Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander" is a collection of reflections by Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and writer, active during a transformative period from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. The book, structured into five parts, consists of personal insights, critiques, and observations reflecting Merton's contemplative life while grappling with the complexities of modern society. As Merton navigates his role within the monastery at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he also seeks to address pressing social issues of the time, including the implications of nuclear technology, materialism, and the emerging dialogues of ecumenism prompted by the Vatican II reforms.
Despite its episodic nature, the work transcends mere random musings, revealing Merton's deep engagement with both his spiritual commitments and the chaotic world beyond the monastery walls. By the 1960s, he had evolved from a position of retreat from worldly affairs to an embrace of them, becoming one of the Church's prominent social critics. His reflections represent an acknowledgment of his own complexities as a "guilty bystander," one who recognizes the need for thoughtful engagement with societal issues while remaining grounded in his monastic values. This duality informs Merton's contributions to contemporary discourse, making the work relevant for readers interested in the intersections of spirituality, social critique, and personal growth within a changing world.
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Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
First published: 1966
Type of work: Cultural criticism
Form and Content
From 1941 until his death in 1968, Thomas Merton lived as a Catholic Trappist monk-hermit in the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky; the episodic form of this work was therefore determined largely by the rhythms and obligations of his religious vocation. Divided into five parts, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander is composed of 320 pages of personal reflections, metaphors, observations, insights, and critiques of various readings and of events, the more important of which are usefully indexed. The passages composing each part vary in length from an epigrammatic sentence or two to sketches and meditations of several hundred words. Merton wrote them between 1956 and 1965, but they do not display any particular chronological order.
Nevertheless, the book is neither a ragbag nor a capricious collection of musings. In 1955, Merton became Master of Choir Novices and thus shouldered what was to be an eleven-year burden of exceptionally heavy religious duties that precluded studied, systematic, or dense writing. Yet 1955 also marked the commencement of the fourth and most significant phase of his already prolific writings. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander constitutes his personal interpretation of the world of the 1960’s. His Trappist emphasis on solitude and meditation during this period was joined to a growing preoccupation with the alternatives and conundrums posed by a transitional era: nuclear weapons, Oriental mysticism, racism and materialism, the social implications of technology, and the disintegrative forces that he discerned primarily as they affected American character, but which were almost equally apparent in France, where he had been born, and in England, where he received his early education. Indeed, he perceived them as forces that were being manifested in varying degrees throughout Western Christendom.
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander is Merton’s acknowledgment that while the monastery provided him with a comprehensible world, he nevertheless desired to remain open to the vast, vocal, chaotic world beyond the abbey’s perimeter. The observations and criticisms that bind the work together as he scanned the contemporary scene are monastic, but they are not reflective of a monasticism that is narrowly circumscribed and constrained toward a hermetic sterility. It is as if in this book Merton, with both feet planted firmly within monastic bounds, were poking his head out his window to offer personal, highly tentative, and informal comments on the shape and character of current issues. Justification for this commentary stems from his belief that the cloistered, contemplative life was one that compelled personal openness, growth, and intellectual development. Understanding that he, too, lacked answers to the profound problems of Western civilization, he sought to make his contribution by at least conjecturing: drawing inferences about the state of Christendom from slight evidence.
Critical Context
Merton’s career as monk and writer has been described as an uncertain love affair with the world. In 1941, he happily abandoned the world, averring that he hoped never again to be a participant in its mean and violent affairs. His early writings, such as The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), the first to bring him general literary notoriety, Figures for an Apocalypse (1948), and Exile Ends in Glory: The Life of a Trappistine, Mother M. Berchmans, O.C.S.O. (1948), extolled the contemplative life and upheld the correctness of his decision to find fulfillment in monasticism. By the 1950’s, however, if The Sign of Jonas (1953) and No Man Is an Island (1955) are valid indications, he was at least on speaking terms with the world. By the 1960’s, as his biographer James Thomas Baker notes, he had resumed the more sanguine disposition of his youth and again, as evidenced not only in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander but also in Seeds of Destruction (1964) and Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (1968), became the world’s friend and lover.
Changes within the Roman Catholic church itself partially accounted for this evolution of Merton’s attitudes and opinions. Early in 1959, Pope John XXIII called for a worldwide council to undertake an aggiornamento (an updating of Catholicism), which eventuated by 1962 in Vatican II, arguably the most significant religious event of the twentieth century. Pope John epitomized the spirit of Vatican II by launching unprecedented dialogues with representatives of other great religions, while simultaneously lending a more humanistic cast to previous Catholic dicta and practices. Clearly, for Merton, monk though he was, the fresh breezes of Vatican II’s internal reforms and ecumenism were propitious. His own examination of Catholicism—hence of himself and of monasticism—in an increasingly pluralistic world had never ceased. Stronger than ever in his faith and persuaded of the wisdom of his own choices, he was also freer to address the worldly plight of Christendom and to remind Christians, at both the spiritual and social levels, of their errors and opportunities.
Parallel changes within the Church as well as within himself also afforded Merton a chance to recast his own image as a writer. The readership to which he had first successfully appealed read a message calling for them to withdraw from worldly concerns (most of which were evil) and to embrace the sacrifices of the contemplative life—the only life, as he perceived it, that offered a true Christian vocation. That life was a singularly spiritual one; what nourishment one derived from it provided little, if any, sustenance for social needs. In truth, until the 1950’s, preoccupied as he was with contemplation, Merton’s notes, poems, and books reveal little knowledge of what those social needs might have been in any case.
Very gradually through the 1950’s, however, he realized that he had drawn too sharp a separation between the abbey and the world beyond. Having entered monastic life in order to find himself, he reasoned that if he entered too deeply into it and lost his place in the world, he would have wasted his time. Accordingly, he rebuked himself for having hated and rejected the world without having praised the good that there was in it and for having written pious books declaring how much better he was than others. This was the spirit in which Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander and other Merton writings of the 1960’s were composed. They were to mark him, after his metamorphosis, as one of the Church’s most outspoken social critics—as another twentieth century man, guilty as everyone else, who had been a bystander for too long.
Bibliography
Baker, James Thomas. Thomas Merton: Social Critic, 1971.
Bouyer, Louis. The Meaning of Monastic Life, 1955.
Cross, Robert D. The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in America, 1958.
Dawson, Christopher. The Historical Reality of Christian Culture, 1956.
Ellis, John T. Perspectives in American Catholicism, 1963.
Knowles, David. Christian Monasticism, 1969.
Maritain, Jacques. True Humanism, 1938.