Books: Men of Silence

THE WATERS OF SILOE (377 PP.) —Thomas Merton—Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

A century ago, the tiny vessel Brunswick sailed from the French port of Le Havre for New Orleans with a mixed human cargo. Of its 180 passengers, 60 were ordinary German immigrants, 80 were pre-Marxist communists who called themselves Icarians, and the other 40 were communists who called themselves Trappist monks. The Icarians were coming to the U.S. to build a materialist Utopia, the Trappists to build a monastery where they could contemplate God. The last Icarian Utopia, at Cloverdale, Calif., fizzled out in 1895. Today in the U.S., there are six Trappist monasteries where some 500 monks dwell “above the” terrors and sor rows of modern life as well as above its passing satisfactions.”

The Waters of Siloe (“waters of Siloe* that flow in silence” — Isaiah 8 : 6) is Thomas Merton’s history of the Trappists since the founding of their order in the 12th Century. For an authorized account, the book has moments of uncommon candor. According to Merton, the history of many 17th Century Trappist monasteries “was nothing but a series of petty and sordid intrigues.” Forgotten was the strict, humble, ascetic life once outlined by St. Benedict. “The monks . . . had all the comforts of the upper class, with servants and feather beds in their own private apartments.” By the 18th Century, Trappist novices were having it so nice that “noble and bourgeois families chose such monasteries as refuges for their less talented sons — the ones who did not stand much chance of making a way for themselves in the world.”

Nowadays, U.S. Trappists sleep on boards covered with straw mattresses, follow an iron waking schedule of hard labor, utter silence, arduous prayer and slim rations that begins at 2 a.m. and ends at 7 p.m.

To Author Merton (now Father Louis of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, in Kentucky) such a life seems the surest way to bring a man close to God. What he finds lacking in it is enough time for contemplation. As he complained in The Seven Storey Mountain, “The life is too active . . . too much to do.”

Thomas Merton’s two previous books (Seven Storey and Seeds of Contemplation) have reached bestseller lists. Seven Storey, with its drama of Merton’s inner conflict, conversion and renunciation, has sold more than 270,000 copies and is still selling. It is not likely that Waters of Siloe will hit any such figure, but Merton has put together a brief, lively history of an order that U.S. readers seem curious to hear about.

* In the King James version, Shiloah.