Teachings of the Catholic Church - Questions     

Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth, “Vision and Illusion”:

1. According to Merton, why do we continue to pursue joys without substance – things that cannot provide happiness?

2. The philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal gives an apt description of this ailment.  Describe it in your own words.

3. “A life based on desire is like a spider’s web,” says Gregory of Nyssa.  Merton comments: “It is not enough to say that the man who is attached to this world has bound himself to it, once and for all, by a wrong choice.”  What does it mean?

4.  According to Merton, man was made, not for work, but for the highest activity, which is what?

5. According to Merton, “man’s guilty sense of his incapacity for this one deep activity which is the reason for his very existence, is precisely what drives him to seek oblivion in exterior motion in desire.”  What is it that man desires in his ceaseless activity?

6. What, according to Merton, is the one thing that can help us to begin our ascent to truth?

7. According to Merton, when a Christian mystic speaks of the created world as an illusion and “nothingness,” he or she (there are as many female mystics as there are male) is only using a figure of speech.  “The words are never to be taken literally,” he says, “and they are not ontological.” [“Ontological” means that the words do not refer to “Being”-- to reality.] When is the created world a vision?  When is it illusion? [Note the title of this section.]
 

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