The Vision of Mercy - Reflections on Thomas Merton’s Climate of Mercy

The Vision of Mercy - Reflections on Thomas Merton’s Climate of Mercy

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

In the preface to his most remarkable book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire comments that as a “handbook for radicals”, it is a work which will be dismissed by many, but nevertheless, will be read through to the end by “Christians and Marxists.” The remark is instructive for the surprise it may well elicit from readers in the United States in the early twenty-first century. For in this milieu Christianity is hardly thought of as a movement of the Left, leave alone a radical one.  Yet, the dominant impressions of our peculiar place and time notwithstanding, Freire is pointing to precisely the spirit of Christianity that designated it as a danger to the authorities of the first century: a spirit growing from not only a conviction, but perhaps an insight that the ground of the sacred is unfolded not in the worldly power of Rome, but an all redeeming Mercy which exceeds the bounds of mundane institution.This vision of this Mercy is recounted to us adeptly by Thomas Merton in an essay which he dedicated to Albert Schweitzer, The Climate of Mercy. And indeed from the outset, Merton points to the dramatic nature of mercy in a way that illumines its radical implications.

The mercy of God in Christ is more than forensic absolution from sin...Mercy is, then, not only forgiveness, but life...Mercy is, then, not simply something we deduce from a previously apprehended concept of the divine Essence...but an event in which God reveals himself to us in His redemptive love and in the great gift which is the outcome of this event: our mercy to others. (Merton 203)

In this characterization, one is immediately pulled out of the connotations of soap and water sentimentality which often attend the use of such words as mercy. Yet even more surprisingly, one is taken outside of the space where one considers mercy a mere virtue, or even a specifically moral sort of activity.Rather, Mercy is an event precipitated, to invoke the Christian language, by an action of Grace whereby one participates in God’s understanding  of ourselves.  Rather than it being an understanding of judgement, it is one of mercy. Merton elaborates,

God does not gaze with grim and implacable revulsion into the heart of the sinner to discern there is the “thing” or the “being” which He hates.He understands the sinner mercifully, that is to say, that His look penetrates the whole being of the sinner with mercy from within so that the inmost reality of the sinner is no longer sinfulness but sonship. (Merton 205)

That is to say, rather than being arrested by a conception of the human being as marred irrevocably by wrong or error, one is brought to understand the person born of the sacred itself. Participation in this vision then leads to a transcendence of alienation: “The sinful consciousness becomes capable of seeing itself face to face with the truth, without fear and without hate, because without division.” (Merton 205) That is, one is brought into a deep realization of communion...and that not merely with some divinity on high, but with one’s fellows, one’s brothers and sisters in Creation.

Within the space of this new vision… which is the metanoia of Matthew…one is liberated from the project of self-redemption that had been so central within the prior vantage of alienation. Crucially, this translates into a fundamental shift in one’s relationship to the Law. For, within the horizon of a project of self-redemption, legal virtuousness stands as a preeminent stratagem to carry forth the designs of the ego. This virtuousness can assume a multitude of different forms, many of a quasi-spiritual aspect: ‘self-purification’, or ‘good works’, or ‘elimination of desires’ or ‘a cleansing of concepts, and still others besides. Yet the pursuit of these efforts is at incommensurable odds with the attainment of a genuine freedom. For they all subject one to a finite standard which underwrites the alienation that is the root of one’s sense of bondage. Nevertheless, their allure remains.The pattern is insidious, and obtains its seductiveness by offering a false sense of freedom in a twofold fashion. Acutely, Merton describes the pattern’s action:

The promises, menaces, and demands of the Law are ambiguous  because they point to self-possession and suggest two conflicting possible ways to autonomy: one by following the Law and the other by defying it. It is always possible for man under the Law, in his fallenness and confusion, to outline projects of liberty “against” the Law...The very Law itself perversely and cruelly seems to define this void as “liberty” and “realization”...Why this illusion? Because at the same time the Law offers a deceptive promise of fulfillment to the self-seeking self in legal righteousness...The Law offers the self-seeking self the spurious autonomy which comes from creating a place for itself in the minds of men by human righteousness and achievements... (Merton 208-9)

In no small way, that illusion is sustained by a sense of scarcity not only materially, but existentially, a sense rooted perhaps in a awareness of one’s own death, or, to use another phrase of Merton’s, one’s own radical contingency. Within the atmosphere of such confinement, certain categories show with a certain prominence, a calculus of debt imposes a general opprobrium, and the logics of dominance and servility by turn insinuate themselves into even our most mundane of interactions. Thus, also, Merton tells us,

In the climate which is not of life and mercy, but of death and condemnation, the personal and collective guilts of men and groups wrestle with one another in death struggle. Men, tribes, nations, sects, parties set themselves up in forms of existence which are mutual accusations. They thus seek survival and self-affirmation by living demonically...A demonic existence is one which insistently diagnoses what it cannot cure, what is has no desire to cure, what it seeks to bring to full potency in order that it may cause the death of its victim. Yet this the temptation which besets the sin-ridden Dasein of man, for whom a resentful existence implies the need and the decision to accuse and to condemn all other existences. (Merton 213-214)

By the phrase, “Dasein of man”, Merton is drawing most explicitly on the German thinker, Martin Heidegger whose own work can be read as emphasizing the sense of alienation which can pervade our lives and which we most frequently seek to evade rather than overcome. In this connection, the power of the event of Mercy to liberate one from a sense of obligation before such evasions, or even overcoming is seen as truly momentous, for the climate of acceptance which it imports effectively dissolves the structure of alienation which grounds that obligation. Thus earlier in the essay we find the explication, “When the sinful Dasein is aware of itself as understood mercifully, and is ‘seen’ full of mercy by its Creator and Redeemer, then the evil of sin, the curse of death, are ‘forgotten utterly’.” (Merton 206) The dissolution of that structure in turn gives rise, as noted earlier to the possibility of profound connection with our fellows. Rather than the climate of totalism which suffuses the vantage of the “Old Law”, one encounters in the climate of Mercy a ‘New Law’ which “liberates us from the tyranny of natural weakness and of existential demands for self-assertion” (Merton 210) Now, this Law of Mercy,

...is a “Law” in a broad and analogical sense, because it is governed not so much by fixed, and abstract patterns as by the existential demands of personal love and loyalty: demands of grace and of the heart which are defined to a great extent by our own history of personal sin, need, and forgiveness. (Merton 210)

The climate engendered thus is one of dramatic acceptance, and “...depends on the realization that all men are acceptable before God.”  This realization gives rise to an inclusivity at gross odds with the imperatives of the “Old Law” wherein self assertion and thus domination or exclusion are its character in both subtle and gross manners.

The implicit demand which we formulate by asserting our own justice, setting ourselves up as a law by which to judge and evaluate other men, kills mercy in our hearts and in theirs. If I set myself up inexorably as a law to my brother, then I cannot help trying to interfere with his life by occult violence, malice, and deceit. I set myself up as a power to which I demand some form, be it only symbolic, of homage and submission…Nor is this power illusory. It is most real and most malevolent in strong collective groups whose ideologies can create a bad conscience and even a sense of guilt and self-hate in supposedly “lesser breeds without the law.” We have seen this at work in colonialism and racism, where arrogance and unscrupulousness and self-righteous power has deeply wounded the consciousness of millions of men...(Merton 213)

In addition, in our own society, the climate of the “Old Law” finds expression through the apotheosis of the financial. So it is is that, “...[t]he true “Law” of our day is the law of wealth and material power...It is the market that in reality determines the existence, indeed the survival, of all men and dictates the ideals and actualities of social life.  In our time the struggle of mercy is, then, not against rigid and inflexible morality but against a different and more subtle hardening of heart, a general loss of trust and of love that is rooted in greed and belief in money.” (Merton 217) We can see thus now why Freire casts Christians and Marxists has holding common cause. For they share a vision of a different world, one vivified by very different principles. Again, Merton:

The claims of mercy are demands in a totally new sense: demands not that the debt be properly measured and then generously paid, but that the whole root of indebtedness be laid open to the light “understandeth mercifully” and thus seen to be quite other than we thought. There can be no limit to pardon...We seek that divine mercy which, enduring forever (Psalms 106:1), and dynamically active as a leaven in history, has entirely changed the aspect of human existence, delivering it from its forfeiture to a syndrome of accusation, projection, resentment, and ultimate despair. We seek it not only in our hearts and minds but in man’s world, his common life on earth. (Merton 216)

The last phrase of this passage is crucial for it exhorts Christians to move beyond a merely personalistic theology to one which seeks social expression of an orientation of love and mercy. The remainder of his essay is an elaboration of that exhortation.

Now through the course of this reflection, the vision offered by Merton is offered in a thoroughly Christian vocabulary. However, it does not strike me as merely a Christian vision. For its most crucial point is one that has found expression in quarters around the world: the freeing and fulfilling power of mercy. By mercy, we are no longer bound by our past and thus are liberated to move into a new and different world, not only in the future, but in this very moment.

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I encountered Merton's essay, The Climate of Mercy, in the collection, Love and Living on which I did a Youtube video here: Thomas Merton, Freedom, Love and Living

Sources Cited

Paulo Freier (author), Myra Bergman Ramos (trans.), Donald Macedo (introduction), The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic. 2000.

Thomas Merton (author), Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Hart (eds.), Love and Living “A Harvest Book”. New York: Harcourt, 1979.