By Thomas Merton.

“Today the first and perhaps the only duty of the philosopher is to defend man against himself: to defend man against that extraordinary temptation toward inhumanity to which—almost without being aware of it—so many human beings today have yielded. —  GABRIEL MARCEL

“As long as I am obsessed with the need to get myself or my work recognized as “incontestable” and “authentic,” I am still under servitude to the myths and anxieties of my society and unable to attain the complete freedom of the artist who chooses his work of art in its own terms and in his, not in those of the market, or of politics, or of philosophy, or of the myth of pure experience, absolute spontaneity, and all the rest…

The following lines were written in reply to nine questions asked by readers of the magazine Eco Contemporaneo, Buenos Aires, and were reprinted in the Lugano Review. I no longer have the questions, but they may be guessed. —Thomas Merton.

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The world is full of poets, novelists, painters, sculptors: they blossom on all the bushes. Who can generalize about them, except perhaps to say that they all tend to start out looking for something that can’t be found merely by selling insurance or automobiles. The problem arises when art ceases to be honest work and becomes instead a way to self-advertisement and success—when the writer or painter uses his art merely to sell himself. (It is an article of faith, in Western society at least, that a poet or painter is by nature “more interesting” than other people and, God knows, everybody wants in the worst way to be interesting!)

2: The artist cannot afford passively to accept, to “reflect” or to celebrate what everybody likes. The artist who subscribes to the commercial slogan that the customer is always right will soon be deserted by everybody. The customer has now been trained to think that the artist is always right.

Thus we have a new situation in which the artist feels himself obligated to function as a prophet or a magician. He sees that he has to be disconcerting, even offensive. Who will ever read him or buy him unless he occasionally insults the customer and all he believes in? That is precisely what the customer wants. He has delegated to the artist the task of non-conforming on his behalf—the task of not conforming with “ordinary decent people.” Where does the artist go from there? In desperation he paints a meticulously accurate portrait of a beer can.

3: The writer who submits to becoming “an engineer of the soul” is in complicity with the secret police—or with the advertising business. He is worse than the policeman who does an honest job of work beating up his prisoner and extracting a confession. The “engineer of the soul” simply dictates routine and trivial testimonials to the rightness of an absurd society without any cost to himself and without need to make use of art in any form whatever. For this he receives certain rewards with which he is content.

4: The artist in uniform. Precisely when does it cease to be respectable to be seen marching with the political police? It is a nice question in countries where, rightly or wrongly, one is considered to be alive only if he is agitating for revolution. Putting the question in another form: how do you know when your revolution has developed sclerosis?

5: Art and ethics. Certainly the artist has no obligation to promulgate ethical lessons any more than political or economic ones. The artist is not a catechist. Usually moral directives are lost when one attempts to convey them in a medium that is not intended to communicate conceptual formulas. But the artist has a moral obligation to maintain his own freedom and his own truth. His art and his life are separable only in theory. The artist cannot be free in his art if he does not have a conscience that warns him when he is acting like a slave in his everyday life.

The artist should preach nothing—not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth—moral, metaphysical, and mystical. The artist has no moral obligation to prove himself one of the elect by systematically standing a traditional moral code on its head.

6: Is the artist necessarily committed to this or that political ideology? No. but he does live in a world where politics are decisive and where political power can destroy his art as well as his life. Hence he is indirectly committed to seek some political solution to problems that endanger the freedom of man. This is the great temptation: there is not a single form of government or social system today that does not in the end seek to manipulate or to coerce the artist in one way or another. In every case the artist should be in complete solidarity with those who are fighting for rights and freedom against inertia, hypocrisy and coercion: e.g. the Negroes in the United States. The American Negroes are at once the ones who fight for their freedom and who exemplify a genuine and living creativity, for example in jazz.

7: “Formalism”—a meaningless cliché devised by literary and artistic gendarmes. It is a term totally devoid of value or significance, as are all the other cultural slogans invented in the police station.

8: I do not consider myself integrated in the war-making society in which I live, but the problem is that this society does consider me integrated in it. 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 the idea of me which they found upon reading my first successful book. 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, and at the same time they continually circulate the rumor that I have left my monastery. What has actually happened is that I have been simply living where I am and developing in my own way without consulting the public about it since it is none of the public’s business.

9: Society benefits when the artist liberates himself from its coercive or seductive pressures. Only when he is obligated to his fellow man in the concrete, rather than to society in the abstract can the artist have anything to say that will be of value to others. His art then becomes accidentally a work of love and justice.

The artist would do well, however, not to concern himself too much with “society” in the abstract or with ideal “commitments.” This has not always been true. It applies more to our time when “society” is in some confusion. It is conceivable that the artist might once again be completely integrated in society as he was in the Middle Ages. Today he is hardly likely to find himself unless he is a non-conformist and a rebel. To say this is neither dangerous nor new. It is what society really expects of its artists. For today the artist has, whether he likes it or not, inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist and bonze.

How could such a man be freer? How can he really “find himself” if he plays a role that society has predetermined for him? The freedom of the artist is to be sought precisely in the choice of his work and not in the choice of the role as “artist” which society asks him to play, for reasons that will always remain very mysterious.

To conclude: the artist must not delude himself that he has an infinite capacity to choose for himself and a moral responsibility to exercise this unlimited choice, especially when it becomes absurd. If he does this, then let him take my word for it, he will find himself with the same problem and in the same quandary as those monks who have vegetated for three centuries in a moral morass of abstract voluntarism. There is a great deal of ambiguity in the facile rationalization which says that even in the worst and most confined of situations you can become perfectly free simply by choosing the situation you are in.

Freedom consists in something more than merely choosing what is forced upon you—and doing so with a certain exultation at the absurdity and the humiliation that are involved. It takes more than this kind of choice to make one “the incontestable author of an event or of an object” (Sartre). At the same time, I wonder if this need to be an incontestable author points to freedom at all. On the contrary, maybe it is one of the roots of un-freedom in the psychology of the modern artist.

As long as I am obsessed with the need to get myself or my work recognized as “incontestable” and “authentic,” I am still under servitude to the myths and anxieties of my society and unable to attain the complete freedom of the artist who chooses his work of art in its own terms and in his, not in those of the market, or of politics, or of philosophy, or of the myth of pure experience, absolute spontaneity, and all the rest.

The impiety of the Sartrian who chooses the ugly, the absurd and the obscene as an act of which he is the “incontestable author” rejoins the piety of the monastic novice who chooses the most arbitrary and most pointless acts of self-mortification in order to see himself as pleasing to God. In either case there is a naive and narcissistic emphasis on the pure voluntaristic choice for its own sake.

The supposed purity of this voluntarism is not purity at all: it is merely abstract willfulness. True artistic freedom can never be a matter of sheer willfulness, or arbitrary posturing. It is the outcome of authentic possibilities, understood and accepted in their own terms, not the refusal of the concrete in favor of the purely “interior.”

In the last analysis, the only valid witness to the artist’s creative freedom is his work itself. The artist builds his own freedom and forms his own artistic conscience, by the work of his hands. Only when the work is finished can he tell whether or not it was done “freely.”

—- from Raids on the Unspeakable, 1966

Thomas Merton OCSO (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968), religious name M. Louis, was an American Trappist monk, theologian, mystic, poet, and social activist. He was a professed member of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky, living there from 1941 to his death.