Religion: The Death of Two Extraordinary Christians

(3 of 4)

A Thinker's Grappling. Despite his acknowledged eminence, Barth's masterwork, Church Dogmatics, is one of the least-read great books of the century, and Barthian neo-orthodoxy now seems almost as old hat as the orthodoxy it displaced. Yet Barth wanted no disciples—except, he said, for his own sons Markus, a professor at Pittsburgh Theology Seminary, and Christoph, a Biblical scholar at the University of Mainz, Germany—and he often told students: "Don't repeat what I have said. Learn to think for yourselves." He tried firmly to shun theological fashion, and his constant goal was to bring men back to the authenticity of God's word. Today, Barth's endless, old-fashioned commentary on this message may appear to be an obstacle to that goal. Tomorrow, it may well be read afresh as a vivid encounter of a great thinker's grappling with the divine unknown.

THOMAS MERTON

"The scenario calls for a quiet death among concerned chipmunks," Thomas Merton once wrote a friend after surviving major surgery, "and I'd like it that way." He did not get his wish. On the very day that Karl Barth lay dying in Basel, the 53-year-old Trappist poet-priest was attending an ecumenical conference of Roman Catholic and non-Christian monks in suburban Bangkok. Returning to his bungalow to rest during the hot afternoon, he reached out to adjust an electric fan and apparently touched an exposed wire. He was instantly electrocuted.

For 20 years Merton had been the most publicly visible Christian contemplative since St. Simeon Stylites took refuge on top of a pillar. Merton's pillar was print, and he had not exactly chosen it for himself. What he had chosen, at the age of 26 and as a new convert to Roman Catholicism, was the silent and anonymous life of the Trappist monks, who rise early, work hard, eat little and pray much. When he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, however, his abbot decreed that Merton should continue writing—as he had since the age of ten. Merton was ordained a priest in 1949, the year after his first major book, The Seven Storey Mountain, had become a bestseller and thrust him permanently into a life of books, articles, poems and a massive correspondence with friends all over the world.

Provocative Perfume. The most lucidly honest autobiography since Rousseau's Confessions, The Seven Storey Mountain found a surprisingly receptive audience in the uneasy, searching postwar world. The book was a frank, self-effacing narrative of Merton's peripatetic youth: his dizzying year at Cambridge, his first grapplings with the craft of poetry, his mildly wicked undergraduate years at Columbia (including a one-meeting membership in the Young Communist League), his ultimate discovery of a faith and a vocation. It was a book suffused with spiritual zeal, and was perhaps the last great flowering of Catholic romanticism. Its perfume was provocative. Under its spell, disillusioned veterans, students, even teen-agers flocked to monasteries across the country either to stay or visit as retreatants.