Nowhere is Merton's integral relation to the Bible more sublimely expressed than in his study of the psalms, Bread in the Wilderness (1953).
SOPHIA: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton
Christopher Pramuk
A Michael Gl o z i er Book
LITURGICAL PRESS Collegeville, Minnesota
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Page 112 Sophia
Like "Fire from Heaven"
Nowhere is Merton's integral relation to the Bible more sublimely expressed than in his study of the psalms, Bread in the Wilderness (1953). Though a relatively early work, it opens an important window into Merton's thoroughly monastic approach to biblical and liturgical revelation, an approach that pulsed deeply in him to the end of his life. Of special significance is his discussion of "Poetry, Symbolism, and Typology;' where Merton distinguishes between "cosmic" and "typological" symbolism in the Bible. The former he describes as the revelation of God in nature, consummately expressed in David's wonder before the grandeur of the natural world: When I gaze at the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and stars, which thou has made ... 149 The corruption of cosmic symbolism occurs, Merton suggests, when human beings no longer relate to the world as sacramental or iconic, as transparent to the God of creation, but view the world rather as a mirror, reflecting back their own glory and mastery over things. Here sacramentality morphs into idolatry; nature becomes opaque, utilitarian, self-referential. Rather than seeing through creation like a clear windowpane to the sun and stars, human beings "had begun to forget the sky, and to light lamps of their own, and presently
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149. Psalm 8, cited in BW, 61.
(In the Belly of a Paradox p. 113)
it seemed to them that the reflection of their own room in the window was the 'world beyond: They began to worship what they themselves were doing. And what they were doing was too often an abomination." 150
Throughout Bread and the Wilderness Merton places considerable import on cosmic symbolism (nature as sacrament) in the Bible, just as a decade later he will describe theoria physike ("natural contemplation") as a crucial preparation for supernatural (historical, categorical) revelation. Still, "the most important symbolism in the Bible is not cosmic symbolism:' Merton suggests, "but typology:' that is, symbols in the Hebrew Scriptures that foreshadow "the Incarnation of the Word of God, and. . . man's Redemption by the Sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, for this is the central Mystery of Christian faith:' 151 Where cosmic symbolism easily lends itself to idolatrous worship of the world or humanity itself, typological symbols break through the tendency to perceive the world and its history in closed, Cartesian, or dangerously self-referential terms: "Cosmic symbols reflect the action of God like the light of the sun on the vast sea of creation. Typological symbols are meteors which divide the dark sky of history with a sudden, searing light, appearing and vanishing with a liberty that knows no law of man. Cosmic symbolism is like clouds and rain: but typology is like a storm of lightning wounding the earth unpredictably with fire from heaven."152
A close study of Bread in the Wilderness, no less than much later, more outward-looking texts, suggests that one should not underestimate the hold that biblical symbols have on Merton's religious imagination. Throughout his corpus certain biblical images flash in repeatedly like "fire from heaven:' and where Merton employs such images, he does so with the conviction that their implicit power goes beyond the merely literary or psychological realm of consciousness. The symbols of Scripture "lead to contemplation precisely because their impact on us is theological rather than psychologicaI:'153 Moreover, there are particular images and symbols of the Hebrew Scriptures that Merton "calls forth" to throw a brilliant and "unpredictable" light on the New Testament. One of these is the "Tree of Life:' which he often links, not without haunting paradox and irony, to the cross of Jesus. Another is Sophia.
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150. BW, 61; cf. TTW, 123, an arresting passage that begins quite simply, "The great work of sunrise again today:'
151.BW, 62.
152.Ibid. 63; cf. Heschel: "Revelation is a cloudburst, a downpour, yet most of us are like moles, burrowing, and whatever stream we meet is underground" (God in Search of Man [New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955], 251).
153. BW, 14; cf. OB, 25: "[These passages] are somehow claiming that there has been a breakthrough of the ultimate word into the sphere of the human, and that what the Bible is about is this breakthrough, recorded in events, happenings, which are decisive not only for the Jewish people or for the disciples of Christ but for mankind as a whole:'
(p. 114 Sophia)
Sophia: the feminine child of Proverbs 8, who delights before God at the dawn of creation, cannot help but reverberate (i.e., typologically) in the same sonorous landscape as St. Paul's hymn to Jesus in Colossians: He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth. It is a connection Merton will make explicit in his most formal christological writings, as we shall see in chapter 4. And just as he finds her "unpredictable light" flashing in Russian icons of Christ, the Pantokrator, so too does she "appear and vanish" before him in the humblest of everyday guises-in the silent woods of Gethsemani, in the faces of passersby on a crowded street corner-breaking in "with a liberty that knows no law of man:'
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