Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton was born in Prades, France, in 1915 to two artist parents — a New Zealand–born painter father and an American Quaker mother who died when he was six. He spent a peripatetic childhood across France, Bermuda, England, and the United States; lost his father at sixteen; studied at Cambridge (which he left under a cloud) and then at Columbia University in [[beacon-ny|New York]], where he came under the influence of Mark Van Doren, Daniel Walsh, and the Indian monk Bramachari (who pointed him, surprisingly, toward Augustine and the Confessions). In 1938 he was received into the Catholic Church. In December 1941, days after Pearl Harbor, he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani — a strict-observance Trappist monastery in rural Kentucky — and remained a monk there for the rest of his life.

In 1948 the abbot, looking for material to publicize the order, had Merton write his autobiography. The Seven Storey Mountain sold over six hundred thousand copies in its first year and continued to sell; it brought a generation of postwar Americans to the doors of monasteries (and a smaller number actually inside). Merton spent the next two decades writing — sometimes the abbey complained he wrote too much — across an extraordinary range: contemplative theology (New Seeds of Contemplation, Seeds of Contemplation, The Inner Experience), poetry (The Strange Islands, Cables to the Ace, The Geography of Lograire), social criticism (Seeds of Destruction, Faith and Violence, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander), and the long journals (seven volumes posthumously published) that record the inner life across nearly thirty monastic years.

In December 1968 he traveled to Bangkok to address a monastic East–West conference. The day after his lecture he was found dead in his room — the official cause was accidental electrocution from a faulty fan. He was fifty-three.

What Merton actually changed

Three durable shifts in Christian contemplative life in the West can be traced largely to him:

• Recovering the contemplative tradition for general readers. Before Merton, the Western contemplative tradition was scattered, much of it in untranslated Latin and Greek, much of it institutionally suspect. Merton wrote for the literate non-specialist. The contemporary Christian contemplative renewal — [[centering-prayer|Centering Prayer]], Bourgeault, Rohr, Keating, the wider lay movement — is unimaginable without him.
• Joining contemplation and public engagement. Through the late 1950s and the 1960s, Merton wrote increasingly on the bomb, on civil rights, on the Vietnam War, on technology, on race. His position: contemplative life produces, when it is real, the obligation to public courage. The Cistercian censors did not always allow him to publish; he wrote anyway, and sometimes circulated mimeographed letters to the major figures of the peace movement (the Berrigans, [[dorothy-day|Dorothy Day]], [[thich-nhat-hanh|Thich Nhat Hanh]], James Baldwin).
• Opening serious interreligious dialogue from a Christian ground. Merton’s correspondences with [[dt-suzuki|D.T. Suzuki]], his late book Mystics and Zen Masters, his Zen and the Birds of Appetite, his Sufi correspondences (with Abdul Aziz of Pakistan), his rapid late embrace of Tibetan Buddhism in his final months — these established the model of dialogue across traditions while remaining rooted in one’s own. He insisted: dialogue is not syncretism. He stayed a monk.

The hermitage years

In 1965 Merton was given permission to live as a hermit in a cinder-block cabin on the Gethsemani property — the first Trappist hermit in centuries. The journals from these years are some of his richest writing: descriptions of weather, birds, the woods, his reading (Heidegger, [[meister-eckhart|Eckhart]], [[zhuang-zhou|Chuang Tzu]], Faulkner), his slow integration of Zen and Christian practice, his late-life love for a young nurse he met during a hospitalization (the affair, mostly epistolary, ended with him recommitting to his monastic life, recorded with unusual honesty in the journals). He wrote: Solitude is not something to hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present.

Honest about Merton

Merton was a complicated man. He could be vain about his fame, struggled with the contradictions of being a hermit who was also a celebrity, doubted his vocation more than once, and conducted the affair noted above. The journals are unusually frank about all of this. [[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s posture: take Merton seriously as a contemplative without pretending he was simple. The contemplative life is not a hagiographic life; the witnesses who matter most are the ones who let the difficulty show.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[christian-mysticism]]
• Shares approach with: [[spirituality]]
• Parallels: [[meister-eckhart]] · [[howard-thurman]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Thomas Merton. The Seven Storey Mountain. Harcourt, 1948. Source class: primary / autobiography.
2. Thomas Merton. New Seeds of Contemplation. New Directions, 1962. Source class: primary / contemplative theology.
3. Thomas Merton. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Doubleday, 1965. Source class: primary / journal-essays.
4. Thomas Merton. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. New Directions, 1973. Source class: primary / posthumous.
5. Thomas Merton. The Journals of Thomas Merton. (7 vols.) HarperSanFrancisco, 1995–98. Source class: primary / complete journals.
6. Thomas Merton & [[dt-suzuki|D.T. Suzuki]]. Encounter: A Conversation in 1968. [[larkspur|Larkspur]], 1988. Source class: primary / dialogue.
7. Michael Mott. The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton. Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Source class: book / authorized biography.
8. Lawrence S. Cunningham. Thomas Merton & the Monastic Vision. Eerdmans, 1999. Source class: book / theological study.

Lenses still to grow

• The Berrigan correspondence and Merton’s role in shaping Catholic peace witness during Vietnam.
• The Suzuki correspondence and the Christian–Zen dialogue in detail.
• The late hermitage journals as nature writing — the bird and weather notes, the Kentucky landscape — deserve treatment alongside the contemplative theology.
• The affair with M. as it appears in the journals; how readers in his lineage have come to think about it.
• Merton’s final Asian Journal in detail — the Dalai Lama meetings, Polonnaruwa.