| Cistercian monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was, for nearly fifteen years, his Abbey's primary educator. This project seeks to cull from Merton's voluminous writings, letters and tape-recorded lectures his theology and philosophy of education.;Merton's vision of education was inextricably related to his own life story (Chapter One), the story of a highly educated and cultured yet broken and parentless young man who took flight from "the world" and his own artistic temperament, favoring instead what he believed would be "God alone" within a monastery. Eventually there emerged a dramatically different Merton. His later monastic curriculum bears the stamp of this transformation, characterized by its appeal to a radical Christian humanism.;At the heart of Merton's vision of education lies his belief that learning ought to be "sapientially" or wisdom oriented. This wisdom orientation begins with his conviction, bequeathed by a host of ancient Christian educators, that God's Triune identity as Wisdom Incarnate has taken up residence within our heart. Invoking the literal meaning of the term, Merton defines "education" as that activity which "brings out" or "draws out" our Christ nature, giving us an almost palpable taste and experience of God's life in and around us. Hence the title "The Feast of Wisdom." Merton's hope is that eventually there will emerge in us what he calls "sapiential thinking," by which he means that our thinking becomes an extension of the thinking and activity of Christ who lives within us as Holy Spirit.;Chapter Two explores several essays where Merton either explicitly or implicitly sets forth his vision and its constituent features.;Chapters Three and Four focus on three theological cornerstones to Merton's vision of education. The first is his imaginative rendering of what theologians in the Christian East call theoria physike, what Merton loosely translates as "natural contemplation." The second cornerstone is his interpretation of the Greek term parrhesia, translated as the "free speech" and "intimacy" which ought to be ours with God and with other persons. And the third is his richly diverse understanding of "solitude" and the necessity for educators to create a learning space in which we can attend to and learn from God's own solitude which dwells within us.;Chapter Five explores those practices without which Merton believed we could not attain to the quality of sapiential thinking he envisioned: the practice of community, solitude, worship, study, manual labor, spiritual direction, confession and repentance, charity, and what he calls the practice of "iconoclastic criticism.";Chapter Six looks at Merton's "classroom personae": those salient features of his teaching style and classroom presence, and, second, at the many diverse kinds and styles of language with which he educated. |
