Disarming discourse: Thomas Merton’s Breakthrough to Peace, October 1961-September 1962
Merton's sense of himself as actively working through writing to become a peacemaker was central to both his sense of religious vocation and his identity as an author. The importance of Breakthrough to Peace for Merton was that it allowed him to forge transatlantic coalitions with nuclear pacifists through correspondence. Merton envisaged the anthology as a transatlantic project with contributions from British Catholic and American intellectuals critical of the dominance of nuclear realist discourse and who reassessed the validity of an American rhetoric of nuclear preparedness from scientific, psychological, sociological and ethical perspectives. The selection of contributors were honed through three-way letter correspondences between Merton, his publisher James Laughlin at New Directions in New York, and Wilbur Ferry who was vice-president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara in California. This educational institution grew out of the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Republic (1951-59) that was dedicated to protecting freedom of speech and civil liberties threatened in the McCarthy era. [note 2] Merton’s casual association with this social policy "think tank" highlighted how he imagined he could place his writings at the disposal of others as a means to legitimate the moral high ground of nuclear disarmament.
Nuclear deterrence and Roman Catholicism
The Roman Catholic Church maintained a qualified acceptance of nuclear deterrence throughout the Cold War era to justify the holding of a precarious peace while, at the same time, holding to the aspiration of multilateral disarmament in a nuclear world. Merton, by contrast, held an absolutist opposition to the deployment of nuclear weapons, even through a deterrence posture. Merton’s stance aligned with an emerging Catholic nuclear pacifism whose adherents were members of the laity although Catholic scholars were responsible for the formulation of the theoretical foundations of this new brand of moral pacifism. Patricia McNeal mentions the influence of Walter Stein, associated with the Catholic New Left in England, on Merton’s pacifism in the Breakthrough to Peace anthology. [note 3] Merton believed that nuclear abolishment was the only legitimate ethical position for faith-based pacifists to hold in the nuclear era and so he based his Breakthrough to Peace on Walter Stein’s Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience that had emerged from a symposium at the Dominican retreat centre at Spode House near Rugeley in Staffordshire. [note 4] Five contributors to Stein’s anthology were university lecturers: Walter Stein taught Philosophy and English Literature, University of Leeds; Elizabeth Anscombe taught Philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford; Robert Markus taught Medieval History at Liverpool; Peter T. Geach taught Logic at Birmingham University; Roger Smith taught at Liverpool College of Art. The foreword was written by Archbishop Roberts who noted freedom of conscience as being an appropriate Catholic response to nuclear weapons and he noted that the contributors “are far from regarding the absence of explicit official prohibitions, in this field of contemporary defence, as grounds for suspending the operations of conscience.” [note 5] These Catholic intellectuals proposed that nuclear weapons constituted a new species of warfare and represented a challenge to Catholic just war teaching that was not being faced by moral theologians. The contributors to Stein's anthology were ignored by the English Catholic hierarchy. Catholic bishops were suspicious of Catholic laity getting involved in moral debates that were the preserve of the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. Members of the Stein symposium group were intellectual “Young Turks” who demonstrated a mixture of Catholic moral philosophy with Wittgensteinian analysis. [note 6] In this sense, they were engaged in doing a form of applied ethics on the limits of nuclear deterrence.
Merton did favour the abolishment of nuclear weapons, but he kept his opinions hidden and contained within the circle of his closest correspondents who were James Laughlin and Wilbur Ferry. Both were associated with Merton on the work of the Breakthrough to Peace project that was a protracted work that began in October 1961 and was published by Laughlin in September 1962. Merton was keen to anchor this work in the arguments of the English Catholic intellectuals because Merton shared through private correspondence with Etta Gullick at Oxford University his belief in Stein as offering a credible moral corrective for seeking a general moral judgement against the possession and use of nuclear weapons as based on the incompatibility of these weapons with the provision of justice in war. [note 7] Merton did not involve himself with the debates of the English Catholic intellectuals, but he did share their frustration that the Roman Catholic Church was not facing up to the moral ambiguity of deterrence as risking war in order to maintain the international peace.
Conceiving Breakthrough to Peace
Wilbur Ferry influenced the agenda for Merton’s Breakthrough to Peace for New Directions publishing. [note 8] Broadly speaking, the anthology was a commitment to the abolishment of all war, not just nuclear war. Ferry sent Merton essays by Lewis Mumford, a philosopher of technology. [note 9] Merton had wanted to title his anthology “The Morals of Extermination,” but because of the bleakness of the wording he changed the working title to “The Human Way Out” inspired by Mumford’s critique of the nuclear arms race presented in a lecture of the same title presented on 28 September 1961 to the University of California while Mumford was a visiting research professor of government affairs at Berkeley. [note 10] Mumford was highly critical of America’s technoculture that he perceived of as placing efficiency before morality. [note 11] Merton echoed Mumford’s sentiments in his letter to Walter Stein at the University of Leeds in which he praised Mumford’s critique of technology as one “where our weapons are telling us what to do. We are guided and instructed [and] nurtured by our destructive machines.” [note 12] Merton approved of Mumford in his letter to Walter Stein. [note 13] Merton reprinted an abridged version of a previously published essay by Stein in Breakthrough to Peace, which highlighted Merton’s support for the abolishment of nuclear weapons. [note 14]
Correspondences between Merton, Ferry, and Laughlin focused on Merton editing the project while Laughlin under-wrote the costs for publishing the anthology. Merton wrote to Ferry, on 18 November 1961, revealing “our idea of a paperback of articles on peace.” [note 15] Ferry insisted that their anthology should offer an alternative to the language of nuclear realism. This eliminated contributions by Protestant realists such as Reinhold Niebuhr. Merton admired Niebuhr as “an American voice, with a clarity, a sobriety, an objectivity, a lack of despair that should be ours.” [note 16] Ferry, in a letter to Laughlin on 14 November 1961, wrote: “[Reinhold] Niebuhr is a Realist. Your paperback will be a utopian one; i.e., the only kind of realism that is possible today.” [note 17] Niebuhr rejected the fatalistic view that the destructiveness of atomic weapons. Such “a purely tragic view of life,” he wrote, “is not finally viable. It is, at any rate, not the Christian view.” [note 18] This was the Niebuhr that Ferry was familiar with and was a reason why he was critical of Niebuhr’s Christian realism. The Berlin crisis in 1961 initiated Niebuhr’s questioning of the moral dilemma of thermonuclear weapons. [note 19] Niebuhr’s nuclear fears had provoked him to consider that a war could occur without anyone seeking to fulfil a messianic dream, and he thought, therefore, as well about how nuclear war could be avoided in the secular realm of international politics. [note 20] It is clear that Ferry had a decisive influence as to how Merton became informed.
Merton’s personal target through writing was his dissatisfaction with his own religious institution in not facing up to the risks posed by an escalating nuclear arms race. It was for idealism that Merton set himself at odds against Catholic just war theorists. Merton’s reading of Stein had persuaded him that the wrongness of intention was the moral benchmark against nuclear deterrence. Merton set the agenda for his New Directions publishing project as “ammunition for the waging of peace” intended to preserve the “moral values of Christianity, the freedoms of democracy – and the world for man.” [note 21] In this view, “Man” was in “crisis” because of the existential threat of nuclear weapons and this he believed was being fuelled by bellicose religious commentators.
The nuclear test-ban movement harnessed Hiroshima memory in 1962 as a rhetorical means to gain popular support against biological and environmental effects of nuclear fallout due to the resumption of atmospheric testing by the nuclear superpowers. In the disarmament narrative the memory of the hibakusha or the victims of the Hiroshima atomic bombing was joined to the memory of the Japanese fisherman, Aikichi Kuboyama of the Lucky Dragon fishing vessel, who was reputedly the first recorded victim of fallout from hydrogen bomb atmospheric tests in 1954 in the Pacific proving grounds.[note 22] Merton was aware of the potency of Kuboyama’s memory as an anti-nuclear symbol because he wrote to James Laughlin to acquire rights to reproduce Ben Shahn's paintings “The Saga of the Lucky Dragon,” painted from 1960 to 1961, expressing Shahn’s anti-nuclear visual statement. [note 23] Merton wrote: “It would be wonderful to get some of Ben Shahn’s ‘Lucky Dragon’ pictures and run them in the middle of [Breakthrough to Peace] somewhere, perhaps with a note to him. They are on exhibit at some gallery in New York and it ought to be easy to get reproductions and permission to use them.” [note 24] Shahn‘s portrait of forty-year-old Kuboyama, included a bright red dragon whose head is surrounded by a fire wreath, a symbol signifying the destructive power of nuclear weaponry. [note 25] The dragon foreshadowed the unmerited demise of Kuboyama as the reputed seminal victim of radioactive fallout. Merton’s initial decision to use Shahn's painting series for the Breakthrough to Peace anthology was motivated by his anthology’s advocacy for nuclear disarmament.
The moral issue that Walter Stein in England had grappled with was whether a credible deterrent could be maintained without an effective intention to resort to nuclear weapons should the risk of deterrence fail. Undoubtedly, to render deterrence credible it needed to appear that the determination to use nuclear weapons was beyond question. Merton, in his proposal for Breakthrough to Peace was planning to use Stein’s moral logic as the basis to communicate the wrongness of intention so as to argue for the necessity for moral restraint on both possession and use of nuclear weapons that might precipitate an accidental nuclear war. However, the evolution of nuclear policy meant that it was impossible for a moralist to devise a general moral theory to encompass the paradox of nuclear deterrence.
Breakthrough to Peace and Trappist censorship
Merton played a double game of submitting his articles to be officially censored for publication while, at the same time, privately circulating his letters in samizdat fashion within his correspondence circle. Merton redrafted similar content under different working titles without comprehensive revision because he was motivated to do anything to support Catholic Action for nuclear pacifism. Dom James Fox, Merton’s abbot, intervened on Merton’s behalf with the Trappist censors concerning the flurry of Merton’s articles. Dom James wrote to the master censor, Fr. Paul Bourne: “Now another point from our end of the ‘battlefield’ is another article by Father Louis [Thomas Merton]. It is not, indeed, a spate article, but sort of a Preface to an Anthology of essays in regard to the present world situation, where the threat of nuclear destruction of the human race hangs over all our heads.” [note 26] Although the “anthology” mentioned was Breakthrough to Peacethat was being published by Laughlin’s New Directions in New York, Merton’s “preface” which was published as the anthology’s introduction needed to be approved for publication by the Trappist censors. Dom James related to Fr. Paul Bourne the psychological “battlefield” they occupied continued to looped around Merton’s so-called “little articles” against war and the ensuing volleys of letters between Merton, the censors, and his religious superiors. [note 27] Correspondence between Dom James in Kentucky and Bourne in Georgia indicate that reasons for the delay in censorship was a backlog in the processing of articles from other Trappist houses undertaken by a small censorship team. [note 28] This was not as nefarious as Merton imagined.
Merton had cautioned Jim Forest during the General Strike for Peace in February 1962 against falling prey to the lure of fast results in the extended work that pacifism required to bring about transformation of attitudes. Merton’s own pacifistic instinct was being put to its hardest personal test during protracted months of censorship. Perhaps he perceived the fears of his superiors as the same fears that existed elsewhere in the world, the same fears that gave rise to violence and war. What would be the sense of calling others to patience in the effort of safeguarding life when he could not be patient with opponents, his brothers, within his community? The question for Merton was whose minds would be changed by his disobedience? In the wider public, those who agreed with Merton’s out-of-step views on war would be confirmed in their views that the Catholic Church was an enemy of conscience, while many of those who disagreed would conclude that Merton, a disobedient monk, was being used as a communist dupe. [note 29] These legitimate concerns echoed in critical reviews of Merton’s Breakthrough to Peace, published in September 1962. Should Merton and his colleagues persuade half of a nation as to the folly of deterrence, Henry Pachter argued, that these “amateur diplomats” would conjure up an even greater danger as the other half might precipitate a war to forestall its dispossession from power. [note 30] Pachter dismissed Merton and the contributors to Breakthrough to Peace as “prophets of doom” who as American “unilateralists” ignored the implications for the balance of power and risked bringing about the very “holocaust” they hoped to avoid. [note 31] Pachter concluded that Merton merely exhibited “ignorance of the real problem” rooted in a struggle between the superpowers. [note 32]
Breakthrough to Peace and its critics
Merton consolidated his writings that were still possible to publish under the constraints that religious censorship imposed on his writings for publication. What was still possible for Merton was to pass over editorial control of the Breakthrough to Peace anthology to James Laughlin at New Directions publishing in New York. Merton had persuaded Laughlin to remove his name as the book’s editor because of Trappist censure. Laughlin wrote to Merton stating his view: “I’m sorry that we can’t say ‘edited by Thomas Merton’ on the cover of ‘Breakthrough to Peace’, but if we can say ‘Introduction by Thomas Merton’ that will at least be a big help in the marketplace.” [note 33] Ironically, this made little or no difference to the critics who associated the work with Merton, himself. Professional scholars of diplomacy and foreign policy evaluated Breakthrough to Peace as having nothing practical to offer either policy makers or the public. Nathan Keyfitz, at the University of Toronto, did see a merit in Breakthrough to Peace in questioning, “the mentality of our age, its willingness to contemplate and plan total destruction” with its emphasis on human values “concerning the sacredness of the person the human race” in a world whose “realities are deterrence and counterforce.”[note 34] Keyfitz, however, noted that the book “hardly contains the answers to the questions it raises.” [note 35] Hedley Bull, a professor of International Relations in London, evaluated the book as a “protest towards the official Western policy of reliance on nuclear weapons” and the contributors made “superficial and arrogant assumptions” that anyone who was “unaware of the moral dimensions of the problem” was “a servant of some special interest.” [note 36] The issue for critics was that Merton and his collaborators had failed to acknowledge the threat of Soviet aggression that had required a deterrence posture. In this case they articulated an irony of Cold War Western anti-nuclear protest in which citizens within the Free World used their freedom to put pressure on their own governments to move towards a more stable nuclear policy. An enthusiastic review of Merton’s work by Justus George Lawler was published in the first issue of Continuum magazine in 1963. Lawler was a correspondent of Merton and was sympathetic with his position. The review praised the book as “encouraging” by speaking with the “voice of sanity, and inasmuch as many of its contributors, who have either in the past or present been vilified as unpatriotic, naïve, or cowardly, continue to plead, in effect, for the lives of their persecutors.” [note 37] Lawler very much praised Breakthrough to Peace for its holistic thinking, but Keyfitz and Bull were critical of Merton moralising and oversimplifying the problem of nuclear weapons. Maintaining the status quo and, where necessary, strengthening it would give the West the best overall chance of continued peace and stability.
Merton’s criticisms of the modern world were often exaggerated, but they are not always easy to dismiss. Merton had committed to New Directions marketing Breakthrough to Peace as peace literature. Henry Pachter in 1962 evaluated writers on the “diplomacy of peace” such as Erich Fromm, C. Wright Mills, and Charles Osgood as “amateur diplomats” who projected to the public their fears for the future of humanity as expressions of their “shame” at U.S. “wrong-doing abroad.” [note 38] Merton conceived of Christianity as the matrix of modernity that he reduced the Cold War to being a moral problem: “Christian leaders have actively joined in the Cold War and call on God Himself to justify the moral blindness and hubris of generals and industrialists, and to bless nuclear war as a holy and apocalyptic crusade.” [note 39] Merton, here, viewed American Catholicism as unwilling to embrace open-ended possibilities of human relatedness. Henry Pachter in 1962 evaluated Merton as a “sectarian prophet who tolerates no argument.” [note 40] Merton was, in Pachter’s analysis, a “prophet of doom” who had chosen “to retire into the desert and be saved while the rest of us perish.” [note 41] Critics dismissed Merton because they perceived nuclear deterrence in political terms and not in the moral theological mode that Merton was attempting to argue, but with little success. Merton's overtly moral criticism of national security did not resonate with his critics because his perception that the U.S. was relying solely on nuclear weapons to defer a Soviet attack did not reflect the shift of the administration of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1961 towards minimum deterrence as a flexible response to the communist threat, but seemed to recall the strategy of Massive Retaliation of the previous administration of President Dwight Eisenhower. In reality, Merton was responding to the atmosphere of popular fear of nuclear weapons that was magnified by pacifists with whom he was in correspondence at the time.
Conclusion
Merton’s critique of nuclear deterrence articulated his condemnation of massive retaliation rather than revealing any awareness of minimum deterrence as a flexible response to the communist threat. Merton was not tempted to believe that American virtue was sufficiently developed that the nation could be trusted never to misuse nuclear weapons. After-all, it had been the United States of America that had dropped the first atomic bombs over Japan in 1945. While this action had ended the Second World War it had ushered in the Cold War. Merton held the view that the Roman Catholic Church, as a faith-based institution and community, had a responsibility to protect life and future generations and so had a moral duty to act as a moral persuader in calling for world leaders to eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons from international politics. It was Catholic activists, rather than Merton, who responded to his Catholic personalism and gave his pacifist writings an afterlife.
Notes
1. Breakthrough to Peace: Twelve Views on the Threat of Thermonuclear Extermination, intro. Thomas Merton, (New York: New Directions, 1962).
2. Greg Barnhisel, “James Laughlin, Robert Hutchins, and Cold War Cultural Freedom,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 75, no. 3 (Spring 2014): 389.
3. Ibid, 113-14.
4. Brian Wicker, “Making Peace at Spode,” New Blackfriars 62, no. 733/734 (1981): 314.
5. Thomas Roberts, “Forward,” Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience, ed. Stein (London: Merlin Press, 1961), 13.
6. Wicker, “Making Peace at Spode,” 316.
7. Merton to Etta Gullick, December 22, 1961, Section A: Correspondence, TMC, typed and mimeographed as Merton, “Cold War Letter #14 to Etta Gullick” (December 22, 1961), in Cold War Letters, eds. Bochen and Shannon, 38; Luke Gormally, ed., Moral Truth and Moral Tradition: Essays in Honour of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1994).
8. Merton to James Laughlin, November 27, 1961, Section A: Correspondence, TMC.
9. Merton to Wilbur Ferry, November 18, 1961, Section A: Correspondence, TMC.
10. Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture 5, no.1 (Winter 1964): 1-8; Robert Casillo, “Lewis Mumford and the Organicist Concept in Social Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no.1 (January-March 1992): 91-116; Robert Jacobs, The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 44, 51 & 52.
11. Lewis Mumford, “The Human Way Out: an address given by Mr. Lewis Mumford at the University of California, Berkeley, 28 September 1961, Dwinelle Plaza.” (London: Friends Peace Committee, 1961); Merton to Wilbur Ferry, November 18, 1961, Section A: Correspondence, TMC.
12. Merton to Walter Stein, December 1961, Section A: Correspondence, TMC, typed and mimeographed as Merton, “Cold War Letter #18 to Walter Stein” (December 1961 or January 1962), in Cold War Letters, eds. Bochen and Shannon, 46.
13. Merton, “Letter to Walter Stein,” (December 1961 or January 1962), in Witness to Freedom: Letters in Times of Crisis, ed. William H. Shannon (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994), 29.
14. Walter Stein, “The Defense of the West,” in Breakthrough to Peace, intro. Merton, 139-58.
15. Merton, “Letter to Wilbur Ferry” (November 18, 1961), in The Hidden Ground of Love, ed. Shannon, 203.
16. Merton, Turning Toward the World (January 28, 1962), ed. Kramer, 91.
17. Wilbur Ferry to James Laughlin, November 14, 1961, Section A: Correspondence, TMC.
18. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952; repr., Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 157.
19. Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 89.
20. Ibid, 90.
21. Jacket blurb for Breakthrough to Peace, intro. Thomas Merton.
22. Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Robert Jacobs, The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 129, n. 27.
23. Frances Pohl, Ben Shahn. (New York: Chameleon, 1993), 27.
24. Thomas Merton, letter to James Laughlin, December 15, 1961 in Selected Letters, ed. David Cooper (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), 190.
25. Susanna Brooks Gorski, “The Artist, the Atom, and the Bikini Atoll: Ralston Crawford Paints Operation Crossroads”, unpublished MA thesis, (The University of Texas at Austin, 2010).
26. Dom James Fox, O.C.S.O. to Fr. Paul Bourne, O.C.S.O., January 23, 1962, Section A: Correspondence, TM
27. Ibid.
28. Dom James Fox, O.C.S.O. to Fr. Paul Bourne, O.C.S.O., January 22, 1962, Section A: Correspondence, TMC.
29. Jim Forest, The Root of War is Fear: Thomas Merton’s Advice to Peacemakers (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2016), 58-59.
30. Henry Pachter, “Amateur Diplomats and the Peace Literature,” Social Research 30, no. 1 (Spring 1963): 95-107.
31. Ibid, 107.
32. Ibid.
33. James Laughlin to Thomas Merton, May 4, 1962. Section A: Correspondence, TMC.
34. Nathan Keyfitz, “Review of Breakthrough to Peace, Introduction by Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1962)” International Journal, 18, no. 2 (Spring 1963): 233.
35. Ibid, 234.
36. Hedley Bull, “Review of Breakthrough to Peace: Twelve Views on the Threat of Thermonuclear Extermination. Introduction by Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions. 1962,” International Affairs 39, no. 3 (July 1963): 427-28.
37. Justus George Lawler, “Balancing the Terror,” Continuum 1 (Spring 1963): 104-05.
38. Henry Pachter, “Amateur Diplomats and the Peace Literature,” Social Research 30, no. 1 (Spring 1963): 98.
39. Merton, “Christian Ethics and Nuclear War,” in Passion for Peace, ed. Shannon, 58.
40. Pachter, “Amateur Diplomats and the Peace Literature,” 106.
41. Ibid, 107.
Comments
Post a Comment