Beautiful, insightful little book on the nature of Christian monasticism. Wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up this book on a whim from my local used book store, other than a dim awareness that Merton wasn’t your typical “Christian” writer. What I found was a book that is partially an explanation of the principles that underlie the monk’s way of life, partially a description of how these principles manifest in various monastic orders.

Even as a non Christian, I could still see the universal significance of the ideas Merton writes about. This is probably because Merton is concerned not only with dogma and liturgy, but how true adherence to the principles of Christian faith manifest in the real world, and how our society as it stands has fallen so far from those principles. You know you are dealing with a real one when Merton decries the way the “totalitarians” and “capitalists” have deformed modern man, or how a monk that pretends to mere bourgeois values can never reach true spiritual purity. Merton recognizes that society as it stands is lacking, and is unsustainable in the long term. The monastic life provides not only the conditions for a closer relationship with god, but also a model for the way man can organize his relationship with his environment, his tools, his work, and his fellow human beings. A monk shares in the work of the cloister, never slacking but also always allowing for plenty of time for contemplation and rest. Mutual aid is a requirement of the communal like style in the cloister, but a monk must always respect the solitude and space of another. A monk is encouraged to take up a creative exploit and devote time to its mastery. A monk lives simply and without extraneous things; the possessions he does own, he treats with the care and dignity befitting tools made to do God’s work.

One might see the monastic lifestyle as meaningless asceticism, a wholesale denial of a big part of what it means to be human; Merton would argue (I think convincingly) that the excision of all unnecessary things makes space for the sliver of human existence that truly makes a life significant, a sliver that has all but been buried by the modern world. ( )

This is not: a comparative analysis of modern monastic communities; a memoir of a monastic experience; theology. I don't know what the hell it is.

Die Große Stille is a better bet for an intimate portrait of monasticism — equally uncritical, but much more experiential. ( )

Also covers the Coenobitic and the Hermit Life