Summary: This books is a series of essays about protest, racism, violence and was the last book published before his death.
I decided to read Faith and Violence after reading Daniel Horan’s book on Merton earlier this year. I probably should have just bought a used copy of the book (which is what I think is probably the best and certainly the cheapest option), but instead I used interlibrary loan. The book I received was a first edition hardcover. There is something interesting in reading a first edition book that came out just over 50 years ago and which clearly had been read, but not by all that many people.
I didn’t have time to read the whole book. It came about a week before I went on vacation and I was busy getting ready for vacation or I was actually on vacation. Almost all of the reading I did (about half the book) was in the car. I was primed to read it with a view toward modern use of Merton’s ideas because of Horan’s essays. And it felt like he was writing with a more contemporary approach toward activism and faith and social problems than some other contemporaries of the era. Part of what I appreciated about Horan’s essays is that he both talked about how we can use Merton in contemporary thought and how Merton was a person of his time and limited in some ways by that historical position.
What I was most interested in is how much Merton approached social issues as systems not individual acts or the acts of unattached individuals. This is not just a book about violence “out there” but a discussion with other Christians about how we as Christians uphold violence. In the introduction he explicitly calls out Reinhold Niebuhr’s “realism” as justifying the use of force and violence. Merton is calling for nonviolent resistance to injustice. Faith and Violence would have been published just before Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. That whole year, and really since 1963, the role of nonviolence resistance was being questioned in the civil rights movement. And in 1968, the resistance to the war in Vietnam was strengthening.
conversationMany who write about nonviolent resistance do so with the explicit understanding that injustice harms both the oppressed and the oppressor. Nonviolence is a means of love for the oppressor.
“The Christian can renounce the protection of the violence and risk being humble, therefore vulnerable, not because he trusts in the supposes efficacy of a gentle and persuasive tactic that will disarm hatred and tame cruelty, but because he believes that the hidden power of the Gospel is demanding to be manifested in and through his own poor person.” (p15)
Earlier this year I read a biography of John Lewis and I previously have read a biography of Stokely Carmichael, their fundamental disagreement was about nonviolence. Lewis believed in it as a methodology and ideology, while Carmichael only saw it as a tactic. And once nonviolence was not achieving the goal at the speed he wanted, he dropped it as a tactic. It is very much in this conversation that Merton is writing. Lewis resigned from SNCC in late 1966 by early 1968, Lewis was working for RFK’s presidential campaign, until RFK’s own assassination.
Merton continues in that essay on to discussed the problem of doing the right thing for the wrong reason or by the wrong means. This is a continual problem with fighting injustice. There is a standard that those who fight injustice must hold themselves to that is different from those who uphold injustice.
Christian non-violence, therefore, is convinced that the manner in which the conflict for truth is wages will itself manifest or obscure the truth. To fight for truth by dishonest, violent, inhuman, or unreasonable means would simply betray the truth one is trying to vindicate. The absolute refusal of evil or suspect means is a necessary element in the witness of non-violence. As Pope Paul said before the United Nations Assembly: “Men cannot be brothers if they are not humble. no matter how justified it may appear, pride provokes tensions and struggles for prestige, domination, colonialism and egoism. In a word, pride shatters brotherhood.” He went on to say that attempts to establish peace on the basis of violence were in fact a manifestation of human pride. “If you wish to be brothers, let the weapons fall from your hands. You cannot love with offensive weapons in your hands” (p23)
The book continues discussion of Black Power, Vietnam, and a fourth section that I did not get to. That fourth section may have been more integrated than I think, but the death of God, the book Honest to God, and “godless Christianity” all feel quite different from the earlier discussions of nonviolence, Black power and Vietnam.
I have seen several copies of Faith and Violence in used book stores for under $5. At some point I will probably come back to it, but I am regularly surprised about accessible many older books are.
Faith and Violence by Thomas Merton Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition