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By education and inclination, Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) was a politically engaged artist. His gifts suited him well for producing cartoons and collages in left-wing publications. But could he integrate his abstract, avant-garde painting with his activism? The solution came largely through his readings and lifelong friendship with Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Reinhardt's famous "black" paintings embody negation theology--defining the deity by what it is not. Further, because these paintings require several minutes of intense looking simply to grasp, they exemplify what I call "slow art," which recreates in a secular idiom the conditions for rumination common to spiritual practices. To jettison the ecclesiastical was not, for Reinhardt, to abandon the spiritual: Merton described his own "black" painting as "a very 'holy' picture ... an 'image' without features to accustom the mind ... to the night of prayer and ... set aside trivial and useless images that wander into prayer and spoil it." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1968 Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, made a journey to the Far East to study Eastern monastic religions. Merton's contemplative prayer life was enhanced by his literary imagination, which was fueled by the reading of a broad spectrum of novelists and poets. During his trip eastward, Thomas Merton read three Hermann Hesse novels and recorded notes in his journal regarding two of them: Journey to the East and Steppenwolf. This essay examines Thomas Merton's enigmatic quotations and observations about the two aforementioned novels within the context of each of the respective volumes. Further clarification of Merton's notes is rendered through a presentation in parallel fashion of other journal entries and recorded conferences made by the monk primarily during his eastward journey. The discussion of Journey to the East reflects Thomas Merton's own spiritual quest as he traveled to Asia revealing his attraction to the 'feminine mystique' as well as his sharing of both Hesse's disdain for the herd instinct of illusory communities and his alternative portrayal of enlightened communes seeking aesthetic excellence. As Merton read Steppenwolf, he identified with Harry Haller's propensity for self-contradiction and a tendency to vacillate between the polarities of holding the bourgeoisie at arm's length and his eventual compromise with the conventions of the bourgeois society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Thomas Merton, artists mirrored many of the functions traditionally performed by religious contemplatives. In particular, the sapiential and holistic approach taken in William Faulkner's fiction gave rise in Merton's view to an embedded higher state of awareness that allowed one to intuitively bridge the gap between the microcosm of one's own mental world and the macrocosm of ultimate reality. This bridge is created when the reader is drawn to plumb the depths of the psyche in order to thereby encounter the face of the creator. For Merton, the truths of the self that had been revealed by depth psychology, comparative religion, and social anthropology had brought forth a sapiential harvest, one that was present in a number of Faulkner's novels and stories. In this way, Merton argued, Faulkner both shaped and enriched theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]