Today is the 111th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton. Theologian Dan Horan writes:
At this particular moment in history, on this specific anniversary of Merton’s birth, I’m drawn to reflect on a concept Merton introduced in the prologue to his essay collection Raids on the Unspeakable; namely, “the unspeakable.”
A play on the T. S. Eliot’s phrase “Raids on the Inarticulate,” from his Four Quartets, Merton’s notion of “the unspeakable” is intentionally ambiguous and aimed at those phenomena and experiences for which, as the expression goes, there are no words. In the prologue to Raids, he writes:
The Unspeakable. What is this? Surely, an eschatological image. It is the void that we encounter, you and I, underlying the announced programs, the good intentions, the unexampled and universal aspirations for the best of all possible worlds. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss...It is the emptiness of “the end.” Not necessarily the end of the world, but a theological point of no return, a climax of absolute finality in refusal, in equivocation, in disorder, in absurdity, which can be broken open again to truth only by miracle, by the coming of God…for Christian hope begins where every other hope stands frozen stiff before the face of the Unspeakable.
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