Thomas Merton.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: I must give vent to my anger at John Russell's "hatchet job" (September 2004) on Thomas Merton, the most significant Christian mystic of the twentieth century. It is difficult to imagine why the article was, in fact, written: there does not seem to be any point to it, apart from caricaturing Merton as "restless" and providing a pretentious vehicle for claiming some sort of expertise in the history of the Cistercian Order.

What was particularly annoying, however, was the arrogantly judgmental tone of Russell's writing. Successively he asserts that Merton was an "overconfident apologist", an author of "not always well-thought-out missives", a "pulpit bully", a person who "wrote too much and too variously", without ever explaining the basis of such assertions.

He calls Merton's first book "one of the great publishing events of the century" but there is not a hint of why that might have been so; a put-down is attempted by merely asserting that a foreword to one of its editions by Evelyn Waugh was "gushing". Instead of Vatican II being, as for many other theologians and spiritual leaders, an occasion for refreshing debate and renewal, we are supposed to believe that for Merton its broadening effect was merely "an albatross around his neck"; and Merton's interest in other mystical traditions (not only Buddhism, it should be pointed out, but also Taoism, Hinduism and Islam) was just a sign of his "desperately seeking stimuli from anywhere apart from his own tradition" and of "existential angst" (doesn't Russell, like the rest of us ...