Bóg i „śmierć Boga” w pisarstwie Tomasza Mertona

Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk and religious writer, is the author of The Seven Storey Mountain, Seeds of Contemplation, The Ascent to Truth, the New Man and many other works in the field of spirituality. He is also an analytical thinker comparing scholastic philosophy with modern existentialism. In Conjectures of a guilty bystander he takes up a polemic with the Heideggerian concept of death. Merton examines this issue from the point of view of Christian axiology. The dogma of existentialism is something illogical to him: the idea of “the death of God”. His entire work is linked to a polemic with Thomas Altizer, an Anglican theologian inspired by the philosophy of Fryderyk Nietzsche. Merton shows how theology of Revelation and natural theology are carriers of existential cognition, in the scholastic sense as the recognition of Existence. From it comes the awareness of moral goodness as participation in the existence of God, the giver of good. In the light of this recognition, the concept of “God’s death” is something unlikely.