new book” (xv). He acknowledges his own shifting horizon, noting that in the late 1940s his focus was not “in confronting the needs and problems of other men [sic],” but solely on the interior life and his own experience within a Catholic Christian context. Now his focus has broadened to include a host of people not initially on his radar as a young monk and recent convert to Catholicism. He even acknowledges that “there are perhaps people without formal religious affiliations who will find in these pages something that appeals to them” (xvii).
Merton also cautions readers against too simplistic an approach to the term “contemplation,” noting that often its use or invocation “sounds like ‘something,’ an objective quality, a spiritual commodity that one can procure, something that it is good to have; something which, when possessed, liberates one from problems and from unhappiness” (xvi). He relays that he even considered not using the word “contemplation” for this very reason, but realized it is essentially unavoidable.
With that caveat stated, Merton then provides an “Author’s Note” in which he names some of the motivations for this project (initially as Seeds, and the continued revision resulting in New Seeds), pointing especially to the universal relevance of contemplation for “everybody, and not only monks” (xix).
What is striking about Merton’s prefatory style in these two small reflections is the similarity it has to certain medieval and early renaissance mystics, especially women mystics. Here I’m thinking in particular of Julian of Norwich (d. ca. 1416) who, in her Showings, goes to great lengths to qualify her own theological reflections and minimize her own authority in part to avoid the censorial backlash of religious leaders. Given the differences in their social, historical, and ecclesial contexts, what we see here is more stylistic resonance than some shared mitigatory aim. Nevertheless, Merton is keen to contextualize what follows as the personal reflections of just one Trappist monk and, if there is something worthwhile to be gained in reading these reflections, then it is because the reader is open to the working of the divine spirit.
Even after reading Merton’s published and unpublished work for decades, including the editing of his massive correspondence with his friend, agent, and editor Naomi Burton Stone, it is still not clear to me how to interpret Merton’s prefatory remarks here. While the style is reminiscent of Julian’s own conscious qualifications and self-diminutions, was Merton likewise attempting to circumscribe criticism or preempt censorship? Or, perhaps, was Merton genuinely expressing a sense of humility occasioned by the unexpected success of the book in terms of sales and readership? These are questions worthy of continued reflection.
What is Contemplation?
Merton opens the first chapter of New Seeds, titled “What is Contemplation?” with a reflection that echoes the second-century Christian theologian St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Doctor of the Church. Irenaeus famously wrote: “The glory of God is the human person fully alive!” (Adv. Hers. 4.20.7). The sense of Merton’s opening lines ties this sense of divine celebration of authentic human life with contemplation.
Merton writes:
Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source (1).
In his opening notes on contemplation, Merton offers a series of oblique impressions of what contemplation is all about without directly providing a definition or programmatic instruction. This is intentional. As Merton noted in Seeds as well as in the preface to the revision of Seeds and the front matter of New Seeds, he is skeptical about the ability we have to fully articulate what the meaning of contemplation is (which is why, in a poetic turn, the next chapter is titled, “What contemplation is not”).
Contemplation is experiential, it is mystical, it is tied in some way to the fundamental structure of human personhood and inextricably connected to the call received at baptism. This latter point is made clear in Merton’s meditation on the death-like nature of contemplative practice. “To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life” (2).
To be clear, Merton is not encouraging bodily death, but rather re-articulating the Pauline notion of “death to self” we find in the Apostle’s own reflections on Christian baptism and the need to “put on” Christ. In the Christian liturgical context, one is said to “die with Christ” in order to “rise with Christ” through baptism.
That Merton opens with such a baptismal emphasis reveals Merton’s on sense of the universality of the Christian call to contemplative life. As we’ll see throughout New Seeds, Merton has a prescient ability to anticipate what will be doctrinally defined in the years that follow at Vatican II. In the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, we are told that all the baptized are called to a life of Christian holiness, which for centuries was understood to be the domain only of the ordained clergy and professed members of religious orders.
In New Seeds Merton is presuming the universality of humanity’s capacity for the divine (Capax Dei) and, therefore, the universal call for all people to develop and foster a contemplative life. In this way, Merton’s words reflect the theological anthropology of the great German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (d. 1984), who was one of the most significant theological periti (experts) of the Second Vatican Council.
Rahner believed that capacity for God’s self-disclosure—revelation—is a universal human attribute, or what he called in the language of Western Enlightenment philosophy, an “existential.” He famously used the metaphor of a question to describe this deeply intimate relationship between God and God’s human creatures.
Rahner wrote:
Man [sic] is the radical question about God which, as created by God, can also have an answer, an answer which in its historical manifestation and radical tangibility is the God-man [Jesus Christ], and which is answered in all of us by God himself. This takes place at the very center of the absolute questionableness of our being in and through what we call grace, God’s self-communication and beatific vision. When God wants to be what is not God, man comes to be (225).
Merton offers a similar reflection, building on the innate capacity all humans have for divine encounter, what Merton describes as “a free gift of love” and “being ‘touched by God’” (3).
Merton writes:
Contemplation is also the response to a call: a call from Him Who has no voice, and yet Who speaks in everything that is, and Who, most of all speaks in the depths of our own being: for we ourselves are words of His…He answers Himself in us and this answer is divine life, divine creativity, making all things new. We ourselves become His echo and His answer. It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question, so that the contemplative is at the same time, question and answer (3).
His reflection on the nature of contemplation and divine encounter also bears an Augustinian valence, which is seen in the “call and response” dynamic both Merton and Rahner convey.
Despite these deeply theological resonances, Merton is careful to caution readers not to slip too easily into philosophical abstractions. For, at the end of the day, contemplation is about relationship and encounter, not mere ideas or propositional claims. Contemplation is “awakening, enlightenment and the amazing intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God’s creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life” (5).
The theological insights of someone like Rahner give a scholarly anchor to Merton’s reflections, which help make these fundamental truths about Christian life and human relationships with the divine accessible. In the end, the goal is not to arrive at some academic conclusion, but to experience God in a new and personal way. The absolute democratization of the spiritual life is Merton’s primary aim, inviting all readers into deeper relationship with God through embracing contemplation.
Works Cited
Donald Grayston, Thomas Merton: The Development of a Spiritual Theologian(Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985).
Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies: Books 4 & 5, trans. Dominic Unger (New York: The Newman Press, 2024).
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1961).
Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).
Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1978).
Vatican II, Lumen Gentium (1964).
Daniel P. Horan, PhD, is a Franciscan friar, Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind., and Affiliated Professor of Spirituality at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He is a columnist for National Catholic Reporter, and the author of many books, including Engaging Thomas Merton: Spirituality, Justice, and Racism (2023) and A White Catholic’s Guide to Racism and Privilege (2021). Follow him on Facebook.
