In the previous post, I noted that Thomas Merton said the monastic life

has a certain prophetic character about it . . . in the sense that [the monk] is a living witness to the freedom of the sons of God and to the essential difference between that freedom and the spirit of the world. (First published in Contemplation in a World of Action, p. 28; now in Selected Essays [SE], edited by Patrick F. O’Connell, p. 387)

Merton portrayed this role of prophetic outsider (which resembles Anabaptist sectarianism in some ways) in the essay “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” written from his hermitage.

Thus the solitary cannot survive unless he is capable of loving everyone, without concern for the fact that he is likely to be regarded by all of them as a traitor. Only the man who has fully attained his own spiritual identity can live without the need to kill, and without the need of a doctrine that permits him to do so with a good conscience. There will always be a place, says [Eugène] Ionesco, “for those isolated consciences who have stood up for the universal conscience” as against the mass mind. But their place is solitude. They have no other. Hence it is the solitary person (whether in the city or in the desert) who does mankind the inestimable favor of reminding it of its true capacity for maturity, liberty and peace. (In Raids on the Unspeakable [RU], p. 22; now in SE, p. 223)

Mennonites have generally looked askance at hermits and solitaries; but one might argue that Mennonite/Anabaptist voluntary withdrawal from society (seen most strongly in the Amish and Hutterites) is a kind of collective solitude, or at any rate the life of a communal anchorite (from the ancient Greek anachōrētēs, one who withdraws from the world). It is precisely from this withdrawn, separated position that Anabaptist pacifism is practiced. At its best (which it has not always been in the 19th and 20th centuries), this pacifism is not just a personal “conscientious objection” but a testimony to the capacity for peace and mutual love exhibited by a humanity restored in Christ.

A few pages earlier in “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” Merton wrote of the solitary’s withdrawal as one of two forms of liberation from the world’s illusion.

Because we live in a womb of collective illusion, our freedom remains abortive. . . .

He who is spiritually “born” as a mature identity is liberated from the enclosing womb of myth and prejudice. He learns to think for himself, guided no longer by the dictates of need and by the systems and processes designed to create artificial needs and then “satisfy” them.

This emancipation can take two forms: first that of the active life, which liberates itself from enslavement to necessity by considering and serving the needs of others, without thought of personal interest or return. And second, the contemplative life, . . . an advance into solitude. . . . (RU, pp. 16-17; SE, pp. 220-221]

Obviously Mennonites and other Anabaptists have strongly preferred the active route toward liberation. But they have also strongly rejected the artificial need-generating system of modern capitalism, insisting on a simple lifestyle detached from what Merton calls the “collectivity” that “informs and shapes your will to happiness . . . by presenting you with irresistible images of yourself as you would like to be.” Anabaptist simplicity aims precisely at undermining the human tendency to create false self-images by fulfilling culturally dictated desires; simplicity too is rooted in sectarian nonconformity to “the world.”

Thomas Merton, sectarian? I doubt very much that he would have thought of himself or his fellow monks as “sectarian”; he might even have been offended by the term. Nevertheless, and whatever you might want to use as a label, I think Merton’s choice to live as a voluntary outsider in a community that is (at its best) a standing critique of “the world” bears some of the marks of Mennonite/Anabaptist sectarian identity.

This is going to be a long topic, so I’m dividing it into two posts. It’s also going to be somewhat theological; don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Part 1

In an essay called “The Monastic Renewal: Problems and Prospects,” Thomas Merton wrote that the monastic life

has a certain prophetic character about it . . . in the sense that [the monk] is a living witness to the freedom of the sons of God and to the essential difference between that freedom and the spirit of the world. . . .

The monastic life then must maintain this prophetic seriousness. . . And there is only one way for the monk to do this: to live as a man of God who has been manifestly “called out of the world” to an existence that differs radically from that of other men, however sincere, however Christian, however holy, who have remained “in the world.” (First published in Contemplation in a World of Action [CWA], pp. 28-29; now in Selected Essays [SE], edited by Patrick F. O’Connell, p. 387)

Merton speaks here of “the world” as an entity that will compromise, and even actively oppose, the purposes of God and the life of God’s people, which bears a striking resemblance to “sectarian” Mennonite language and thought. The notion of an “essential difference between [Christian] freedom and the spirit of the world” seems characteristically Anabaptist to me, and even more so the sense of having been “‘called out of the world’ to an existence that differs radically from that of other [people].”

Of course, the language of “leaving the world” and living in a way that contrasts with those still “in the world” goes back to the very beginnings of Christian monasticism in the desert fathers and mothers of the third century. But it is just such a conviction of radical difference from “the world” that gives Anabaptism its “sectarian” flavor (in the sociological sense, not the wacko-cult sense). There is no mistaking Merton’s Anabaptist-like tone when he writes later in the same essay:

The specific value that draws a Christian into the “desert” and “solitude” (whether or not he remains physically “in the world”) is a deep sense that God alone suffices. The need to win the approval of society, to find a recognized place in the world, to achieve a temporal ambition, to “be somebody” even in the Church seems to them irrelevant. They realize themselves to be called to a totally different mode of existence, outside of secular categories and outside of the religious establishment. (CWA, pp. 42-43; SE, p. 398; emphasis Merton’s)

The ideal of a life dedicated to God alone, even while remaining physically “in the world”; of abandoning “worldly” quests for approval and position; and especially of a mode of existence outside of “worldly” categories, including established religious ones: is this not central to the “Anabaptist vision”?

The monastic stance of prophetic critique of “the world” from outside it is one that Merton shared with Anabaptism in contrast to mainstream Christianity or secular progressives. (Gordon Oyer’s award-winning book Pursuing the Spiritual Roots of Protest documents one highly significant instance of this.) In such a view, in order to struggle truly and authentically against evil powers, believers must do two things. They must disentangle themselves from those powers and their confusion as much as possible, in the first place; and then they must begin to be the new humanity, the eschatological community in which the life of Christ is manifest and is aware of being that life. Both mainline, establishment Christianity and secular progressives would argue that the authentic stance is to remain within the messiness and confusion of the world, taking part in its necessary evils in order ultimately, eventually, to bring about good. But Merton (like the Anabaptists) claims that one cannot possibly see clearly to make things new while remaining embedded in the fog and confusion of the old. Monks and Mennonites agree on the need to come apart from the problem and then, in that alternative space, to take up an alternative existence as the solution, both in individual life and in community. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2, NRSV). This is bedrock “sectarianism.”