Lord Northbourne Confronts Thomas Merton on Vatican II

The clear-eyed critique of an English perennialist in dialogue with an American Trappist

Walter Ernest Christopher James, 4th Baron Northbourne (1896–1982), was a fascinating thinker whom I’ve discovered only recently. Besides being an English aristocrat and hereditary landowner of much working countryside, he was a religious thinker and the first translator into English of the works of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, perennialist philosophers who eventually became Muslim Sufis.¹

The perennialist thinkers, whom Lord Northbourne followed closely, believed that the world’s religious traditions were all exoteric manifestations of a single esoteric truth. These thinkers were not, however, relativists; they firmly held that the “exoteric traditions” could easily fail to convey to their adherents the esoteric, perennial truth if they became faddish or captured by ideology. Basically, not all religions were equal in their view.

According to Guénon, Christianity had been ensnared by modern ideology — especially Cartesian rationalism — and corrupted by it. Consequently, he thought Christianity could no longer set its followers on a mystical pathway to union with God. But other perennialists disagreed with him and developed a fruitful Christian perennialism of their own. Lord Northbourne was himself both a perennialist and an Anglican Christian. Whatever the merits or demerits of perennialism, its proponents were customarily fierce critics of many aspects of modernity. They saw modernity as one great revolution against the wisdom enveloped in Tradition. Anyone who intuits that there is something deeply wrong with the modern world can derive much benefit from studying these thinkers.

Lord Northbourne was the first to coin the term “organic farming” following his successful venture to apply on his English estates Rudolf Steiner’s notion of “biodynamic agriculture.” The writings by Lord Northbourne on husbandry, spirituality, and the failings of modernity are profoundly insightful, and I cannot recommend them highly enough. As is typical of the perennialists whom he admired, Lord Northbourne deeply worried that modernity was going to accelerate, eventually uprooting man in toto from his traditions, customs, and ancestrally received ways of life, plunging him into an abyss of meaninglessness and purposelessness.

Trappists in Kentucky in 1918 — long before their traditions were called into question and overthrown (source)

Vatican II as extension of the modern project

What may come as a surprise to some is that Lord Northbourne, by then in his late sixties, closely followed the Second Vatican Council as it was happening. He feared that in the Church’s attempt to meet the modern world where it is, it was in fact transposing some of the worst aspects of modernity into its liturgical and catechetical life. Lord Northbourne’s immeasurable respect for Tradition in general, and the Catholic tradition in particular, made him not a little anxious about the great conciliar experiment transpiring before him.

During the years of 1965 and ’66, a letter exchange between Lord Northbourne and the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton took place, in which he cautioned Merton not to be overly optimistic about the Council and its ensuing effects. The first letter comes from Merton (which he wrote to thank Lord Northbourne for penning a book entitled Religion in the Modern World, from which Merton says he learned a great deal). Merton discloses in that letter that he sees amid the conciliar fever the whole way of life of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance waning and giving way to half-baked innovations: