A Report on Emotional Education for Young Children:


THOMAS MERTON’S TROUBLING QUESTIONS

ON VIOLENCE: FROM AUSCHWITZ TO

VIETNAM

Donald P. St. John

Moravian College, USA

Abstract

This paper presents some of the major “questions”

and points of inquiry concerning war and peace, ethics and

conscience, language and duplicity directed at secular gov-

ernments and religious institutions by the Catholic monk and

writer Thomas Merton (1915-1968). In a series of essays

penned during the 1960s this popular spiritual writer shook

his more conservative readers with his strongly worded at-

tacks on the passivity of religious institutions in the face of

extremely violent wars, genocidal campaigns and nuclear ter-

rorism sponsored by the governments with which they were

aligned. Merton draws lessons for his own era from the trials

of Auschwitz personnel to the ruthless conventional and

atomic bombings by the Allies, and uses them to raise trou-

bling questions about attempts to justify the insanity of nuclear

escalation and the vicious quagmire that was Vietnam. And

in the midst of raising moral questions, Merton examines the

language used to distort the reality of Auschwitz, Dresden

and Hiroshima, of first strike capabilities and the “free fire

zones” of Vietnam. This paper also attempts to demonstrate

something of the prophetic fire and philosophical coolness of

Merton’s thought as well as its literary power. The final sec-

tion suggests that Merton’s questions are as troubling and

germane today as they were when initially raised.

Prajñâ Vihâra, Volume 10, Number 1-2, January-December, 2009, 3-50
© 2000 by Assumption University Press

3



Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was one of the most prolific and

influential Catholic writers of the twentieth century.1 He combined the critical

thinking of a philosopher, the moral outrage of a prophet, and the pen-

etrating insight of a contemplative, delivering his message with the literary

command and creative imagination of a writer and artist. These various

voices of Merton did not always harmonize with each other, and some-

times one or the other would either fall silent or overwhelm the others.

Nevertheless, and more times than one would expect, they pulled to-

gether to produce memorable works of prose and poetry.

Thomas Merton had the ability to raise troubling questions with

great power and penetrating insight. Often they came unexpectedly, as

when two contexts not normally related were shown to be connected or

when surprising conclusions were reached after an argument took an un-

usual turn. Merton’s unnerving ability to draw a moral lesson about a

contemporary issue from a discussion purportedly about a past situation

won him both friends and foes. This method was especially effective when

Merton made connections between the moral behavior of Nazis and their

religious sympathizers and the contemporary rhetoric and actions of West-

ern political, military and religious leaders.

This paper will examine some of the more “troubling” questions

Merton posed to his contemporaries, both secular and religious, occa-

sioned by the horrific and continuing episodes of extreme violence, such

as the genocide of Nazi death camps, saturation bombing of cities with

conventional and nuclear weapons, nuclear brinksmanship and escalation

during the Cold War, and finally the interface of superpower and guerilla

forces in a rural setting (Vietnam). In this context, we will explore Merton’s

reflections on the moral implications of language and “logic” as they were

used by the actual or potential perpetrators of extreme violence. Being a

highly literate and literary person, Merton was fascinated with how lan-

guage operates in extreme situations and how the logic of “necessity” (“I/

we had to do it”) works both to explain and justify the contemplation,

initiation, or continuation of extreme violence.

We have chosen a few seminal essays that illustrate the range of

Merton’s thinking and have supplemented them with material from other

essays to present a fuller view or to raise additional questions. It is impor-

tant when dealing with a writer like Merton to keep the tone and flavor of

4  Prajñâ Vihâra



his own words, especially in the many places where how Merton ex-

presses himself is important to grasping what he is saying. Sometimes

Merton’s ability to evoke a particular image, recreate a specific experi-

ence, or elicit a certain response (humor, disgust, anger, etc.) is crucial to

grasping or sometimes being grasped by his message.

AUSCHWITZ

Language

Thomas Merton, a poet, novelist, literary critic and essayist, had

a sophisticated appreciation for the use and abuse of language. In the

summer of 1961, he wrote two unusual prose poems that signaled a will-

ingness to experiment in new styles, a renewed interest in world affairs,

and a decision to reengage the modern world in a significant way. He

already had made a decision to engage in an apostolate to intellectuals

and other persons of importance around the world. His famous corre-

spondence with and public defense of Boris Pasternak in 1959 and 1960

marked the beginning of this new phase. Merton’s prose poem “Original

Child Bomb”2 used wartime images, slogans, official statements, code

words, and news releases in a cool journalistic recounting of the events

leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His “Chant to be

Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces”,3 a sardonic and ironic

poem, recreated the style of language used by Nazi war criminals and

found in documents pertaining to the running of death camps. If truth is the

first casualty of war, language is its murder weapon. Gandhi understood

this deeply and so did Merton. Merton was not so interested in the crude

but honest language of personal violence, but in the ultimately more dan-

gerous and subtle language utilized by governments and their bureaucra-

cies, by military think-tanks, by politicians and even the mass media to

express, conceal, encourage and normalize violence and its effects.

Merton’s essay “Auschwitz: A Family Camp”4 was a lengthy re-

view of Auschwitz by Bernd Naumann (1966) with an introduction by

Hannah Arendt, one of Merton’s favorite political philosophers. Naumann's

is a disturbing work, filled with pages of testimony by former SS men,

employees, and survivors of Auschwitz. The testimony was presented

Donald P. St. John  5



during a twenty-month trial which began in Frankfurt in December, 1963.

As Merton notes: “Language itself has fallen victim to total war, genocide,

and systematic tyranny in our time”. At Auschwitz, language itself was so

dangerous and so guarded in its use that all military and civilian personnel

took what amounted to a “vow” of secrecy.  Anyone revealing informa-

tion about what was occurring at Auschwitz was accused of the unforgiv-

able sin of “defeatist talk”. Truth became as much of an enemy as the

Allies, perhaps more. When it was absolutely necessary to write or speak

to outsiders, language had to be cast in “officialese”, which “has a talent

for discussing reality while denying it and calling truth itself into question”.

Merton would observe the same thing in relation both to the nuclear war

and to Vietnam. Yet, truth could not be totally hidden. One of the unavoid-

able side effects of the use of so much doubletalk and doublethink, eu-

phemisms and clichés was the unavoidable suggestion that something was

missing, like a doughnut encircling its hole.  The literature is full of euphe-

misms like: “special treatment”, “special housing”, “special custody”, “re-

education”, “recovery camp for the tired”, “disinfectants”, “material for

resettlement of the Jews”, and “Ovaltine substitute”.

Auschwitz language is merely an extreme example of all official

bureaucratic languages in their “celebration of boredom, of routine, of

deadness, of organized futility”. Yet it is unique in containing “a kind of

heavy lilt in its mockery”.  For example, “Work makes free”, the words

over the entrance to Auschwitz, really mean that in here we work every-

one to death; freedom is death and death is freedom. The sign, “To the

Bath”, means that there we will purify and cleanse you of everything.

Merton notes how a fetish for cleanliness characterized the crew caring

for the gas chambers and crematoriums. Such fastidiousness left not a

speck of dust to indicate that a human being had ever been there. And the

S.S. order “Assigned to harvest duty”, means that you have been as-

signed to Auschwitz to “harvest” people. Merton suggests that the key to

unlocking the coded Auschwitz language “is its pathological joy in death”.

The military and civilian “employees” of Auschwitz displayed a

remarkable virtuosity at creating a virtual reality when placed on trial for

war crimes. This led the judge at one point to sarcastically remark that

from what the defendants said, no one had done anything at Auschwitz.

One guard, when asked about the practice of shooting prisoners in the

6  Prajñâ Vihâra



back and then claiming they had tried to escape, indignantly responded

that such a charge was ludicrous. Why would anyone want to escape

from Auschwitz? After all, was it not “a family camp”?  The surreal quality

of that world was conveyed by an ex-prisoner who recalled seeing a

group of children playing ball when a woman guard (there were woman

guards) clapped her hands and shouted “All right now, let’s stop. Now

we take showers”. The woman guard picked up one of the little girls and

carried her down the steps to the “bath”. The little girl, noticing the eagle

emblem on the guards’ hat, asked, “What kind of birdy is that?”  The ex-

prisoner sadly noted that that was the last time he saw that little girl. There

was also the case of the one hundred and twenty children from the Polish

town of Zamosc. Their parents were dead and so eventually they were

led into an “examination room”. Klehr, an SS male nurse, was expert in

injecting “patients” in the heart with phenolic acid. It cured all health prob-

lems. He waited for the boys and then proceeded to methodically “treat”

them one after another. When he tired, others took over but they were not

always up to the demands of the work. His successor “broke down under

the strain and ran out of the room, refusing to kill any more children”. But

a third SS man finished the task. Merton rhetorically asks: “Reason for the

death of the little boys from Zamosc?” The answer given in testimony was:

“As a precaution against ‘immorality’ in the camp”. As with its ovens,

“Auschwitz had to be very, very clean!” observes Merton.

Merton was, of course, interested in more than the language of

Auschwitz. As a highly moral and spiritual person he was intensely inter-

ested in finding answers to the many questions that troubled his own mind:

questions about human nature and about the negative effects on the hu-

man mind and heart of social and political forces. Above all he wondered

whether we could learn anything that might help us avoid similar horren-

dous events in the future. Merton’s first question flowed from his observa-

tion that the “demonic sickness of Auschwitz emanated from ordinary

people, stimulated by an extraordinary regime”. Most grew up in Chris-

tian homes, attended church and received a good education in a civilized

city. They lived and moved among respectable citizens in the years pre-

ceding and following Hitler’s rule. Yet, Merton asks, how is it that, during

the years in between, “they could beat and bash and torment and shoot

and whip and murder thousands of their fellow human beings, including

Donald P. St. John  7



even their former neighbors and friends, and think nothing of it?” Merton

used this troubling question to shake his readers out of their smug compla-

cency and make them confront their own darker possibilities. Merton was

not a pessimist regarding human nature, and he understood how impor-

tant social environments are in shaping people. But he also knew how

essential is the development of critical thinking, moral conscience and the

spiritual qualities of compassion and love if one is to be empowered and

equipped to criticize and counter the pressures toward acquiescence and

conformity.

Merton’s second question flowed from the first: “How is it that

Auschwitz worked?” It worked, Merton answered, because a lot of people,

both inside and outside of the camp, “wanted it to work”. Instead of

rebelling against its existence or resisting it, they put their energies into

turning genocide into a reality. The few legitimate psychopaths who worked

in this system could have gotten nowhere without the committed assis-

tance of bureaucrats, managers and military police at the camp as well as

the owners and employees of the companies that profited from the cheap

slave labor provided by the camp and the many people who knew some-

thing was terribly wrong but did nothing.

Merton’s third question concerns the issue of individual conscience.

Most individuals at the trial claimed that they were only following orders.

But, Merton asks, “Was there no choice?” There were individuals who

did refuse to torture and murder their fellow human beings. “Why was not

this done more often?” Merton asks.  Merton suggests that the relative

“security” of the camps for employees was an incentive to stay silent. The

camps were a safe assignment, preferable to being sent to the front, and

they were not in danger of being bombed. There were also “privileges”

that went with this kind of work: cigarettes, drinks, and extra rations. But,

then there was the gratuitous violence perpetrated by camp workers; vio-

lence that went beyond their orders. Most of these acts “were forbidden

even by Gestapo’s own rules”. In fact, some individuals were punished by

the SS for their overly enthusiastic use of violence. One would think that

there were plenty of opportunities to inflict pain and death on the inmates

and a wide enough selection of perversities that extracurricular activities

would not be necessary. But, regardless of whether individuals stepped

over the official line or not, it was evident that “many of these men tortured

8  Prajñâ Vihâra



and killed because they thoroughly enjoyed it”.

Fourth, “what does all this add up to?” Merton fears that given

the right situation places like Auschwitz can spring up again and people

could easily be found to do this kind of work. What would it take? First,

a legitimating authority willing to assume responsibility or to whom re-

sponsibility can be transferred for acts of violence. Second, an official

ideology of hate that affirms one basic principle: “ANYONE BELONG-

ING TO CLASS X OR NATION Y OR RACE Z IS TO BE RE-

GARDED AS SUBHUMAN AND WORTHLESS, AND CONSE-

QUENTLY HAS NO RIGHT TO EXIST. All the rest will follow without

difficulty”. If such a principle became acceptable there would be no need

for monsters: “ordinary policemen and good citizens would take care of

everything”.

One must remember that Merton was writing against the back-

drop of the recent history of   the civil rights movement with its scenes of

police dogs, water cannons, racial hatred and racist murders, even of

children. Merton was vehemently opposed to the way blacks were being

treated in America, especially in the Southern U.S., where he lived. Merton

wrote extensively on matters of race and in support of the civil rights and

nonviolent movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although this

essay does not deal with this aspect of Merton’s life and writings, its his-

torical and biographical context must be kept in mind, especially when

reading his writings on the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany. In 1968, Dr.

King would cancel a retreat he was to take under Thomas Merton to

attend the Memphis boycott. He was planning to journey to the monas-

tery at Gethsemane to see Merton soon afterwards. The meeting never

took place. King was assassinated in Memphis and by year’s end Merton

would be dead.

Merton’s “Chant”

Merton wrote “Chant to be Used in Processions Around Sites

with Furnaces” in the summer of 1961, well before his review of the

Auschwitz book or the Eichmann trial, but after his reading of William

Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.5 Merton’s prose poem

broke new ground, both in style and in content. It reflected his

Donald P. St. John  9



reengagement with the world and the crucial issues of his day. Merton

“borrowed” the language for this prose poem from actual statements or

documents connected with the trials of death camp personnel found in

Shirer’s work. In this prose poem, the major voice is that of a commander

of Auschwitz who uses language that appears on the surface to be too

objective, unemotional, and rational. The reader knows to what he is al-

luding, i.e. a camp structured to take in thousands of living beings and

destroy them: some gradually, most immediately. While this advantage

allows the reader to “see through” the façade, the reader is led to wonder

whether he or she is blind and deaf to his or her own linguistic universe

when it presents violence as normal business or as an excusable necessity.

A few rearranged excerpts from this poem are presented below.

The commander of the camp is the narrator and his voice and

tone are so dispassionate that one suspects that they mask a sick smirk.

He loves cleanliness and efficiency though death’s greedy grasp finally

encircles even him.

I was the commander I made improvements and installed a guar-

anteed system taking account of human weakness I purified and I

remained decent

How I commanded

I made cleaning appointments and then I made the travellers sleep

and after that I made soap...

When trains arrived the soiled passengers received appointments

for fun in the bathroom they did not guess...

How I often commanded and made improvements and sealed the

door on top there were flowers the men came with crystals I

guaranteed always the crystal parlor...

All the while I had obeyed perfectly

So I was hanged in a commanding position with a full view of the

site plant and grounds

You smile at my career but would do as I did if you knew yourself

and dared...

Violence, even mass murder, can be conducted in a business-like

manner. There is always the necessary business correspondence for equip-

10  Prajñâ Vihâra



ment, arrangements and bills. Business language seems well suited in

Merton’s mind both for conducting for-profit transactions and ignoring

any ethical implications. Merton had drawn from examples of correspon-

dence he had come across in his reading. He was to develop this insight in

his later discussion of structural violence. The commander is so enthusias-

tic over his newly purchased machinery which functions so coldly and

efficiently that he begins to identify with the equipment itself.

A big new firm promoted steel forks operating on a cylinder they

got the contract and with faultless workmanship delivered very

fast goods

How I commanded and made soap 12 lbs fat 10 quarts water 8

oz to a lb of caustic soda but it was hard to find any fat

“For transporting the customers we suggest using light carts on

wheels a drawing is submitted”

“We acknowledge four steady furnaces and an emergency guar-

antee”

“I am a big new commander operating on a cylinder I elevate the

purified materials boil for 2 to 3 hrs and then cool”

For putting them into a test fragrance I suggested an express el-

evator operated by the latest cylinder it was guaranteed

Finding words with which to mask the horrendous murder of chil-

dren or the gruesome task of gathering wedding rings from dead bodies

was challenging and met by simply making words mean something other

than what they would normally mean. Jewish inmates were recruited for

some tasks and rewarded by being given “adequate food”. This proves

perhaps to the commander both that humans can be reduced to their

basic needs but also that he is not a pure racist but that maybe there were

the more and the less deserving inmates.

Children of tender age were always invited

By reason of their youth they were unable to work

They were marked out for play

They were washed like the others and more than the others . . .

Donald P. St. John  11



Jewish male inmates then worked up nice they had rubber boots

in return for adequate food I could not guess their appetite . . .

Their love was fully stopped by our perfected ovens but the love

rings were salvaged

Thanks to the satisfaction of male inmates operating the heaters

without need of compensation our guests were warmed . . .

Finally, the commander__and Merton__cautions the reader against

assuming a self-righteous position. As he often does, Merton makes a

surprising connection between actions done in the past that the reader

finds repugnant and present actions in which the reader might be complicit.

Do not think yourself better

Because you burn up friends and enemies

With long-range missiles

Without ever seeing what you have done.

Eichmann was Sane?

The testimony of Nazi war criminals and the historical record of

the Third Reich demonstrate the power of language to justify, conceal,

and normalize the most atrocious kinds of brutal violence. But it was the

famous Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann so penetratingly reported on by

Hannah Arendt that most affected Merton and moved him to reflect on

some of the implications of that trial.

In a journal entry dated March 23, 1963, Merton writes that per-

haps his reading of a book on Nicholas of Cusa provides some…

comfort to which I respond inordinately after reading the first two

of Hannah  Arendt’s articles on the Eichmann case. It’s incredible,

and shattering. The trial is not just an indictment of one man or

one system, but is in fact a sordid examination of conscience of

the entire west and one which has proved singularly inconclusive

because no one seems to grasp anything definite about it (if they

have even tried to grasp anything).  All that remains is a sense of

loss, of horror, and of disorientation. And even the horror is dif-

fuse and superficial. Where does one begin to respond to the

12  Prajñâ Vihâra



multiple indictment of our world? The stereotypical answers all

collapse, and there are no new ones, and there is no faith!6

Yet Merton quickly recovers and cautions that the “total irratio-

nality” of the trial should not make us distrust reason or humanity. Reason,

conscience, humanity have not been destroyed by the “inane cruelties” of

the times. Such thinking leads to “a more complete surrender to a more

absolute irrationality, and a more total cruelty”.7

Merton notes that Eichmann had appealed to “blind obedience”

or “corpse-like obedience” to explain his actions. Eichmann claimed that

he lived his life from childhood in accord with Kant’s “moral precepts”

and “conception of duty”. He later admitted that Kant did not approve of

“blind obedience”. Eichmann also confessed that when following Hitler’s

program for the “final solution”, he went beyond Kant’s principles and

took as his grounds for blind obedience the dictum “Act as if the Führer

would approve of it if he saw you!” This goes beyond duty, to an identifi-

cation with the “legislator”. Eichmann seemed bothered by two excep-

tions he made to the rules. In those cases, instead of following his duty to

his Führer, he allowed Jews to escape. “All along, the terrible thing about

the Eichmann case”, Merton suggests, “was the fact that his motives were

always motives of conscience and duty, not of fanaticism”.8

While Merton obviously is fascinated with Arendt’s “banality of

evil” argument, this remains in the background, and is not the main con-

cern of his essay “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann”,9

Merton, as usual, wants to draw a lesson from Eichmann to apply to his

ongoing concern with the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the possi-

bility of nuclear war. And he wants to raise a troubling question that goes

to the core of his understanding of human beings: what are the implications

of Eichmann’s being judged “sane” for our understanding of the human

person and his or her relationship to society?

Merton’s famous essay begins with these words: “One of the most

disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist

examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all,

and that is why I find it disturbing”. Merton goes on to describe Eichmann

as orderly, punctual, and unimaginative with a “profound respect for sys-

tem, for law and order”. He was obedient and loyal. He didn’t develop

Donald P. St. John  13



any psychosomatic illnesses and seemed to sleep well. He had some dis-

turbing experiences but bore them “bravely” for the sake of the Father-

land in the spirit of duty and self-sacrifice.

Yes, “the sanity of Eichmann is disturbing”, because we usually

equate sanity with “a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence,

with the capacity to love and understand other people”. We depend on

the sane people to protect us from madness and destruction. But what if it

is the sane ones who are “the most dangerous”? Merton bitingly suggests:

“It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and

without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the

great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared”. We

are naïve to think that a psychotic will push the button.

No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly

good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot.

They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the

chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no

qualms at all. When the missiles take off, it will be no mistake.

Merton then raises the question of whether the whole notion of

sanity as the ability to act in a “cool, orderly manner”, adjusting to the

needs and varying expectations of society makes any sense when that

society has lost its spiritual values. If the test of sanity is “adjustment”, then

perhaps these people could be perfectly adjusted in hell. If the people

who planned, supported, and ran the death camps are deemed “sane”,

then obviously the definition of sanity does not include empathy, compas-

sion, or other qualities that indicate an ability to experience the suffering of

others as one’s own. Sadly, the possession of these “spiritual” qualities is

not deemed necessary for one to be declared clinically “sane”. Does that

mean that a spiritual person who has developed these qualities to a high

degree is not sane? Would that person not feel out of place in an insane

society, much as a conscientious person would have felt as an employee

of a death camp? Or perhaps Christians should be realistic and just try to

“fit in”. After all, Christians have been “sane” in the past:

Torture is nothing new, is it? We ought to be able to ratio-

14  Prajñâ Vihâra



nalize a little brainwashing, and genocide, and find a place

for nuclear war, or at least for napalm, in our moral theol-

ogy. Certainly some of us are doing our best along these

lines already. There are hopes! Even Christians can shake

off their sentimental prejudices about charity and become

sane like Eichmann.

Eichmann was sane, according to Merton. So were the military

leaders on both sides during World War II who obliterated whole cities.

And sane were those involved in the creation and detonation of the A-

bombs and H-bombs, and sane are those who plan the strategy for the

next war including nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. These are

the sane ones, the cool-headed ones who estimate “how many millions of

people can be considered expendable in a nuclear war”. The truly insane

people, of course, the real “crazies”, as every sane person knows, are the

pacifists and the ban-the-bomb crowd.  Merton thinks that perhaps sanity

is “no longer a value or an end in itself”. Just as the dinosaurs proved

counter-productive when things changed, so might sanity in a nuclear age.

Perhaps, though, there is a chance for survival if we are a little less sane, a

little more conscious of our “absurdities and contradictions”. But if we are

sane, too sane, well “. . . perhaps we must say that in a society like ours

the worst insanity is to be totally without anxiety, totally ‘sane’”.

HITLER AND THE FAILURE OF THE CHURCHES

Traditional Western Christianity has always held that there is a

special connection between Christ and the “Spirit” of Western civilization.

Conquistadores and colonialists brought both sword and cross, Western

civilization and the Gospel to “heathen” cultures and in some cases even

after a separation had developed between institutional Christianity and

secular political institutions. While there were still some areas of “friction”

between Christian teachings and the practices in secular Western societ-

ies, a general agreement developed that if the Church did not encroach on

the powers of secular authority, it could do pretty much whatever it wants.

However, governments expected the churches to support them in

time of war and would look unkindly at wholesale opposition and resis-

Donald P. St. John  15



tance. “One of the few demands for heroic sacrifice still made by the

Church was that the faithful put aside their scruples and fears and obey the

nation without question when it summoned them to go to war, even against

other supposedly “Christian” nations. Theirs not to reason why. The gov-

ernment knew best”.10

Merton notes that the “violence of believers” has played a signifi-

cant part in the history of the West. If practice is a form of preaching, then

by their practice Christians have often preached that violence and not

nonviolence proves the strength of one’s faith. In the twentieth century

during two world wars “Christians, on both sides, were exhorted to go

out and kill each other if not in the name of Christ and faith, at least in the

name of ‘Christian duty’”. Even more strangely, German Christians during

WWII were urged to go out and kill and die “for a government that was

not only non-Christian but anti-Christian and which had evident intentions

of getting rid of the Church”. And so it was, notes Merton, that “God was

drafted into all the armies and invited to get out there and kill himself”.11

Recent studies on the role of the churches in Nazi Germany raised ques-

tions in Merton’s mind about the moral passivity of the Protestant and

Catholic Churches. To examine this, he turned to the testimony of Chris-

tians who opposed the Third Reich and therefore their churches, some-

times at the cost of their lives. We shall consider three people about whom

Merton wrote, what they taught him, and how he applied the lessons

learned sometimes to the discomfort of his fellow Catholics.

The first person we shall consider is Fr. Ignace Lepp whose dia-

ries, written during the Nazi occupation of France, had just been pub-

lished (1962).12 Lepp’s book struck a chord with Merton. Ironically, on

the twenty-fourth anniversary of his baptism (November 16, 1962) and in

the middle of his own period of enforced silence, he records in his journal

that he is reading Lepp’s book and that “In a certain sense I am scandal-

ized by my own Catholicism”. He complains that it is “bad enough” that

one has “constantly to yield to officialdom and follow the decisions and

regulations of bureaucrats”, but increasingly there are clear cases of “con-

flict between the dead regulation on the one hand and living, spontaneous

moral action on the other”.13

Merton’s sympathetic review of Fr. Lepp’s book also provided

him the opportunity to critically examine the use and abuse of authority by

16  Prajñâ Vihâra



the Church especially in dealing with individuals who presented a chal-

lenge to its passivity over issues of war and peace.14 Fr. Lepp opposed

the Vichy puppet government and Nazism but received little support and

considerable opposition from his fellow Catholic priests. Merton focused

on what he characterized as a mentality of evasion which was responsible

for the failure of bishops, clerics, and especially wealthy laity to resist and

attempt to undermine the Nazi puppet government. The Bishops and cler-

ics in Vichy France supported the Nazi installed regime because in their

minds it was the only alternative to Communism. Such an either/or char-

acterization of the situation reflects a “latent despair of freedom and of

democratic government”, which is another trait of the psychology of eva-

sion. Theirs was not a genuine “choice” but a regressive “capitulation to

power”. Lepp’s fellow priests could not understand or support his resis-

tance activities and tried to dissuade him from being involved in the under-

ground.

“The authoritarian character of the Church”, wrote Fr. Lepp, “has

developed in many Catholics a tendency to evade all spiritual responsibil-

ity; they wait to be told what to do by authorities”. When ministers of the

church encourage such morally immature ideas and practices, they abuse

their authority and thereby weaken rather than strengthen the moral life of

Catholics. Thus, the lay people do not take any initiative when serious

social evils appear but passively await instructions from priests who them-

selves are frequently out of touch with the real world and give useless

advice. “This results in an abdication of responsibility and passive submis-

sion to an evil that ought to be identified, denounced, and resisted, not

‘obeyed’”, says Merton. Not only that, men such as Fr. Lepp and

Emmanual Mounier who had the courage and Christian values to oppose

evil were often refused comfort and support by their Church when impris-

oned by Vichy. According to Lepp, Mounier, a courageous and articulate

Catholic writer, went on a hunger strike but was refused “absolution on

the grounds that he had disobeyed legitimate authority and was not pre-

pared to repent his disobedience”.

This false understanding of Christian obedience, notes Merton,

leads to a “mechanical and irrational submission” to an “official machine”.

This is not the freedom of the “Sons of God” but a “compliance of func-

tionaries”. Merton’s point could not be lost on the hierarchy and lay people

Donald P. St. John  17



of his day. In fact, he directly challenges them, charging that the Church

either refuses or is unable to face and to protest against injustice as well as

the threat of nuclear war. “One of the grave problems of religion in our

time”, writes Merton, “is posed by the almost total lack of protest on the

part of religious people and clergy in the face of enormous social evils”.

These people suffer from a moral blindness because “they are no longer

fully capable of seeing and evaluating certain evils as they truly are: as

crimes against God and as betrayals of the Christian ethic of love”. Merton

cites the rampant social injustice in Latin America and the possibility of

nuclear war in North America which most Catholics “tend to accept pas-

sively and without question because it is ‘better than being a Communist’.

It is a ‘lesser evil’”. This is not a moral judgment but simply “a psychology

of evasion, irresponsibility, and negativism” which cloaks itself in concepts

such as “self sacrifice”, “obedience to civil authority” and “defense of

freedom and religion”. Persons in authority encourage this evasive help-

lessness and take advantage of it. True Christian obedience should “liber-

ate” a person from all forms of servitude and free him or her to criticize

and refuse to cooperate with injustice and dehumanization no matter what

the source. This understanding of freedom has gradually been replaced by

a “psychology of subservient opportunism” which supports the worst habits

of the “mass mind” and threatens both Christianity and democracy.

In “An Enemy of the State”,15 Merton presents the case of the

Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter who was beheaded by the Nazis for

repeatedly refusing to take the military oath and for declaring Hitler’s wars

“unjust”. Jägerstätter was a convert to Catholicism and thought that he

was taking a very traditional Catholic stand. Unfortunately most of his

fellow Catholics including clergy thought otherwise, and everyone from

friends to judges tried to convince Franz to change his mind.

What were their arguments? First, they claimed that there was

simply nothing that one person could do against the Nazi regime. There-

fore, Franz should serve, and if he was forced to engage in immoral acts,

those who gave the orders were responsible, not him. This sounds like the

Eichmann defense. Jägerstätter disagreed, claiming that a Christian would

be guilty of a grave sin if he or she simply obeyed whatever a civil ruler

ordered, however immoral. Whether or not it shakes the regime, Chris-

tians are obligated to resist and to fight evil, not with physical weapons but

18  Prajñâ Vihâra



with spiritual ones. Second, they argued that since Bolshevism was anti-

Christian and since Hitler at least tolerated the churches (for the present),

his refusal to fight for Hitler was a refusal to defend the faith against god-

less communism. Merton, of course, would note many times in other places

that this “mentality of evasion” with its lack of faith in democracy or in the

power of Christ was a characteristic of the “Better Dead than Red” crowd,

Christian and non-Christian, who would rather commit national suicide

and genocide in a nuclear exchange than to live under godless commu-

nism.

Third, they accused him of pride and arrogance for presuming to

be a better judge of what constitutes a “just war” than those in authority.

This, of course, was an invitation to abdicate one’s responsibility as a

moral creature with reason and free will. Fourth, they pointed out that

thousands of Catholic priests and lay people were serving in the military.

Was he better than they? Here was an invitation to join a herd of sheep

who blindly follow where they are led. Fifth, the bishops had not officially

opposed the war and, in fact, his own bishop had tried to convince him to

serve. In other words, the moral failing of the bishops was to be replicated

by their lay people. Fifth, he could contribute better to the salvation of

others by joining the army where he could practice the “apostolate of

good example”. As Merton points out, these arguments could be heard in

his day (and in ours, one could add).

The Bishop of Linz neither openly condemned Jägerstätter’s ac-

tion nor praised him as a moral hero. At best he could be considered a

unique witness. But he was not to be a model for others. The bishop did

not approve of conscientious objection as a legitimate Catholic option.

Rather, he stated that the true heroes were “those exemplary young Catholic

men, seminarians, priests, and heads of families who fought and died in

heroic fulfillment of duty and in the firm conviction that they were fulfilling

the will of God at their post. . . .” These men were acting out of “a clear

and correct conscience” while Jägerstätter was “in error” even if “in good

faith”, the bishop decreed.

Merton suggests that the bishop may have had things in reverse

and that he and many of his clergy were the ones with “ill-formed con-

sciences” due to their weak seminary training. Many in the hierarchy shirked

their responsibilities for correctly forming the consciences of young people

Donald P. St. John  19



in matters pertaining to war and peace. Merton was concerned in his day

about the responsibility of “those who help men to form their conscience__or

fail to do so”. The unnerving question was to what extent the “innocently

erroneous” convictions of church people in Nazi Germany were shared

by clerics and bishops of Merton’s day who were charged with the cor-

rect formation of consciences regarding war and peace. All of this “gives

food for some rather apocalyptic thought”, given the nuclear saber rattling

on both sides, Merton warns. The real question, then, raised by the

Jägerstätter story was “the question of the Church’s own mission of

protest and prophecy in the gravest spiritual crisis [humanity] has

ever known”. [italics are mine]

There were those, however, who reached across political and

ideological borders and who worked for peace and unity among all peoples.

Some laid down their lives in this effort. One such person was Fr. Max

Josef Metzger who was imprisoned and executed in 1944 in Germany.

His life stood in stark contrast with that of many of his fellow Christians__a

fact not lost on Merton in his essay, “A Martyr for Peace and Unity: Fa-

ther Max Josef Metzger (1887-1944)”.16 Merton points out that when

Germany invaded Poland and plunged the world into war, the German

Catholic press, with some exceptions, supported Hitler’s war in order to

stay in business. But this less than laudatory choice goes far beyond just

the Catholic press. The situation in the modern world (both under Hitler

and the nuclear cloud) often demands that Christians make heroic moral

choices against war and on behalf of peace because the survival of hu-

mankind may hinge on enough people resisting evil. And yet “in order to

preserve our institutional freedom of action” we can blind our consciences

“with a false conception of duty and of sacrifice”. This allows us to quietly

“participate in colossal injustices and barbarities”. Christians too often

forget their primary duty to Christ and allow their “duties to Caesar” to

justify cowardice, greed and deafness to the cries of suffering that can be

heard everywhere. Merton laments that it is easier to prefer “infidelity to

conscience and Christ” to social ostracism. And, when economic interests

are involved, Christians can be easily persuaded “that the side of God is

the side on which our bread happens to be buttered”.

However, the example of Father Metzger reminds us that “not

everyone needs to be a passive utensil of the militarist”. Metzger had been

20  Prajñâ Vihâra



a chaplain in WWI and had seen the senseless horrors of war close up.

After the war he spent his life working for peace. He founded organiza-

tions dedicated to “the works of mercy”. A special cause of his was Christian

unity and he was a crucial player in Una Sancta, an ecumenical move-

ment among Protestants and Catholics that began in 1939. He was a

frequent participant in peace conferences and congresses. He was ar-

rested several times by the Gestapo who tried to pin sedition charges on

him without success. He had written that: “The ‘just war’ of which the

moralists wrote in former days is now no longer possible. War today is a

crime. We need to organize peace as men have organized war”.

Metzger was betrayed by an undercover Swedish woman who

pretended to want to work for international peace. He was arrested for

the last time in 1943. His “treason” was his efforts to procure the help of

bishops in other countries to request from the Allies something short of the

demand that Hitler surrender unconditionally, so that the cities could be

spared thousands of deaths. He was executed by the Gestapo on April

17, 1944. He did not live to find out that the Allies were not disposed to

receive such overtures.

Regarding the witness of Christians like Lepp, Jägerstätter, and

Metzger, Merton writes:

The point to be emphasized, however, is not only that

these Christians were nonviolent but that they resisted.

They refused to submit to a force which they recognized

as antihuman and utterly destructive. They refused to ac-

cept this evil and to palliate it under the guise of ‘legiti-

mate authority’. In doing so they proved themselves bet-

ter theologians than the professionals and the pontiffs who

supported that power and made others obey it, thus co-

operating in the evil.17

TERROR FROM THE AIR: THE (IL)LOGIC OF WAR

The Allies began the war against Germany in 1940 rightly con-

vinced that if ever there was a just war, they were fighting it. Good and

Donald P. St. John  21



God were on their side (no matter what the Vichy and German clerics

said). In only five years (1940-1945) the Christian ethic of the “just war”

was turned upside down. But it did not happen suddenly with the drop-

ping of the A-Bomb. In fact, dropping the A-Bombs on Japan was but the

horrific culmination of a series of decisions made during World War II

concerning the morality of “area bombing” or “terror from the air”.  These

practices were made possible by new military technologies, encouraged

by military leaders, acquiesced in by civilians, and justified by recourse to

a logic and language of “necessity” and other appropriate obfuscations.

For their own part, the Christian churches largely remained silent even

though they knew that   once the line between combatants and non-com-

batants was erased, the just war theory flew out the window along with

the dove of peace.

Terror from the air began with the Fascist Generalissimo Franco

of Spain at Guernica, a Christian city in the Basque country, in 1927. The

Nazis, of course, practiced the indiscriminate bombing of civilians and

civilian targets from the beginning of their expansion. They were rightly

condemned by other countries for this immoral and barbaric practice. In

his essay, “Target Equals City”,18 Merton notes that the British govern-

ment took the high ground__at least for awhile__and declared that the RAF

would adhere to traditional rules and would bomb only military and indus-

trial targets. In 1942, however, Air Marshall Sir Arthur Travers Harris

decided to abandon these traditional ethical guidelines. He argued that

since the “precise bombing” of military and support sites during daylight

hours was too dangerous, “area bombing” during the night would become

standard practice even though it meant that the urban areas surrounding

the targets would be destroyed and its civilians killed. This would save the

lives of British airmen and the cost of planes. If that wasn’t justification

enough, an additional reason was given: such bombings would “destroy

enemy morale”. To achieve that end, Churchill declared: “There are no

lengths in violence to which we will not go”. One spokesman bluntly re-

marked that: “Our plans are to bomb, burn and ruthlessly destroy, in ev-

ery way available to us, the people responsible for creating this war”. And

by “the people” he did not mean only the military and political leaders.

When America entered the war, Roosevelt announced that the

AAF would bomb only strategic targets.19 By 1944, however, oblitera-

22  Prajñâ Vihâra



tion bombing by the “yanks” had begun in earnest. Some Americans, es-

pecially pacifists, objected. Roosevelt, following the Brits, defended the

tactic as “necessary” if the war was to be shortened. Public opinion polls

were on the side of this thinking and tactic. Americans by a fifty-to-one

margin supported saturation bombing and opposed their “overly scrupu-

lous”, if not “defeatists”, compatriots who raised moral objections.20

(Shortening the war mysteriously had become an ultimate and unques-

tionable end that justified, presumably, any means. But in order to shorten

the war one must intensify the pressure and increase the damage. As the

fire grows, larger logs must be thrown on.)

The old rule of “double effect” where one could “justify” the unin-

tended and limited killing of innocent non-combatants when the action

served a greater “intended” good became mote. These deaths were not

unintended. America had every intention of inflicting horrific damage on

German cities and death to their occupants. As Merton says, “This was

pure terrorism. And the traditional doctrine of war excluded such immoral

methods”.21 Dresden was a good example of what modern “conventional”

weapons could do and how that possibility quickly pushed aside reason

and morality. Wave after wave of bombers reduced this German city to

rubble. There were more people killed in the saturation bombing of Dresden

than as a result of the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

combined. And, although Dresden was an industrial city, no special atten-

tion was paid to industrial sites. The city itself was the target with its men,

women, and children. In fact there was what one official called a “bonus”,

in that the city was filled with refugees fleeing the advancing Russian Army.

While some tried to defend the bombing “as an inescapable necessity”, it

was bombed, in fact, for political reasons. It was “a ferocious and mas-

sive act of destruction . . . a calculated atrocity, perpetrated for the effect

it might have on the Russian ally. But as ever in such cases, it was rational-

ized as an inescapable necessity”.22

The Americans expanded their practice of targeting German cities

to Japanese cities even as they were developing the Atomic bomb. In

early 1945, General Curtis Lemay, another general acting under his own

responsibility, launched a campaign of obliteration, bombing Japanese cit-

ies. Napalm bombs set Tokyo ablaze, fire storms sucked away oxygen,

killing more people than were later killed in Hiroshima. Low-flying night

Donald P. St. John  23



raids on fifty cities were conducted to destroy “phantom industries” lo-

cated in neighborhoods amidst civilians.23

Finally, the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were oblit-

erated with one bomb each, leaving innumerable civilians dead and many

others so burned and sick that they came to envy the dead. Claims that

industrial targets were the intended bombing sites were quickly withdrawn.

The purpose again was “to shorten the war” and to avoid American casu-

alties. The story of backdoor diplomacy remained hidden, as was the split

between the Emperor and the military. The demand for “unconditional

surrender” was to remain the only option on the table. As the eighth “medi-

tation” in Merton’s sardonic prose poem “Original Child Bomb” reminds

us:

8. When they bombed Hiroshima they would put the

following out of business: the Ube Nitrogen Fertilizer

Company; the Ube Soda Company; the Nippon Motor

Oil Company; the Sumitoma Chemical Company; the

Sumitoma Aluminum Company, and most of the inhabit-

ants.24

There is an irrational logic to modern warfare, one that leads in-

evitably to committing acts that had once been considered unethical. It is

then “rationalized as an inescapable necessity”.25 Merton compares it to

an addict who swears that he or she can control their drinking but finds

that as they take each drink their resistance to having another one weak-

ens until they end up where they swore they wouldn’t be. With nuclear

weapons, Merton notes, indulging in the first “drink” could swiftly turn

into a “binge” that would end with the destruction of the world.26 War,

even with modern conventional weapons, is no longer an activity that can

be easily controlled rationally and morally once the terrible spirit is out of

the bottle__and imbibed. There is one winner in war. The winner is war

itself . . .

Though moralists may intend and endeavor to lay down rules for

war, in the end war lays down the rules for them. He does not find it hard

to make them change their minds. If he could, he would change God’s

own mind. War has power to transmute evil into good and good into evil

24  Prajñâ Vihâra



. . . Now more than ever he is omnipotent. He is the great force . . . with

his globe of sun-fire, and his pillar of cloud. Worship him.27

Several times during his recounting of the history of obliteration

bombing, Merton notes that the language of necessity was appealed to.

One assumes that using the language of necessity (“I had to do it”) ab-

solves the perpetrator of responsibility for his or her actions. The resort to

such a rationale strangely resembles the most common Auschwitz de-

fense. The language of necessity suggests that there is a will or force stron-

ger than one’s own which is morally and perhaps ontologically superior.

This powerful momentum of war overrules one’s misgivings and leads to

the surrender of one’s will. Fr. Lepp and Franz Jägerstätter could have

easily resorted to it and declared that the will of God impelled them to put

aside their qualms about giving in to the Nazis. They could have said “The

Church made me do it”. Other “religious” people would have understood

and even praised their decision. Yet people like them__the death camp

refuseniks, the peaceniks in America, or the scientists who objected to the

use of the A-Bomb, spoke against the systems of authority that condoned

genocide and mass murder. In all cases, the larger social order had an

ideology/theology that it claimed superior to and more universally valid

than the “opinion” or “viewpoint” of a single individual. The larger order

also claimed to have a moral authority, either politically or religiously

grounded, that overruled all individual claims to a different moral axiom.

Any “sane” person or “devout” Catholic must acknowledge and adjust to

such “obviously” superior forces. It was “necessary” for them to do so

and in doing so they experienced the thrill of being swept along by the

inevitable currents of history or of the divine will.

THE LANGUAGE OF WARS COLD AND HOT

The Cold War

Merton wrote “War and the Crisis of Language”,28 in 1968, the

final year of his life. In it he reflects on the use and abuse of language in

both the Cold War and the Vietnam War. This was the latest episode of a

Donald P. St. John  25



century-long corruption of language in the interests of war-making. “The

incoherence of language that cannot be trusted”, says Merton, “and the

coherence of weapons that are infallible, or thought to be: this is the dia-

lectic of politics and war, the prose of the twentieth century”.

The language of the Cold War was characterized by the “more

pompous and scientific jargon of the war mandarins in government offices

and military think-tanks”. This language was “scientifically antiseptic, busi-

nesslike, uncontaminated with sentimental concerns for life . . .” The “men”

huddled together in their war-rooms and around the conference tables of

their think-tanks, trying to prove their “manliness” by playing with statis-

tics about the deaths of millions, if not of the whole earth. Like Auschwitz

language, “it is this playing with death, however, that brings into the play-

ers’ language itself the corruption of death: not physical but mental and

moral extinction”.

Because of the irrationality of “winning” a nuclear war (winning

equals suicide), the language of goals and noble ends quickly gives way to

the language of strategies and tactics (process) which serves one purpose:

“to mask this ultimate unreason and permit the game to go on”. The lan-

guage of nuclear escalation is “the language of naked power” but is ‘all the

more persuasive” because it proudly displays its ethical illiteracy and be-

cause it affirms as realistic its own irrationality. The language of escalation

expresses a massive death wish through a superb mix of “banality and

apocalypse, science and unreason. . . .” Given currency through the mass

media, this language can “quickly contaminate the thinking of everybody”.

It can spread to other countries who are also eager to play the game. U.S.

experts at the time were opining that the country could survive a war

where only fifty million people were killed and China was predicting that it

could spare 300 million people and still make it. In such a world, Merton

concludes, “it is obvious that we are no longer in the realm where moral

truth is conceivable”.

True, and it is also a surreal world like that of Auschwitz where

one is sure that what one’s comrades or party says is true and what is

being repeatedly reinforced by the highest authorities must be fact and

therefore is to be accepted as the real picture of the world. Behind this

these same keepers of meaning and of authority play on fear: fear of God’s

wrath, of the death squad, of nuclear annihilation, even of social ostra-

26  Prajñâ Vihâra



cism. Only someone able to find and maintain an alternative base from

which to think, judge, and feel can oppose such a totalizing world.

The interplay of reason and madness that ran through the lan-

guage of nuclear “diplomacy” and escalation fascinated and frightened

Merton. He made connections with other events and found insights in

unexpected places. Reading Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civiliza-

tion (Random House, 1965), Merton was struck “by the way in which

the ‘reason’ of the Age of Enlightenment unconsciously shares so much of

the madness with which it was in dialogue”. Foucault described a method

by which doctors tried to “fool” the inmates of insane asylums by adopting

their own “logic” in order to act out scenarios that would push patients

into a crisis where they would have to confront the illogical nature of their

own delusions.   For example, people who feared they were dead and

hence would not eat food (because dead people don’t eat) were shown

pictures of dead people eating. They were therefore disarmed by their

own logic and began to eat.

This reminded Merton of the modern “language of power and

war”.  Our enemy is considered mad and must be treated as such. People

of his ilk only understand force and violence. To enter his world, we em-

ploy the “language of escalation”, building up our stockpiles while threat-

ening a pre-emptive use of the H-bomb.  If we strike first, it will prove that

force was necessary because we were facing “various bunches of mad-

men who understand nothing else”. Even as we conclude that words are

of little use in dealing with such people, we continue to use the language of

diplomacy and negotiation. But it is the mutual escalation of weapons that

becomes the real “dialogue”. So there are terms offered, there is the ap-

pearance of dialogue on the political level but “the real dialogue is with

weapons” even though this might contradict what our words are saying.

After all, you are dealing with someone who is mad and who only under-

stands the language of force. This is a circle, of course, because we begin

with a tacit conviction that negotiation through words is meaningless and

we do in fact “render the language of negotiation meaningless”.

One might note that in the nuclear rhetoric of the Cold War the

argument from “necessity” is developed, promoted and reinforced by both

sides. The spiral of reciprocal escalation turns: it is necessary for the U.S.

to escalate because the U.S.S.R. escalated because the U.S. escalated,

Donald P. St. John  27



and on and on. To use Merton’s metaphor of drinking, the drunks are

now buying each other drinks while loudly proclaiming their respective

intentions to “control” things themselves. Or, following Foucault, when

one enters the world of the madman one must discard one’s old logic.

Unfortunately, and unlike the case of the enlightenment doctors, one may

also lose one’s old identity and adopt the reality of the world of the mad-

man. Like those who adopted and internalized the language of Auschwitz,

one can rename reality and justify actions that one’s old language would

have found insane.

It is good to remember what was being justified and what was

being permitted by silence in those early years of the 1960s. Writing in his

journal on a hot August 21, 1962 Merton updates us on nuclear tests:

Up to mid-August__There have been 106 nuclear

tests in the last year. 31 by the USSR, 74 by the U.S.A.

and 1 by Britain (in Nevada).  The U.S. tests have been

29 in the atmosphere (the South Pacific) (three in Ne-

vada), 1 high altitude and 44 underground (New Mexico).

Total tests since the beginning. U.S.A. 229, USSR 86,

UK 22, France 5. Grand Total 342 of which 282 in the

atmosphere.

Nice going, boys!29

THE CHURCH AND THE BOMB

The dramatic increase in the destructive capabilities of weapons

during World War II, with the accompanying decrease in the moral ca-

pacity to control them, weighed heavily upon Merton’s mind as he lis-

tened to the propaganda spewing forth from both nuclear powers. Also

weighing heavily upon his mind was the fear that the current moral posture

of the churches was not significantly different from the passivity that char-

acterized the churches on both sides during WW I and II. In a letter to the

Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, in March of 1962, Merton explained why he

had spoken out, and revealed something of the climate of the early 60s.

The chief reason why I have spoken out was that I felt I owed

28  Prajñâ Vihâra



it to my conscience to do so. There are certain things that have to

be clearly stated. I had in mind particularly the danger arising from

the fact that some of the most belligerent people in this country

are Christians, on the one hand fundamentalist Protestants and on

the other certain Catholics. They both tend to appeal to the bomb

to do the “holy” work of destruction in the name of Christ and

Christian truth. This is completely intolerable and the truth has to

be stated. I cannot in conscience remain indifferent.30

Merton recognized the coming together of conservative Protes-

tants who had always considered America a “Christian” nation and Ro-

man Catholics who in his time were flexing their muscles and flashing their

credentials as loyal Americans. After all, a Catholic was now President

and the political power in major U.S. cities was in the hands of Catholics.

The formerly despised immigrants had become mainstream Americans.

Merton himself had been a leading figure in this upsurge in Catholic re-

spectability, influence and power. Now he was in the process of severely

criticizing the Church for its cozy embrace of American political and mili-

tary power. Merton raised troubling questions and engaged in harsh rhetoric

over the inability __ or even the unwillingness __ of the Church to fulfill its

primary mission as peacemaker and representative of the King of Peace,

especially in the face of the current apocalyptical possibilities. If there ever

was a time for the churches to speak up, Merton thought that this was it.

But silence ruled the day, interspersed with feeble attempts by institutional

theologians to justify nuclear war. By and large, the Church again ceded

the moral ground to the State.

There was, of course, a longer history to this. Merton’s interpre-

tation is that even as the State became secular in the West and wrested

temporal authority from the “sacred” domain of the Church, it looked to

the Church for certain social services such as moral training, “good works”,

and in some cases, education of the young, but especially “moral” support

in time of war. The Church responded too eagerly, in Merton’s view. As

with Augustine’s promulgation of the just war theory, religious authority

was exercised to persuade church members that following the secular

authorities was their “sacred” duty. (One need only think of the position of

the churches on both sides during the American Civil War). The Church

Donald P. St. John  29



thereby also assured itself of survival and special treatment (tax breaks,

no military service for clerics, etc.). However, as Merton notes, when the

Church equates secular authority with divine authority and cedes to it the

right to decide whether a war or its tactics are moral, the Church abdi-

cates its mission.31 In short, just because the Church no longer coaches

the team does not mean that its only possible role is that of cheerleader.

Merton thought that in the United States, most Christians just did

not understand or were unwilling to face the profound moral and religious

issues then facing humankind. The attitude of most priests and ministers

was not much different from their countrymen who were agnostics and

atheists. They confused the interests of the Church, America, NATO and

the West in general. Hence, many claimed that a first strike was not too

high a price to pay for freedom and religious liberty. But Merton insisted

that “genocide is too high of a price and no one, not even Christians, not

even for the highest ideals”, has a right to kill millions of noncombatants

and “defenseless populations of neutral nations or unwilling allies”. West-

ern society does not equal Christ and Russia is not the anti-Christ; the

cause of the West is not the cause of God. (One can imagine the anger

and outrage these kinds of remarks elicited from American Christians).32

In America, loyalty to a country that sees itself as a “city on a mountaintop”

and claims to be influenced by Christian history and principles, becomes a

“religious” justification for supporting the planned nuclear obliteration of

the cities of America’s enemies. But, the Church “does not belong to any

political power bloc”, Merton points out, and it exists on both sides of the

Iron Curtain. Yet, some theologians attempted to justify the mass slaugh-

ter of civilians, including fellow Christians, in Russia and Eastern Europe.

The Christian ethical sense had been corrupted “by theorizing in a vacuum,

by juggling with moral clichés devoid of serious content, and the weaken-

ing of genuine human compassion”.33 Merton is concerned in many places

with the “bombardment” of a populace by and the circulation among them

of patriotic slogans, catch words and clichés which substitute for rational

and ethical thinking. Propaganda serves to build up an image of the enemy

as subhuman and demonic and hence as an object of anger, hatred, or

fear but certainly not of compassion.

One would have thought that following the awful spectacle of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, any “civilized” nation that threatened to inciner-

30  Prajñâ Vihâra



ate the human residents of major cities would be condemned for terroriz-

ing these populations. (Incineration, a method used in the Nazi death camps,

was now being threatened on each another by the two major victors over

Nazi Germany). While Christian moral teaching allowed for a war that

was defensive in nature, and where evil did not outweigh good, it never

condoned terrorism.

In all-out nuclear war, there is no longer [a] question of simply

permitting an evil, the destruction of a few civilian dwellings, in

order to attain a legitimate end: the destruction of a military target.

It is well understood on both sides that all-out nuclear war is purely

and simply massive and indiscriminate destruction of targets cho-

sen not for their military significance alone, but for their impor-

tance in a calculated project of terror and annihilation.34

And yet, both the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in

nuclear escalation under the umbrella of what was later dubbed, MAD:

Mutually Assured Destruction. Writing in the early 1960s Merton noted

that even a conservative estimate placed the U.S. stockpile of nuclear

weapons as equivalent to “ten tons of TNT for every human being on

the face of the earth”.35  While many considered a nuclear war “unthink-

able”, the lessons of WWII demonstrated that, when pushed both by the

logic and force of events and by expediency, leaders could initiate and

justify what were heretofore “unthinkable” and grossly immoral actions.

In fact, a campaign had been launched in America to acclimate people to

thinking the unthinkable.

As the pressures of the cold war become more intense, the fallout

shelter scare has had a direct and intimate connection with the

policy of nuclear deterrence. It has been clearly and explicitly part

of a campaign to “engineer consent” and make nuclear war more

thoroughly acceptable, at least as a reasonable possibility, in the

American public mind. This, in turn, is intended to convince our

enemies that we “believe in” the bomb, and that, though we still

utter pious hopes that it will never be necessary, we thoroughly

intend to use it if we feel ourselves to be sufficiently threatened.36

Donald P. St. John  31



The moral passivity and patriotic activity that had characterized

American Catholic support of obliteration bombing in WWII continued

into the nuclear age. “Never was religious protest so badly needed”, claimed

Merton. But “[s]ilence, passivity, or outright belligerence seems to be char-

acteristic [of] official and unofficial Christian reactions to the H-bomb”.

Merton observed that what debate there was within the Churches in the

early 1960s concerning nuclear war “has been marked above all by a

seemingly inordinate hesitation to characterize the uninhibited use of nuclear

weapons as immoral”.37 Moral theologians who wanted to save the no-

tion of a just war tried to tie it to the policymakers’ concept of a limited

nuclear war that was tactical in nature. But, in order to do that, they usu-

ally had to accept the idea of total nuclear war in self-defense. The idea

that a nuclear war could be limited and somehow “won” by one side

seemed to fly in the face of history-and commonsense. If one side felt

itself to be losing, why would it not resort to “total” war? Hence, Merton

found ludicrous the attempt by some theologians to reintroduce a just war

defense to justify the American use of nuclear weapons.38

In nuclear warfare, victims are estimated in “mega-corpses” or

millions of deaths. And so Merton asks the churches how far they are

willing to go in giving over the decision on whether to push the button that

would inflict this carnage to politicians and military personnel? How do

Christians really know that these people are “worthy of our confidence”?

And do these individuals actually realize the full ramifications of what they

are doing? Or are they merely following the protocols they and their co-

horts set up, making the next move as dictated by their position in the

chain of events defined by their job description and the specific orders

given to them? Merton directs this troubling question to his fellow Chris-

tians: “To what extent can we assume that in passively following their lead

and concurring in their decision__at least by default__we are acting as Chris-

tians?”39 (Are we back to the non-responsibilities of the bureaucrats of

the Third Reich__and the silent collusion of the churches?) In short, Merton

is asking if the Church’s desire to be seen supporting the country’s nuclear

strategy places it in a position where it accedes to the destruction of much

of God’s creation and millions of human beings created in his image?

Vietnam

32  Prajñâ Vihâra



The claim by some that the Cold War with its nuclear standoff

would bring world peace and eliminate conventional small wars would be

proven wrong.  In addition to a series of small “hot” wars, brutal violence

was inflicted on millions of people by dictators and super-power client

states whose only virtue was their loyalty to one bloc or the other. “Bad

dictators” were those supported by our enemy, “good” dictators were

those supported by us. The language used to explain these incongruities

and justify these proxy wars was filled with euphemisms and doublespeak.

This became even more apparent as the U.S. involvement in Vietnam

deepened. Merton had warned early-on about the dubious nature both

morally and geopolitically of what America was doing in Vietnam. He

became increasingly aware of the widening gap between what was being

touted as the case by Washington and what the events on the ground

seemed to indicate. As for the latter, the language coming from the ground

was itself beginning to take on a surreal tinge.

A U.S. Major, seeking to defend the indiscriminate shelling of

civilians in a village in South Vietnam (supposedly the country America

was there to defend), and with no visible appreciation for the irony, de-

clared that “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it”.

Merton pointed out that:

Here we see, again an insatiable appetite for the tauto-

logical, the definitive, the final . . . The destruction of the

village and the killing of the people earn for them a final

and official identity. The burned huts become “enemy struc-

tures”; the dead men, women, and children become

“Vietcong”, thus adding to a “kill ratio” that can be inter-

preted as “favorable”. They were thought to be Vietcong

and were therefore destroyed. By being destroyed they

became Vietcong for keeps; they entered “history” de-

finitively as our enemies, because we wanted to be on the

“safe side”, and “save American lives”__as well as Viet-

nam.40

The Cold War slogan: “Better Dead than Red” leapt into Merton’s

Donald P. St. John  33



mind as he considered this piece of rationalization for another Vietnamese

tragedy. In both cases, to be made “dead” is to be saved from becoming

“red”, a fate obviously worse than death. Thus rescue and destruction

become identical. “The logic of war-makers” applied this bit of Cold War

Speak to the fate of Asian villagers on the other side of the world. In

effect, says Merton, “we decide, in their place, that it is better for them to

be dead__killed by us-than Red, living under our enemies”. The Asian

caught in the middle finds himself in a no-win situation. If he is on their

side-a “bad guy”__he certainly must be killed. If he is on our side-a “good

guy”__then he should be willing to die for our highest value, freedom, rather

than to fall under the sway of our enemy. Hence we protect his virtue (and

ours) as well as defend his interests (and ours). Of course, one dare not

ask the troubling question: “what might happen if he fell under Communist

rule and liked it!”

All of these convoluted linguistic acrobatics deflect attention from

the underlying “logic of power”. This is the same logic that Hitler ex-

pressed following his viewing of the aftermath of the Luftwaffe’s brutal

bombing of Warsaw. “‘How wicked these people must have been’, he

sobbed, ‘to make me do this to them!’” Ironically, Hitler is here confess-

ing that these people are stronger than he is or that his hate for them is

stronger than his moral sentiments. “They made me do it”, he is saying,

“so don’t look at me; don’t blame me”. But there is a certain insecurity

behind this pronouncement: a fear of dialogue. And so he speaks with

weapons in order to silence, preemptively, all speech from the “Other”.41

The Vietnam War, of course, had other euphemisms such as “paci-

fication”, “liberation” “winning hearts and minds”, and “free zone”. As to

how the latter worked, an American Captain declared that the army had

marked off a triangle and designated it a Free Zone. There were villages,

of course, within the triangle. Unfortunately for the occupants, the Captain

announced:  “‘From now on anything that moves around here is going to

be automatically considered V.C. and bombed or fired on’”. The villagers

were to be considered “hostile civilians”. When asked how he would

distinguish between hostile civilians and refugees, the Captain explained

that there were only three categories of people in this area. First, the V.C.,

second, the V.C. sympathizers, and third, fumbling with language, but sure

of the underlying logic, he blurted out: “‘I can’t think of the third just now

34  Prajñâ Vihâra



but . . . there’s no middle ground in this war’”.42

Merton also hears echoes from the “old frontier” in the language

and attitudes of the military in Vietnam. The old myths, learned from his-

tory books, teachers, scout leaders, movies, church leaders, drill instruc-

tors and parents are adapted to new contexts. Many of the metaphors

bandied about by the military clustered around images associated with

“clearing” the jungles of Vietcong and “cleaning out” an area of “hostiles”.

Merton is reminded of how settlers and frontiersmen spoke about the

necessity of clearing the woodlands or the plains of hostile Indians. This

use of images connected with “cleansing”, “purifying”, and “clearing out”

makes the aggressor himself feel clean, like someone engaged in a hy-

gienically beneficial task. Other images such as “vermin”, paint a slightly

more negative view of the inhabitants who must be “cleared out” of towns

and forests in order to make way for more “acceptable” folk. Of course,

one has to hide the fact that innocent men, women and children are being

sanitized by these housecleaning activities. At first, this killing of women

and children, whether in the old west or Southeast Asia, is permitted as an

unintended “side effect” of “something more important” that has to be

done. Overtime there is “more and more killing of civilians and less and

less of the ‘something more important’ which we are trying to achieve”.43

Of course, modern military weapons made the bombing of cities “infested”

with civilians easier than cleaning out the frontier of “dirty Injuns”.

One recalls that the operators of Auschwitz were also obsessed

with cleanliness and with purification activities; the ovens had to be cleaned

of any dust from the remains of Jews. Clearing the world of Jews, Indians

or any other undesirables seems a “final solution”. But if successful the

result will be a world of soulless sameness: a non-threatening, non-diverse

environment-socially and naturally. Everything would look like us-and we

would eventually be so nauseated that we would have to clear the world

of ourselves__which is perhaps the secret hatred behind it all anyways.

Of course, the act of “ethnic cleansing” borders on genocide. The

Western and Christian “mission” to conquer the world for Cross and

Crown brought Europeans to the American shores and led to both cul-

tural and physical genocide. The international use of the term “genocide”

began after the Second World War and was defined with the Holocaust in

mind. But, as Merton points out, “the destruction of races is not new__just

Donald P. St. John  35



easier”. Americans tend to forget that “a century ago white America was

engaged in the destruction of entire tribes and ethnic groups of Indians”.44

In North America the Puritans in imitation of the ancient Israelites came

into the “Promised Land” and proceeded to “clear out” the idolaters.

Theirs was a divine mission much as that of the Conquistadores in Latin

America.45 The explicitly religious myths that guided and justified the de-

struction of these “aliens” continue to propel America in a modified form

today, Merton argues. But contrary to its myth, “the United States has

received from no one the mission” to police the world or to dictate to

other peoples how they should live.46 Or how they should die!

Taking on a global presence and responsibility but carrying myths

of divine missions and manifest destinies, America oversimplified the com-

plexities of Southeast Asia and misunderstood its various peoples. As is

usually the case, Americans were surprised when the effects of their “good”

intentions turned out to be so different from what was anticipated. At best,

the language of war, power blocs, “dominoes”, “friends and foes”, suffers

from a lack of sophistication. At worse, it creates a virtual reality that traps

its articulators and leads to an obliteration of the humanity of the “other”

and anyone connected with him. As Merton so pointedly notes:

The tragic thing about Vietnam is that, after all, the “real-

ism” of our program there is so unrealistic, so rooted in

myth, so completely out of touch with the needs of the

people whom we know only as statistics and to whom

we never manage to listen, except where they fit in with

our psychopathic delusions. Our external violence in Viet-

nam is rooted in an internal violence which simply ignores

the human reality of those we claim to be helping.47

Merton notes that the newspapers reported that a youth leader in

the South who originally believed that the Americans could be trusted,

changed his mind. He complained that while the Americans kept making

declarations about how they have come to help his people, their actions

and the effects of the war on the people made them hate the Americans.

This, of course, surprised the Americans. While an American Catholic

Bishop whispered words of comfort and encouragement into the ear of

36  Prajñâ Vihâra



President Johnson, a Buddhist nun in South Vietnam burned herself to

death to protest the war. Billy Graham proclaims the war to be a “spiritual

war between good and evil”. Merton wryly notes that Graham is right but

not in the way he intends.48 The myth declares that America doesn’t lose

wars to “bad guys”. Neither Lyndon Johnson nor his supporters wanted

to be the first to expose it as myth. As the anti-war movement grew in

number and strength, generals like Westmoreland insisted that the war is

winnable__with a few more troops, a little more napalm, several powerful

air strikes (and, if all else fails, then threaten to “nuke ’em”).

Merton suggests that the language used by governments in war-

time distorts reality since it only presents one side of a complex picture

and is unwilling to solicit “other” voices. “Because the language of the

war-maker is self-enclosed in finality”, it can only be expressed in

speeches, threats, press releases, position papers, anonymous leaks, and

white papers from think-tanks. It does not invite reasonable dialogue, it

uses language to silence dialogue, to block communication, so that instead

of words the two sides may trade divisions, positions, villages, air bases,

cities__and of course the lives of the people in them. This was the language

of nuclear escalation as well as of the Vietnam War.

In addition, one of the mistakes of the war planners was listening

to the language of military-industrial-intellectual “experts” was bathed in

overly optimistic predictions about the effectiveness of the superior mili-

tary technology of the U.S. (no doubt with dollar signs in the eyes of some

consultants). They thought that technology would allow the U.S. to do

what neither the French nor the South Vietnamese army could do. False

pride, wrapped in its presuppositions by technological thinking, becomes

blinded to “decisive realities that do not fit those suppositions”. The U.S.

cranks up its propaganda machine and enlists its network of statisticians

to “prove” that it is winning the war and that its basic assumptions are

coming true. Of course, as Merton notes, the Tet offensive of February

1968 shatters much of that façade.49

During the Vietnam War, “officialese” had to carry the additional

burden of denying the actual flow of events. “Modern politics is a matter

of defining how you think things ought to be and making them come out

that way by cunning or by force”.50 Yet Vietnam shows that even with

enormous technological power, one cannot always make one’s words

Donald P. St. John  37



come true, says Merton. The language from Washington took on the

twisted logic and defensive tone of a group that finds itself in a situation

where its heroic myth keeps insisting that it should be on the edge of

victory but reality keeps insisting otherwise. “We are getting to the point”,

warns Merton, “where American ‘victory’ in Vietnam is becoming a word

without any possible human meaning”.51 The word is kept but the meaning

is ejected because alternative terms which might better describe the situ-

ation are unacceptable. They might be words of the enemy. And dialogue

with the enemy is prohibited by the logic of power.

“One of the curious things about the war in Vietnam”, Merton

notes, “is that it is being fought to vindicate the assumptions upon

which it is being fought”.52 Here is the awful tautology again! If the only

acceptable language is that which interprets what is happening so as to

vindicate the original reasons behind our doing it, then if the course of

events or new information threaten to prove our assumptions wrong we

must either distort the meaning of present events so they comport with our

assumptions or reveal the “real” meaning of our assumptions in order to fit

with current events. Nothing must happen that would prove us wrong and

empty the present of its justification, forcing us to change course and/or

admit mistakes. (The difficulty with admitting mistakes is intensified when

doing so implies that young men were sent to die in vain. The only way to

“save” these heroic acts from becoming meaningless is to offer more lives

as proof that they had not died in vain. Thus we get caught in a demonic

spiral, in an historical tautology).

The problem is that these assumptions have been proven wrong,

claims Merton. The administration originally tried to make Vietnam look

like Korea, with North invading South with support from China. That

way, the war could be fought like a “conventional limited war”. This turned

out to be wrong and the U.S. got mired down in a guerilla war in the

South. And, of course, the fact that the Vietnamese and Chinese were

ancient and current enemies did not fit the narrative of China being behind

the war. Merton had a prescient feeling that the Tonkin Bay incident was

faked to allow Johnson to push Congress to pass a resolution that sup-

ported turning the war into the war we thought we were fighting. So,

troop numbers were escalated and bombing raids were carried out on the

North. Of course, unlike Korea, it was not the North that had attacked us

38  Prajñâ Vihâra



but we had invaded the North. Such minor details were irrelevant.53

The United States government strove mightily to gain support at

home and abroad for its version of the war by increasing its attempts to

turn that version into reality. This effort had the unintended effect of further

undermining the credibility of America as well as its “basic human integrity

and sincerity”. “The political language of the United States, which was

suspect before, has now been fatally denatured”, claims Merton. It has

lost its “intellectual currency” because of its double-talk about the war,

about race in America, about domestic programs that go unfunded. “The

tragedy is not so much that America has come out of its pristine isolation-

ism but that it has decided to rule the world without paying serious atten-

tion to anybody else’s view of what the world is about”. As a result, “lan-

guage has been distorted and denatured in defense of this . . . attitude”.54

Those who lead others into war claim that war is a reasonable if

the last resort. Merton, however, insists that “war is not made by reason,

its conduct is not governed by reason. To appeal against war to reason is

to make an appeal that cannot have any serious effect on the war makers

themselves”.55 Officials, of course, must sound rational, appealing to “hard”

facts and “irrefutable” evidence while shaping them so as to point to fear-

ful scenarios should this “evidence” go unheeded. “The awful danger of

war is then, not so much that force is used when reason has broken down

but that reason unconsciously inhibits itself beforehand (in all the trivialities

of political and military gamesmanship) in order that it may break down,

and in order that resort to force may become ‘inevitable’.” In other

words, the events that are pointed to as “evidence” that war or its escala-

tion are necessary are themselves selected so that “the occult determi-

nation to resort to force in any case” will become reality.56

EPILOGUE: ONE MORE TROUBLING QUESTION

Thomas Merton is no longer with us. And neither are the Soviet

Union, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. The United States is the only

Super-power. But one troubling question remains. We can be sure Merton

would have asked it: Have things really changed?

Merton might have assumed that after the demise of the Soviet

Donald P. St. John  39



Union in the early 1990s that the United States could scale back on its

military expenditures and use its considerable ideological, moral, and eco-

nomic resources to help the world enter an unprecedented era of peace

and prosperity. Large arsenals of nuclear weapons would no longer be

necessary or even useful in this era. In fact, the danger of nuclear black-

mail or unscrupulous scientists selling plans or transferring weapons grade

uranium to terrorists or rogue states would encourage both the U.S. and

the ex-U.S.S.R. to dismantle and safely dispose of all nuclear weapons.

Hence, to the extent that the negative image of the United States

had been linked to its dangerous nuclear weaponry, that image would

have dissolved.  And the extent to which its negative image was tied to its

support for petty dictators, that image would have changed. Excuses for

supporting right-wing dictators or ongoing structures of violence including

death squads could no longer be made, absent Cold War competition.

Military interventions would be used only to prevent genocides or brutal

repression by governments of their own citizens. No Rwandas. No

Srebrenicas. No Darfurs.

A new era would dawn in which the U.S. would seek interna-

tional consensus before taking military steps that could result in hundreds

of thousands of civilian deaths. The idea of the U.S. unilaterally attacking

a weaker country would be unthinkable. Without the Soviet Union there

would no longer be a military that could come close to that of the U.S.

Even involvement in a protracted war in Vietnam could be marginally un-

derstood given the Cold War background. Certainly, given American pro-

testations that it abhors the idea of becoming an Empire, Merton’s charge

that the United States had “decided to rule the world without paying seri-

ous attention to anybody’s view of what the world” was about, could

never apply forty years hence when the U.S. would definitively lay to rest

any charges that it desired to “rule the world”.57 The U.S. would certainly

have shifted its heavy defense expenditures into peaceful uses like estab-

lishing educational and diplomatic institutions that would be dedicated to a

sophisticated study of other cultures and a cooperative dialogue on how

best to join with other nations in ushering in an era of reduced poverty and

increased peaceful global existence.

In March of 2003, the United States of America, with little inter-

national support, bombed, invaded and then occupied an Arab nation

40  Prajñâ Vihâra



with a third rate military and a dictator that had been courted and armed

by the Americans in the 1980s. One among many of the reasons given for

the invasion of Iraq was the assertion that Saddam Hussein, a secular

dictator, might give sanctuary and aid to an extremist religious Islamist

group (one the U.S. gave aid to in the 1980s to fight the Soviet Union)

responsible for the deadly attacks on the World Trade Center towers in

New York City on September 11, 2001.

The justifications for the Iraq war kept changing and turned out to

be mainly a smokescreen behind which was hidden a desire and perhaps

a decision to attack Iraq even prior to September 11, 2001. As a result,

“language has been distorted and denatured in defense” of this duplicity as

it had during the Vietnam war.58 The claim that the Iraq War with its hun-

dreds of thousands of casualties was absolutely necessary, only under-

taken as a “last resort”, after reason and reasonable steps had proven

insufficient, was a charade.  Merton had written that, “The awful danger

of war is then, not so much that force is used when reason has broken

down but that reason unconsciously inhibits itself beforehand (in all the

trivialities of political and military gamesmanship) in order that it may break

down, and in order that resort to force may become “inevitable”.”59 A

series of orchestrated events with their predetermined outcomes are pointed

to as “evidence” that the enemy is duplicitous, hiding something and hence

an imminent danger to national security. They merely hid an “occult de-

termination to resort to force in any case”.60 Merton suggested that the

language of war-makers in the twentieth century had proven useless as an

instrument of peace. He would say the same thing of the language of Ameri-

can war-makers in the twenty-first century. Why? “Because the language

of the war-maker is self-enclosed in finality. It does not invite reason-

able dialogue, it uses language to silence dialogue, to block communica-

tion . . .”61

Are these remarks of Merton still relevant? One need only recall

the frequent attempts to minimize or discredit the United Nations weap-

ons inspectors, some of whom were Americans; the fear mongering and

push for invasion through the use of such memorable lines by Bush and

Condolezza Rice as “The smoking gun that could come in the form of a

mushroom cloud”; the Cheney-inspired claim by President Bush in his

2003 State of the Union address that Hussein was trying to buy yellowcake

Donald P. St. John  41



for the production of nuclear weapons (which of course would be given to

terrorists); the presentation of “irrefutable evidence” of Iraq’s secret weap-

ons program at the United Nations by the Secretary of State; and the

intimidation of domestic dissenters by White House Press Secretary Ari

Fleischer, who warned that “Americans need to watch what they do and

watch what they say”. Even when veil after veil of lies had been torn from

the face of truth, members of the administration continued to spout the

party line on Sunday morning talk shows or in interviews with conserva-

tive news outlets. Statements, declarations, press releases, staged “inter-

views”, and manipulated press conferences continued the tradition of mono-

logue and indicated no willingness for dialogue. The administration con-

sistently displayed an arrogant contempt for democratic and legal pro-

cesses-an ironic way for promoters of freedom in Iraq to act.

Playing the 9/11 card, the administration presented their war to

Americans as a war of self-defense launched preemptively. They pre-

sented it to Iraqis as liberation from a dictator. Unrealistic images of Iraqis

greeting Americans in Baghdad as if they were Americans in Paris, and the

premature unfurling of a “Mission Accomplished” banner showed a horri-

bly deficient understanding of the actual situation. The Bush administra-

tion, like the Johnson administration in the 1960s, tried to “turn the war

into the kind of war it was supposed to be in America”. There had been

aggression, but for the Iraqis like many Vietnamese, “the aggression was

the other way around”.62 To the Iraqis and their sympathizers this war of

necessity was a war of choice; this war of self-defense was an invasion

and occupation.

For Merton, “American ‘victory’ in Vietnam [was] becoming a

word without any possible human meaning”.63 The opposing interpreta-

tions of what America’s presence and intentions in Iraq were, combined

with a lack of serious planning for post-invasion conditions, contributed to

the country spiraling into an inferno of sectarian conflict, I.E.Ds. (Impro-

vised explosive devices) and suicide bombings caused by foreign and

domestic terrorists and insurgents. In the midst and mist of it all came

another mantra enclosed in finality: “We fight them (al Qaeda) in Iraq so

that we don’t have to fight them here (in the USA)”. Merton claimed that

the Vietnam War was “being fought to vindicate the assumptions upon

which it is being fought”.64 The Al Qaeda that Bush claimed was in Iraq

42  Prajñâ Vihâra



but wasn’t, soon is. And so, fighting them in the present vindicates the past

decision to go to war. As Merton noted, “Modern politics is a matter of

defining how you think things ought to be and making them come out that

way by cunning or by force”.65 If the political language of the U.S. had

“lost all its value as intellectual currency” by 1968, it had become abso-

lutely bankrupt by 2008.66

Even wars begun with the best of intentions and with high purpose

have a tendency to turn moral convention on its head. Merton certainly

felt that had been the case with saturation bombing, nuclear bombing, and

the treatment of civilians in Vietnam. He concluded that, “There is one

winner, only one winner in war. The winner is war itself . . . War has

power to transmute evil into good and good into evil”.67 This is especially

true when a nation is convinced that God is on its side and hence need not

suspect self-deception or the gradual corruption of ideals. If whatever

one does is good by definition, there is no need to defend one’s actions or

apologize for one’s tactics. Yet the administration realized that some people

would object if they knew all of the facts, and some people were not as

enlightened about such matters as the neo-conservatives__especially their

political enemies. Therefore, it was decided that a certain level of secrecy

might be prudent. Thus arose illegal wiretaps, “extraordinary renditions”,

and “enhanced interrogation techniques” __ most infamously, the long-con-

demned practice of waterboarding. Just as the language of “necessity”

justified the war itself, it could be used to justify actions that most Ameri-

cans would find abhorrent if committed by “the enemy”.

Even if the intelligence provided by the “suspected terrorists” or

“enemy combatants” in U.S custody proved useless, or if they had been

erroneously imprisoned, they should be willing to be “inconvenienced” in

the service of a good cause__the War on Terror. As Merton noted of the

Catch-22 of Vietnam, the Vietnamese civilian was caught in the middle (in

more ways than one) if he lived in a free fire zone. If he was a “bad guy”

(V.C. or a Vietcong sympathizer), then death was deserved. If he was “a

good guy” (on our side), then he should be “ready to die for freedom”.

We take it upon ourselves to decide, “in their place, that it is better for

them to be dead” or traumatized, than to be Red or, in the case at hand, to

live under a fundamentalist Muslim regime (not counting Saudi Arabia).68

In one of his last essays Merton asks the troubling question,

Donald P. St. John  43



“What next? The illness of political language . . . is character-

ized everywhere by the same sort of double-talk, tautology, am-

biguous cliché, self-righteous and doctrinaire pomposity, and

pseudoscientific jargon that mask a total callousness and moral

insensitivity, indeed a basic contempt for man. The self-enclosed

finality that bars all open dialogue and pretends to absolute condi-

tions of one’s own choosing upon everybody else ultimately be-

come the language of totalist dictatorship, if it is not so already.69

Of the vitriolic language of extremist Islam, Merton would un-

doubtedly level the same criticism as he did to some revolutionary groups

of his day. That is, as long as it “remains another language of power,

therefore of self-enclosed finality, which rejects dialogue and negotiation

on the axiomatic assumption that the adversary is the devil with whom no

dialogue is possible”.70

Ultimately Merton’s condemnation of war and violence and his

pleas for peace rested on his religious humanism, which holds to the sub-

lime dignity of the human Person rooted in the Person of God. He feared

at times that his own language, while condemning violence, was itself too

violent and could sow further seeds of conflict rather than bring peace. In

many writings Merton worked out a vision of universal peace and a Gandhi-

like program to pursue it. His dialogue through writings and meetings with

leading thinkers and spiritual figures of all religious and political persua-

sions around the world was a witness to his positive belief in dialogue. The

following is from a prayer composed by Thomas Merton and read in the

House of Representatives on April 12, 1962. It still resonates today.

Almighty and Merciful God…

Save us then from our obsessions! Open our eyes, dissipate our

confusions, teach us to understand ourselves and our adversary!…

Save us from the compulsion to follow our adversaries in all that

we most hate, confirming them in their hatred and suspicion of us.

Resolve our inner contradictions, which now grow beyond belief

and beyond bearing…

Grant us prudence in proportion to our power,

44  Prajñâ Vihâra



Wisdom in proportion to our science,

Humaneness in proportion to our wealth and might.

And bless our earnest will to help all races and peoples to travel,

in friendship with us,

Along the road to justice, liberty and lasting peace…71

Endnotes

1Born in France on the eve of WWI, young Tom Merton fled with his

family to America as the war clouds gathered. Merton returned to and lived in

France (1925-1929) with his now-widowed father and then traveled to and was

educated in England (1928-1934). Following his father's death in England and amidst

personal turmoil at Cambridge University, Merton returned to America and entered

Columbia University (1934-1938) to study English Literature and writing (B.A.,

M.A.). Merton converted to Roman Catholicism (1938), taught briefly at St.

Bonaventure’s College (1940-41), and, at the beginning of WWII (December 10,

1941) he entered the Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance. The Trappists,

as they were also called, still lived a basically medieval existence separate from the

world and under a vow of silence. During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s,

Merton broke most of the precedents of this silent life. Following the publication in

1948 of his bestselling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, he soon estab-

lishes himself as one of the major voices of the post-war American Catholic renais-

sance, focusing on the revitalization of the spiritual and mystical traditions of the

church. In the late 1950s Merton became more engaged with the world and until the

end of his life wrote extensively on some of the important issues of the 1960s

including: nuclear war, civil rights, church reform, eastern religions, Vietnam, Marx-

ist humanism, and the American counter-culture. In a letter to Etta Gullick written in

October, 1961, Merton revealed that “there is one task for me that takes precedence

over everything else: working with such means as I have at my disposal for the

abolition of war”. He felt compelled to speak out especially on the issue of nuclear

war because “there is such apathy and passivity everywhere, with people simply

unable to face the issue squarely, and with only a stray voice raised tentatively here

and there, it has become an urgent obligation”. (The Cold War Letters; Orbis Books:

Maryknoll, N.Y., 2006; 9).

Articles poured out over the next six months. Given who he was and how

he could write, attitudes towards him on the part of many conservative Catholics

including some members of the hierarchy changed dramatically. He was notified by

his Abbot in April, 1962 that he had been forbidden by the Superior General of the

Order to publish or submit to the censors for review, anything having to do with

issues of war and peace. Merton obeyed but circulated letters and other writings

privately and on occasion published under a pseudonym. However, things began

to loosen up when many of his views showed up in April 1963 in Pacem in Terris, a

Donald P. St. John  45



papal encyclical of Pope John XXIII. Merton half-jokingly wrote to his Superior

General suggesting that the Pope was lucky he wasn’t a Trappist. Merton was to

find additional support for many of his views in December 1965 in an important

document of Vatican Council II (“The Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the

Modern World”).

With a new Abbot at Gethsemani, Merton began to travel more and under-

took a trip to Asia in 1968 to explore and meet with leaders of eastern religions such

as the Dalai Lama. After delivering a keynote address at a conference in Bangkok,

Thailand, Thomas Merton returned to his room and was “accidentally” (conspiracy

theories abound) electrocuted. The date was December 10, 1968 seventeen years to

the day that he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani. The body of this critic of the

Vietnam War was flown home on a USAF transport plane that was also carrying the

bodies of young Americans who had lost their lives in that war.
2Merton, Thomas. Original Child Bomb. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 3-11.
3Merton, Thomas. Chant to be Used in Processions Around a Site with

Furnaces. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 261-

262.
4Merton, Thomas. Auschwitz: A Family Camp. The Nonviolent Alterna-

tive; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 150-159.
5Shirer, William H. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Simon and Shuster,

Inc.; New York.
6Merton, Thomas. Turning to the World: The Journals of Thomas

Merton,Volume 4. 1960-1963. Ed. Victor A. Kramer; HarperCollins; San Francisco,

1996; 306.
7Merton, Thomas. Turning to the World: The Journals of Thomas

Merton,Volume 4. 1960-1963. Ed. Victor A. Kramer; HarperCollins; San Francisco,

1996; 307.
8Merton, Thomas. Turning to the World: The Journals of Thomas

Merton,Volume 4. 1960-1963. Ed. Victor A. Kramer; HarperCollins; San Francisco,

1996; 308.
9Merton, Thomas. A Devout Meditation in Honor of Adolf Eichmann. The

Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 160-162.
10Merton, Thomas. Violence and the Death of God: Or God as Unknown

Soldier. The Nonviolent Alternative. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 205.
11Merton, Thomas. Violence and the Death of God: Or God as Unknown

Soldier. The Nonviolent Alternative. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 205.
12Lepp. Fr. Ignace. The Christian Failure; The Newman Press, Westminster,

MD, 1962.
13Merton, Thomas.  Turning to the World: The Journals of Thomas Merton,

Volume 4. 1960-1963; Ed. Victor A. Kramer; HarperCollins; San Francisco, 1996;

265.
14Merton, Thomas. Passivity and Abuse of Authority. The Nonviolent

46  Prajñâ Vihâra



Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 129-133.
15Merton, Thomas. An Enemy of the State. The Nonviolent Alternative;

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 134-138.
16Merton, Thomas. A Martyr for Peace and Unity: Father Max Josef Metzger

(1887-1944). The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 139-

143.
17Merton, Thomas. Towards a Theology of Resistance. The Nonviolent

Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 191.
18Merton, Thomas.Target Equals City. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 96.
19Merton, Thomas.Target Equals City. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 96.
20Merton, Thomas.Target Equals City. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 97.
21Merton, Thomas.Target Equals City. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 95.
22Merton, Thomas. Love and Living; Ed. Naomi Burton Stone and Patrick

Hart. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; New York, 1985; 130.
23Merton, Thomas. Target Equals City. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 98.
24Merton, Thomas. Original Child Bomb. The Nonviolent Alternative;

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 5.
25Merton, Thomas. Love and Living; Ed. Naomi Burton Stone and Patrick

Hart. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York, 1985; 130.
26Merton, Thomas. Love and Living; Ed. Naomi Burton Stone and Patrick

Hart. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, New York, 1985; 129.
27Merton, Thomas. Target Equals City. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, New York, 1980; 94.
28Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1980; 234-247.
29Merton, Thomas. Turning to the World: The Journals of Thomas Merton,

Volume 4. 1960-1963. Ed. Victor A. Kramer, HarperCollins, San Francisco; 1996;

238.
30Merton, Thomas. The Cold War Letters; Orbis Books; Maryknoll, N.Y.,

2006; 114.
31Merton, Thomas. Violence and the Death of God: Or God as Unknown

Soldier. The Nonviolent Alternative. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York; 1980; 205.
32Merton, Thomas. Christian Ethics and Nuclear War. The Nonviolent

Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 83.
33Merton, Thomas. Peace: Christian Duties and Perspectives. The Non-

violent Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 14.
34Merton, Thomas. Peace: A Religious Responsibility. The Nonviolent

Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 120.

Donald P. St. John  47



35Merton, Thomas. Target Equals City. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 96.
36Merton, Thomas. Target Equals City. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 100.
37Merton, Thomas. Peace: A Religious Responsibility. The Nonviolent

Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 107.
38Merton, Thomas. Target Equals City. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; New York; 1980; 100-101.
39Merton, Thomas. Peace: A Religious Responsibility. The Nonviolent

Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 120.
40Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 238-239.
41Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 239.
42Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 239-240.
43Merton, Thomas. Ishi: A Meditation. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 253.
44Merton, Thomas. Ishi: A Meditation. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 248.
45Merton, Thomas. Conquistador, Tourist, and Indian.  A Thomas Merton

Reader; Image Doubleday; New York, 1974; 306.
46Merton, Thomas. The Vietnam War: An Overwhelming Atrocity. The

Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 196.
47Merton, Thomas. The Vietnam War: An Overwhelming Atrocity. The

Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 195.
48Merton, Thomas. The Vietnam War: An Overwhelming Atrocity. The

Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 195.
49Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 245.
50Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 244.
51Merton, Thomas. The Vietnam War: An Overwhelming Atrocity. The

Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 195.

I write during the summer of the Iraq “surge” and following years of the

promise of “victory” and the redefining of what victory means. This writer also

remembers how the power of “victory” as a symbol to rally support still held sway

in 1968.  To the “greatest generation” who had fought in Europe and the Pacific in

WWII, “victory” had a profound significance. Their children might have taken to

the streets to protest the Vietnam War but they were still willing to trust in their

president and military leaders. Most of them also trusted in their religious leaders.

48  Prajñâ Vihâra



52Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 244.
53Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 244-245.
54Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Alternative;

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 245.
55Merton, Thomas. Love and Living; Ed. Naomi Burton Stone and Patrick

Hart. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; New York, 1985; 131.
56Merton, Thomas. Love and Living; Ed. Naomi Burton Stone and Patrick

Hart. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; New York, 1985; 131.
57Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 246.
58Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 245.
59Merton, Thomas. Love and Living, Ed. Naomi Burton Stone and Patrick

Hart. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; New York, 1985; 131.
60Merton, Thomas. Love and Living, Ed. Naomi Burton Stone and Patrick

Hart. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; New York, 1985; 131.
61Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 244.
62Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 245.
63Merton, Thomas. The Vietnam War: An Overwhelming Atrocity. The

Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 195.

This writer remembers the power that the concept of “vic-

tory” still had in the 1960s. For my father and other members of the

“greatest generation” who had fought in Europe and the Pacific in

WWII, “victory” had a profound significance, as did the implica-

tions of “loss”. The manipulation of that term and a deliberate

mystifying of its meaning during Vietnam, and now in the war on

terrorism, cynically extend conflict and bloodshed while the gov-

ernment looks for some face-saving way to extricate itself and its

military from a morass. Public trust is needed however and is woe-

fully lacking today.
64Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 244.
65Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 244.
66Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 245.
67Merton, Thomas. Target Equals City. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 94.
68Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

Donald P. St. John  49



ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 239.
69Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 246.
70Merton, Thomas. War and the Crisis of Language. The Nonviolent Al-

ternative; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 247.
71Merton, Thomas. Prayer for Peace. The Nonviolent Alternative; Farrar,

Straus and Giroux; New York, 1980; 269.

50  Prajñâ Vihâra