Bulgakov-Merton - OoCities



Kristi Groberg

Sergius Bulgakov: The Ongoing Discussion, Panel J-03

AAASS New Orleans, 2007

“Sweet Yielding Consent of Sophia”[1]:

The Wisdom Visions of Merton via Solov’ev and Bulgakov

From the second half of 1956, Thomas Merton (1915-68), a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, began to read the works of an earlier generation of Russian religious philosophers. These were the seminal thinkers of the religious renaissance which began, for all intents and purposes, with the work of Vladimir Solov’ev (1853-1900).[2] Merton progressed unevenly through the available writings of Solov’ev, beginning with Lectures on Godmanhood,[3] and a few of those (e.g., Pasternak and Evdokimov) influenced by him, but most notably for our purposes Fr. Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944). Merton experienced an almost visceral response to their fascination with the idea of Sophia as a female entity. Like them, he understood Sophia as Divine Wisdom and as the Eternal Feminine.

In Solov’ev’s writings, and those of Bulgakov and Merton, one sees a pattern of spiritual crisis, vision, and preoccupation with a female image. Each identified with the archetypical symbol. She was for each of them the prima materia of creation, the Gnostic Anima Mundi (the dark Soul of the World, Sophia Pruneikos[4]), Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom or the Wisdom of God), the Theotokos (the Mother of God or Bogomater), the Blessed Virgin Mary (Bogoroditsa), the erotic Bride of the Lamb (from the biblical Song of Songs), the Eternal Feminine, the Universal Church, sister, wife, and playmate.

Solov’ev (if we interpret his poetry thus) had an ecstatic vision of Sophia during a church service in 1862. He described it and two subsequent visions in his 1898 poem “Three Meetings.”[5] This poem makes it clear that the image of Sophia was a dream he grew up with, as had Dante with his Beatrice.[6] The first time Solov’ev saw her, he was nine years old, in church, and she was bathed in a golden azure light. Later in life, he knew himself to have been a strange child with strange dreams, and indeed in “Three Meetings,” there is an element of humor (Merton, too, had a well-developed sense of humor and of the absurd).[7] As Solov’ev grew older, he actively sought Sophia in his studies, his writings, and his life. In his 1875 “Sophia Prayer,” he prayed to her to appear in visible form.[8] In the course of his London research in that same year, during which he read only esoterica about Sophia, he had a second vision in the British Museum. Again he experienced her in a golden azure light. At this point, she became an integral part of how he experienced the world. Taking her direction, he traveled to Egypt and experienced a third vision of Sophia in the desert. In a glow of heavenly purple, with her eyes a blazing blue, she smelled of roses.

Solov’ev identified his Sophia with Wisdom in the Old and New Testaments, the Kabbalah[9], and in Eastern and Western esoteric and mystical traditions.[10] He was not the first intellectual to be “seduced by the [. . .] concept of the primacy of Sophia Wisdom over the Creation, or by the psychic power of Gnostic imagery and mythology (which can be very powerful indeed).”[11]

Solov’ev led an ascetic life and never married, but this is not to say that he did not experience lust or romantic love. In fact, he loved often and projected his Sophia onto several real women during his lifetime.[12] His visions,[13] and those of his philosophical heirs and acolytes, were not historically unusual. From the Russian intellectual spiritual crisis, it has been suggested, there emerges the idea of “some ineffable female force” which offers to lead [male] “intellectuals to salvation.”[14]

In 1894, the young Marxist philosopher Sergei Bulgakov experienced a spiritual crisis, embraced idealism, and began to move from Marxism toward Russian Orthodoxy. He discovered Solov’ev’s philosophy in 1902 and then came to Sophia “by way of economics.”[15] It was she who would bring him back to the Russian Orthodox Church, in which he became both a priest and a theologian.

Traveling in the Caucasus in 1895, Bulgakov had his first definable perception that someone or something had been revealed to him. Later, he was to identify this as his first encounter with Sophia.[16] A beautiful sunset, against which stood the outline of the mountains, reawakened a suppressed yearning for spirituality. “A revelation of love spoke to me of another world, of much that had been lost,” he wrote.[17] Then, while contemplating Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in a Dresden art gallery in 1898, Bulgakov had a second experience.[18] “The eyes of the Queen of Heaven,” he wrote, “pierced my soul. [. . .] I forgot myself. My head spun. Joyous and at the same time bitter tears flowed from my eyes; the ice melted from my heart, and some sort of vital knot in me loosened.”[19] The precedent had been set by Raphael, to whom the Virgin Mary appeared in a dream and served as model for the Sistine Madonna in 1513. Bulgakov, however, knew nothing of Western art; he simply intuited that “Beauty in nature and beauty in art are phenomena of the Divine Sophia and have one essence. Therefore art, rather than philosophy, is the direct and immediate way to know her.”[20] Further, Bulgakov was not the first Russian to experience an epiphany while looking at this painting. She was the image revered by Vladimir Odoevskii’s idealist Society of Lovers of Wisdom (Obshchestvo Liubomudriia) in the early 19th century, a group which held that the image of a woman was the primary vehicle of artistic beauty.[21]

Bulgakov married happily in 1898 and formally returned to the Church in 1908. Reflecting on Solov’ev’s visions of Sophia, he claimed that they were “based on concrete experience” and that “without these visions, Solov’ev’s abstract philosophy was impossible.” He noted that, while there had been many men who wrote of the Eternal Feminine (e.g., Dante, Petrarch, Boehme, Schelling, Goethe, and Novalis), the “eroticism of Solov’ev’s vision was unique.”[22]

After Bulgakov’s exile from Soviet Russia in 1922,[23] he stopped in Constantinople, where he had another encounter in the Byzantine cathedral of Hagia Sophia. He saw, in this most tangible of manifestations, the pagan Sophia of Plato mirrored in the Orthodox Divine Wisdom.[24] Bulgakov had no further experiential visions. From his position as a Russian exile and an Orthodox priest in Paris, he defended his ideas about Sophia for the rest of his life.[25] In 1937, he emphasized that “the most holy Mother of God is the created Sophia.”[26] Terminally ill with death at hand, Bulgakov embraced his image of and philosophy about Sophia with no need to defend her further.[27]

Thomas Merton, like the Russian religious philosophers, reached Sophia at the highest critical level – that of parallel creation. At the time he began to read their work in French and English translations, he lived and worked in Kentucky’s Abbey of Gethsemani; officially he was Father Marie Louis, Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance. He was given a special dispensation to live the life of a hermit -- the first Roman Catholic desert father in a thousand years.[28] Committed to solitude, silence, and meditation, his task was to write. In isolation for all intents and purposes, he was nonetheless very much in and of the world. He routinely invited his literary and secular friends to his hermitage in the woods, and with equal delight, left the monastery by back roads to visit others in Lexington and Louisville.[29] “Tom Merton,” wrote a close friend, “knew no strangers.”[30]

Merton began to read Bulgakov in April of 1957, at which time he noted that the religious philosopher was a writer “of great, great attention.”[31] Bulgakov, wrote Merton, “dared to accept the challenge of the image of Proverbs where Wisdom is ‘playing in the world’ before the face of the Creator.” Sophia was “somehow, mysteriously, to be revealed and ‘fulfilled’ in the Mother of God and in the Church.” And, “most importantly of all” for Merton, Bulgakov claimed that man’s creative vocation was “to prepare, consciously, the ultimate triumph of Divine Wisdom.”[32]

In July of 1957, Merton read Bulgakov’s Du verbe incarnee, quoted it in his journal, and noted that Bulgakov’s explanation of Sophiology was “clear and satisfactory.”[33] Merton discerned that, for Bulgakov, Sophia was “a person!” as well.[34] A few days later, Merton quoted Bulgakov: “Sophia IS the Wisdom of God.”[35] Within a week, Merton concluded that he had determined the key to Bulgakov’s Sophianism: “His idea is that the Divine Sophia, play, wisdom, is . . . hypostasized.”[36] [Bingo!] Merton’s study of the Russian religious philosophers, wrote his biographer, “reached a crescendo” in the autumn of 1957.[37]

Late February 1958 found Merton at work on the eight-page poem “Hagia

Sophia.” It begins:

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity,

a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden

wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is

Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There

is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity,

a silence that is a fount of action and joy. [. . .] This

is at once my own being, my own nature, and the

Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me,

speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister,

Wisdom.[38]

On February 28, 1958, Merton dreamed he was embraced by a young Jewish girl. He asked her name and she said “Proverb.” He realized she was Sophia and wrote “I loved wisdom and sought to make her my wife.”[39] Merton’s March 4th journal entry is a love letter to Proverb that expresses his joy about and love for her.[40]

The entire Book of Proverbs was important to Merton, especially the Chapter 8 verses in which Wisdom plays in a cosmic dance before God. These are reflected in his poem “Hagia Sophia”:

Sophia, the feminine child, is playing in the world,

obvious and unseen, playing at all times with the Creator.

[. . . ] Sophia is Gift, is Spirit, Donum Dei. She is God-

given and God Himself as Gift.[41]

The feminine Wisdom was illuminated for Merton by the Russian religious philosophers and sophiologists whose work he continued to read. He had plans to continue a “huge study” of Russian literature, art, and politics; to this end he ordered books, articles, and music from various libraries.[42]

On March 18, 1958, Merton left the monastery to run an errand in Louisville, Kentucky. As he stood on a street corner, he had an epiphany – the “Vision in Louisville” that became a turning point in his life.[43] “I was suddenly overwhelmed,” he wrote, “it was like awakening from a dream of seperateness. [. . . ] “This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud.”[44] He met his Proverb and she was Sophia: “woman-ness” was “at once original and inexhaustibly fruitful, bringing the image of God into the world”; every woman was “Wisdom and Sophia and Our Lady.”[45] “Dear Proverb,” he wrote on March 19, “I have refrained from speaking to you until seeing you again. I knew that when I saw you again it would be very different, in a different place, in a different form, in the most unexpected circumstance. I shall never forget meeting you yesterday. The touch of your hand makes me a different person.”[46]

Merton heard about Boris Pasternak in May of 1958, noting in his journal that he looked forward to the English version of Doktor Zhivago.[47] He exchanged letters with Pasternak through a third party. In time he wrote about the dream of Proverb.[48] Merton’s response to Zhivago floated in his consciousness. He could not have known that later scholars would connect Pasternak’s heroine Lara, via Solov’ev, to Sophia,[49] but he did discern Pasternak’s links to the “sophianic” Russian religious philosophers, notably Solov’ev.[50] Lara does appear to Zhivago in a vision,[51] and for Merton she had “all the characteristics of the Sancta Sophia who appeared to Soloviev in Egypt.”[52]

During a visit to the scholar and icon-writer Victor Hammer in April of 1959, Merton saw an unfinished work and was drawn to the image. A female figure crowns a man whom Hammer knew to be Christ, but he claimed the woman was a mystery.[53] Merton was deeply moved and interpreted her as Sophia, the Wisdom of God, and this prompted him to write the poem “Hagia Sophia.”[54] Like ideas swirled in Merton’s intellectual consciousness. In 1959 he read Paul Evdokimov’s Woman and the Salvation of the World,[55] which he understood as “a whole survey of Sophianic theology.” His journals fleetingly reflect that in this work, Evdokimov meets “the concept of natura naturans [nature acting according to nature] – the divine wisdom in ideal nature, the ikon of wisdom, the dancing ikon – the summit. [. . .] Faith in Sophia, natura naturans, the great stabilizer today – for peace. [. . .] The dark face, the ‘night face’ of Sophia – pain, trouble, pestilence.”[56] Merton also turned to St. Julian of Norwich, whose understanding of the feminine face of God helped him to explore “God’s feminine aspect” and “linked his dream of Proverb to Holy Wisdom.”[57] And, as if to cement his growing realization, he experienced dream-like personifications of Proverb in both a Louisville hospital and a Cincinnati museum.[58]

On March 23, 1966, Merton experienced his Sophia in the flesh. In a hospital bed recovering from back surgery, he was awakened by the hand of a student nurse. He lurched toward the livid reality and fell in love with her, known in his journals and correspondence as “M” or “Margie.”[59] “She resembled the original Proverb of his dreams.”[60] Merton’s vow of chastity, wrote a close friend, then began “to contend with an uncontrollable desire to be in love and to be loved.”[61] Yet the relationship, never consummated, was one of cognizant and immediate love, as well as a profoundly spiritual experience for him.

As had Solov’ev and Bulgakov, Merton found his center in his multivalent understanding of Sophia. All moved from their readings to their visions, and then, to a spiritual understanding of Wisdom as a pervasive female force in their lives. Bulgakov knew of Solov’ev’s visions, and Merton knew of both of theirs. The fact that all three came to virtually the same conclusions, despite their religious and philosophical proclivities, begs questions that merit further explanation. A close reading of Merton’s journals and his correspondence reveals that his sophianic experiences emerged only after he began to read the philosophers of the Russian religious renaissance. How deeply his own early dedication to the Virgin Mary affected his Sophia remains vital factor in determining what occurred to him and how he defined it. The Russian connections, however, and especially the intriguing visions that mark them, strongly indicate a syncretic convergence that transcends both time and place.

-----------------------

[1] Thomas Merton, Hagia Sophia (Lexington, KY, 1978). Merton began the original manuscript in 1958 and it went to Victor Hammer in 1961, even though many routinely note that Merton wrote the poem in 1963, which is actually the first publication date. In this paper, I refer to the poem as it is published in Thomas Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York, 1977), 363-71.

[2] For the a detailed study of Solov’ev and his followers, see Samuel D. Cioran, Vladimir Solov’ev and the Knighthood of the Divine Sophia (Waterloo, ON, 1977); for a bibliographical essay

on the topic, see Kristi A. Groberg, “The Feminine Occult Sophia in the Russian Religious Renaissance,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 26, nos. 1-4 (1992): 197-240.

[3] Merton read English and French, but not Russian (although he had begun to study it), so he had access to Vladimir S. Solovyov, Lectures on Godmanhood, trans. Peter P. Zouboff (London, 1948). The Russian original, Chteniia o Bogochelovechestvo, was serialized in the journal Pravoslavnoe obozrenie (1877-1881) and later included in Vladimir S. Solov’ev, Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, 10 vols., ed. Sergei M. Solov’ev and Ernest L. Radlov (St. Petersburg, 1911-1914), I: 1ff.

[4] This is the “Lower Sophia” described in Sergei M. Solov’ev, Zhizn’ i tvorcheskaia evoliutsiia Vladimira Solov’eva (Brussels, 1977), 138. She is sensual and was eventually assimilated to the Great Goddess and Tellus Mater of ancient religions; see Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston, 1963), 107, quoting Irenaeus.

[5] Vladimir S. Solov’ev, “Tri svedaniia,” Stikhotvoreniia, 6th ed., published by Sergei M. Solov’ev (Moscow, 1915), 195-98. See also Vladimir S. Solovyov, Poems of Sophia, trans. Boris Jakim and Laurie Magnus (New Haven, CT, 1995).

[6] See A. A. Asoian, “Beatriche I ‘vechnaia zhena’ Vl. Solov’eva,” in Dante i russkaia literature (Sverdlovsk, 1989), 100-12, and Pamela Davidson, “Vladimir Solovyov and Dante,” in her The Poetic Imagination of Vyacheslav Ivanov: A Russian Symbolist’s Perception of Dante (Cambridge, 1989), 53-71.

[7] Guy Davenport, “Tom and Gene,” in his The Hunter Gracchus (Washington, DC, 1996), 32-46. On Solov’ev and humor see Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, “On Laughter and Vladimir Solov’ev’s Three Encounters,” Slavic Review 57, no. 3 (1998): 77-94.

[8] See Solov’ev’s “Prayer of the Revelation of the Great Mystery: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: Ain-Soph, Jah, Soph-Jah” (London, 1875), from his “Al’bum I [MS],” 1875, as translated in Maria Carlson, “Gnostic Elements in the Cosmogony of Vladimir Soloviev,” in Russian Religious Thought, ed. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt and Richard F. Gustafson (Madison, WI, 1996), 49.

[9] Vladimir S. Solov’ev, Pis’ma Vl. S. Solov’eva, 3 vols., ed. Ernst L. Radlov (St. Petersburg, 1908-1911), II: 199-200. On Solov’ev and Kabbalah, see Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, “Solov’ev’s Androgynous Sophia and the Jewish Kabbalah,” Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (1991): 487-96, and her “Russian Religious Thought and the Jewish Kabbalah,” in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, ed. Bernice G. Rosenthal (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 75-98.

[10] Zdenek David, “The Influence of Jacob Boehme on Russian Religious Thought,” Slavic Review 21, no. 1 (1962): 42-64.

[11] Maria Carlson, “Gnostic Elements in Soloviev’s Cosmogony,” 50.

[12] See Samuel D. Cioran, “The Affair of Anna N. Schmidt and Vladimir Solov’ev,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 16, no. 1 (1974): 39-61, and Vladimir Solovyov, At the Dawn of Mist-Shrouded Youth. With Selected Letters to Ekaterina Romanova, trans. Boris Jakim (Carlisle, PA, 1999).

[13] See Kristi A. Groberg, “Eternal Feminine: Vladimir Solov’ev’s Visions of Sophia,” in Alexandria I, ed. Paul R. Fideler (Grand Rapids, MI, 1991), 77-96.

[14] Joanna Hubbs, “The Worship of Mother Earth in Russian Culture,” in Mother Worship: Theme and Variations, ed. J. J. Preston (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984), 133, and Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington, IN, 1988). See also Samuel D. Cioran, “Vladimir Solovyov and the Divine Feminine,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 4 (1972): 219-39.

[15] Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “The Nature and Function of Sophia in Sergei Bulgakov’s Prerevolutionary Thought,” in Russian Religious Thought, ed. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt and Richard F. Gustafson (Madison, WI, 1996), 154.

[16] Sergei N. Bulgakov, “Dve vstrechi,” in his Avtobiograficheskaia zametki, ed. Lev A. Zander (Paris, 1946), 103-13. Later sources on this topic include Anselm Walker, “Sophiology,” Diakonia 16, no. 1 (1981): 40-54; Winston F. Crum, “Sergius N. Bulgakov: From Marxism to Sophiology,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1982): 6; Barbara Newman, “Sergius Bulgakov and the Theology of the Divine Wisdom,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1978): 50, describes Bulgakov’s Sophiology from the Orthodox viewpoint, but states that the use of feminine pronouns is essential to Bulgakov’s doctrine of Sophia; see also Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, “La sophiologie de Pere Boulgakov,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 19 (1939): 155-56.

[17] Sergei Bulgakov, Svet nevechernii (Moscow, 1917), 8.

[18] See Sergius Bulgakov, “From Marxism to Sophiology,” Review of Religion 1, no. 4 (1937): 361-68.

[19] Bulgakov, Svet nevechernii, 8-9.

[20] Rosenthal, “The Nature and Function of Sophia in Sergei Bulgakov’s Prerevolutionary Thought,” 165 – the author comments on Ibid., 214.

[21] See Ian Pearson, “Raphael as Seen by Russian Writers from Zhukovsky to Turgenev,” Slavonic and East European Review 59, no. 3 (1981): 346-91.

[22] Sergei Bulgakov, “Stikhotvoreniia Vladimira Solov’eva,” Russkaia mysl’ 2 (1916): 14-17.

[23] See Lesley Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (London, 2006).

[24] Sergei N. Bulgakov, “V Aia-Sofii,” in his Avtobiograficheskaia zametki (Paris, 1946), 94-102. Portions of this essay are translated as “Haghia Sophia,” in Sergius N. Bulgakov, A Bulgakov Anthology, ed. James Pain and Nicolas Zernov (Philadelphia, 1976), 13-14.

[25] Sergius Bulgakov, The Wisdom of God: A Brief Summary of Sophiology, trans. P. Thompson, O.F. Clarke, and X. Braikevitch (London, 1937). On Bulgakov’s defense of his well-elaborated Sophiology, see Bryn Geffert, “Sergii Bulgakov, the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, Intercommunion and Sofiology,” Revolutionary Russia 17, no. 1 (2004): 150-41.

[26] Bulgakov, The Wisdom of God,

[27] Bulgakov, “Sofiologiia smerti,” Avtobiograficheskaia zametki, 139-47.

[28] Davenport, “Tom and Gene,” 33.

[29] Ibid., 37.

[30] Ibid., 33.

[31] Journal entry for April 25, 1967, in Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude: Pursuing a Monk’s True Life [The Journals of Thomas Merton, Vol. III (1952-1960)], ed. Lawrence S. Cunningham (San Francisco, 1997), 63.

[32] Ibid., 64.

[33] Journal entry for July 29, 1957, in Ibid., 101. Serge N. Boulgakov, La Sagesse Divine et la Theanthropie, trans. Constantine Andronikoff (Lausanne, 1943-44); a two part work, the first part of which is Du Verbe Incarnee. L’agneau de Dieu, to which Merton refers.

[34] Merton, A Search for Solitude, 102.

[35] Bulgakov, La Sagesse de Dieu (Paris, 1937), 38, as quoted in the journal entry for August 2, 1957, in Merton, A Search for Solitude, 104-05.

[36] Journal entry for August 7, 1957, in Merton, A Search for Solitude, 107.

[37] Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (San Diego, 1984), 308.

[38] Merton, “Hagia Sophia,” in his The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, 363.

[39] Journal entry for February 28, 1958, in Merton, A Search for Solitude, 175-76, quote 176.

[40] Journal entry for March 4, 1958, in Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals, ed. Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo (San Francisco, 1999) , 121-22. The journal entries in this collection are uncensored.

[41] Merton, “Hagia Sophia,” The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, 368.

[42] Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, 313-14.

[43] Reiterated in Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York, 1966), 156-57. For a realistic, compassionate understanding of this chapter in Merton’s life, see Jim Forest, Living with Wisdom: A Life of Thomas Merton (Maryknoll, NY, 1991), 121-38.

[44] Merton, A Search for Solitude, 157.

[45] Journal entry for March 19, 1958, in Merton, A Search for Solitude, 182. Censored.

[46] Journal entry for March 19, 1958, in Merton, The Intimate Merton, 125. Uncensored.

[47] Journal entry for May 18, 1958, in Merton, A Search for Solitude, 202.

[48] Merton to Pasternak, October 23, 1958, Thomas Merton and Boris Pasternak, Six Letters, ed. Naomi Burton Stone and Lydia Pasternak Slater (Lexington, KY, 1973), 11-12.

[49] See Jerome Spencer, “‘Soaked in The Meaning of Love and The Kreutzer Sonata’: The Nature of Love in Doctor Zhivago,” in Doctor Zhivago: A Critical Companion, ed. Edith W. Clowes (Evanston, IL, 1995), 76-88.

[50] Merton, Disputed Questions, 22-23.

[51] See Ian Crawford Kelly, “Eternal Memory: Historical Themes in Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1986), 189-207, and Jane Gary Harris, “Pasternak’s Vision of Life: The History of a Feminine Image,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 9 (1974): 410-17.

[52] Merton, Disputed Questions, 33.

[53] Hammer’s broadside image for the 2001 reproduction of Merton’s “Hagia Sophia” is reproduced at

[54] Thomas Merton, Witness to Freedom: The Letters of Thomas Merton in Times of Crises (New York, 1994), ed., 3.

[55] Journal entry for September 18, 1959, in Merton, A Search for Solitude, 330, a reference to Paul Evdokimov, La femme et le salut du monde. Etude d.anthropologie chretienne sur les charismes de la femme (Paris, 1958). For an English version, to which Merton did not have access, see Paul Evdokimov, Woman and the Salvation of the World: A Christian Anthropology on the Charisms of Women, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel (Jordanville, NY, 1994).

[56] Thomas Merton, Turning Toward the World: The Pivotal Years [The Journals of Thomas Merton, Vol. IV (1960-1963)], ed. Victor A. Kramer (San Francisco, 1996), 91.

[57] Forest, Living with Wisdom, 31.

[58] Journal entries for July 2 and October 29, 1960, in Merton, Turning Toward the World, 17 (supposedly another inspiration for his poem “Hagia Sophia”) and 61-63.

[59] See Merton’s journal entries between April 10, 1966 and October 2, 1967 in Merton, The Intimate Merton, 275-312. Uncensored.

[60] For a short sensitive encapsulation, see Forest, “A Proverb Named Margie,” in his Living with Wisdom, 173-81 – quote 173.

[61] Merton, Disputed Questions, 39.

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