At Home in the World: Thomas Merton and Rosemary Ruether on the Beloved Creation

Abstract

This article examines the exchange of ideas between Merton and Ruether on creation. Merton’s sacramental views and Ruether’s eco-feminist perspectives rooted in an incarnational spirituality can serve as a corrective to those who regard the Earth as an object of consumerism, which leads to the degradation and the desacralization of matter. I will examine how the way out offered by Merton and Ruether reflects an integral eco-spirituality responsive to and in resonance with the supreme reality that permeates everything. As Rosemary Ruether, Sallie McFague, Elizabeth Johnson, and other Christian eco-feminists have described in metaphorical language, the world may be conceived of as a kind of self-giving activity of God’s body in feminine terms. According to this view, a constant birth of life is taking place in a universe ultimately rooted in the cosmic womb of divine love to which Ruether referred as the Great Mother. I will show examples of their writings where both Merton and Ruether highly emphasized the importance of seeing the good creation reflecting God’s love for all creatures. I will conclude by pondering on the ecological implications of their writings, where they address the environmental threats that global warming and climate change caused by humans pose to Mother Earth.

1. Introduction

As Catholic mystics and modern prophets, Merton and Ruether reconciled in their thoughts the apparent tension that exists between divine transcendence and divine immanence, following St. Paul’s eschatological vision of seeing God’s presence “all in all” (1 Cor: 15:28). Their cosmic mystical theology is based on the contemplative idea that the universal Christ as the Pantokrator is present in all things and dwells in each and every sentient and non-sentient being as part of God’s creation. In so doing, Merton’s and Ruether’s panentheistic views can serve as a corrective to both the so-called pantheist problem through divine immanence and the deistic problem through divine transcendence. Merton and Ruether shared a view of both the immanent and the transcendental dimensions of God as integral to the supreme reality that pervades the entire cosmos. To harm nature is a grave moral offense against God, as Pope Francis claims in his encyclical Laudato si’ when he asserts: “this rupture is sin” in reference to a threefold broken relationship, namely, “with God, with our neighbor, and with the earth itself” (66).

Panentheism, a term that is credited to the German philosopher Karl C. F. Krause, holds the view that God is present in everything and everything is present to God. In this particular context, a panentheist maintains that the universe exists in the infinite mind of God without being identical to God. As John Cobb asserts:

God is not the world, and the world is not God. But God includes the world, and the world includes God. God perfects the world, and the world perfects God. There is no world apart from God, and there is no God apart from some world. Of course there are some differences. Whereas no world can exist without God, God can exist without this world. Not only our planet but the whole universe may disappear and be superseded by something else, and God will continue. But since God, like all living things, only perfectly, embodies the principle of internal relations, God’s life depends on there being some world to include.

(Birch and Cobb 1981, pp. 196–97)

Pantheists do not leave room for the transcendental and personal aspects of God that are common characteristics found in deistic dualists. According to Nadja Furlan Stante, pantheism “… asserts that everything is part of a divine unity consisting of an all-encompassing, manifested deity or God/Goddess” (Furlan Stante 2023, p. 1). The author claims that few pantheists have equated God with the universe and that the panentheistic views of Christian ecofeminists like Ruether can be seen as a useful tool for deconstructing the Western Cartesian dualism but only “as the first ‘safe’ phase of transition from Christian anthropocentrism” (Furlan Stante 2023, p. 1). The author concludes in her article with a defense of a pluralist pantheistic evolutionary model for ecofeminist ecotheology as the real alternative to transcendental theism. However, Stante has defined pantheism in a new way by avoiding the total equation of God and nature, and by admitting that pluralist pantheists can embrace both divine transcendence and divine immanent models, which is obviously what the term panentheism fully implies.

In contrast to pantheists, panentheists affirm that God is both immanent and yet transcendent; God is both temporal and yet eternal; God is both moving and yet unmoved: God is both relative l and yet absolute. They also criticize deistic dualists for advocating a God who is totally outside the world. Consequently, panentheists are partakers in the divine life as co-creators, taking full responsibility for their own actions and the fate of the universe. This perspective is what both Merton and Ruether referred to in their writings as building the kingdom of God on Earth. We are called by God to be co-partakers in building the Earth. In sum, the panentheistic model offers a more coherent view of the relationship between God, the universe, and humans. Furthermore, panentheism can then be viewed as a viable solution to the denial of individual freedom as characterized by many pantheistic doctrines and to the unresolvable distance that separates us from God in deistic dualism. Additionally, it recovers the biblical understanding of a merciful, living God, who sees the goodness of creation, sharing the sufferings of all created beings until the end of time as we know it. Also, this perspective incorporates into its philosophical and religious worldview the reality of time and change from an evolutionary standpoint. Full support is given to the sacramental value of nature and a total reverence is displayed for all life, since all life has its origin in God. Finally, the panentheistic model leaves room for human freedom, which is an unfinished business. Everything that happens in the world is not completely determined and influenced by God’s decisions, and humans are called to be co-participants with the divine in building the kingdom of heaven here on Earth. As Joe Holland insightfully writes,

Panentheism differs from Pantheism, which identifies the Divine Mystery only with creation. By contrast, Panentheism perceives the Divine Mystery both as immanently revealed within the depth of creation and as transcending all created reality. Panentheism may also be contrasted with a purely transcendent Theism, which perceives the Divine Mystery as revealed only beyond creation, and with a purely immanent Materialism, which claims there is no transcendence.

(Holland 2017, p. 232)

This article is divided into three parts. First, brief biographical sketches are presented of Merton and Ruether. Second, an examination of the exchange of letters between the Trappist monk and the ecofeminist as part of their historical context is offered to better understand their take on the good creation. And finally, the panentheistic legacy of Merton and Ruether, and how their incarnational views can offer us some alternatives in addressing the contemporary ecological crises facing us today, is explored.

2. Brief Biographical Sketches of Merton and Ruether

Merton never met Ruether in person, although they both exchanged approximately 40 letters from August 1966 to February 1968. Merton was born in Prades, France, in 1915, while Ruether was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1936. The only important understanding they both shared in common is their incarnational and sacramental Catholic view of Merton’s love for creation and Ruether’s love for the Great Mother. The differences between the two of them were great. Merton was living the eremitical life at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, while Ruether was fully active in the political and social activities in the 1960s.

2.1. Merton’s Life

Thomas Merton was born in Prades, France, on 31 January 1915. As Merton wrote in his autobiography, he was born “in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain…” (Merton 1948, p. 3). Interestingly, Merton’s mother kept a record of her son in journals, and it was clear that from an early age, he had a real love for nature experienced as a French boy and later expressed in his spiritual writings and journals. In Merton’s case, the images preserved in his mind of the Pyrenees would remind him in his later years of Prades and France when he traveled to Asia and saw some of the highest mountains in the world.

Merton’s secular life reflects the hedonistic atmosphere of his Cambridge student years living in England, where he left a woman pregnant out of wedlock. And because of this incident, he was forced to move to the United States, and he enrolled to study at Columbia University (1935–1938). This move to North America was crucial in Merton’s own spiritual and intellectual journey because it was there in New York when he encountered a group of professors and students who created the proper environment that led Merton to move from his earlier agnostic beliefs to his full conversion as a Roman Catholic after receiving baptism in the Corpus Christi Church in 1938, The key people who influenced Merton’s conversion were his English literature professor and mentor Mark Van Doren who opened him to read the classical Christian authors, philosophy professor and spiritual confidant Dan Walsh who introduced Merton to the writings of Etienne Gilson and other Thomist Catholic philosophers but, more importantly, he was the one who told Merton about spending time at the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani during a spiritual retreat, and his closer friends and classmates Robert Lax, the poet; Edward Rice, the editor and, later, one of his biographers; Robert Giroux, the publisher at Farrar, Straus & Giroux; and others in his supportive circle of friends, such as Seymour Freedgood, Ad Reinhardt, and Sy Freegood. The spiritual advice that Merton received at Columbia University cannot be forgotten; it was from a visiting Hindu monk, Mahanambrata Brahmachari, who told him to read St. Augustine and other Catholic writers before exploring the great wisdom traditions from Asia. All of them were catalysts in Merton’s spiritual and intellectual development and academic formation. But they were all surprised when Merton decided to become a monk and joined the Strict Order of the Trappists in Kentucky.

It was on 10 December 1941 that Merton entered the Trappist Cistercian Order as a postulant, 1942 was when he became a novice, and 1947 was when he took the final monastic vows. But for our purpose in this article, it was in 1951 when Merton was appointed the forester of the monastery. His major task was to mark those trees that would be cut and to plant new trees with his novices. In his new role, Merton found the freedom to bring his novices with him to the woods by allowing them to have an experience of solitude in the forest where the vestiges of God could be seen through creation. Merton, as a panentheist, saw the divine reflected in all things and developed a sense of cosmic interconnectedness. In 1965, Merton was granted permission to build a hermitage/cabin not far away from the Abbey of Gethsemani so that he could spend more time in solitude listening to God’s voice through the chorus of birds and other species living in the hills of Kentucky. The Trappist monk moved into the hermitage/cabin on 20 August 1965 and lived the eremitical life for the next three years. Merton recalls in his diary:

I know there are trees here, I know there are birds here. I know the birds in fact very well, for there are precise pairs of birds (two each of fifteen or twenty species) living in the immediate area of my cabin. I share this particular place with them: we form an ecological balance. This harmony gives the idea of “place” a new configuration.

(Merton 1981, p. 33)

For Merton, being mindful of the concreteness of living with unique species of birds, snakes, and trees around his cabin setting was part of his integral ecology of living in harmony with other living beings. And this contemplative way of living came out of his deep respect for nature, which is rooted in finding God in all things, like St. Ignatius of Loyola. Both contemplatives saw the vestiges of God’s creation present “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). Merton’s holistic approach to God and nature is revealed through his monastic way of living. In his journals, Merton writes the following in March 1951: “How necessary it is for monks to work in the fields, in the rain, in the sun, in the mud, in the clay, in the wind: These are our spiritual directors and our novice masters. They form our contemplation” (Merton 1996a, p. 450). In this quote Merton recognized the Christian way of stewardship and how an integral part is the work of the monks in the fields of Kentucky with God’s ongoing creation, which Merton’s spiritual vocation extended by forming an ‘ecological balance’ as part of his contemplative way of life. This is to say that there is a symbiotic relationship established between Merton’s own monastic way of life as intimately coexisting with the natural rhythms of God’s creation through nature, as the monks were singing their Psalms inside the chapel by giving glory to the Lord of the universe.

The cosmic or holistic vision of reality that Merton envisioned has been used by other Christian mystics (Griffiths 1989; Panikkar 1993) with different coined terms like theophanies, cosmotheandric experiences, or epiphanies defined as mystical experiences or insights as it was told in Merton’s case during his epiphany passage illustrated in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander while he was walking in the shopping and business district of Louisville and wrote that “[t]here is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun” (Merton 1966, pp. 153–55). And later it was manifested during his pilgrimage trip to Asia after having an aesthetic mystical experience in front of the Buddha statues of Polonnaruwa where Merton confessed to have had a direct revelation “of inner clearness … beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination” (Merton 1973, p. 233) that clarified all that he was looking for in his final journey towards the East.

On 10 December 1968, Merton died near Bangkok, Thailand, while attending a Benedictine monastic conference. Merton suffered censorship from the Trappist Order and also from the Holy Office by Dominican French theologians. Merton was banned from publishing on Christianity and evolution. Merton was accused by some ecclesiastical authorities of various theological errors and heresies, like in the case of de Chardin for being a pantheist. As Robert Weldon Whalen claims, “[b]oth in their day were accused of assorted errors and even downright heresies, both spent much of their religious lives in the ecclesiastical doghouse” (Whalen 2013, p. 147). Unfortunately, the Catholic Church before the Second Vatican Council was reluctant to embrace modern reforms or the teachings of evolution. Merton would not have faced censorship under Pope Francis for his writings on Christianity and evolution.

In his last trip to Congress, Pope Francis gave credit to Thomas Merton for being a Catholic man of dialogue who built bridges between North and South, East and West. Today Merton is celebrated and honored by many Catholic authorities and laypeople as a monk who lived his later life as a hermit surrounded by the woods and all other creatures living near the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani. Even His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama and other non-Christian leaders have visited Merton’s tomb to pay homage to his old friend and spiritual comrade.

The environmental legacy left by Merton of living in harmony with his natural surroundings is worth mentioning. It is well known to Mertonian scholars how Merton knew the names of most species of animals and trees in his local area (Deignan 2003; Weis 2011). This fact alone reminds us of Merton’s love of nature and how, from the time of his conversion, he felt connected to the Franciscans because of their founder, St. Francis of Assisi, who had a special sense of spiritual kinship with all creatures. Unfortunately, Merton’s vocation received a monastic rejection by the Franciscans, but he found in the Trappist brothers a sense of walking with God through and in nature. And in my numerous visits to the Abbey of Gethsemani, I witnessed how the Trappist monks walked in solitude around the Abbey and how they felt connected to God’s creation. Brother Paul Quenon is one great example of a Trappist monk who was a novice under Merton and told many of us visiting the Abbey how influential Merton was in his life and why he has spent the last few decades living and sleeping outside his monastic cell, being exposed to the natural elements. His testimony as a poet, photographer, and mystic of nature is revelatory since Quenon has followed in the footsteps of his novice master, Thomas Merton (also known in the monastic circles as Father Louis because of his French origins).

2.2. Ruether’s Life

Rosemary Radford Ruether was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1936, and she died in a hospital in Pomona, California, on 21 May 2022, at the age of 85 years old. Her Catholic mother gave her confidence in who she was as a woman of faith, while her Episcopalian father instilled in her an ecumenical and more pluralistic worldview that enabled her to excel during her years at Claremont Graduate School in California. In 1965, at the age of 29 years old, Ruether completed her Ph.D. in classics and patristics. During that summer, Ruether went to Beulah, Mississippi, to volunteer with Head Start. It was there when her social and prophetic consciousness was formed and developed after experiencing the frightening violence displayed by members of the Ku Klux Klan when they were driving through the campus of the Delta Ministry in Beulah. After graduation, she moved with her husband Herman and their three children to Washington, DC, where she taught as a faculty member in the historic African American institution Howard University. In August of 1966, Ruether started the correspondence with Merton. She stayed in DC for the next 10 years, teaching at Howard. As an activist she got involved in the Civil Rights movement by addressing the three social evils in the U.S.: racism, poverty, and war or the military–industrial complex, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called them. Ruether spent some time teaching at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, starting her job in 1976 and officially retiring in 2002. She then moved to teach at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley before returning to her beloved doctoral institution at Claremont School of Theology and the Graduate University.

Ruether was not only a well-known ecofeminist but also a Catholic historian, theologian, activist, and mystic seer, who sought a creative synthesis in telling the sacred story of creation from her Catholic faith and the secular creation stories found in the evolutionary science of her time. As a pioneer of the new ecofeminist movement within the Roman Catholic Church, Ruether suffered attacks from some Catholic theologians. For instance, Ruether’s attempt to bring Christianity and evolutionary ideas together threatened the Christian myth of God creating the world in six days, especially when scientific data has shown it took billions of years for the Earth to come into existence. Yet the most important accusation raised by Catholics against Ruether was that she was a pantheist because she identified God with the world as the divine feminine. Her emphasis on divine immanence got her in trouble with some Catholic doctrinaires, especially the most conservative circles in Washington, DC. Ruether was called by HLI Reports “a feminist pagan wearing the mask of a Catholic” because in her research on ecofeminism, she cited the pagan sources of Christianity (Human Life International 1994). In response to this accusation, Ruether herself categorically denied that she was a pantheist or a pagan in many of her writings. Ruether’s panentheistic solution offers a way out of simplistic notions where the person, the world, and God are reduced to mere objects of a particular system of thought.

Ruether’s major theological contribution lies in her efforts to renew Christianity from within using a humanistic and ecofeminist framework in which human beings are called to participate in the evolutionary process of the universe by cooperating with the Great Mother as the embodiment of the cosmic body of God. Ruether’s ecofeminist critique of patriarchal institutions like the Catholic Church was the real issue in her controversy with some Catholic authorities. It is quite interesting that Ruether never taught in Catholic universities. In so doing, Ruether avoided the ecclesiastical censorship that Merton endured. She found more academic freedom doing her doctoral dissertation at Claremont Graduate School and teaching at Howard University in DC before she returned to spend her last years teaching at Claremont. Ruether put into question some of the dogmatic interpretations by the Catholic Church, from who God is to the doctrine of original sin.

Ruether’s love for the Catholic Church was shared by Merton, even though both of them came from different perspectives. Merton was following the more traditional and orthodox Catholic mystical theological tradition, while Ruether was more radical in her theological ecofeminist views and adopted a process theology from Claremont intellectuals (Birch and Cobb 1981). Ruether’s major contribution to the Catholic Church was to bring her closer to the modern ecofeminist language of seeing God as the Great Mother and not to be afraid of the role of women within the Church. As she often professed, the oppression of Mother Earth is metaphorically understood to be similar to the oppression that women faced. As she poignantly declares, “Domination of women has provided a key link, both socially and symbolically, to the domination of earth, hence the tendency in patriarchal cultures to link women with earth, matter, and nature, while identifying males with sky, intellect, and transcendent spirit” (R. R. Ruether 1994, p. 3). Thus, Ruether’s spirituality of resistance to patriarchal structures and her communitarian sense of belonging at home in the world give her a prophetic and mature voice within the Catholic Church as a lay intellectual woman and as a theologian.

Merton saw the genius of Ruether, who was able to combine the best ecofeminist insights of her day with her mystical revelations received in her twenties. In her autobiographical book, Ruether writes: “At some point I had a vivid experience, something like a dream or visual hallucination … I sensed that inside was the throne room of God … With great excitement and nervousness I threw open this door and saw inside a great room with a throne, but the throne was empty” (R. R. Ruether 2013, p. 18). Ruether’s theological interpretation of the vision reminds one of the Spanish Carmelite St. Teresa of Avila. But in Ruether’s case she added to her symbolism an ecofeminist terminology by describing God as the Great Mother or Holy Wisdom. For Ruether, God was envisioned as a nurturing energy that pervades all in all. And once she entered the great room, the throne was empty, meaning that God cannot be seen or be grasped as an object. This could explain why Ruether was reluctant to use different images to define God and why she rejected the patriarchal imagery of God as divine transcendence. And instead, Ruether developed her process theology of divine immanence.

Like the apophatic mysticism of Merton, Ruether’s vision of the divine is beyond words, but her preference as an ecofeminist is to use the model of God as the divine feminine; that is to say, Ruether experienced God as a loving, nurturing energy that is closer to the metaphorical language of motherhood. As Jim Robinson states, “Rosemary Radford Ruether had one such mystical experience in her twenties … The impact can be sensed in her deeply prophetic resistance to the status quo, which emerges throughout her scholarship and activism” (Jim Robinson 2023, p. 31). In her later years, one can see how relevant it was for Ruether to interpret her own mystical experience when she approached the famous mystical visions of Hildegard of Bingen or Julian of Norwich, understood this time as being mystical revelations coming from God directly. In a chapter of a book titled What I Find Liberating in Christianity, Ruether writes the following: “Christian women mystics maintained the Jewish tradition of God as female -personified Wisdom … Julian’s writings represent the flowering in Medieval women’s mysticism of this fluid and gender-inclusive understanding of God” (Gross and Ruether 2001, p. 127). This response by Ruether offered a prophetic and liberationist perspective which she claimed “was partially present in Christianity’s beginnings as a subversive movement” (Gross and Ruether 2001, p. 126). Here, Ruether emphasized that God stands on the side of the oppressed and, through the prophets, denounced the social injustices and proclaimed a new heaven and a new Earth to come.

Ruether’s mystical approach is aligned with the long apophatic mystical theology of medieval times. As Ruether says: “The via negativa or apophatic theology in Christian tradition emphasized the need to deny the appropriateness of all our images for God in order to express God’s transcendence” (Gross and Ruether 2001, p. 137). In this way, Ruether’s inner vision in her twenties corroborated what she later studied using the Christian women mystics. However, during the medieval era, Ruether saw the powerful testaments of Christian women mystics and wrote a book about their lives and writings. In it, Ruether declares that “[s]uch a range of female symbolism belongs more to the mystical than the scholastic tradition and was particularly developed by women mystics” (R. R. Ruether 2002, p. viii). With the help of Popes, prelates, and other powerful male authorities, these women mystics were validated and allowed to share their mystical visions and prophetic voices with their religious communities. These revelatory visions gave them the status of being prophetic writers by covering a wide range of theological topics. But their prophetic authority was only seen as a vehicle of divine grace, which created a dual perspective. One is that as a woman, she is inferior to men because of the fall, but as a messenger of God, she has the authority of the heavens and she is encouraged to speak on behalf of God to humanity, showing her confidence and trust in God’s voice speaking through her.

Thus, Ruether’s skills as a historian, social critic, and feminist theologian allowed her to add more perspectives to her mystical impetus and to her social transformative praxis that led her to work with African American minorities and other destitute groups of women who were treated like the ancient anawim in the biblical tradition. So, we can infer from Ruether’s recounts of her inner vision when she was in her twenties that this mystical experience was not only transformative but also formative. In her autobiography, Ruether later reflected on how her inner experience influenced her theological journey. Unlike other classical texts in mysticism (James 1902; Underhill 1911; Otto 1923; Stace 1960; Smart 1969; Turner 1995; McGinn 2006) where the goal is to become one with a transcendental deity (often described as the Absolute), Ruether’s mystical vision is more down to earth, more incarnational, and more immanent in that she grounded her later activism and academic career to ecofeminist and liberationist movements.

Merton understood the shortcomings of Ruether, like Martin Marty, who in their effort to cope with modernity had fallen into the trap of the activism era of the 1960s by ignoring the rich contemplative and monastic resources that Merton was trying to recover. In 1965, Marty criticized Merton in a book review of Seeds of Destruction which was published in the New York Herald Tribune by stating that Merton’s monastic withdrawal from political and social activism was like hiding behind the monastery walls and his monastic vows (Marty 1965, p. 4). The letter of apology that Marty wrote to Merton after having criticized the Trappist monk for choosing to live in a monastic setting is well known in Mertonian circles. Marty, a Protestant historian, was biased in his criticism of Merton’s monastic withdrawal, and he apologized in a letter to Merton and did so in public for his shortcomings.

Merton’s response to both Ruether and Marty is one of contextualizing the contemplative monastic tradition that requires him to live within the monastic walls at the Abbey of Gethsemani. Yet, Merton’s argument is that he has made his monastic life a prophetic statement; that is to say, by becoming a monk, he renounced the social injustices of the world, and he bore witness to truth, justice, and love from this particular monastic context. This is why Merton wrote many books and articles combining both the contemplative life and the active life (Merton 1961, 1998). In Merton’s view, both Mary and Martha went hand in hand as living metaphors of the mixed life where contemplation and action form two integral parts of the Christian life. Merton, like Ruether, brought fresh air to a Church in need of an aggiornamento. Their shared mystical insights and prophetic witnesses served as a bridge between the traditionalist views of the Catholic Church and the modern views they both embraced from the arts and humanities to the sciences. Their incarnational and sacramental views of creation served them well in their effort to reconcile the Church with the modern world.

3. The Exchange of Letters Between Merton and Ruether

Although it is true that the exchange of letters between Merton and Ruether was not one of the longest, we can nonetheless attest to the intensity of their existential dialogue, where the two of them started from their unique worldviews but gradually reconciled their differences and worked together to make the world a better and safer place to live. The correspondence of almost 40 letters started in August 1966 and ended in February 1968. We find their original correspondence in Hidden Ground of Love (497–516), but later, in 1995, Mary Tardiff edited this collection of letters in her book At Home in the World (Tardiff 1995, pp. 8–9). The friendship began when Ruether was a doctoral student at Claremont. She knew Merton was a well-known Catholic monk and the author of many books and articles and asked him for feedback, since her new book, The Church Against Itself, was almost ready to be published. Ruether saw this potential exchange of ideas with a Catholic thinker as an opportunity for both of them to address important ecclesial issues, from authority to the roles of women to the renewal of the monastic traditions. Clearly, the exchange of letters brought a level of intellectual tension to the fore when she challenged him to leave the monastic life and join the active life of protests and resistance in urban areas where the real battles, she thought, were fought. But Merton, though feeling uncomfortable with her honest critique, was nonetheless firm in his conviction that the monastic tradition was the real place for him. As Patrick W. Collins observes:

For Merton the hermit life was lived in ever deepening communion of love and compassion with the whole world. “… a hermit today is not all that isolated, with letters, planes coming down this way, and so on. I think I am probably much more in communication with people all over the place, all over the world, than most active lifers are. So much for the treetop: but I don’t deny the water sounds fine where you are …”

(Ruether, 5.5.67 HGL 511) (Collins 2021, p. 126)

Merton was receptive to Ruether’s critiques, but he offered Ruether a different way to look at the monastic spiritual traditions as communities of resistance, not as places to escape from the world in the manner of fugi mundi or contemptus mundi. In the words of Brennan R. Hill,

Merton came to see that it was only in embracing the world that the Creator could be found … Merton’s faith revealed to him not a world to be denied or escaped but a world that was a “new creation” where God still walked with human beings. Merton believed that the contemplative’s role was to help the technological person of our time regain a respect for self and for the integrity of the world … An environmental spirituality reclaims the notion that the earth, its resources, and all living things are reflections of God’s goodness, and must therefore be treated with respect and care … All creation is perceived to be charged with divine energy. This spirituality, like the prophets and psalmists, will praise, glorify, and thank the Creator for the earth and all living things.

(Hill 1998, p. 255)

The real exchange of ideas between Merton and Ruether brought them together as equal partners in their attempt to make sense of their being at home in the world. Merton listened to her while she also learned from him as a mature Catholic visionary who, like her, was hungry to see the Church move towards a more accepting, loving, and caring community of believers and practitioners. For Ruether, liberation theology was the historical context for her resistance. For Merton, this movement was not too foreign to him. The Trappist monk had befriended Ernesto Cardenal and many other liberation theologians from Latin America. What was new to Merton was her ecofeminist approach of radically challenging the patriarchal structures and offering Merton an alternative to his isolated rural environment. But Merton responded to Ruether’s criticism with a compassionate message that he as a monk was resisting against the wild forces of consumerism, materialism, and militarism from the woods of Kentucky, joining the chorus of poets, peacemakers, and troublemakers who were working together to build a new future for the Earth.

Ruether wrote to Merton her first letter addressing the work of the French theologian Gabriel Vahanian. Merton was well versed in the French Catholic tradition, knowing the language as well as the intellectual and monastic traditions of France, his birthplace country. As James Robinson points out, “Ruether advances a critique of the ways in which the institutional Church has co-opted and domesticated the living God, replacing the infinite Creator with an idol of power” (James Robinson 2021, p. 124). Merton’s response, sent on August 18, 1966, asked her for more material to be sent to him, and he would send her his essay on “Christian Humanism.” What we know is that both of them trusted their gut feelings of seeing the other as a spiritual comrade, and Merton, a priest and author, treated her as an equal partner and friend. He saw her full capacity as a theologian and as a historian of the Church, while Ruether saw in him a Catholic monk and priest who she could trust and who was not concerned about matters of authority and patriarchal behavior. Throughout their exchange of letters, we see their development: first, it is defined by competitive forces working in them based on their expectations and assumptions, but later, the dialogue moves on to greater levels of trust based on mutual love, respect, and care.

Like Merton always did with many of his correspondents, the exchange of letters between him and Ruether started with a formal greeting (Father Louis or Father Merton), but once he and Ruether felt the spiritual friendship had been established, they called each other by their first names (Thomas Merton, Thomas, Tom, and by the end of their correspondence, she called him Dear Brother—letter dated late December 1967). The spiritual development of their friendship goes hand in hand with their initial greetings. This proves the dynamic relationship that existed between the two, moving from a more tense dialogue to a more intimate one. First, we find Ruether’s harsh critique of Merton’s monastic vocation living in a rural environment as a permanent commitment to a patriarchal structure. “For Ruether, the institutional structure serves as a vehicle for transmitting a set of traditions about a reality that is actively happening, but that is not exclusively or even centrally happening within the space of the institution; and that reality is ‘God’s constant renewal of His good creation’”

(James Robinson 2021, p. 125).

In a letter dated 9 March 1967, Merton’s emotional and visceral response is reflected in the following words:

But honestly, your view of monasticism is, to me, so abstract and so, in a way, arbitrary … that it is simply poles apart from the existential, concrete, human dimension which the problem has for us here … I am so far from being “an ascetic” that I am in many ways an anti-ascetic humanist, and one of the things in monasticism that has always meant most to me is that monastic life is in closer contact with God’s good creation and is in many ways simpler, saner, and more human than life in the supposedly comfortable, pleasurable world. One of the things that I love about my life, and, therefore, one of the reasons why I would not change it for anything, is the fact that I live in the woods and according to a tempo of sun and moon and season in which it is naturally easy and possible to walk in God’s light, so to speak, in and through his creation … All you do is breathe and look around and wash dishes, type, etc. or just listen to the birds.

(Tardiff 1995, p. 34)

Merton’s apologetic answer to Ruether’s letters demonstrates his love for the rich contemplative monastic life, and more importantly, his new eremitic lifestyle that allows him to have more freedom, more solitude, and more clarity to experience God’s good creation. Furthermore, Merton writes the following:

You ought to know what hundreds of pine saplings I have planted, myself and with the novices, only to see them bulldozed by some ass a year later. In a word, to my mind the monk is one of those who not only saves the world in the theological sense, but saves it literally, protecting it against the destructiveness of the rampaging city of greed, war, etc. And this loving care for natural creatures becomes, in some sense, a warrant of this theological mission and ministry as a man of contemplation.

(Tardiff 1995, p. 35)

For Merton, the true contemplative life “is simply the restoration of man, in Christ, to the state in which he was originally intended to live” (Tardiff 1995, p. 35). This of course presents certain problems but Merton believed that the authentic contemplative rooted in the desert tradition lives in the midst of the biblical proclamation of a new heaven and a new Earth. This new creation takes precedence over the greedy, consumeristic, and militaristic society in which one existentially lives by seeing the presence of God all in all.

In a letter dated Mid-March, 1967, Ruether replied to Merton by offering a counter argument:

As to your last remarks, basically I also take the paradise tradition, the restoration of creation as my understanding of redemption and far from thinking the talk of tame lions is not good theology, I think it is the very best theology! However, that monasticism got mixed up with anti-matter theology and hence got involved in a fearful ambiguity towards creation is something that we don’t have to dispute about … It seems to me that a paradise tradition that is mixed up with agrarian romanticism fails to take the principalities and powers seriously enough … In short, I think a theology of opposition to the principalities and powers and a bringing of paradise out of the wilderness is a theology on which we can both adhere, but I think we do disagree as to what this means.

(Tardiff 1995, pp. 39–41)

Merton returned to his defense of monasticism by calling Ruether “a very academic, cerebral, abstract type. You talk about God’s good creation, the goodness of the body and all that, but I wonder if you have any realization at all of the fact that by working on the land a person is deeply and sensually involved with matter” (Tardiff 1995, p. 43). Merton’s resentment can be explained in the context of his mother’s cerebral type. In a letter dated 21 March 1967, Ruether tells Merton how disappointed she was with him and how defensive he was. She writes: “Sorry you find me so abstract. If I weren’t a woman would it have occurred to you to accuse me of being cerebral. Interesting resentment there … I am just as fleshy as you, baby, and I am also just as much a ‘thinking animal’ as you” (Tardiff 1995, p. 49). After reading this response, Merton acknowledged that he did not know “why you frighten me so. (“cerebral” probably because I resented my mother’s intellectuality or what I later interpreted as that) (Tardiff 1995, pp. 50–51). In a subsequent letter dated 27 March 1967, the Trappist monk apologized to Ruether by citing that the tone of her letter was reminiscent of his “mother’s cold intellectualism which I hated and which made life difficult for me as a child” (Tardiff 1995, p. 49). From that moment on, the dialogue shifted from a position of intellectual disputes to a more intimate, vulnerable, and compassionate quest for truth.

One can see how Merton embraced some of Ruether’s critiques and wrestled with them until his last days while Ruether had to do some soul searching and saw the validity of healthy contemplative and monastic lifestyles that Merton was fully embracing and working on in his attempt to renew the monastic structures at his home monastic institution in Kentucky and around the globe. In this sense alone, this author firmly believed the two of them found a common ground of being at home in the world, although they both share some unfinished business in terms of profound disagreements between the contemplative life and the active life. Perhaps Merton was stressing Mary more as the ideal contemplative life while Ruether was putting more emphasis in being Martha. But both Merton and Ruether agree on the mixed life where Mary and Martha were sisters and they must go hand in hand. As Patrick F. O’Connell states in his Introduction to an article written by Ruether herself five years after Merton’s death, which is found in Christianity and Crisis, it seems that Ruether had a more positive assessment of Merton’s monastic vision of renewal and of being at home in the world as a marginal prophet and hermit. He writes:

Perhaps owing to a more detailed acquaintance with Merton’s seminal role as mentor, conscience and inspiration of the Catholic peace movement of the 1960s, Ruether provides here a much more positive evaluation of Merton and monasticism than that found in the correspondence. At least at this point, without ignoring what she considers to be its limitations, she shows herself to be receptive to Merton’s commitment to maintaining a “marginal” position, literally and figuratively, in relation to both church and secular society, as a standpoint that can provide needed wisdom regarding the needs and hopes of both.

(R. Ruether 2022, pp. 74–75)

In sum, Ruether’s critique against the Maniquean monasticism of the past is rooted, in her final analysis, in that this type of Christianity is bad theology and extremely harmful to creation and to all her creatures. The theological dualism that causes the divorce between spirit and matter elevating a heavenly realm above that which it is earthly is in Ruether’s ecofeminist view the heart of the matter of our ecological crisis. This is why she stresses the importance of recovering the divine immanence of process theologians after having studied and taught at Claremont. But more urgently Ruether is advocating for a radical ecofeminist perspective that can serve the antidote to a static and harmful patriarchal society that is promoting the destruction of God’s good creation.

When many Christians were looking to go to heaven as our true home in the afterlife, both Ruether and Merton are calling us to feel at home in the world and see the grandeur of God’s cosmic mysteries dwelling in each part of our universe. As Christine Bochen says in her Afterword, Merton was open to Ruether’s criticism of monasticism but he tried very hard to persuade her that the contemplative life he lived in his hermitage was the place for him of “being at home in the world” (Tardiff 1995, p. 105). Both Ruether and Merton found in their critique of these modern crises the presence of a dualistic mindset in humans that is destroying the ecological balance. As Susan McCaslin rightly points out: “For me, the issue that unites them becomes a question: what are we doing individually and collectively to alter our destructive relationship to each other and to planet Earth at this time?” (McCaslin 2022, p. 25) Ruether’s ecofeminist approach serves as a good critique of Merton’s own contemplative-monastic vision. It is a call to action. Merton answered this critique by getting more socially immersed in the political and ecological crises of his time. His contemplative answer was not of an escapism from the world (fugi mundi). Rather, it was a prophetic stance to be at home in the world. This idea promotes the right balance of cultivating inner freedom and of working towards building a better world in which we all can live more peacefully. This is, in Christian terms, what we may call the spiritual kingdom found within and the kingdom that is at hand in the realm of everyday life.

4. Thomas Merton and Rosemary Ruether on Panentheism

Merton’s appreciation for Ruether’s work is well corroborated throughout their two-year correspondence. The Trappist monk sees in Ruether’s prophetic voice an important bridge builder between ecofeminism and traditional religion. Merton shows his great respect and admiration for Ruether. Merton saw the genius of Ruether’s eco-visionary ideas. Merton knew that Ruether was looking at the Great Mother from an ecofeminist perspective, where the divine feminine can be seen as the whole world of matter moving closer to the final eschatological Parousia, or the ultimate end of creation as finding God all in all.

4.1. Thomas Merton on Panentheism

The goal of the Christian mystic is to become God by participation so that the contemplative can share the fruits of his or her mystical experience or insight with others by becoming a messenger of God on earth. For Merton, mystical contemplation is in its broadest form infused contemplation (or the dark night of St. John of the Cross as mystical theology) which is a gift from God given to the human soul as a pure gift. Thus, Merton defines Christian contemplation “as an experiential contact with God, in and through Christ, beyond all knowledge, in the darkness of the mystery of divine charity, in ‘unknowing’” (Merton 2004, p. 42). Merton did prefer to use the word ‘contemplation’ than mysticism because mystical experiences are sometimes associated with all sorts of pseudo-religious experiences. However, he used ‘contemplative’ and ‘mysticism’ interchangeably. In fact, Merton wrote several books and articles using the term ‘mysticism’, such as in Mystics and Zen Masters, in a posthumous collection of lectures titled Christian Mysticism: A New Testament View, and in dozens of essays using mysticism in the title.

Merton, as a follower of the long and rich Catholic tradition of mystical theology from Pseudo-Dionysius to the present day, saw the urgent need of the contemplative mystic to search for divine truth as ultimate reality. God and truth are interchangeable, as it was in the case of Merton and Gandhi. One arrives not through clear concepts and ideas of God, but rather through a loving knowledge of God that is beyond words. It can only be grasped through a direct encounter with the living God. This mystical experience is apophatic and sapiential because there is no object to be seen, yet the experience is personal and transformative and brings a loving wisdom to the person who received this divine gift. For Merton, “Contemplation is a supernatural love and knowledge of God, simple and obscure, infused by Him into the summit of the soul, giving it a direct and experimental contact with Him. Mystical contemplation is an intuition of God born out of pure love” (Merton 2004, p. 73). This definition encapsulates Merton’s own development with the terms ‘contemplation’ and ‘mysticism’.

In sum, a true contemplative in its highest form is a mystic who has an immediate and direct contact with God. In mystical theology, there are two models of contemplation: one is the so-called acquired contemplation and the other model is called infused contemplation. Acquired contemplation can only prepare the person to know through intuition and human effort what ultimate reality is. But it is through infused contemplation as the free gift of grace in the human soul that frees the person from all anxieties, and as a result, the contemplative mystic reaches a sense of trust in the unknowing of God by resting in Him while experiencing the great mysteries of life in the here and now. This is what Merton meant by paradise consciousness. One lives in the presence of God by performing each task day by day. Like in Zen Buddhism, the ordinary life becomes extraordinary. The secular becomes the sacred. There is no ultimate separation between the contemplative life and the active life. All dualisms are transcended by this living contact with the infinite source of life.

For Merton, no doctrine will bring salvation to human souls without following the work of Christ in building the heavenly kingdom here on Earth. Thus, Merton’s eschatological vision is highly trinitarian, and it requires the participation of building a new creation in and through Christ. As Merton expressed in his essay “The Climate of Mercy”: “To receive mercy and to give it is, then, to participate, a son of the Father, in the work of the new creation and of redemption. It is to share in the eschatological fulfillment of the work of Christ and in the establishment of the kingdom” (Merton 1985, p. 204). In other words, we all participate in the divine life since we are all sons of God through Christ. Merton’s panentheistic mystical theology is firmly rooted in the Pauline recapitulation of all things in Christ. As Merton claims, “Let me seek, then, the gift of silence and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all” (Merton 1958, p. 94). Merton’s biblical reference to St. Paul can be found in 1 Corinthians 15:28, which is at the core of an authentic panentheism put into action, as the famous Merton Prayer illustrates. So, why should contemplation matter to us in addressing our ecological crises? Merton saw the real need to recover the lost contemplative wisdom of the ancient monastic traditions, following the best spirit of renewal during the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). In a journal dated 6 June 1963, Merton enumerates certain guidelines to follow to cope with the modern challenges of his day; among them is the following:

Importance of a tradition that opens out in full continuity into a wisdom capable of understanding the mystery of the contemporary world in the light of theoria. I.E.—Sensitivity on the issue of peace, racial justice, but also technology, and the great spiritual problem of the profound disturbance of ecology all over the world, the tragic waste and spoilage of natural resources etc.

(Merton 1996b, p. 330)

According to Daniel P. Horan, the ecological development of Merton’s consciousness takes place early on in his life. Furthermore, “Merton’s paradise consciousness, awareness of God’s created vestiges, and celebration of humanity’s kinship with all of creation bear a remarkable resemblance to and are, in part, indebted to the Franciscan spiritual and theological tradition” (Horan 2014, p. 155). In addition to this early Franciscan influence in Merton, other Mertonian scholars (Pramuk 2009; Weis 2011) have noticed the ecological development found in Merton, especially in his treatment of a holistic or integral ecology which parallels the contemporary efforts by the Vatican to address the ecological crises, as it is often cited by Pope Francis in Laudato si’ and his followers (including the recent elected Pope Leo XIV who became Pope on 8 May 2025 and has continued the same line of arguments exercised by Pope Francis).

As Andrew Prevot points out,

Daniel Horan discusses what he calls Merton’s “paradise consciousness”—hat is, Merton’s contemplative awareness of divine goodness and beauty in the natural world—and argues that it is connected with St. Francis’ celebration of other creatures, not as instruments to be used for human benefit but as brothers and sisters. Fraternal love is ecological. Christopher Pramuk draws inspiration from Merton’s 1968 journal called Woods, Shore, Desert, which contains vivid accounts and photographs of his natural surroundings as he traveled through California and New Mexico, and Pramuk associates Merton closely with Pope Francis’s teachings on ‘integral ecology” in Laudato si’. Monica Weis explains how Merton’s 1963 exchange with Rachel Carson, the environmentalist author of Silent Spring, helped him grow in his love of the natural world, and his awareness of the threats it faced from chemicals such as DDT and from larger technocratic forces. Contemplation ought to help us experience our inner oneness and interdependence, not only with other human beings who differ from us racially, but also with the whole of creation.

(Prevot 2021, pp. 52–53)

In January 1963, Merton read Carson’s Silent Spring (the book was published in 1962, although Carson started to write the book in 1958 at the age of 50). Merton probably felt guilty because the Trappist monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky had been using DDT pesticide in their fields. As a result, Merton became more interested in developing an ecological conscience within his monastic tradition, but also had an influence on broader society.

It is clear from the letter that Merton wrote to Rachel Carson how the author of Silent Spring helped Merton better understand the root causes of our poisoning the Earth, the water, and the air with chemicals. Merton was well aware of this extinction problem. As Kathleen Deignan quotes from Merton’s journals: “A phenomenal number of species of animals and birds have become extinct in the last fifty years—due of course to man’s irruption into ecology. There was still a covey of quail around here in early fall. Now I don’t hear a single whistle, or hear a wing beat” (Deignan 2003, p. 48). Moreover, Julie L. Pycior says, “At a time when the environmental movement was in its infancy—and, if noted at all, was widely seen as unrealistic and a threat to American jobs—this monk deep in the Kentucky woods declared that the crime of environmental degradation was, in fact, a sin” (Pycior 2020, p. 129). Or, as Gordon Oyer put it so well:

Carson helped him more clearly see how our assault on nature for economic gain and persona ease reflected more than an isolated sin against God and God’s creation. He came to see how it expressed the same self-destructive assault on life confronted in his Cold War writings. Her book’s impact remained with him. In “The Wild Places,” he invoked it to underscore human blindness to their own actions: “When people like Rachel Carson try to suggest that our capacity to poison the nature around us is some indication of a sickness in ourselves, we dismiss them as fanatics.”

(Oyer 2021, pp. 230–31)

For Merton, contemplation can help us gain new spiritual insights and can expand our sense of cosmic interconnectedness through the radical love for all creation and her creatures. Without attaining this inner contemplative clarity of being at home in the world, we cannot save Mother Earth from future extinctions. “The forms and individual characters of living and growing things, of inanimate beings, of animals and flowers and all nature, constitute their holiness in the sight of God” (Deignan 2003, p. 49). This new holistic approach to ecology made Merton a pioneer in addressing the environmental sins of his time, but the way he did it was through seeing all life as sacred. As Monica Weis says,

Citing Albert Schweitzer and Aldo Leopold as appropriate spokespersons for environmental integrity, Merton reminds Hubbard of Schweitzer’s maxim: “Life is sacred … that of plants and animals [as well as of our] fellow man”; he includes, as well, Leopold’s “expansion of the Golden rule” in his definition of an ecological conscience … Surely, Thomas Merton was ahead of his time in challenging us to adopt Aldo Leopold’s concept of an ecological conscience. Truth to be told, Leopold’s principles for ethical land use eventually became the blueprint for U.S. federal environmental legislation in the 1980s and 1990s. But laws can easily be disregarded and principles forgotten.

(Weis 2011, pp. 151–52)

Merton read the works of Schweitzer and of Leopold, and integrated their thoughts into his eco-spiritual theology. Clearly, Merton is a panentheist as he leaves room in his mystical theology to experience the sacred, manifesting the transformative power in his innermost being through partaking in divine transcendence and in divine immanence. Merton talks about having a personal relationship with God, who is the center of his life and all life in general. There is no dissolution or annihilation of the self in God. In this regard, Merton shares the Christian humanistic appreciation of Ruether. This is in line with the rich Cosmic Christ tradition found in Christianity and now being renewed by creation-centered theologians such as Matthew Fox, Thomas Berry, Sallie McFague, and Elizabeth A. Johnson. For Fox, “[t]he Cosmic Christ is alive and well in Merton’s theology, and he recognized both its personal and its social implications” (Fox 2016, p. 233). In doing so, Merton can reach out to other eco-thinkers who share this cosmic vision of reality.

Our failure to understand the way nature works as a living organism and as a single reality blinds us from the possibility of living a way of life in full communion with Mother Earth, as the cosmic embodiment of the divine feminine. We cannot save the Earth as separate units or fragments. We need to recover the lost tradition of reverence for all life as being sacred. As Berry often says: “That the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects is the central commitment of the Ecozoic” (Swimme and Berry 1992, p. 243). Furthermore, Berry notes the following:

The rise of movements such as feminism and ecofeminism has already altered all the basic professions and social institutions throughout the industrialized countries of the world. As this participation increases throughout the world, as women are liberated from the oppressions they have long endured, as women reach new levels of personal fulfillment, a new energy will undoubtedly be felt throughout the Earth.

(Swimme and Berry 1992, p. 257)

This urgent message of Berry is the one that resonates with Ruether and Sallie McFague, among other ecofeminist thinkers and activists. As McFague prophetically put it:

Climate change, quite simply, is the issue of the twenty-first century. It is not one issue among many but … it is warning us that the way we are living on our planet is causing us to head for disaster: We must change. All of the other issues we care about—social justice, peace, prosperity, freedom—cannot occur unless our planet is healthy.

(McFague 2008, p. 14)

It is clear from these eco-visionaries and thinkers that the role of women is a call to action. Women may help us recover our harmonious relationship with the Earth community by co-partaking in building the future of the Earth. This is why Merton’s panentheism connects with Christian ecofeminists such as Ruether and McFague. Merton embraced the divine feminine presence of God in the universe.

For Merton, the Universal-Cosmic Christ (or the Pantokrator) is at the heart of creation. God is present everywhere, from the tiniest atoms to the greatest galaxies. Merton experiences Christ as the ultimate cosmic fire that hides and reveals the sacred wholeness of Hagia Sophia (or Divine Wisdom) throughout the cosmos. Merton knew well that the fullness of God cannot be understood without taking into consideration the feminine dimension of the Divine as Hagia Sophia. Merton was contemplating this ecofeminist language in early 1955 when he was visiting Viktor Hammer, an Austrian artist living in Kentucky. Years later, in a letter Merton wrote to Hammer dated May 1959, Merton tells his friend the following:

The first thing to be said of course is that Hagia Sophia is God Himself. God is not only Father but a Mother. He is both at the same time, and it is the “feminine aspect” or “feminine principle” in the divinity that is the Hagia Sophia … to ignore this distinction is to lose touch with the fullness of God.

(Merton 1994, p. 4)

His famous prose poem, written in 1962, celebrates this hidden wholeness of Divine Wisdom. Following the monastic liturgy of the hour of Lauds, Merton writes the following:

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy … This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.

(Merton 1977, p. 363)

Christopher Pramuk raises the question,

Who, then, is Hagia Sophia? She is the Spirit of Christ but more than Christ. She is the Love joining the Father, Son, and Spirit that longs for incarnation from before the very beginning. She is Jesus our mother, and Mary, the Theotokos. She is the “pivot” (le point vierge) of nature, Natura naturans, and all creation in God from the beginning. Perhaps most of all, Merton’s Sophia is our “true self,” when we (like Mary, seat of Wisdom) allow Christ to be birthed in us, and so realize the hidden ground of mercy, creativity, and presence in our very selves, the mystical Body of Christ. The moment her name awakens in us a sense of mercy, communion, and presence Sophia—“one Wisdom, one Child, one Meaning, one Sister”—is not symbolic, but real, more than literally real. The remembrance of Sophia opens onto a mystical-political spirituality of engagement in the world.

(Pramuk 2009, pp. 207–8)

Thus, Merton’s panentheism is rooted in a Sophianic mysticism that allows the Trappist monk to expand his network of friends with ecofeminists like Ruether. Both Catholic eco-thinkers valued the wisdom traditions and understood the importance of connecting the past with the real challenges facing them in modern times. In doing so, the two of them worked together, acknowledging their big differences but reaching out to each other in search of common projects and plans of action.

4.2. Rosemary Ruether on Panentheism

Ruether’s panentheism holds one of the keys to understanding why she emphasized her ecofeminist model of God as the embodiment of divine immanence through the Great Mother Earth. This metaphorical language of God/ess being the mother, lover, and friend is present in the writings of many ecofeminists, especially found in Sallie McFague. Unfortunately, many Christian doctrinaires have excluded other models of God and have focused mainly on patriarchal, hierarchical, and anthropocentric images when referring to God as a male deity sitting on a celestial throne in the sky and also functioning as a ruler, king, and punisher of sinners. But the panentheism of Ruether and McFague points to a different worldview:

Aware that we exist only in relationship and aware, therefore, that all our language about God is but metaphors of experiences of relating to God, we are free to use many models of God. Aware, however, that the relationship with God cannot be named, we are prohibited from absolutizing any models of God.

(McFague 1982, p. 194)

Ruether offered a counterpoint to most Christians of her time who saw an irreconcilable difference between Christianity (religion/faith) and evolution (science/reason), and in the process constructed a panentheistic interpretation of the relationship between God and creation. Unlike Merton’s orthodox mystical theological tradition, Ruether’s process theological views are more radical and heterodoxical in stature on the basis of this relational theology. For the ecofeminist, narrative stories through the usage of metaphorical language must include the divine feminine as the Great Mother. The main purpose is to maintain a well-balanced view of the universe so as to avoid underestimating the phenomenon of change in the human condition (the biblical creation story) or by omitting the inward process (the scientific creation story), which is an essential tool for the human understanding of the relationship between God and the world. This panentheism resonates well with Sallie McFague. She proclaims the following: “The word is alive with God—but indirectly, incarnationally. Christian mysticism—seeing God in all things and all things in God—is incarnational. We live in God through the world … We become aware of God through the earth” (McFague 2008, p. 163). For McFague, the Earth is our true home. We belong to the Earth. This is our true spiritual place. The problem is that some Christians have put too much emphasis on our home being located in a heaven that can only be found in the afterlife. This false dualism has caused irreparable damage and harm to millions of creatures. Ecofeminists such as McFague and Ruether worked very hard to maintain that the panentheistic worldview is compatible with the orthodoxy of Christianity. McFague, without sounding too apologetic, writes the following:

This description of a panentheistic view of the relation of God and the world is compatible with our model of God as the spirit that is the source, the life, the breath of all reality. Everything that is is in God and God is in all things and yet God is not identical with the universe, for the universe is dependent on God in a way that God is not dependent on the universe.

(McFague 1993, p. 149)

For Merton, Ruether the mystic spoke with a modern prophetic voice, serving as an important bridge between the theological and the ecofeminist community. In other words, Ruether opened new worlds for investigation. Ruether was highly critical of patriarchal structures for the harm they caused to both women and Mother Earth. However, she was not oblivious to the positive elements found in the ancient cultures of the Hebrew and the Christian Bible. This understanding is precisely one of Ruether’s major contributions. She brought the wisdom of the ancient traditions together with the new contemporary ecofeminist perspectives. Nonetheless, she acknowledged the evils and misinterpretations found even within some ecofeminist authors and writings. Ruether states,

This tendency to blame the religion of the Bible for these evils is often found in ecofeminist writings. In my opinion, this accusation against the Bible is much too simplistic. These attitudes of domination over women and nature existed in all the other patriarchal societies of that time. In no way were they specific to Israel. In addition, these classical cultures, including the Hebrew culture, also established regulations for the care and maintenance of the earth as a way of limiting its exploitation. Let us not forget that ancient technology did not allow the extreme abuse of the earth that we see today. Only in modern times, with the simultaneous appearance of industrialism and colonialism, have we seen the development of a worldwide capacity for exploiting the earth and other people groups that is capable of leading to a survival crisis for the human race on this planet.

(R. R. Ruether 1995, p. 202)

For Ruether, God is penetrating everywhere throughout the universe because she is the cosmic womb from where everything comes and everything returns. This world is, for Ruether, a sacred place that radiates the hidden reality of the Great Mother. Ruether is without a doubt thoroughly orthodox and panentheistic in her interpretation of the Christian mystery of a human being becoming God by participation. For Ruether, the call to become co-creators is a divine call for every sentient and non-sentient being, This Christian kingdom is at hand because God is present in each creature. One of the highest Christian goals is to see the divine glory of God in nature and in each part of Her creation.

In sum, Ruether’s panentheism is the key to a better understanding of this creative synthesis between religion and ecology, God and the world, and all other apparent disjunctions. As she concludes in her chapter titled, “Christian Resources for Ecological Sustainability,” Ruether states:

It has become apparent to thousands of people who have been involved in these many forums for dialogue on religion, ecology, and social justice that the threatened earth can no longer afford rivalries between the religions. Neither can we afford the continuing rivalry between religion and science. Only a dynamic interrelationship of the world’s cultures can help save the earth that is our common home. The world’s religions, operating out of a new sense of mutual respect and solidarity with one another, have a key role to play in this process of earth’s “redemption.”

(Gross and Ruether 2001, p. 202)

For Ruether, the capacity for dialogue has the potential to help people to heal their dualistic mindsets by bringing together religion and science as sources of wisdom and knowledge that have been competing for the past centuries. But for now it is time for religion and science to work together in addressing the ecological crises. Here is where the ecofeminist insights of Ruether and other eco-thinkers can be useful, serving as bridges of understanding between the two apparent disjoined worlds of religion (matters of faith) and science (matters of fact). The narrative language of mythos and logos must be brought together in order to build a more inclusive civilization that can tackle the most pressing ecological issues of our time. This is a topic I plan to explore in a future article.

5. Conclusions: The Eco-Spiritual Legacy of Merton and Ruether

This article has demonstrated that although Thomas Merton was different from Rosemary Ruether in many ways, the Trappist monk was very fond and sympathetic to the panentheistic worldviews held by the ecofeminist. As mystics, both Merton and Ruether converge as co-partakers in building the Earth and finding God’s presence in all things. Their summoning of a higher truth is a powerful message for our contemporaries because the panentheistic worldview of Merton and Ruether is rooted in an unconditional faith, hope, and love in humanity and in all God’s good creation.

It is not an exaggeration to say that their greatest legacy is that both Merton and Ruether shared a common purpose. Merton and Ruether saw themselves as co-partakers in building the future of the Earth. Consequently, Merton and Ruether acted as prophetic messengers on behalf of God by foreseeing a new creation. Their ultimate goal was the creation of a new heaven and a new Earth where the beloved community becomes a reality for all creatures.

Both Merton and Ruether tried their best to bring together what is divided in our perceived universe. For them, the creation of a new heaven and a new Earth does not mean that the kingdom of God is presently absent from our lives. On the contrary, Merton and Ruether recognized that we have access to the heavenly kingdom in the here and now because the Mystical Christ, or the Risen Christ, is already present in all creation. God is calling men and women to work together to accomplish the building of the kingdom of heaven on Earth. This work is always in progress. Christians have often refused to fully participate as co-creators in building the heavenly kingdom on Earth because of the belief that heaven, their true home, was located in a far celestial realm and thus this universe was not their true home. However, Merton and Ruether took the responsibility of building the Earth seriously. They both felt at home in the world, since God dwells in each part of creation. As Karen Armstrong prophetically concludes in her book Sacred Nature,

We too perhaps leave this book sadder and wiser, recognizing the gravity of our environmental predicament and our personal responsibility for it, but also intent on a transformation of mind and heart that will impel us to repair the damage. We have seen how nature was revered by the great sages, mystics and prophets of the past. It is now up to us to revive that knowledge and commitment and recover our bond with the natural world.

(Armstrong 2022, p. 199)

Through their exchange of nearly forty letters, Merton and Ruether move from an intellectual and rational critique of the institutional Church and of themselves to a more intimate, caring, and reciprocal trust as the Trappist monk and the Catholic theologian converge in addressing their passionate love of the mystics, prophets, and peacemakers while preserving a healthy criticism of each other’s spiritual paths. Merton as a man of dialogue opened conversations with activists like Ruether, who challenged his monastic way of life. Yet, Merton welcomed her ecofeminist approach, adding new insights to the kind of renewal and reform that he was envisioning and working within the institutional Church and his monastic tradition.

The fact that Merton and Ruether shared mystical and transformative experiences made the two of them more accepting, vulnerable, and trustworthy partners in their ongoing conversations. Their mystical insights led them to speak out truth to power and resist against the status quo within the Church and the U.S. consumeristic society. Although their activism was unique in many different ways, both Merton and Ruether spoke from that inner life that unites more than divides us.

In the case of Merton, as a Trappist monk, he addressed the ecological crisis through his writings and his testimony of life as a forest ranger for the Abbey property in his own rural environment in Kentucky. Meanwhile, Ruether, the prophetic scholar, historian of the Church, and activist, took her public theology to the streets in urban areas by taking the form of social protests, joining social movements, and teaching at African American universities. This difference does not mean that Merton was antisocial. In fact, he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation organization, a largely Protestant peace movement, and sponsored a Catholic peace organization with Jim Forest and other fellow friends in the Catholic Worker movement.

Merton’s own monastic vows kept him grounded in his spiritual geography of rural Kentucky, like his fellow poet friend and correspondent Wendell Berry. In fact, the two of them met on 10 December 1967, with poet Denise Levertov and photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Merton asked Berry to send some of his poems so he could get them published in Monks Pond. They planned to meet for a picnic in the woods near Merton’s hermitage/cabin, but Berry was unable to visit due to his trip on the West Coast. Both Merton and Berry loved the wilderness, the true solitude of being in the woods of Kentucky, and the encounters with other poets and humanists. This is the beloved community that brought together Merton and Ruether, among other influential writers and activists in the 1960s, such as Dr. King, Dorothy Day, the Berrigans, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Thich Nhat Hanh. As Merton himself writes: “The ecological conscience is also essentially a peace-making conscience” (Capps 1989, p. 107). In his essay “The Wild Places,” Merton connected the ecological conscience of the great North American visionaries from Thoreau to Muir to Leopold arguing that although it is true that “a certain kind of Christian culture has clearly resulted in a Manichean hostility toward created nature” (Capps 1989, p. 97) there are great ecological voices found in the Transcendentalists, in the American wilderness ecologists, and in the great preservationists.

Merton, like Ruether, was highly critical of the institutional Church, which cared less about ecological consciousness. But today the Catholic Church has embraced the ecological spirituality of Merton and to some extent of Ruether. Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato si’ and his Apostolic Exhortation Laudate Deum, redacted in 2023, reveal solid evidence of how mainstream integral ecology has become in the Catholic social teachings of the Church. Pope Francis adopted his name after the patron saint of animals and lover of the poor, St. Francis of Assisi. “Francis the friar inspired Francis the pope with his nature mysticism, his election of the poor as his premier spiritual priority and his simplicity of style. They also shared the belief that all creatures are united in a grace-filled universal communion. We are all connected” (Higgins 2025, p. 5). This is why Merton’s teachings would have been received much better by the Vatican without enduring so much censorship and prohibitions. Under Pope Francis, I have no doubt Merton would have been allowed to travel more and establish himself in other monastic communities, as he has planned with ongoing conversations between himself and Ernesto Cardenal.

Our common home has become the new theological language of the Catholic Church thanks to Merton, Ruether, and many other pioneers like Teilhard de Chardin and Raimon Panikkar. These perspectives are the real seeds of ecological spirituality planted by Catholic seers, sages, mystics, prophets, poets, and peacemakers that have become an integral part of the institutional Church. There is still much progress to be made because women are still absent from the ecological conversion proposed by Pope Francis. The critique of ecofeminists like Ruether is that the institutional Church is still too hierarchical, while the message from ecofeminists involves more egalitarian and inclusive voices from within the Catholic Church, such as prophetic voices as Agnes M. Brazal, Celia Deane-Drummond, and other women voices. But the new Christian eco-spiritual humanism has real potential to transform individual and social institutions, as these ideas become an integral part of academic curricula in schools, seminaries, colleges, and universities. The future looks better and brighter with these new ecological initiatives being implemented and promoted by the institutional Church.