Via Negativa: The Search for Purity, The Work of Thomas Merton and Ad Reinhardt
Thomas Merton and Ad Reinhardt walked parallel paths: one toward the cloister, one toward the studio, each stripping life and art down to almost nothing to see what remained. Their friendship began in the crowded halls of Columbia University and ended in work that feels nearly bare—black paintings and sparse drawings that ask the eye to wait, to watch, to enter a kind of prayer. Between them runs a shared conviction that what matters most cannot be pictured directly; it must be found in the spaces left open after everything extra has been taken away.
The Parallel Paths of Thomas Merton and Ad Reinhardt
Merton, Reinhardt, and the poet Robert Lax started out as young men trading jokes, ideas, and fragments of faith on a campus that buzzed with noise and ambition. They wrote for a humor magazine and argued about art and God, the way you do when you are trying to find out who you are and what you will give your life to. Even then, Reinhardt’s drawings carried a clean edge and a sense of refusal, as if he were already testing how far he could pare a line back and still have it speak.
When Merton left that world and entered the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani, he chose a life that looked like a vanishing act: silence, enclosure, strict rules, and days ruled by bells and prayer. The decision shook his friends. It was not a pose or a phase, but a clean break, an all‑in bet on God and hiddenness. Years later, when Reinhardt turned hard toward a severe abstraction that rejected scenery, story, and personal display, his choice carried something of that same stubbornness. He, too, walked away from the crowded room.
Letters kept their friendship alive. The two men sent each other puns, sharp as pins, and also slow, serious thoughts about art, faith, and the dark. Packages slipped through the monastery gates: fine paper, art books, traces of a world Merton no longer walked in but still watched with interest. On that paper, the monk drew in the quiet hours—marks that looked simple but came out of long days of prayer and solitude.
Both men were drawn to the way of saying no. In theology, it is called the via negativa, the negative way: God is not this, not that; not an object, not a picture, not a concept the mind can hold and keep. Merton wrote of a God who cannot be pinned down by pious images, who meets the soul not in crowded devotions but in a clear, interior emptiness, when the self lets go of its own stories. He trusted a kind of holy unknowing, a darkness that is not the absence of God but the place where God is too present to be named.
Reinhardt moved along a similar track in paint. He described his work by subtraction: not representational, not expressive, not narrative, not personal confession. His late black paintings look, at first glance, like simple blocks of darkness. Stand long enough in front of them and they begin to shift: faint crosses surface, small changes in value appear, and the field is no longer flat but quietly alive. The picture does not yield its meaning at once; it waits for the viewer to slow down, to learn a different tempo of looking.
Merton came to see his own drawings and collages as another form of contemplation. They are small, unassuming works: a few strokes of ink, a rough shape, a field of white left open. He thought of them as collaborations with solitude. The repetition of gesture, the restraint of line, the willingness to leave much unsaid—all of it matched the habits he practiced in prayer. The page became another cell, another chapel, where attention and patience were tested.
Reinhardt’s canvases are also exercises in discipline. They obey strict rules. They avoid spectacle. They shun the easy pleasures of color and story. Layer after layer of black is laid down, adjusted, corrected, until the surface comes to a point of tense stillness. This is not decoration; it is a long, quiet argument with excess. What remains is as plain and demanding as a monastic wall. The painting asks as much from the viewer as a psalm asks from the monk at dawn.
Both men mistrusted the way the world uses images. Merton worried about religion turning God into an object among others, a product to hold, defend, and trade. Reinhardt was wary of art becoming an ornament to money or politics. Each, in his way, tried to protect a core of reality from being soaked up by markets, slogans, or sentiment. For Merton, that core was God, encountered beyond words. For Reinhardt, it was “art‑as‑art,” a realm where painting is not illustration, not entertainment, but a serious, almost moral, practice of form and perception.
In their work, God and minimalism meet not in stained glass or obvious symbols but in subtraction. Take away the surplus, they both seem to say. Take away the noise. Take away the self showing off. What is left may look like almost nothing: a small drawing, a black square, an empty space. Yet in that near‑emptiness, something steady and weighty appears—the stillness of a chapel before the service begins, or the bare canvas that holds more silence than color.
For Merton, the aim was to become “nothing but a monk,” a man whose life is pared down to prayer and work and the quiet presence of God. For Reinhardt, the aim was “nothing but art,” a painting that is only itself and nothing else, stripped of role and pretense. The two aims are cousins. Both require a willingness to disappear, to let the work—not the ego—stand at the center.
In the end, their paths do not merge, but they run close enough for a while that you can see the same light on both. One man sits in a Kentucky monastery, drawing on smuggled paper between the offices of the day. Another stands in a New York studio, brushing black upon black until a barely visible cross begins to breathe. Both are working with small means and great seriousness. Both are building, out of almost nothing, a place where the viewer—or the praying soul—can stand still long enough for the hidden to show itself.
