Faith and Violence

Thomas Merton

Description

In Faith and Violence, Thomas Merton offers concrete and pungent social criticisms grounded in prophetic faith about such issues as Vietnam, racism, violence, and war.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Philosophie et théologie
• Vietnam
• Theology
• Catholic
• Christianity
• Viêt Nam

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 1968
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268161347
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Faith and Violence
That neither the low democracy of a nightmare nor
An army s primitive tidiness may deceive me
About our predicament.
W. H. Auden
( Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden , Random House, p. 129)
F aith and V iolence
Christian Teaching and Christian Practice
Thomas Merton
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS
Copyright 1968 by
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
Second Printing 1972
Third Printing 1976
Fourth Printing 1981
Fifth Printing 1984
Sixth Printing 1994
Seventh Printing 2015
Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 68-20438
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN 9780268161347
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
To Phil Berrigan and Jim Forest
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgement is herewith made to the following for permission to reprint the material listed below.
Commonweal , The Unbelief of Believers and Honest to God ;
Continuum , Peace and Protest and The Meaning of Malcolm X ;
Fellowship , Blessed Are the Meek ;
Herder and Herder, Non-Violence and the Christian Conscience and Prison Meditations of Father Delp ;
Katallagete , Events and Pseudo-Events, The Hot Summer of Sixty-Seven and Godless Christianity? ;
The Mountain Path , Contemplative Life in the Modern World ;
New Blackfriars , Is Man a Gorilla with a Gun? and Race and Religion in the United States ;
Peace News , An Enemy of the State and Pacifism and Resistance in Simone Weil ;
Pendle Hill Pamphlets , A Note on The Psychological Causes of War by Eric Fromm ;
Theoria to Theory , The Death of God and the End of History ; and Simon and Schuster, Inc., Taking Sides on Vietnam, from Authors Take Sides on Vietnam , 1967 by Simon and Schuster, Inc., New York.
Contents
Preface
PART ONE
Toward a Theology of Resistance
Blessed Are the Meek
Non-Violence and the Christian Conscience
Peace and Protest
The Prison Meditations of Father Delp
An Enemy of the State
Pacifism and Resistance in Simone Weil
PART TWO
Vietnam-an Overwhelming Atrocity
Is Man a Gorilla with a Gun?
Nhat Hanh Is My Brother
Taking Sides on Vietnam
A Note on The Psychological Causes of War by Eric Fromm
PART THREE
From Non-Violence to Black Power
Religion and Race in the United States
Events and Pseudo-Events
The Hot Summer of Sixty-Seven
The Meaning of Malcolm X
PART FOUR
Violence and the Death of God: or God as Unknown Soldier
The Unbelief of Believers
Apologies to an Unbeliever
The Contemplative Life in the Modern World
Honest to God
The Death of God and the End of History
Godless Christianity ?
Index
By Way of Preface
THE HASSIDIC RABBI, BAAL-SHEM-TOV, ONCE TOLD THE following story. Two men were traveling through a forest. One was drunk, the other was sober. As they went, they were attacked by robbers, beaten, robbed of all they had, even their clothing. When they emerged, people asked them if they got through the wood without trouble. The drunken man said: Everything was fine; nothing went wrong; we had no trouble at all!
They said: How does it happen that you are naked and covered with blood?
He did not have an answer.
The sober man said: Do not believe him: he is drunk. It was a disaster. Robbers beat us without mercy and took everything we had. Be warned by what happened to us, and look out for yourselves.
For some faithful -and for unbelievers too- faith seems to be a kind of drunkenness, an anesthetic, that keeps you from realizing and believing that anything can ever go wrong. Such faith can be immersed in a world of violence and make no objection: the violence is perfectly all right. It is quite normal-unless of course it happens to be exercised by Negroes. Then it must be put down instantly by superior force. The drunkenness of this kind of faith-whether in a religious message or merely in a political ideology-enables us to go through life without seeing that our own violence is a disaster and that the overwhelming force by which we seek to assert ourselves and our own self-interest may well be our ruin.
Is faith a narcotic dream in a world of heavily-armed robbers, or is it an awakening?
Is faith a convenient nightmare in which we are attacked and obliged to destroy our attackers?
What if we awaken to discover that we are the robbers, and our destruction comes from the root of hate in ourselves?
A BBEY OF G ETHSEMANI
Advent 1967
Part One
Toward a Theology of Resistance
THEOLOGY TODAY NEEDS TO FOCUS CAREFULLY UPON THE crucial problem of violence. The commandment Thou shalt not kill is more than a mere matter of academic or sentimental interest in an age when man not only is more frustrated, more crowded, more subject to psychotic and hostile delusion than ever, but also has at his disposition an arsenal of weapons that make global suicide an easy possibility. But the so-called nuclear umbrella has not simplified matters in the least: it may (at least temporarily) have caused the nuclear powers to reconsider their impulses to reduce one another to radioactive dust. But meanwhile conventional wars go on with unabated cruelty, and already more bombs have been exploded on Vietnam than were dropped in the whole of World War II. The population of the affluent world is nourished on a steady diet of brutal mythology and hallucination, kept at a constant pitch of high tension by a life that is intrinsically violent in that it forces a large part of the population to submit to an existence which is humanly intolerable. Hence murder, mugging, rape, crime, corruption. But it must be remembered that the crime that breaks out of the ghetto is only the fruit of a greater and more pervasive violence: the injustice which forces people to live in the ghetto in the first place. The problem of violence, then, is not the problem of a few rioters and rebels, but the problem of a whole social structure which is outwardly ordered and respectable, and inwardly ridden by psychopathic obsessions and delusions.
It is perfectly true that violence must at times be restrained by force: but a convenient mythology which simply legalizes the use of force by big criminals against little criminals-whose small-scale criminality is largely caused by the large-scale injustice under which they live-only perpetuates the disorder.
Pope John XXIII in Pacem in Terris quoted, with approval, a famous saying of St. Augustine: What are kingdoms without justice but large bands of robbers? The problem of violence today must be traced to its root: not the small-time murderers but the massively organized bands of murderers whose operations are global.
This book is concerned with the defense of the dignity and rights of man against the encroachments and brutality of massive power structures which threaten either to enslave him or to destroy him, while exploiting him in their conflicts with one another.
The Catholic moral theology of war has, especially since the Renaissance, concerned itself chiefly with casuistical discussion of how far the monarch or the sovereign state can justly make use of force. The historic context of this discussion was the struggle for a European balance of power, waged for absolute monarchs by small professional armies. In a new historical context we find not only a new struggle on a global scale between mammoth nuclear powers provided with arsenals capable of wiping out the human race, but also the emergence of scores of small nations in an undeveloped world that was until recently colonial. In this Third World we find not huge armed establishments but petty dictatorships (representing a rich minority) armed by the great powers, opposed by small, volunteer guerilla bands fighting for the poor. The Great Powers tend to intervene in these struggles, not so much by the threat and use of nuclear weapons (with which however they continue to threaten one another) but with armies of draftees and with new experimental weapons which are sometimes incredibly savage and cruel and which are used mostly against helpless non-combatants. Although many Churchmen, moved apparently by force of habit, continue to issue mechanical blessings upon these draftees and upon the versatile applications of science to the art of killing, it is evident that this use of force does not become moral just because the government and the mass media have declared the cause to be patriotic. The cliche My country right or wrong does not provide a satisfactory theological answer to the moral problems raised by the intervention of American power in all parts of the Third World. And in fact the Second Vatican Council, following the encyclical of John XXIII, Pacem in Terris , has had some pertinent things to say about war in the nuclear era. (See below, Chapter V).
To assert that conflict resolution is one of the crucial areas of theological investigation in our time is not to issue an a priori demand for a theology of pure pacifism. To declare that all use of force in any way whatever is by the very fact immoral is to plunge into confusion and unreality from the very start, because, as John XXIII admitted, unfortunately the law of fear still reigns among peoples and there are situations in which the only way to protect human life and rights effectively is by forcible resistance against unjust encroachment. Murder is not to be passively permitted, but resisted and prevented-and all the more so when it becomes mass-murder. The problem arises not when theology admits that force can be necessary, but when it does so in a way that implicitly favors the claims of the powerful and self-seeking establishment against the common good of mankind or against the rights of the oppressed.
The real moral issue of violence in the twentieth century is obscured by archaic and mythical presuppositions. We tend to judge violence in terms of