By way of introduction

For years I avoided a critical reading or judgment of the Bible and Christian theology. Which is not to say I avoided the subject. Indeed, I read everything from the Bible to Augustine to Otto. I withheld critical commentary out of peer pressure; my parents are deeply religious. In religious conversation I hid behind the critical authors I read, always representing their views in the third person, and never letting on that they represented my own views. Recently I was given Thomas Merton's Mystics and Zen Masters, a text to help me understand Christian mysticism and humanism. Merton was a gifted writer and scholar, and through his writing I did indeed come to better understand Christian morality.

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The Morality of Christ

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Part 1: The Poverty of Christian Humanism

Thomas Merton was a Christian monk who lived and wrote in the early to mid-1900s. A Catholic author of noteworthy influence, he had a gift for analytical writing. While Merton lived from 1915 to 1968 he participated in talks with the Dalai Lama and traveled the world, paying particular attention to the Far East where he studied Zen and Buddhist mysticism.

I admire the breadth of Merton's reading and am somewhat envious of his travel record. I am not, however, impressed by his anti-human and woman-hating philosophies, drawn and inspired by his Christian background.

It is to his credit that he had the intellectual courage to draw the necessary conclusions demanded by Christian thought. Merton, for all his faults, is no coward, nor is he one who distorts his views or the views of others. He shares something with Rudolf Otto, who realized the moral of the story of Job is not that God will reward faith, but that God cannot be described as loving by human standards.

It is sad, though perhaps no fault of Merton's, that his intellectual and literary gifts were perverted by the hateful influence of Christianity. I am sensitive to the fact that Thomas Merton is a man of his time, and it would not be appropriate to judge him by the standards of today. After all, Jefferson owned slaves, and Lincoln himself wrote "I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races." I recognize that sound historical analysis demands that we treat individuals and their views in the context of their own zeitgeist.

Morality and ethics shift, as the civil rights movement so ably illustrates. In his own time, Merton's sympathy for communist philosophy and his disregard for the social equality of women would be unremarkable. It is, however, telling that in defending his most bigoted statements Merton relies not upon contemporary thought, but on ancient Christian texts.

We may excuse as symptoms of his time some of Merton's views, we cannot, however, extend the same excuse to Christian theology and philosophy. Although it too is a product of its time--bronze age barbarism and bigoted superstition--it has self reflectively maintained its nature, enshrined in a holy book purported to be the inspired word of God.

We shall take Merton and his religion at their best, and grant they believe what they say. Merton had the courage to accept what his God told him, and we can find no fault with Merton's accuracy or diligence when he describes the fundamental element of Christian humanism and theology.

Merton devotes a chapter of his text, Mystics and Zen Masters, to Christian humanism. He is quick and concise in describing Christian humanism as defined by a millennia of celebrated scholars, monks, official Saints, and of course the Bible. He details that the fundamental base on which the humanism of Christian theology rests is the concept of the virgin. Merton explains that,

Make-up is a sin against God, and a virgin is what all human persons really ought to be! But that's just the beginning of the grotesque, sexist, anti-human beliefs that are "the full flowering of the theology of the Incarnation" (114).

"But," Merton informs us,

First, note that Merton views the act of erotic sexual intercourse as cruel pain. He has my sympathies. Second, it is grimly ironic that Merton refers to "the ancient world" where women were "the husband's property." It is almost as if he intends to imply that a theology based on a 2,000 year old bronze-age story is separate from "the ancient world." Or, more ominously, maybe he does not intend to divorce Christian marriage from the ancient world at all.

Let us examine Merton's Bible, the source of his Christian humanism. I direct you to I Corinthians 11:3 and 11:8-9. The verses describe how man unto woman is as God unto man. I should have no need to point out the numerous verses and parables where it is made quite clear that man is an object, the property, the creation of God, surviving on His sufferance. Perhaps, at least, I shall mention Job.

But in case the Bible's opinion on women as property isn't clear enough, we can turn to another verse,

But wait, there's more! Ephesians states,

Wow! The Bible says women are to submit to their own husbands in everything! That's an absolute. I guess that means it must be okay for Christian men to force their wives to get raped to death, right? Let's check the Bible, see what it has to say on that exact subject. Oh, you didn’t know the Bible covered a man's right to have his woman gang raped? It's true, it does. Perhaps it is not so ironic that in my experience, those who have most read the Bible are those who are most disgusted by religion.

Turn to Judges 19:24, where a good servant of God, along with his wife (really his concubine, which at the time was like a wife with none of the fidelity restrictions but all of the property-status, hurrah polygamy!), visits a city of infidels. The good servant is given shelter by another follower of the one true God, but when night falls a band of infidels attack! They tell the owner of the house to send out the male stranger, that they may rape him.

The owner of the house, however, will not stand for this. He is a man of God, a follower of the one true Lord of all, and he has the strength and moral courage granted by his faith to stand against such a disgusting demand. Indeed, with great moral fortitude, the owner of the house says,

Yeah! You tell them, brother! They aren't going do no such vile thing as gang rape to your male guest, but they can humble your daughter and rape her until the sun comes up. You're so generous, you'll throw in your guest's wife with the bargain. Do unto others, eh?

But alas, the heathens making the demands were not as civilized as the man of the Good Book, and they refused his generous offer. It appears the oppressed followers of the Lord were at an impasse. But wait! The male guest under threat of rape has a wife. And we know that the wife must submit to the husband to do "everything" he says. Let's see the next verse:

So the infidels refused to rape the man's virgin daughter (hey, even infidels have standards), and then without being asked to the husband ordered his wife to do the duty of gang rape service. It's a good thing he had both a wife and a God who commanded her to submit to her husband, otherwise he could have been in for a rough night. How rough? Well, let's see the next verse:

Note that 'lord' here doesn't refer to God, but to her husband. So the wife was raped until dawn, at which point she collapsed on the doorstep. You might think that the husband would have waited up all night waiting for his wife's safe return. You would be wrong, though. This is a man of the one true Lord, after all, and like Merton he understood woman's proper place. He slept soundly, by all appearances, and after it was full light he, well, let's just see the text:

Ah, he found his wife. He appears to have almost forgotten about her, as he was "out to go his way." Continuing,

Up, woman! Oh, what's that? Can't answer? Well, I'll just put you on our donkey…

Oh, she was silent because she was dead. She was raped to death. At least, we hope she was raped death. Otherwise she was alive for the dismemberment.

But the story continues! The very next verse is interesting, and a key to the whole context of this sordid affair.

Ah yes, this story is being narrated by the husband to an audience of his fellow Israelites, the chosen people of the one true Lord. It seems from the context that this whole story is being viewed as a tragedy, a real crime. "There was no such deed done nor seen" and all that.

The story continues onto Judges 20 as the murderous husband's friends speak their minds. It may or may not surprise you to learn that the gang rape was a cause of tragedy, and judged to be a crime. But not in the way you or I or any modern human with the slightest sense of decency might judge. No, the horrible crime was not that a husband volunteered his wife to be gang raped to save his own skin, nor that the husband then mutilated and desecrated her corpse. No, these actions were accepted and praised for sound judgment. You can practically see the high-fives.

The crime was that the infidels had used the wife too hard, and killed her. This constituted a loss of property(1) and so a genocide was hastily decided upon. A policy decision--kill all the people in the neighboring village!--was immediately accepted as an appropriate course of action. This ex-husband's fellow men had to defend his honor

They ethnically cleanse the entire city where the rapists lived. It's all in the Bible.

For my own part, I rank it is a worse and more evil thing to volunteer one's wife for gang-rape, subsequently defile her corpse, and then use the crime to which one was a party to instigate a genocide. But, oddly enough, the Bible's moral judgment is the exact opposite of mine.

It is not too much a stretch to imagine that Paul justified his disgusting claim that a wife must submit to "everything" from her husband because he read, and understood, the above story. Okay, but that was an Old Testament story, and then just Paul restating it. Paul was kind of a jerk, and not really Jesus Christ. Maybe Christ has a better track record with women.

Let's see, ah yes, Jesus will personally murder the children of a woman who gives birth out of wed-lock. That'll show her to have the proper ceremonies performed! (Rev. 2:22-23). If we accept, as Christianity insists we must, the divinity of Jesus Christ, and that he is fully God, then this following quote can be rightly attributed to Him:

That's God talking, presumably before he split off into Christ. This is pre-Trinity oppression, but I'll be generous and grant that it could well have been Christ himself who made woman the slave of man, and who deliberately and coldly "multiplied" her sorrows.

Let us return now to Merton. He was discussing how, "The virgin was by her consecration liberated by Christ from the tyranny of a pagan of half-converted husband" (115). Very good, Merton. I'm convinced. Although I do hope he won't mind if at this point I call him a raving madman.

But we're not quite done with this anti-humanist monk. His writing is like a train wreck, impossible to not watch. I admit it could be worse. It could be like a biblical gang rape.

"It must not be forgotten," continues Merton, "that the Fathers also saw in virginity the return to the paradisiacal perfection of man's beginning, the recovery of the innocence, the purity, and the familiarity with God for which man was originally created" (115). This doesn't sound too awful. A little saccharine, like a bad Disney knock-off, but alright.

According to Merton,

Wow! We swung right off the deep end there. According to Merton, the "Christian humanism that is the full flowering of the theology of the Incarnation" views sex as a shadow of death, set in direct opposition to personal and spiritual freedom, and of no noteworthy value to the person, but only to human nature (which we assume is 'terrestrial' and dirty). That's quite a claim, but it's awfully negative. Give me something positive, Merton!

There we are! A highest affirmation of human values--that's very positive. And to achieve the highest affirmation of human values one only need be a virgin (and a Christian!). I had never considered that the highest thing to which a human can aspire is to be a virgin. We should bring this good news to China; might help with the population problem.

For my own part, my infidel atheist mind would have pegged something like mercy or compassion or empathy or helping others as being the highest affirmation of human values. I might even say that having sexual intercourse is easily capable of being a high affirmation of human values and aspirations, though perhaps not the highest.

But Merton has anticipated my objection. "If we look closely," he says, "we see that it is always the corrupt pagan society in which human love and honor tend to be debased." (117)

Oh, I see. It's the infidel societies that debase human love, not the Christian society whose most holy and important work, the inspired word of God, prescribes gang-rape as a suitable means for conflict resolution.

The Greatest Immorality is Within the New Testament

I want to say a little more about Merton, because he touches on what I take to be the greatest immorality of Christianity: original sin. This is the ugly concept that the child ought to be punished for the crimes of the father. It has been soundly rejected as barbaric cruelty by every civilized society and philosopher, with the notable exception of Christianity. Today, one could not find a man or woman who would even consider agreeing to convict Hitler's unborn grandchildren of crimes against humanity.

No, no one accepts the concept of original sin, or of sin passing down bloodlines. No one, that is, except Jesus Christ and every Christian you could care to name. Exodus describes the all-loving God as saying that the sins of the fathers will be visited on their children "even unto the third and fourth generation."

Lest we forget, the reason for Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, and our subsequent need to accept him as our savior, is based on the concept of inherited sin. Our sin is original, for something Adam did millennia ago. Because of a failure on Adam's part, thousands of years before we were born, we have been sentenced to death everlasting.

The crucifix which Christians proudly display is a symbol of our redemption--redemption from an inherited sin. This is a grossly immoral concept. Inherited sin is a blight on all that is good, and those who promote it should be deeply ashamed.

Merton adroitly combines this anti-human sentiment with woman-hating sexism by self-ingratiatingly saying,

This is condescending bullshit to the highest degree. Eve is inferior to Adam? And since when do two wrongs make a right? Just because X makes a bigger mistake doesn't absolve Y of any guilt, at least not under any system of morality or ethics a sane human would recognize. But Merton, nothing if not thorough, gleefully adds:

That's a sweet deal, Merton. Women get punished with great pain in childbirth, and that pain absolves men! Cool! But maybe I am misinterpreting Merton. He was an avid reader. A great synthesizer of thought, and he references a lot of other authors in his text. He doesn't always quote people with whom he personally agrees. If only there was a way to tell for certain, oh! Here it is, Merton's commentary on St. Ambrose's words,

That settles that, then. Merton is absolutely right, though, this 'defense of woman' reveals to us exactly the depth and reality of Christian humanism. And the wife in the ancient world was indeed a thing rather than a person, and she was not always treated with gentleness or consideration--a tradition that is fully outlined, realized, and defended in the bronze-age barbaric book upon which 'modern' Christianity is founded.

I will cease here my analysis of Merton on anti-human, anti-woman bigotry, save to note that I have only taken you through half of his chapter on "Virginity and Humanism." The latter half is devoted to young girls. His deranged ravings on this subject, although increasingly revolting, deserve no more consideration, in spite of their continued alignment with Biblical text and modern 'moderate' Christian thought.

(1)Recall that the 10th commandment does not say "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife." That is the politically-correct, bowdlerized version. Open a Bible and check out Exodus 20:17, King James Version. The 10th commandment says "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's property,” of which "wife" is merely one item in a rather long list, and not even the first item at that.