Sunday, September 2, 2007

Beatus vir, baby

I remember reading this the first time, Mike Aquilina, one of the best minds of my generation, threw this heavy thing down in '97. Excerpts:

Thus it was with the Beats from the beginning. Though ostensibly a literary movement, the Beats were about much more. Critic John Clellon Holmes noted in 1958: "The Beat generation is basically a religious generation."
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Perhaps that should not be so surprising. The Beat movement’s other founder, novelist Jack Kerouac, was an intermittently practicing Catholic. It was Kerouac who named the movement (in 1948) and wrote its early aesthetic manifestos.
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Ultimately, what the Beats were after was mystical experience. "I want God to show me His face" was Kerouac’s description of his goal.

To that end, the early Beats spent long hours poring over the saints’ works on prayer and the spiritual life. Ginsberg, a secular Jew, was an avid reader of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila. Kerouac was fond of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

Yet just as Beat writing had rejected traditional forms and disciplines, so eventually would it reject religion. The Beats wanted the mysticism, but without any ascetical preparation.

So being "beat" was an attempt to attain the beatific vision "on the cheap." In my experience most people who are into the Beats don't often acknowledge this relationship between the word beat and beatitude. That's probably because, as Mike writes, "most of his Beat-sympathetic biographers dismiss Kerouac’s fitful faith as the last infantile regression of a deeply troubled man." But Jack K. came up with the word, and it's how he defined it. Check it out:

He seemed to be grasping his way, again, to Christianity. In a 1959 essay on the origins of the Beats, he expresses outrage that Mademoiselle magazine, after a photo session, airbrushed out the crucifix that hung from a chain around his neck.

"I am a Beat," he wrote, "that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son to it."

Whoa, John 3:16. Strange flowers for someone who learned about Kerouac from the revisionistae.

So by definition, the Beat philosophy was sort a Christian heresy which accentuated the teachings about the existence of a Benevolent Deity and the blessedness (beatitude) of the Saints and the Heavenly Kingdom, the goodness of existence and creation and the ability of man to transcend the material world while completely throwing out any relationship these realities might have to behavior along with most of the Judeo-Christian moral code, teachings about the fall, the real danger of losing one's soul, etc.

These thoughts form sort of an unplanned dovetail with this earlier post regarding "kernels of truth and wishful thinking". I've always been intrigued by the work of these cats, especially Kerouac, since I read On the Road circa 1988. Before reading Mike's piece, I always felt guilty liking the stuff since it's so decadent morally. It's good to know that there might be a kernel of goodness in this literature, that you can catch a passing glimpse of the Divine amid the wrong-headed ideas of flawed these flawed visionaries. It's probably also good to only allow yourself small doses and restrict reading to mature adults. And let's not revise their material in the opposite direction to make these guys into the saints and mystics they claimed themselves to be. In other words, a kernel of truth is not the "whole truth and nothing but the truth" and while useful, we should be careful not to substitute the kernel for the whole.

8 comments:

  1. Someone still needs to write the story of the Beats' relationships with Thomas Merton. The correspondence is voluminous. They shared publishers and published each other's work. Some of them visited Gethsemani.

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  2. Maybe I'll do that, guy. If not, there's a guy named Cubeland Mystic who might be interested. He way into that cat.

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  3. Meant to write "He's way that cat," but actually "he way into" sound better. Or sounds better.

    SAN FRANCISCO-OH-OH-BABY!

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  4. It's like listenin to Ol' God Shearing, man.

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  5. Mike, I just read this piece by Eric Scheske, and what I can't figure out is how Merton got so screwed up. It seemed to start when he rebelled against the authority of his superiors. He had to have known about St. Thérèse's sufferings at the hands of other sisters and how she bore everything patiently. I mean, yeah, anyone can screw up and "but for the grace of God there goeth my ass" and all that. But seems like arrogance; maybe selling all those books went to his head?

    Here's a beat story from my past life with an "On the Road" reference. When we were in the band our original keyboard player -- I'll simply call him "Dean" -- decided to drive naked from Pittsburgh up to Grove City. I had to sit beside him in the front seat; he was speeding and I was just braced for getting pulled over. As I remember it was my 1979 LTD, you know, cop car, cop shocks, cop engine, cop brakes.... Some weird cat in a Chevette drove up beside us and surreally handed a few beers through the window at 70 miles an hour. I'm not making this up. Later Dean quit the band to -- you guessed it -- move "out West" for awhile.

    We arrived safely whenceupon Dean reclothed himself. The beat goeth on.

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  6. If you go to the website of Keep the Faith, you can get Merton diagnoses on MP3 from Robert Royal and Alice von Hildebrand. They're only a buck apiece.

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  7. Pauli

    From the article, I read only the parts about Merton. First, Merton was ordered to write his autobiography by his Abbot. It was a work of obedience. He may not have ever wrote Seven Story Mountain if were not for his Abbot . He was also put to work translating Trappist works from French into English. If I am not mistaken he was not happy about that but did it. I don’t think he wanted more intellectual pursuits at the time. Not sure though. Naturally I am going to defend Merton, but I am willing to listen that he was perhaps a fool. If I am reading him correctly, he would probably admit that he was a fool.

    I don’t think it was arrogance or that he really went that far off track or was really “screwed up’. I am probably not going to read works from his foray into the East. I am not interested at this time. Seven Story Mountain should be required reading and part of the Catholic cannon. There is nothing unorthodox about it. Merton was capable of obedience, I just think he was meant to be a hermit, but he manifested his vocation as a Trappist. Living with others, doing lots of work, practicing the minutia of monastic life was probably not where he thought he was going when he signed up. I think you get to the point in religion where the “religious forms” can be a hindrance to growth. It might be possible for a monk to see praying the office as an obstacle to prayer and union with God. At that point why would it be so absurd to desire more solitude? I could see that this desire would lead to disobedience as you wasted time with rituals that were designed to get you to a certain level of spiritual growth that you surpassed years ago. The Abbot is making you ride the tricycle when you are ready for the Tour de France. That’s bitter medicine. His lack of obedience is wrong, but understandable. Perhaps “screwed up” is a bit harsh to describe it?

    About his correspondence with the beats, that is news to me. I am hearing it here first. I had no idea, but I could understand why. It is the same reason I would correspond with Dreher or Stegal. I would genuinely be interested in hearing how their system could sustain 300 million Americans and by doing so end abortion, poverty, and turn the nation to Christianity. I certainly would dialog with anyone who would turn us away from materialism. Eventually their absurdities would rise to the surface, and you would discount their philosophy based on its errors. Can you really truly believe that Merton would advocate for a book like Naked Lunch? He may have done foolish things, but I think it is a stretch to link him up with the beats in a intellectually concomitant manner. Jesus kept bad company too.

    It would be interesting for me to see just how far off track he strayed toward the end. Was he really astray when he died. I often wondered if God took him, and that is why he died so tragically. Perhaps he was ready to quit the Church, and God intervened before it could happen. I am going to post the last words of Seven Story Mountain written not long after he was in the monastery. I don’t think he was a monk more than ten years when he wrote it. One could assume that the fire of his conversion and vocation had not yet worn off. PLEASE feel free to delete it, if you think it is too long. Right from the beginning he wanted solitude.

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  8. Please delete this if it is too much. It is the last 500 words of Seven Story Mountain. It describes what he is hearing from God at the time. It does not sound like someone who craves companionship. If you ask me it seems pretty accurate to how things turned out.

    "I will give you what you desire. I will lead you into solitude. I will lead you by the way that you cannot possibly understand, because I want it to be the quickest way.

    Therefore all the things around you will be armed against you, to deny you, to hurt you, to give you pain, and therefore to reduce you to solitude.

    Because of their enmity, you will soon be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you and reject you and you will be alone.

    Everything that touches you shall burn you, and you will draw your hand away in pain, until you have withdrawn yourself from all things. Then you will be all alone.

    Everything that can be desired will sear you, and brand you with a cautery, and you will fly from it in pain, to be alone. Every created joy will only come to you as pain, and you will die to all joy and be left alone. All the good things that other people love and desire and seek will come to you, but only as murderers to cut you off from the world and its occupations.

    You will be praised, and it will be like burning at the stake. You will be loved, and it will murder your heart and drive you into the desert.

    You will have gifts, and they will break you with their burden. You will have pleasures of prayer, and they will sicken you and you will fly from them.

    And when you have been praised a little and loved a little I will take away all your gifts and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and you will be nothing, a dead thing, a rejection. And in that day you shall begin to possess the solitude you have so longed desired. And your solitude will bare immense fruit in the souls of men you will never see on earth.

    Do not ask when it will be or where it will be or how it will be: On a mountain or in a prison, in a desert or in a concentration camp or in a hospital or at Gethsemani. It does not matter. So do not ask me, because I am not going to tell you. You will not know until you are in it.

    But you shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of my joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in My mercy which has created you for this end and brought you from Prades to Bermuda to St. Antonin to Oakham to London to Cambridge to Rome to New York to Columbia to Corpus Christi to St. Bonaventure to the Cistercian Abbey of the poor men who labor in Gethsemani:

    That you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men."

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