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“Is not Christianity supremely hostile to all forms of idealism, to all reduction of its quite “realistic” end and means to mere lofty ideas? Is the ideal of the “abolition of war” really different in kind from such other lofty aims as the “abolition” of disease, of suffering, of sin, of death? All of these ideals have enlisted the enthusiasm of some modern idealist or other, but it is quite clear to the Christian that they are secularizations and so perversions of genuine Christian hopes. They can be realized only in Christ, only in His Kingdom that is not of this world; when faith in Christ and hope in His Kingdom are wanting, when the attempt is made to realize Christian “ideals” in this world—then there is idolatry, the spirit of Antichrist. Disease, suffering, sin, and death are an unavoidable part of the world we know as a result of the Fall. They can only be eliminated by a radical transformation of human nature, a transformation possible only in Christ and fully only after death.”—Fr. Seraphim Rose’s Letter to Thomas Merton 1962
Although Eugene never finished his essay on the “New Christianity,” he did complete another lengthy statement on the same topic, in the form of a letter to Thomas Merton.
The time was 1963. Having long been on the rise, Catholic humanism would soon change the face of the Roman Church at the Second Vatican Council. Thomas Merton, already famous as a proponent of “contemplative spirituality,” had not only caught the spirit of the age, but was to some extent directing its course. He became an outspoken advocate of the new Christianity of Pope John XXIII; and, like the “religionless” humanism from which it was copied, he upheld man’s reason, with or without faith in God, as the key to global felicity. “Pope John’s optimism,” Merton wrote, “was really something new in Christian thought because he expressed the unequivocal hope that a world of ordinary men, a world in which many men were not Christians or even believers in God, might still be a world of peace if men would deal with one another on the basis of their God-given reason and with respect for their inalienable rights.” In recent articles Merton had affirmed in no uncertain words: “War must be abolished. A world government must be established.... A truly international authority is the only answer [to] the critical needs and desperate problems of man.” He spoke of a possible “birth agony of a new world,” of the duty of Christians today “to perform the patient, heroic task of building a world that will thrive in unity and peace”; and in this connection he spoke of “Christ the Prince of Peace.”
Eugene wrote to Merton that, in light of what seemed to him to be the plain teaching of the universal Church, he found such remarks disturbing. In expressing his disagreement, Eugene was challenging but at the same time respectful. He probably took the time to write this letter because he felt that Merton was one who would consider seriously what he had to say. Years earlier, as we have related, Merton’s first book, The Seven Storey Mountain, had made a deep impression on Eugene as a description of a typical modern man who, having experienced the world’s delights and discerned their emptiness, had renounced them to seek the world to come.
In his essay on the “New Christianity,” Eugene had written: “The tragedy of these times is that men, rediscovering the fact that they require more than earthly bread, turn in their spiritual hunger to what seems to be the ‘renewed’ Church of Christ, only to find there an insubstantial imitation of genuine spiritual food. Starving men cannot distinguish flavors.”
It seemed that Merton had done just this. For whatever reason, this monk, having made a sincere monastic beginning in the strict, cloistered Trappist Order, was now starving for true spiritual life. Grateful to Merton, Eugene hoped to turn him back to his “first love.” The fact that Merton was not Orthodox did not deter him. Despite the chiliastic pronouncements of recent popes, Eugene knew that the true, otherworldly eschatology of traditional Christianity was not entirely dead in the Roman Church, as was witnessed by the recent book by the Catholic writer Joseph Pieper, The End of Time.
In his letter, Eugene told Merton that “we are witnessing the birth-pangs of... a ‘new Christianity,’ a Christianity that claims to be ‘inward,’ but is entirely too concerned with outward result; a Christianity, even, that cannot really believe in ‘peace’ and ‘brotherhood’ unless it sees them generalized and universally applied, not in some seemingly remote ‘other world,’ but ‘here and now.’...
“Christianity become a ‘crusade,’ Christ become an ‘idea,’ both in the service of a world ‘transformed’ by scientific and social techniques and a man virtually ‘deified’ by the awakening of a ‘new consciousness’: this lies before us. Communism, it seems clear, is nearing a transformation itself, a ‘humanizing,’ a ‘spiritualizing,’ and of this Boris Pasternak* is a sign given in advance; he does not reject the Revolution, he only wants it ‘humanized.’ The ‘democracies,’ by a different path, are approaching the same goal....
“An age of ‘peace’ may come to weary — yet apocalyptically anxious — man; but what can the Christian say of such ‘peace’? It will not be the peace of Christ.”
At the end of his letter, Eugene encouraged Merton not to be ashamed of genuine, otherworldly Christianity, no matter how foolish it may appear in the eyes of worldly men. “Above all,” he wrote, “the Christian in the contemporary world must show his brothers that all the ‘problems of the age’ are of no consequence beside the single central ‘problem of man’: death, and its answer, Christ. Despite what you have said about the ‘staleness’ of Christianity to contemporary men, I think that Christians who speak of this problem, and in their lives show that they actually believe all that ‘superstition’ about the ‘other world’—I think they have something ‘new’ to say to contemporary man. It has been my own experience that serious young people are ‘tired’ of Christianity precisely because they think it is an ‘idealism’ that hypocritically doesn’t live up to its ‘ideals’; of course, they don’t believe in the other world either — but for all they know, neither do Christians....
“The outward Gospel of social idealism is a symptom of this loss of faith. What is needed is not more busyness but a deeper penetration within. Not less fasting, but more; not more action, but prayer and penance.... If Christians in their daily life were really on fire with love of God and zeal for His Kingdom not of this world—then everything else needful would follow of itself.”
Eugene was one with Dostoyevsky in believing that any true improvement of society must come through the spiritual transformation of each person. As Elder Ambrose of Optina clearly expressed it: “Moral perfection on earth (which is imperfect) is not attained by mankind as a whole but rather by the individual believer according to the degree to which he fulfills God’s commandments and the degree of his humility. Final and complete perfection is attained in heaven in the future eternal life for which the short terrestrial life serves only as a preparation.”
If Eugene ever sent his letter to Thomas Merton, no reply from the latter has been preserved. In succeeding years, Eugene was to watch with sadness as the consequences of Merton’s “disturbing” orientation played themselves out. In 1966 Merton formally rejected the outlook he had held twenty-five years earlier, when he had entered the monastery and written The Seven Storey Mountain. He mocked what he felt to be his former delusion in renouncing the world, believing this to be part of the “negative,” “world denying” Christianity that had existed throughout the centuries but was now outmoded, ready to be
Merton had written an article entitled “Pasternak and the People with Watch Chains” (in Jubilee, July, 1959) replaced by the new vision of Pope John XXIII. In outlining his new way of thinking, Merton said that the true duty of the Christian was “to choose the world.”
The tragedy of Thomas Merton — and such it was, no matter what the world may try to make of him — bore witness to Eugene’s statement that “the outward Gospel of social idealism is a symptom of loss of faith.” At the same time that Merton made a break with the tenets of his younger days, he began to take his spiritual search outside Christianity and into Eastern religions. At first Eugene hoped that this search would free him from the straitjacket of Roman Catholic institutionalism with which he was struggling as a monk, and would lead him, as it had Eugene himself, to the “Eastern,” mystical dimension of Christianity — Orthodoxy. But such was not the case. Merton’s investigation of Buddhism and Hinduism only led him deeper into them. Following from his Church’s striving for “universality in the spiritual field,” he gradually lost his faith in the uniqueness of Christian Truth. “Starving men cannot distinguish flavors.” By the time of his famous pilgrimage to Hindu and Buddhist centers of Asia, Merton viewed Christianity as but one path among many; he said he felt more rapport with Buddhists than with Roman Catholics, and expressed his desire to “find a Tibetan guru and go in for Nyingmapa Tantric initiation.”
One can imagine where Merton’s course would have taken him and his millions of admirers had he been able to finish his Asian pilgrimage and return to America. When he died suddenly in Bangkok after lecturing at a conference of United Religions in Calcutta, Eugene felt that he had been mercifully stopped by God’s Providence. With sorrow he remarked to Gleb on the fate of this man who had once given him hope — hope that it was indeed possible for a 20th century man to live for the otherworldly Kingdom of Christ.
Eugene was now going in a direction opposite to the one Merton had taken at the end of his life. For Merton, pagan Asia was “clear, pure, complete... it needs nothing.” But Eugene, from his own years of searching in Buddhism, had already felt most excruciatingly that it still lacked the most essential thing of all. Merton, who had reached a spiritual impasse in contemporary Roman Catholicism, believed that he had “fully utilized his own tradition and gone beyond it.” Eugene, on the other hand, had already experienced the limitations of the non-Christian religions which Merton had been exploring. He had already gone beyond them to find, for the first time in his life, joy and spiritual regeneration in Jesus Christ; and his growth within the Orthodox tradition had only begun.”—Not of this World:(pp. 230-233)
Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the Kingdom (Luke 12:32)
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"The outward Gospel of social idealism is a symptom of loss of faith."
Fr. Seraphim,
Letter to Thomas Merton, 1962
“Eugene wrote to Merton that, in light of what seemed to him to be the plain teaching of the universal Church, he found such remarks disturbing. In expressing his disagreement, Eugene was challenging but at the same time respectful. He probably took the time to write this letter because he felt that Merton was one who would consider seriously what he had to say. Years earlier, as we have related, Merton’s first book, The Seven Storey Mountain, had made a deep impression on Eugene as a description of a typical modern man who, having experienced the world’s delights and discerned their emptiness, had renounced them to seek the world to come.“— Not of this World: (pp. 231)
