Sunday, January 3, 2016


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Unleashing the Good that is Already Within
Thomas Merton is man I like to listen to as he thinks out loud.  He has written two of my favorites books, Contemplative Prayer and The Way of Chuang Tzu (although it is twenty page introduction to the second volume that captivates me in that book).

In The Way of Chuang Tzu he tells us we can only understand CT in context, because this thinker was responding to, interacting with, other thinkers, his contemporaries and others from earlier ages.  “But before we can understand even a little of his subtlety, one must situate him in his cultural and historical context.”

This is a common claim among social scientists and cultural critics, though rarely followed through on as thoughtfully and intentionally and meaningfully as Merton does here.  In fact, Merton argues one might see CT as silly or profane or illogical if one did not interpret his words as responses, countervailing forces, designed to illuminate (both the strengths and weaknesses in the position being responded to as well as CT’s own position, without actually ‘taking sides’ in the traditional sense).
Which leads to one of my favorite passages (pages 22-24)…

Merton notes that CT is concerned about both the means and the ends that Confucians focus on, because “the whole concept of ‘happiness’ and ‘unhappiness’ is ambiguous from the start, since it is situated in the world of objects.  This is no less true of more refined concepts like virtue, justice, and so on.  In fact, it is especially true of ‘good and evil,’ or ‘right and wrong.’ 

From the moment they are treated as ‘objects to be attained,’ these values lead to delusion and alienation.

Therefore CT agrees with the paradox of Lao Tzu, ‘When all the world recognizes good as good, it becomes evil,’ because it becomes something that one does not have and which one must constantly be pursuing until, in effect, it become unattainable.

The more one seeks ‘the good’ outside oneself as something to be acquired, the more one is faced with the necessity of discussing, studying, understanding, analyzing the nature of the good.  The more, therefore, one becomes involved in abstractions and in the confusion of divergent opinions.  The more ‘the good’ is objectively analyzed, the more it is treated as something to be attained by special virtuous techniques, the less real it becomes.  As it becomes less real, it recedes further into the distance of abstraction, futurity, unattainability.  The more, therefore, one concentrates on the means to be used to attain it.  And as the end becomes more remote and more difficult, the means becomes more elaborate and complex, until finally the mere study of the means becomes so demanding that all one’s efforts must be concentrated on this, and the end is forgotten.

Hence the nobility of the Ju [Confucian] scholar becomes, in reality, a devotion to the systematic uselessness of practicing means which lead nowhere.  This is, in fact, nothing but organized despair: ‘the good’ that is preached and exacted by the moralist thus finally becomes an evil, and all the more so since the hopeless pursuit of it distracts one from the real good which one already possesses and which one now despises or ignores.

The way of Tao is to begin with the simple good with which one is endowed by the very fact of existence.  Instead of self-conscious cultivation of this good (which vanished when we look at it and become intangible when we try to grasp it), we grow quietly in the humility of a simple, ordinary life, and this way is analogous to the Christian ‘life of faith.’ It is more a matter of believing the good than of seeing it as the fruit of one’s efforts.

The secret of the way proposed by CT is therefore not the accumulation of virtue and merit taught by Ju, but wu wei, the non-doing, or non-action, which is not intent upon results and is not concerned with consciously laid plans or deliberately organized endeavors. 

‘My greatest happiness consists precisely in doing nothing whatever that is calculated to obtain happiness…if you ask ‘what ought to be done’ and ‘what ought not to be dong’ on earth to produce happiness, I answer that these questions do not have [a fixed and predetermined] answer’ to suit every case.  If one is in harmony with Tao…the answer will make itself clear when the time comes to act, for then one will act not according to the human and self-conscious mode of deliberation, but according to the divine and spontaneous mode of wu wei, which is the mode of action of Tao itself, and is therefore the source of all good.


The other way…is fundamentally a way of self-aggrandizement…CT is not against virtue, but he sees that mere virtuousness [of Ju] is without meaning and without deep effect either in the life of the individual or in society.

Once this is clear, we see that CT’s ironic statements about ‘righteousness’ and ‘ceremonies’ are made not in the name of lawless hedonism and antinomianism, but in the name of that genuine virtue which is ‘beyond virtuousness.’

Once that is clear, one can reasonably see an a certain analogy between CT and St. Paul’s…teaching on faith and grace, contrasted with the ‘works of the Old Law.’”



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