How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh, and crabbed, as full fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute...
Milton, Mask of Comus (l. 476)
| Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite St John of the Cross Walter Hilton Richard Rolle Thomas a Kempis Jacob Boehme Nicholas of Cusa |
Paul Tillich Soren Kierkegaard Thomas Merton Henri Nouwen |
Thomas Merton
"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. It is also a witness to the fact that there is and must be,
in the church, a contemplative life which has no other function than to realize these mysterious things,
and return to God all the thanks and praise that human hearts can give Him.
It is certainly true that I have written about more than just the contemplative life.
I have articulately resisted attempts to have myself classified as an "inspirational writer." But 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 child of God.
Man must respond to this call to live in peace with all his brothers and sisters in the One Christ."
"A monk is a man who has given up everything in order to possess everything. He is one who has abandoned desire in order to achieve the highest fulfillment of all desire. He has renounced his liberty in order to become free. He goes to war because he has found a kind of war that is peace.
Beyond imagination, beyond grandeur, power, wisdom, and the light of the mind, the monk has found the key to existence in things without romance and without drama: labor, hunger, poverty, solitude, the common life. It is the silence of Christ's Nazareth, in which God is praised without pomp, among the wood shavings."
Thomas Merton, in The Waters of Siloe