Thomas Merton, Deep Ecologist

Thomas Merton
(1915-1968)

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist monk who — according to Fr. Daniel Berrigan, who should know — became the conscience of the peace movement of the 1960s.

He was not only that. He was one of the most prolific Catholic writers of the 20th century.

A collection of Merton's writings on the natural world, When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature, shows that he was also, in his own way, a "deep" ecologist — recognizing (says Wikipedia of deep ecology) the inherent worth of all living beings, regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs. Merton wrote:

It is not Christianity, indeed, but post-Cartesian technologism that separates man from the world and makes him a kind of little god in his own right, with his clear ideas; all by himself. ...

What a miserable bundle of foolish idiots we are! We kill everything around us even when we think we love and respect nature and life. This sudden power to deal death all around us simply by the way we live, and in total “innocence” and ignorance, is by far the most disturbing symptom of our time. ...

A phenomenal number of species of animals and birds have become extinct in the last fifty years — due of course to man’s irruption into ecology. There was still a covey of quail around here [his abbey near Bardstown, Kentucky] in early fall. Now I don’t hear a single whistle, or hear a wing beat.

The Abbey of Gethsemani at Trappist, Kentucky, was Merton's home for the last 27 years of his life, where he looked for and found God "beyond all and in all." There was for Merton no contradiction between the "beyond" and the "in":

I want not only to observe but to know living things, and this implies a dimension of primordial familiarity which is simple and primitive and religious and poor. This is the reality I need, the vestige of God in His creatures.

"The vestige of God in His creatures": It's what I mean when I talk of "this sacramental earth"!