New Seeds 2: What Contemplation is Not
This is part of an ongoing, occasional series of essays offering commentary on Thomas Merton’s classic book New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)
Background and Context
This chapter, like the previous one (“What is Contemplation?”), was an original addition that appeared in New Seeds but not in its predecessor. As other scholars have noted, these two chapter offer a substantive introduction to the revised and expanded text that follows. As William Shannon explains, “In Chapter 2, and in a number of other places in the book, Merton develops more fully an approach to spirituality that he had hinted at in Seeds of Contemplation and expanded somewhat in “The Inner Experience”: the distinction between the true self and the false self” (325).
And here we see what has, in large part, made New Seeds the “spiritual classic” that is remains today. Without a doubt, Merton’s introduction of the concept of the “True Self” and “False Self” continues to be the most influential and significant contribution Merton made to the field of Christian spirituality. It has not only taken hold within faith communities, in discussions related to spiritual direction, and has played a central role in thousands of spiritual retreats over the decades, but other fields like that of psychology and pastoral counseling have studied, engaged, critiqued, and appropriated the concept. Subsequently, other great spiritual writers, like Franciscan friar Richard Rohr and Merton’s former novice James Finley, have made the concept even more popular and accessible.
The origin of Seeds (and, by extension, New Seeds) can be traced back to early conversations Merton had within the context of confession and spiritual direction while still a monk in formation. One example of this sort of encouragement appears in a journal entry dated December 29, 1946 in which Merton is encouraged to “teach contemplation, and especially to let people know, in what I write, that the contemplative life is quite easy and accessible and does not require extraordinary or strange efforts, just the normal generosity required to strive for sanctity” (34). A version of the passage appeared later in Merton’s 1953 book The Sign of Jonas.
Perhaps it was precisely this encouragement that led Merton to respond favorably to a request from a student at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, for information explaining the meaning of contemplation. This short 25-page booklet had eight sections that represent Merton’s first quasi-public attempt to teach about contemplation. One of the key themes that will remain constant in Merton’s writings about the contemplative life, and go back to that 1946 conversation with his confessor, is the conviction that contemplation is a divine gift open to everyone.
At the same time, Merton was continuing to read the works of Medieval Franciscan theologians, especially John Duns Scotus, with whom he had been introduced by his Columbia University professor Dan Walsh. In a December 10, 1946 entry in his journal, Merton remarks:
I have been reading Dun Scotus Oxoniense III, distinction 18, on Christ’s will and His love. Scotus is really simple once you get through the barricade of distinctions that are so hard to understand. His underlying thought is beautiful, coherent, and he is always working for simplicity, elimination of non-essentials. Sometimes I get a glimpse of the unity that underlies all his discussions and I find it lucid and easy to see and wonderful to contemplate, once I get the whole perspective. And the contemplation of it fills me with love for God and makes me praise Him. Nevertheless, it is sometimes brutally hard to crack through the shell and get into Scotus’s thought!
Earlier that Fall, in a September 1946 letter to another one of his former Columbia professors, Mark Van Doren, Merton wrote:
Duns Scotus and Bonaventure are tremendous. A book on that Scotus is brewing, I can see that: it will take time, though, and God will have to give me a lot of special graces if [I] am going to do it well, because Scotus is something big. The thing is: while St. Thomas got off with Aristotle and tended to be intellectual and systematizing, Scotus knew how to take Aristotle and leave him alone and he keeps the full tradition of St. Augustine and St. Anselm—which keeps love in the first place all the way down the line—in its purity. Also, he is the one who most glorifies Christ, that is gives the Incarnate Word, the Man-God, the full limit of everything that can be given Him.
Merton scholars, including myself and George Kilcourse, have suggested that what eventually became Seeds and New Seeds began as this “book on Scotus” that Merton conveyed to Van Doren was “brewing.” It’s true that Merton never authored a monograph explicitly on the Subtle Doctor, but as I demonstrate in my 2014 book The Franciscan Heart of Thomas Merton, Scotus was clearly a major inspiration and influence in Merton’s thinking not only in Christology but also on the development of his concept of the “True Self.” We will return to this line of influence with commentary on later chapters of New Seeds
But it is clear from journey entries at the time that Merton connected the reading of Scotus and other sources to his deepening appreciation for and reflection on contemplation.
Finally, there is one historical note worth highlighting that is not widely known. It appears that Merton’s original title for Seeds was “The Soil and Seeds of Contemplation.” He relayed this working title to his then-literary agent Naomi Burton Stone in a letter dated March 8, 1948.
Also, [Jay] Loughlin is interested in another project that is underway, a book of more or less random thoughts about the contemplative life called THE SOIL AND SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION. That will be ready I suppose about midsummer.
She responded three days later expressing her interest in hearing more about this project. It’s worth noting that this exchange about this work-in-progress that would become Seeds later that year, occurred seven months before The Seven Storey Mountain would be published.
What Contemplation Is Not
As noted above, this chapter plays a key role in setting the thematic stage for what follows in the rest of the book. Notably, the introduction of the “True Self” (in contrast to the “external” or “false” self) provides us with an important thread to trace throughout the text. While the appearance of these categories is significant, substantively, the question of how contemplation relates to one’s identity plays a more immediate role in Chapter 2.
There are two ways this theme unfolds in the present section. First, in describing what contemplation is not (a clever theological approach and literary device), Merton explains that authentic contemplation does not arise from the “false” (or “external”) self. And, second, when we talk about contemplation we are not talking about an action so much as a way of being.
Merton is skeptical about aspects of ostensible contemplative experiences that are, in his description, external or exceptional “manifestations” or phenomena. He writes:
Contemplation is not trance or ecstasy, nor the hearing of sudden unutterable words, nor the imagination of lights. It is not the emotional fire and sweetness that come with religious exaltation. It is not enthusiasm, the sense of being “seized” by an elemental force and swept into liberation by mystical frenzy. These things may seem to be in some way like a contemplative awakening in so far as they suspend the ordinary awareness and control exercised by our empirical self. But they are not the work of the “deep self,” only of the emotions, of the somatic unconscious…Such manifestations can of course accompany a deep and genuine religious experience, but they are not what I am talking about here as contemplation (10–11).
For Merton, these sorts of experiences or apparent religious phenomena tend to be superficial, fleeting, or wholly unrelated to the deeper contemplative life God calls all people to experience. As he says directly, “Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self.” He also explains that “Our external, superficial self is not eternal, not spiritual. far from it” (7). We will see as we progress through New Seeds that Merton will return frequently to this challenge of the false self in the contemplative life.
This theme leads to the second point Merton makes in this chapter; namely, that contemplation is not a thing but a way of being. He opens the chapter with a clear assertion of the experiential nature of true contemplation. “The only way to get rid of misconceptions about contemplation is to experience it” (6).
That contemplation is experiential, embodied, and not merely a “thing” among others to be studied or “explained,” makes it a subject that is difficult to describe (hence the proliferation of “misconceptions” about it). For Merton, the experience of contemplation is a response to God’s initiative, love, and disclosure of the divine self in relationship. It is not something that we can conjure at will nor is it something we are in control of, as he explains, “contemplation can never be the object of calculated ambition. It is not something we plan to obtain with our practical reason, but the living water of the spirit that we thirst for, like a hundred deer thirsting after a river in the wilderness” (10).
It is always and everywhere the work of grace, of God’s presence in our lives. This is why Merton can say “It is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God Who chooses to awaken us” (10). The issue then is not a matter of our determination or exercise of some honed skill. In fact, Merton goes to great lengths in New Seeds and in his other writings on contemplation to prescind from offering any explicit guidebook or regimen for how to contemplate.
Contemplation is about the experience of God through which we concurrently come to a deeper encounter with our true self, which is who we are before God in our totality, particularity, and authenticity. “Contemplation does not arrive at reality after a process of deduction, but by an intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mystery of God” (9). The experience of contemplation is an experience of relationship.
Merton’s emphasis on the need for Christians to be disabused of false notions about contemplation, the need to surrender the fictions of our false or external selves, and the affirmation that contemplation is fundamentally about the encounter with God in relationship, leads not only to a kind of “myth busting” about our identity (exposing the false selves) but also a deconstruction of false notions of God. At the end of the chapter, Merton explains how authentic contemplation troubles whatever preconceived notion of God we have constructed.
In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing the he no longer knows what God is. He may or may not mercifully realize that, after all, this is a great gain, because “God is not a what,” not a “thing.” That is precisely one of the essential characteristics of contemplative experience. It sees that there is no “what” that can be called God. There is “no such thing” as God because God is neither a “what” nor a “thing” but a pure “Who,” He is the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness. He is the I AM before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo “I am” (13, emphasis in original).
Taken out of context, one might mistake Merton’s reflections here for an apologia on behalf of atheism. However, Merton is in no way denying the reality or existence of God. On the contrary, he is calling out the many Christians who replace the living God of Jesus Christ, who calls us into real and subjective relationship, with idols of their own making. For this reason, contemplation can be scary because the experience of contemplation radically unsettles our assumed notions about who we are (“false self”) and who God is (idols, things, what and not who).
When we find ourselves attuned to the mystery of grace present in our lives, attend to that loving invitation to divine encounter extended to all of us by God, then we begin to let go of the static, false, propositional, and self-constructed images and notions we have of the Creator. Our hearts and minds then open up, not to the need to control, label, or categorize, but to experience transcendence and dwell in divine love.
Works Cited
Donald Grayston, Thomas Merton: The Development of a Spiritual Theologian(Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985).
Daniel P. Horan, The Franciscan Heart of Thomas Merton: A New Look at the Spiritual Inspiration of His Life, Thought, and Writing (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 2014).
George Kilcourse, Ace of Freedoms: Thomas Merton’s Christ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).
Thomas Merton, Entering the Silence: The Journals of Thomas Merton, 1941–1952, ed. Jonathan Montaldo (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996).
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1961).
Thomas Merton, “September 19, 1946, Letter to Mark Van Doren,” unpublished letter, Mark Van Doren Collection, Butler Library of Columbia University.
Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953).
Thomas Merton, What is Contemplation? (Notre Dame: Saint Mary’s College, 1948).
William H. Shannon, “New Seeds of Contemplation,” in The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, eds. William H. Shannon, Christine Bochum, and Patrick F. O’Connell (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2002), 324–325.
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.
