Heretic Blood: The Spiritual Geography of Thomas Merton

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

Merton (1915–1968) came to public attention in 1946 with the
publication of his best-selling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain,
which portrayed his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Later, as a
Trappist monk, he proved to be a prolific writer of prose and poetry on
topics ranging from moral dilemmas facing the modern world to the
spirituality of Eastern religions. In the decades following his sudden,
unexpected electrocution in Bangkok, Merton has inspired dozens of
authors to write about his life and thoughts, including Higgins,
currently the academic dean and vice-president of St. Jerome’s
University at the University of Waterloo.

Higgins’s book is welcome not just because he appears to have read
and assimilated a huge amount of published primary and secondary
sources, but also because he had access to new sources, including
interviews with those who knew Merton as well as recently released diary
entries and correspondence that reveal, among other things, that later
in his life Merton fell in love with a beautiful nurse. Most important,
Higgins succeeds in explaining the huge inconsistencies and changes in
Merton’s thought and action over his life by interpreting him as
“the William Blake of our time.”

After providing a brief biographical overview of his subject in the
first chapter, Higgins dissects Merton from the four perspectives
supplied by Blake: Instinct (Tharmas), Intellect (Urizen), Emotion
(Luvah), and Wisdom (Urthona). From these perspectives, Higgins
interprets Merton as “The Rebel,” “The Marginal Critic,” “The
Lover,” and “The Wise One,” respectively. While Blake’s
“heretical blood” coursed through his veins throughout his life,
Higgins argues that Merton understood his task as nothing short of the
Blakean undertaking to reintegrate a shattered humanity.

Most of this book is accessible to the nonspecialist, and there are
plenty of excerpts from Merton’s writing, especially his poetry, to
excite the reader. But even Higgins admits that on occasion Merton was
opaque, and regrettably this is reflected in some of Higgins’s own
material (although not, it must be said, in his overall thesis). Heretic
Blood would be best appreciated by those intimately familiar not only
with Merton’s own writing but with Blake’s as well.