Merton, Chesterton and the ImaginativePulpit

Joe MarrenSUNY Buffalo State

Abstract

Two great Catholic writers shared a parallel viewpoint, though G.K. Chesterton used a fictional detective who was an English priest to opine about human nature in the early 20th century while Thomas Merton, a very real Trappist monk in the United States, commented on the world’s ills in the mid-20th century. These two men, writing a generation and an ocean apart, saw spirituality as a way to contextualize and analyze the world. Because most people get their information through the news media they also, from time to time, wrote about journalism theory.

Both Merton and Chesterton wrote about sin. Each confessed to human foibles and alsoasked readers to examine their own lives. Although Chesterton is regarded by some as conservative and Merton as liberal, both praised God and asked for mercy and wisdom as a step to lead better lives since they believed that God is the source of truth, wisdom and mercy. Therefore, they also share some thoughts about precision of language and that is a theme of this paper.

Chesterton’s fictional Father Brown was solving crimes while simultaneously striving to save the sinner. For example, in “The Flying Stars,” Father Brown asked Flambeau to give up his life of crime: “There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don’t fancythey will last in that trade. Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it. Many a man I’ve known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime” (The Father Brown Omnibus, 80-81).

Father Brown was concerned with spiritual and philosophic truths as well as the symbolic functions of faith and language. So was Merton and this paper will show the

parallels in their outlooks on life through their words. Since I am not a Merton scholar I am indebted to William Shannon, Christine Bochen and Patrick O’Connell for their work in The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia for much context and analysis.

Ideas

There were 51 Father Brown stories, mostly written from 1910 to 1951. Of those 51 stories in The Father Brown Omnibus there were nine concerned with journalism in a more than cursory manner. (Bythat I mean the reporter or news organization is part of the story and moves the plot forward, as opposed to the Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle method of using newspapers as a sideline means to introduce a plot twist and/or character.) This is important because each of those stories (all about 10 to 15 pages) can have a connection with Merton’s thoughts on language. The case can be made that if both Merton and Chesterton are concerned with communicating ideas then the media itself, as wellas commentary on media practices and outlook, is a good place to start looking for intersections, especially when dealing with theimaginative pulpit.

The story “The Flying Stars” was originally published in The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) and it has the now reformed criminal Flambeau reminiscing about his “most beautiful crime” that he committed. In essence, it is the story of his conversion. Disguised as a brusque Canadian who dominates a Boxing Day party,Flambeau steals three diamonds and is about to make his getaway when Father Brown finds him and tells him: “I want you to give them back, Flambeau, and I want you to give up this life. … I know that the woods look very free behind you, Flambeau, I know that in a flash you could melt into them like a monkey. But some day you will be an old grey monkey, Flambeau. You will sit up in your free forest cold at heart and close to death, and the tree-tops will be very bare” (Omnibus, 80-81). Flambeau returns the

diamonds but he makes his escape. Eventually he reforms and aids Father Brown in other Chesterton stories, although Flambeau playsthe detective who never sees as clearly as Father Brown because the priest is focused not only on the sin but also on salvation.

In the same story is journalist John Crook who, despite the name,is an honest journalist with leanings to socialism, which doesn’tmake him popular with Sir Leopold, who owns the diamonds. The snippets of a social justice motif fleetingly expressed in the story are paralleled in Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, whichprobes the issues of the day and the challenges that are facing people. Merton doesn’t offer any packaged solutions, but he says that if people are open they can honestly reason through the contradictions about the world that are reported in the media. Hesays there is some truth in the total media/communication packagethat mixes news with advertising, but there is also absurdity andpropaganda, which Father Brown’s John Crook detests and which both Merton and Chesterton say leads to a certain amount of cynicism. While Chesterton’s Crook would protest against using the media as an advertising or propaganda tool, Merton would say the media already uses deceptive techniques and words to create aculture of conspicuous consumption (that needs to have and to flaunt things like diamonds, as Sir Leopold does):

We live in a society that tries to keep us dazzled with euphoria in a bright cloud of lively and joy-loving slogans.Yet nothing is more empty and more dead, nothing is more insultingly insincere and destructive than the vapid grins on the billboards and the moron beatitudes in the magazines which assure us that we are all in bliss right now. … I think the constant realization that we are exhausting our vital spiritual energy in a waste of shame, the inescapable disgust at the idolatrous vulgarity of our commercial milieu(or the various other apocalyptic whoredoms that abound

elsewhere on the face of the earth) is one of the main sources of our universal desperation (Faith and Violence, 116).

Thus it is all the more remarkable that Chesterton’s Flambeau gives up the diamonds and tells the story as the point of his conversion from the material world to the spiritual. But Merton adds that if God is the source of truth, then the media is still far from God:

Action is not governed by moral reason but by political expediency and the demands of technology – translated into the simple abstract formulas of propaganda. These formulas have nothing to do with reasoned moral action, even though they may appeal to apparent moral values – they simply condition the mass of men to react in a desired way to certain stimuli (Confessions of a Guilty Bystander, 53-54).

Form

The theme of newswriting style, and of what news organizations report, is also raised in the Father Brown story “The Mistake of the Machine,” which appeared in The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914). InChesterton’s case the commentary on news style is confined to theprint journalism of his time, though Merton sees a parallel trackin talking about broadcast news of his own day.

There are two themes in “The Mistake of the Machine”: a commentary on news style that is rather minor and sets up the larger theme of nature (the Father Brown/Thomas Merton method of reasoning through situations and intuitively finding a solution or commenting on what conscience would tell us is right) versus the scientific method (a’la Sherlock Holmes) of examining all thefacts and pronouncing what must be right based on that examined data or clues. (“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable,

must be the truth?” – Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four (Doubleday p. 111).)

The differences between the techniques of the fictional Holmes versus the fictional Father Brown are also commented on in two stories: “The Resurrection of Father Brown,” which was in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926) and in “The Secret of Father Brown,”in the book of the same name published in 1927. In “The Resurrection of Father Brown” a Midwestern newspaper reporter is featuring the reluctant and publicity shy priest/sleuth: “A series of stories about him, like the stories of Sherlock Holmes,were, by the instrumentality of Mr. Snaith, planned out and put before the hero with the request for assistance and encouragement. As the priest found they had started, he could offer no suggestion except that they should stop” (Omnibus, 440).The humility is not just because Father Brown doesn’t feel worthy, but because he feels he is being used by the media and that the true message of the Gospels that he preaches is being ignored.

Merton expressed a similar concern in Faith and Violence: “But in addition to the sheer volume of information there is the even more portentous fact of falsification and misinformation by whichthose in power are often completely intent not only on misleadingothers but even on convincing themselves that their own lies are ‘historical truth.’ ”(Faith and Violence, 250).

That’s not to say that Father Brown is deliberately misleading anyone, but the circumstances of how facts could be manipulated are concerns of Chesterton and Merton. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hadSherlock Holmes supposedly die while fighting with Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls; in “The Resurrection of Father Brown” the priest recovers from a supposedly fatal attack so thathe can seemingly come back from the dead in a mysterious, mystical Holmesian fashion. But Father Brown catches on to the

plan and thwarts it: “That’s all there is to it; and about as near hell as you and I will ever be, I hope” Omnibus, 452.)

In “The Secret of Father Brown” Chesterton further explores the differences in the Brown technique versus the Holmes technique byhaving the protagonist explain to a visitor how he solves crimes.The explanation begins when an American, Grandison Chance, says: “Dr. Watson had to listen to some pretty exact expositions of Holmes’s method, with its observation of material details. But nobody seems to have got on to any full account of your method, Father Brown, and I was informed you declined the offer to give aseries of lectures in the States on the matter” (Omnibus, 636).

Father Brown replied that he has to think like a criminal to solve his cases. As Merton would say, we are all sinners and haveto acknowledge that, and that approach differs from a calculatingapproach that does not take into account human frailty and complexity. As Father Brown puts it:

Science is a grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest words in the world. But what do these men mean nine times out of ten, when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science? When they say criminology is a science? They mean getting outside a man and studying him as if he were a gigantic insect; in what they would call a dry impartial light; in what I should calla dead and dehumanized light. They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his ‘criminal skull’ as if it were the sort of eerie growth like the horn of a rhinoceros’s nose. … I don’t try to get outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer. … Indeed it’s much more than that, don’t you see? I am inside a man. I am always inside a man,moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am insidea murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions; till I have bent myself into the posture of his

hunched and peering hatred; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes, looking between the blinkers of his half-witted concentration; looking up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of blood. Till I am really a murderer.

It’s so real a religious exercise that I’d rather not have said anything about it. But I simply couldn’t have you goingoff and telling all your countrymen that I had a secret magic connected with Thought-Forms, Could I? … No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be. (Omnibus, 639-40).

Merton and Chesterton were of one mind on man’s relationship to good and evil. For both, it was a matter of choice, and for both it was also a matter of forgiveness similar to a process in whichpeople either recognized the evil in themselves, or had others point it out to them. As Merton wrote:

“We do not have to create a conscience for ourselves. We areborn with one, and no matter how much we may ignore it, we cannot silence its insistent demand that we do good and avoid evil. No matter how much we may deny our freedom and our moral responsibility, our intellectual soul cries out for a morality and a spirited freedom without which it knowsit cannot be happy” (No Man is an Island, 41-42).

Chesterton also used a literary technique that James Joyce used in the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses, but the gigantism of Chestertonis not the gigantism of Joyce. For one thing Joyce’s gigantism takes up much of the chapter. Chesterton’s gigantism in “The Mistake of the Machine” is there to mock society news as found inthe papers of the day as he reads a story from an American paper about “Last-Trick Todd” and a party that night at Todd’s mansion near Chicago that will include Lord Falconroy, who is visiting from England. Joyce’s gigantism dominates by design, Chesterton

designed his gigantism as a minor element shown via journalistic style in various newspaper clippings that Father Brown is asked to read at key moments to set the stage for the inevitable crime.For example, an official at the prison who relies on science to solve cases asked the intuitive Father Brown if he is interested in the news clip about the party and the priest replied: “I cannot think at this moment of anything in this world that would interest me less. And, unless the just anger of the Republic is at last going to electrocute journalists for writing like that, Idon’t quite see why it should interest you either” (Omnibus, 300).

The gigantism mocks newspaper reporting of this style but other such clips later in the story are used to show that Father Brown’s intuitive methods are more to be trusted that the scientific method. The prison official, who is a retired detective, hands Father Brown another newspaper clipping from themetro news section about an escaped convict who murdered a guard.Father Brown’s friend believes that he captured the escapee that morning. He validates his beliefs using a series of psychologicaltests that rely on a machine to interpret the suspect’s pulse that would say whether or not he is lying. Father Brown has his doubts about the efficacy of the machine and, at the end of the story when his theory and intuitive methods are proven right, says it is not the fault of the machine for giving false data, but that the machine was only as good as its human operator and the person interpreting the raw data:

“You always forget,” observed his companion, “that the reliable machine always has to be worked by an unreliable machine.”

“Why, what do you mean?” asked the detective.

“I mean Man,” said Father Brown, “the most unreliable machine I know of.”(Omnibus, 307)

These themes find an echo in Merton because although he criticized the media, he also reminded us that it was media practitioners who brought us the context of the current news. We allow someone else to define news for us and watch, listen or read what they believe is the truth. But intuitively some people may have thought that there was a deeper meaning to what was presented as news as technology (the so-called new machines that the prison official believes in) changed the presentation of the news and, subsequently, what was reported or not reported. The steam press, the telegraph, radio and television were technological changes and today the Internet gives us so many more choices at such a hurried pace that the wonder is that some issues still matter more than a day or a week.

There is yet another aspect of that to explore because Merton believed that the true and real self depended on a knowledge of God’s grace. So, therefore, language has to be precise. Yet technology, although it allowed advances, also deepened the chasmbetween the ideas and the truth, as Father Brown also says in “The Mistake of the Machine.” This is also essentially what mediatheorist Neil Postman argued in his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Postman wrote that television debased, or overly simplified not only politics but also our conversations and debates. In a sense, Postman offered the secular viewpoint to Chesterton and Merton by writing that technology spawned news executives who valued the entertainment aspects of journalism, education, and religion more than the informative or redemptive value. Chesterton prefers his intuition – expressed through Father Brown – over a machine’s interpretation of data. Similarly, Merton prefers real discourse over what he termed pseudo-events:

I have watched TV twice in my life. I am frankly not terribly interested in TV anyway. Certainly I do not pretendthat by simply refusing to keep up with the latest news I am

therefore unaffected by what goes on, or free of it all. Certainly events happen and they affect me as they do other people. It is important for me to know them in their fresh condition as “news.” When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts. The news reaches me in the long run through books and magazines, and no longer as a stimulant. Living without news is like living without cigarettes (another peculiarity of the monastic life). The need for this habitual indulgence quickly disappears. So, when you hear news without the “need” to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too (Faith and Violence, 151)

Father Brown treated his interaction with information differentlyfrom his counterpart in the story. Merton would say in a broader aspect this is a re-commitment to seeking the truth, but both Merton and Chesterton prefer nature and faith before science, as can also be seen in the Chesterton story “The Strange Crime of John Boulnois” in The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914). In that story ofjealousy gone awry, Father Brown shows that a person’s nature canlead down destructive paths:

Anybody can be wicked – as wicked as he chooses. We can direct our moral wills; but we can’t generally change our instinctive tastes and ways of doing things. Boulnois might commit a murder, but not this murder. … No, the romantic setting is not like Boulnois. It’s more like Champion (Omnibus, 411).

Chesterton mentions the romantic impulse and Merton subtly adds what might be termed Romanticism into things as well. Merton’s views emphasize a commitment to seeking and reporting the truth, which is a value that seems forgotten by some in a media culture devoted to celebrities and pack journalism. Journalists working

from a Mertonian perspective must realize that conduct and decisions matter as much as ideas.

Parrhesia

But what conduct? What decisions? And what ideas? Merton would say that parrhesia is an expression that can symbolize the contact that starts communication with each other and with God. There are a couple definitions of parrhesia, one is that it means“boldness or freedom of speech,” according to Merriam-Webster. And the other definition is that it implies that someone is asking for forgiveness before speaking in such a manner. Either way, it also means to face the truth and Merton used the concept to discuss the metaphor of Adam’s sin: “The experience of falsitydestroyed in him the instinctive taste for spiritual truth. Illusion entered in to spoil the existential flow of communication between his soul and God. Parrhesia was at an end not because God no longer consented to speak with Adam, but because Adam, stripped of his sincerity, ashamed to be what he infact was, determined to fly from God and from reality, which he could no longer face without a disguise” (The New Man, 77).

That boldness of freedom of speech was alluded to in “The Purple Wig,” from 1914’s The Wisdom of Father Brown. In fact, though, Chesterton pointed out the need for freedom of speech by writing a story that showed how easily such freedom could be squashed. Init, free-lance reporter Francis Finn proposes a story to The Daily Reformer on the dreariness of the aristocracy. Although thepaper might be interested in the concept of such a story, what finally was written did not fit the editor’s prejudices. Indeed, there is little evidence of freedom of speech in editor Edward Nutt’s dealings with Finn. Nutt’s editorial judgment was not the “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” style of journalism that was perhaps hinted at in the paper’s masthead.

And perhaps that’s because: [Nutt’s] “life was a series of distracted compromises, between the proprietor of the paper (and of him) … and the very able staff he had collected to run the paper; some of whom were … sincere enthusiasts for the political party of the paper” (Omnibus, 332). In other words, the truth andboldness of speech was too free and too bold for the editor who “crumpled up the copy and tossed it into the waste-paper basket; but not before he had, automatically and by mere force of habit, altered the word ‘God’ to the word ‘circumstances’ ” (Omnibus, 346).

Merton rejected such an attitude. But that’s hardly new, so did St. Augustine, who was trained as a rhetorician and said rhetoricand communication were useless without true wisdom from God. To know God, one must be open, and not be like the editor who rejects a story because it doesn’t conform to his limited understanding of the world. As Augustine wrote:

In Greek the word ‘philosophy’ means ‘love of wisdom,’ and it was with this love that the Hortensius [a book by Cicero] inflamed me. There are people for whom philosophy is a meansof misleading others, for they misuse its great name, its attractions, and its integrity to give colour and gloss to their own errors. Most of these so-called philosophers who lived in Cicero’s time and before are noted in the book. He shows them up in their true colours and makes quite clear how wholesome is the admonition which the Holy Spirit gives in the words of your good and true servant, Paul: Take care notto let anyone cheat you with his philosophizings, with empty fantasies drawn from human tradition, from worldly principles; they were never Christ’s teaching.In Christ the whole plentitude of Deity is embodied and dwells in him.

But, O Light of my heart, you know that at that time, although Paul’s words were not known to me, the only thing that pleased me in Cicero’s book was his advice not simply

to admire one or another of the schools of philosophy, but to love wisdom itself (Confessions, 59).

If St. Augustine and Merton believed in wisdom gained through thefreedom of truth, what do journalists believe in, at least according to Chesterton?

“I don’t believe in anything; I’m a journalist,” answered the melancholy being; “Boon, of the Daily Wire” (Omnibus, 540).

The word melancholy is key here because it purports to show how anewspaper reporter in the story “The Curse of the Golden Cross,” in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926) can be deceived and, in turn, can in turn unwittingly deceive others in the audience of readers, listeners, viewers, or more likely these days, scrollersand/or clickers on websites. That’s a rather cynical viewpoint, as opposed to a perhaps more romantic viewpoint that Merton wouldpreach to journalists: “We make ourselves real by telling the truth” (No Man is an Island, 188).

Journalistic training emphasizes that news people report the truth “without fear or favor.” Yet the cult of personality throwsup some exemplars and some phonies. Merton would say a reporter’strue allegiance is to serve the audience. Merton said his life was “a struggle to seek the truth” and seeking the truth is seeking God. Along a similar path, Father Brown seeks not only tosolve the crime, but save the sinner. That duality of purpose in both men means there must be a certain amount of boldness and freedom in telling the truth.

As long as the issue of duality of purpose has been introduced, this is a good place to remind people that Chesterton has been accused of anti-Semitism. There are his defenders who deny it, but the issue won’t be explored in detail here. Rather, it will just be noted that there were racist and/or anti-Semitic commentsby the narrator or some characters that were especially visible

in the following Father Brown stories: “The Quiet Feet” and “The Flying Stars,” both in the 1911 The Innocence of Father Brown; and “TheAbsence of Mr. Glass,” “The Paradise of Thieves,” “The Duel of Dr. Hirsch” and “The God of the Gongs” in The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914). There is a drop of ecumism in Father Brown that obviouslyalso existed in Chesterton, but there is also the rage against the times that led to Father Brown’s apologetics.

Although Merton would agree with Chesterton on some matters of faith, he would also caution against hearing without truly listening and against accepting without first critically thinking, and that brings things back to the Father Brown/Merton method versus the Sherlock Holmes method:

The clichés of popular religion have in many cases become every bit as hollow and as false as those of soap salesmen, and far more dangerously deceptive because one cannot so easily verify the claims made about the product. The sin of religiosity is that it has turned God, peace, happiness, salvation and all that man desires into products to be marketed in an especially attractive package deal. In this, I think, the fault lies not with the sincerity of preachers and religious writers, but with the worn-out presuppositionswith which they fare content to operate. The religious mind today is seldom pertinently or prophetically critical. Oh, it is critical all right; but too often of wrong or irrelevant issues. (Faith and Violence, 116-117).

In his works Merton touched on debasement of language that peoplerelied on to try to justify all manner of things from prejudice to war. Language was violence used to sway the masses and both Merton and Father Brown sought to remind readers of the peace of God as reflected in their own minds and times.

News

Where to find the truth? News people would have us believe that it is in column inches of newspapers and magazines, in the 90-second stories on radio and television, or in the scattershot links and bytes online. And one caricature Chesterton drew of such a character was Sir John Cockspur in “The Chief Mourner of Marne” in The Secret of Father Brown (1927). Cockspur was “no other than the great newspaper proprietor” who “cursed freely, but not in an English idiom or accent, for he came from Toronto” (Omnibus, 783). Cockspur, owner of the Comet newspaper, believes that he should right what he sees as wrong. However, as events unfold, a lie is exposed and the publicity Cockspur threatened would turn out to support the lie rather than change things; in this case freedom of speech would perpetuate the lie and not the truth. When Cockspur and the others in the story learn the truth they condemn the sinner and that’s when Father Brown upbraids them:

For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.

We [priests] have to say the word that will save them from hell. We alone are left to deliver them from despair when your human charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose path pardoning all your favourite vices and being generous to your fashionable crimes; and leave us in the darkness, vampires of the night, to console those who really need consolation; who do things really indefensible, things that neither the world nor they themselves can defend; and none but a priest will pardon (Omnibus, 803).

Chesterton here is looking in the face of institutional evil and saying there is hope for the individual sinner and for the world.

Merton would agree and say that authentic communication molds a new connotation to parrhesia because people must use that freedomand boldness of speech to admit their sins and then revitalize their own language to seek – but more importantly face – the truth: “Our real choice is between being like Job, who knew he was stricken, and Job’s friends who did not know they were stricken too – though less obviously than he. (So they had answers!)” (Faith and Violence, 145-146). In the essay, “Events and Pseudo-Events,” from Faith and Violence Merton seems to be offering amessage that he and Chesterton might consider a Catholic theory of journalism, which is vastly different from the Cockspur type of journalism:

When one has too many answers, and when one joins a chorus of others chanting the same slogans, there is, it seems to me, a danger that one is trying to evade the loneliness of aconscience that realizes itself to be in an inescapably evilsituation (Faith and Violence, 145).

Criticizing the news values and judgment of a Cockspur has a modern equivalent in criticizing the photo-ops, sound bites and made-for-TV-new-events of our own times. What we should seek fromthe media, and what Merton called for and what Chesterton implied, is a contextualization of the news. Yet is that the roleof a news story in a 24-hour news cycle? Is there a way to somehow also get analysis and interpretations of the events that are in the news? Or is it all just publicity and we are in its clutches, whether it is correct or not?

In the Chesterton story “The Scandal of Father Brown” (in the 1935 book of the same name), a newspaper journalist is set to write a story saying that Father Brown helped a married woman run

away with her lover. But, again, the truth isn’t what it seemed to be to the newspaper reporter:

Not much more than an hour had passed, between the time whenRock had telephoned to say the priest was helping the poet to run away with the lady, and the time when he telephoned to say that the priest had prevented the poet from doing precisely the same thing. But in that short interval of timewas born and enlarged and scattered upon the winds the Scandal of Father Brown. The truth is still half an hour behind the slander; and nobody can be certain when or where it will catch up with it. The garrulity of pressmen and the eagerness of enemies had spread the story through the city, even before it appeared in the first printed version. It wasinstantly corrected and contradicted by Rock himself, in a second message stating how the story had really ended; but Iwas by no means certain that the first story was killed. A positively incredible number of people seemed to have read the first issue of the paper and not the second. (Omnibus, 831).

Merton would call this simulacrum and say that the debasement of language – and journalism – is used to show how inadequate the reporting process is. There is a veneer of truth in it, but it isdeceptive because it doesn’t fully and really serve the truth:

We believe that the “news” has a strange metaphysical statusoutside us: it “happens” by itself. Actually, it is something we fabricate. Those who are poor artisans make only pseudo-events. These are the tired politicians and businessmen, the educators, writers, intellectuals and tiredest of all, the Churchmen.

The word simulacrum, it seems to me, presents itself as a very suggestive one to describe an advertisement, or an

over-inflated political presence, or that face on the TV screen (Faith and Violence, 152).

The half-truths that daily make it to the news may look good and confirm beliefs, but the words mask the intent behind the act whether insincere (as Merton criticizes) or criminal (as Father Brown solves).

In other words, instead of taking care to examine the realities of our political or social problems, we simply bring out the idols in solemn procession. “We are the ones who are right, they are the ones who are wrong. We are the good guys, they are the bad guys. We are honest, they are crooks.” In this confrontation of images, “objectivity” ceases to be a consistent attention to fact and becomes a devout and blind fidelity to myth. … Objectivity becomes simple dogmatism (Faith and Violence, 154-155).

For Merton and for Chesterton, rational communication is the way to recognize that we are all sinners and that we all need the grace of God to have mercy on ourselves and others. In their view, neither journalists nor monks are dispassionate observers. Journalists and monks seek truth and both must work for a better world in their own way: “But since the times have become what they have become, I dare to blurt this out. Have you and I forgotten that our vocation, as innocent bystanders – and the very condition of our terrible innocence – is to do what the child did, and keep on saying the king is naked, at the cost of being condemned criminals” (Raids on the Unspeakable, 62).

In a way, this goes back to the Gnosticism of the early church. The Gnostics used the same words as their non-heretical brethren,but the words ultimately had entirely different meanings between those in the Christian community. And Merton says it is the duty of the poet (one can also read journalist in this) to make people

aware of the power of the symbolism of language. And it is the job of the reporter to use the right words and phrases.

Conclusion

Although there are some parallels between Chesterton and Merton, care must be taken not to read too much into those parallels and try to fit words and attitudes to the point. For example, Merton advised that those who seek to put words into James Joyce’s mouthrun the risk of failing “to recognize and respect Joyce’s own ambivalences” (Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, 261). As Joyce would say, Yes. Yet sometimes the pull to compare the writers is too real and too strong to resist, as illustrated by Irish journalist James Byrne as he passed between two camps in “The Ghost of Gideon Wise” (The Incredulity of Father Brown, 1926): “The reporter passed to and fro between the three millionaires and the three Bolshevist leaders with the immunity of the modern herald or the new ambassador” (Omnibus, 610). The temptation to see parallels is there. Yes.

Why? Because issues evolve as people change listen to opinions and think things through. But there is a constant value to what is considered the truth that both Chesterton and Merton clung to,even as their thinking evolved. Merton wrote about the changes onhis life that informed his attitudes on the world around him:

I notice that for nearly twenty years my society – or those in it who read my books – have decided upon an identity for me and insist that I continue to correspond perfectly to theidea of me which they found upon reading my first successfulbook. Yet the same people simultaneously prescribe for me a contrary identity. They demand that I remain forever the superficially pious, rather rigid and somewhat narrow-minded

young monk I was twenty years ago (Raids on the Unspeakable, 172).

Yet what ideas passed between Chesterton and Merton, though they never knew each other or communicated with each other, remained constant because there was a sense of love and faith in God and an urge, perhaps a calling, to tell the modern world that there were ways to communicate responsibly and morally.

A letter social activist Dorothy Day wrote to Merton on June 24, 1965, said: “You will never know the people you have reached, thegood you have done. You certainly used the graces and the talentsGod has given you” (The Catholic Worker, 4).

Both used words to spread their news, yet both were wary of thosewho used words to sell, to tout, and ultimately to debase language. As Father Brown says in “The Secret of Father Brown”: “This is what comes of trying to talk about deep things … What’s the good of words? … If you try to talk about a truth that’s merely moral, people always think it’s merely metaphorical” (Omnibus, 638).

References

Chesterton, G. K. (1982). The Father Brown Omnibus. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company.

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. (1992). In L. Cunningham (Ed.), Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master. New York: Paulist Press.

Forest, J. (2015, January-February). On Holy Perseverance. The Catholic Worker, pp. 1, 4-5.

Merton, T. (1955). No Man is an Island. New York: Harcourt, Jovanovich Brace.

------------. (1960). Raids on the Unspeakable, 7th Printing. New York: New Directions.

------------. (1961). The New Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy.

------------. (1966). Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. New York: Doubleday.

------------. (1968). Faith and Violence. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

Pine-Coffin, R.S. (1961). Saint Augustine Confessions. London: Penguin Books.

Shannon, W., Bochen, C., & O'Connell, P. (2002). The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books.