The Unspeakable

I came across this comment recently on thecatholicthing.org: "...lots of people who welcomed the Second Vatican Council's opening to the modern world, or were trained by those enthusiasts for the Council, think that taking some strong stances against that world now constitutes a step backwards", which presumably is meant to be a bad thing. It put me in mind of something of Thomas Merton's that I read a long time ago and have never forgotten: "Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of the Unspeakable. That is what too few are willing to see." I went and looked up the context. It's in the Prologue to his book Raids on the Unspeakable :

"The Unspeakable. What is this? Surely an eschatological image. It is the void that we encounter ... underlying the announced programs, the good intentions, the unexampled and universal aspirations for the best of all possible worlds. It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience ... It is the emptiness of "the end". Not necessarily the end of the world, but a theological point of no return, a cllimax of absolute finality in refusal, in equivocation, in disorder, in absurdity, which can be broken open again to truth only by miracle, only by the coming of God ... This is precisely what it means to be a Christian; for Christian hope begins where every other hope stands frozen stiff before the face of the Unspeakable.

"... The goodness of the world, stricken or not, is incontestable and definitive. If it is stricken, it is also healed in Christ. But nevertheless one of the awful facts of our age is the evidence that it is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable.

"Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of the Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see."