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Introduction
Anyone fairly well acquainted with Thomas Merton and his work is familiar with his enthusiasm for various figures, whether literary or religious, or both. Think of the poet William Blake, subject of Merton's master's thesis in 1938, whom he is still writing about in 1968, the year of his death (LE 385453,3-11; see also Griffith); or the French Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus- Merton reads all his novels, all his stories, all his essays, even his journals, and writes seven different essays on diverse aspects of his thought (LE 179301; see also Beicastro); or William Faulkner, whom Merton considered an American prophet and a voice of wisdom, subject of essays and conferences and journal passages (LE 92-123, 495-536; see also Labrie); or St. John of the Cross, Merton's mystical guide in the ascent of the mountain of God in the darkness of unknowing beyond images and ideas and concepts (TMSB 159240, SE 15-22, ICM 304-32; see also Cannon, Egan, Nugent); or Julian of Norwich (CGB 191-2, MZM 140-44, ICM xlviii-1; see also Del Prete), whom Merton calls the greatest of English mystics and along with Cardinal (now Saint) John Henry Newman, even the greatest of English theologians;1 or Meister Eckhart, whose teaching on the divine spark of the soul catches fire in much of Merton's later writing in both poetry and prose (ICM xliii-xlv, 199-214; see also Davies, Faricy, Paguio).
Probably not very many readers would include St. Anselm of Canterbury on this list of Merton's particular favorites. On the face of it, this seems quite unlikely. Besides being the second Archbishop of Canterbury after the Norman Conquest (1093-1109), he was an immensely influential pre-scholastic philosopher and theologian, renowned for applying reason to matters of belief. He is best known for three principal theological formulations: his description of theology as fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) (Proslogion, Prooemium [PL 158.225A; Schmitt 1.94]); the so-called ontological argument found in his Proslogion (PL 158.223A-248C; Schmitt 1.93-122) for the necessary existence of God, as "that than which no greater can be conceived";2 and his "satisfaction theory" of redemption, in the Cur Deus Homo (PL 158.339C-432B; Schmitt 2.37-133), in which the offence of sin against the infinite honor of God can only be cancelled by the sacrifice of...