As one might expect from almost anything by Thomas Merton, The Climate of Monastic Prayer is both solidly traditional and creatively insightful. It provides a valuable introduction to Catholic Christian prayer.
The present book, however, is truly perplexing to review. How dare anyone be less than respectful toward anything written by Thomas Merton? It was, however, published in 1969 as Contemplative Prayer, and is available in that format, online, having been assembled shortly before Merton's trip to Asia and untimely death. Its chapters were written in the 1950s, as noted in the new introduction to the text—about half the chapters written in 1959 (nine chapters), and the rest (ten chapters) from “an earlier manuscript.” Merton's diaries from the 1950s and 1960s find him occasionally chiding himself about publishing unnecessarily. One might wonder why the publishers of the present text felt the need to reprint a book assembled in 1968, published in 1969, but written in the late 1950s. Among other journals, it was reviewed in America in 1969 and in Theological Studies in 1970.
A disclaimer: the present reviewer was a seminarian in a Catholic novitiate in the 1950s, and read a good deal of the kind of material that is in this book, so he brings a certain amount of deja vu, which both informs and biases his response.
It is puzzling that the book is noted as not for beginners, and not for the more advanced in Catholic (monastic) prayer. The present reviewer began reading it straight through, and found it so puzzlingly errant between what seemed to be advice about discursive meditation, and more advanced contemplation, that he went back, numbered the chapters according to the announced chapters from 1959, and separately, the chapters from “an earlier manuscript,” and reread the book according to the two separable sections with their separable emphases.
In that era of “ascetical theology,” spiritual writers, whom Merton surely knew, distinguished among three stages of prayer: the purgative, the unitive, and the illuminative. The purgative stage was where most people started, those who had to cope with the most basic attention to such spiritual obligations as the Ten Commandments and the most basic cleaning up of adolescent distraction. Subsequently one worked into, and was graced by God, to experience a trans-discursive unitive way, addressed by a reassuring book called An Ignatian Approach to Divine Union by Louis Peeters, SJ, which comfortingly assured the ordinary soul that simple “acquired” contemplation was within the possibilities of ordinary folk. All were cautioned against any presumption that any but the most uniquely and obviously undeservedly graced would be admitted to the illuminative stage of infused contemplation. All of this was worked out in a summary handbook on spiritual direction called The Spiritual Life: A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology, by Adolphe Tanqueray, SSM. Novices were cautioned not to read this book, lest they get any false ideas about their presumed mystical depth.
The present book moves back and forth between the purgative and the unitive ways, without explanation. If one reads half the chapters, one is in the realm of (word not mentioned) “discursive meditation,” while the second set of chapters uses the word “contemplation” far more frequently, almost exclusively. Assembled as they are in the book, to one reading it straight through, there is a confusing mixture of advice about meditation and then about contemplation, with no formal distinctions pointed out. The present reviewer worked through the book, and then simply turned to Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation, which he had partially read in the 1950s as Seeds of Contemplation. The last ten chapters of New Seeds of Contemplation give very substantially deeper advice on contemplation.
Except for antiquarian or biographic interest, skip The Climate of Monastic Prayer and read Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation.
