Thomas Merton

Lanza del Vasto noted a deep connection between play and war, even before the games theory and nuclear war strategy became practically identified. In our society, everything, in fact, is a game. But if everything is a game, then everything leads to war. Play is aimless and yet multiplies obstacles so that the "aim," which in fact does not exist, cannot be attained by the opponent. For instance, getting a ball in a hole. War is caused by similar aimless aims. Not by hunger, not by real need. War is a game of the powerful, or of whole collectivities devoted to self-assertion. It is "the great public vice that consists in playing with the lives of men." War plays with life and death, and does so magnificently. Everybody becomes involved. Everybody has to live or die—so that the other side may not get a ball in a hole. But the real excitement of the game comes from the suspension of conscience.

In all play, one has to prescind from real conditions. One has to assume that such and such a thing is real and everything else unreal. In war, one assumes that it is not only right, but necessary, to kill. The great sacrifice in war is not so much the sacrifice of life as the suspension of conscience (a sacrifice which, however, most people find easy and delightful as long as everybody makes it at the same time). If there is any "need" at all that drives men to war it is this. The need for a massive suspension of conscience, a total irresponsibility, in which everyone can let go and devote himself to one task: destroying the enemy. Reasonable? Obviously not. If war were only reasonable, it would not be the menace that it is. The great danger of war is precisely this universal need for mass immorality, which the game of war so completely satisfies. The satisfaction is all the greater when the suspension of conscience can be seen as a charismatic response to a higher, more mystical summons: to destroy the devil by a delicious recourse to the devil’s own methods.

Conjectures Of A Guilty Bystander, 1966

Is Christian ethics merely a specific set of Christian answers to the question of good and evil, right and wrong? To make it no more than this is to forget that man's fall was a fall into the knowledge of good and evil, reinforced by the inexorable knowledge of a condemning law, and that man's restoration in Christ is a restoration to freedom and grace, to a love that needs no law since it knows and does only what is in accord with love and with God. To imprison ethics in the realm of division, of good and evil, right and wrong, is to condemn it to sterility, and rob it of its real reason for existing, which is love. Love cannot be reduced to one virtue among many others prescribed by ethical imperatives. When love is only "a virtue" among many, man forgets that "God is love" and becomes incapable of that all-embracing love by which we secretly begin to know God as our Creator and Redeemer.

Conjectures Of A Guilty Bystander, 1966

Music is being played to the cows in the milking barn. Rules have been made and confirmed: only sacred music is to be played to the cows, not "classical" music. The music is to make the cows give more milk. The sacred music is to keep the brothers who work in the cow barn recollected. For some time now sacred music has been played to the cows in the milking barn. They have not given more milk. The brothers have not been any more recollected than usual. I believe the cows will soon be hearing Beethoven. Then we shall have classical, perhaps worldly milk and the monastery will prosper. (Later: It was true. The hills resounded with Beethoven. The monastery has prospered. The brother mainly concerned with the music, however, departed.)

Conjectures Of A Guilty Bystander, 1966

"Vitalism," the enthusiastic exaltation of life in neo-pagan and totalist forms of mass-society is, as Bonhoeffer saw, in reality a masked hatred of life, and a radical unfitness for its common and simple joys, the natural joys implanted in nature by God, and which prepare us, by gratitude and hope, to enter into His Kingdom.

Where the animal "joy of living" is expressed brutally with ferocity, and with many violent images, what we have is no longer a superabundance of life but a failure and a deficiency of life. Perhaps the mixture of satiety, boredom, violence, and despair which characterizes our mass-society comes from the impotence of well-fed bodies with empty and lost minds. The obsession with lust and violent, erratic forms of sex is not a sign of great passion but of the absence of passion. On the contrary, Western society is characterized above all by its abstraction, its confusion, its pseudo-passion (passion fabricated in the imagination and centred on fantasies). There seems to be excitement—but there is only the super-ficial agitation of a nervous daydream. So much for our lusty apes with cowboy hats—they are not even comic any more! But collect them together, put uniforms on them, give them a leader that fits into the pattern of their fantasies and knots their dream images all together into a psychosis—then the whole thing comes alive in destruction. The total incapacity for love is let loose, with extreme and efficient effect, in hate that smashes cities and ravages whole countries. Yet even this hate is impotent. It can burn buildings and ruin crops, it can smash and mutilate bodies, it can torture and degrade: but life comes back all the stronger and derides it.

Conjectures Of A Guilty Bystander, 1966

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