Thomas Merton

An Adaptation of the Words of Thomas Merton in a letter to Pablo Antonia Cuadro, Concerning Giants 1963

I have learned that an age in which politicians talk about peace, justice, and security is an age in which everybody expects bloodshed, injustice, and war. The politicians of the earth would not talk of peace and security so much if they did not secretly believe it possible, with one more execution, one more war to annihilate their enemies forever. Always, “after just one more war,” it will dawn, the new era of love: but first, everybody who is hated must be eliminated. For hate, you see, is the mother of their kind of love.

Unfortunately, the love that is to be born out of hate will never be born. Hatred is sterile; it breeds nothing but the image of its own empty fury, its own nothingness. Love cannot come out of emptiness. It is full of reality. Hatred destroys the real being of humanity in fighting the fiction which it calls “the enemy.” For people are concrete and alive, but the “enemy” is a subjective abstraction. A society that kills real people in order to deliver itself from a phantasm of a paranoid delusion is already possessed by the demon of destructiveness because it has made itself incapable of love. It refuses, a priori, to love. It is dedicated not to concrete relations of human with human, but only to abstractions about politics, economics, psychology, and even, sometimes, religion.

-Dan