William Higginbotham

1 April 2003

Western Civilization Since 1500

Dr. K. Wilburn

Thomas Merton; A Man in History

Once in a great while does a man of simplicity and deep thought comes along to silently change and influence the face of culture and the way we look at the greatest issues of our times and the way we look at ourselves. One such man was Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk from the Monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Bardstown Kentucky. He was a man of peace, who knew intimately the horrors of war.

It has been said War is the major points of historical monument. Perhaps this is so, if so, how ironic is it that a man who dedicated his entire life to peace was born during war and died during a war. Thomas Merton was born on January 31 1915 in the French mountains on the border of Spain. He was born during World War I, “the war to end all wars” and he died on December 10 1968 during the Vietnam War. His father Owen Merton was from New Zealand and mother Ruth was American. Both of Merton’s parents were painters. His mother died when he was six years old and his father when he was 15, of a brain tumor.

Thomas Merton early schooling in France; at age ten he was in a Montessori school in Monteban France. He was reputed to be a lonely and sickly child at this time of his life. His mothers death is said to have been the beginning of a long lonesome period of intense searching in his life. It was during his time in the Montessori that he had his first experience with religious houses. As he later wrote of the abandoned abbeys he found as a small child while wandering the countryside:

There were many ruined monasteries in those mountains. My mind goes back with great reverence to the thought of those clean and ancient stone cloisters. Those low and mighty rounded stone arches set in place by monks who perhaps prayed me where I am. Is it any wonder that I should have a friendly feeling about those places? (Seven Story Mountain)

This experience stayed with the young Thomas Merton and he reflected on it often. As he believes that this experience affected him, he also wrote how every experience of every man’s life continues to affect him. Merton states and his life exemplifies that old Chinese proverb that “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” Merton lit a lot of candles. His own reflections on this are echoed in New Seeds of Contemplation.

Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love. (14)

He was in attendance at Oakum in England when his father Owen died. This sad moment in Merton’s life did not dull his intellect and search for deeper meaning. While in Oakum he wrote a paper about Gandhi during a time when Gandhi was still considered a dissident in England. In fact one of his classmates, John Barber, stated …”He thought deeply much more deeply then those of us who came from less international back grounds…” Even at a young age, Merton was becoming a man of deep conscience and conviction.

At age eighteen Thomas Merton visited Rome, where he had more “germs” planted in his soul. He writes in the Seven Story Mountain, “It was in Rome that my conception of Christ was formed. It was there that I first saw Him.” Merton was influence by the art of the churches and the frescos of Rome, but he was still young and followed the call of the young in parties and carousing with young women. Merton went to school at Cambridge, where he smoked, drank and was a womanizer. His poor grades and amoral behavior reached a fevered pitch when he got a woman pregnant and his grandfather ordered him home. Then at age twenty in 1935, he enrolled in Columbia where he belonged to a fraternity, frequented speak easies and was considered a popular date. He spent long hours writing novels, essays and reviews. As he admits in the Seven Story Mountain he saw his future as a writer.

Then something began to happen to him. As he writes;

Every week as Sunday came around, I filled with the growing desire to stay in the city and go to some kind of a church…What a revelation it was to find so many ordinary people together in one place more conscious of God than of one another. Not here to show off their hats or clothes but to pray or at least to fulfill a religious obligation, not a human one.

A few months later he had been baptized a Catholic. Two years later he applied to the Franciscan Order, having been accepted he confessed everything about his life and was dismissed. After his dismissal from the Franciscans he started teaching at St. Bonaventure’s College.

During his time at St. Bonaventure’s, he took a retreat at the Cistercian of the Strict Observance of the Rule of St. Benedict (generally referred to as Trappist) Monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani. His friend Robert Lax best summed up his reaction, “You could see that it had made a profound effect on him and that he had found something that he really liked.” Shortly there after he applied and was accepted to the Monastery at Gethsemani. He had become the very model of what Benedict referred to when he wrote that, “A monk is someone who wants to be under an Abbot.” He left the chaos of the world to go live in a world that is so committed to peace that “Pax Intrantibus” (Peace Resides Here) carved over its gateway.

Upon entering the monastery, he had given up all aspirations of writing in order to be a simple Trappist monk. Merton writes in his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain; “Everything makes sense. Everything I wanted to do I can now do all the time without interference. As soon as I got here I knew I was home, where I never have been or would be a stranger.”

Its amazing and surprising that Thomas Merton, now Br. Louis, did not want to write the book that launched him into the worlds view, The Seven Story Mountain. He had to be ordered to do it by his abbot, and as an obedient monk, he was obliged to write it. The Seven Story Mountain sold over 600,000 copies in its first year of publication. And James Laughin publisher for New Directions said that “One days orders was 10 000 copies in a single day.”

Laughin goes on to say:

Seven Story Mountain had something to say that people were, at that moment in our social history, were ready to hear. It presented an answer to spiritual problems that many people, particularly young people that were upset about the way things were going in the country that were upset by the threat of the atomic holocaust and all the rest of it. They wanted to hear that and they liked the way Thomas Merton put it. Once you’ve been bitten by Merton you will go on reading him and read every thing you can. He simply is a remarkable American, writer, thinker, and monk.

However Merton later in his life goes on to say about Seven Story Mountain, “I rebel against it and assert my basic human right not to become a myth for young children in parochial schools.” He did continue to write; in fact he also had a book of poetry published called Thirty Poems. He was very well received as a poet. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fellow poet and publisher of a literary magazine that published a great deal of Merton’s work said of him, “He was a poet and that is the way the poets that we were publishing identified with him. This was the beginning of the Beat Movement.”

In 1948, after being a monk for eight years, Merton was ordained to the priesthood, a calling he says he felt he was born for. In 1951 he was appointed as Master of Scholastics and continued his writing career. James Laughin, his publisher, states the effect that Merton had on him in a story he relates about his invitation to visit Merton in Gethsemani. He says that despite his up bring to think of monasteries as “places of the devil” he went to visit Merton. To his surprise, he found it to be a “wonderful place full of fun and good feeling. Thomas Merton was very happy.” It was in this way that Thomas Merton influenced the world and world history. He influenced people, proved to them that they could make a difference and they did.

Joan Baez said of him;

He was a rebel, you know a rebel as a church person. I imagine that gives priests and nuns the courage to take steps they wouldn’t other wise take…The traditional western pacifism is let my little light shine and I will do my good within my community in my short life. Radicalizing pacifism means taking it out into the war fronts and to the community and I believe that is what he did when he took a stand and he wrote his poetry.

She, Baez, was deeply influenced by Merton and his poetry and thinking. She took a great many of his ideas and teachings and put them into her songs. Merton, there reached hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people.

Merton’s message was one of peace, a radical kind of peace, a message of detachment, but not of disinterest. The Nicaraguan Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal, who was a novice under Merton, had this to say about him,

It was an incredible privilege to be instructed by this great master of mysticism who had been my instructor for years through his books. I thought I would have to renounce everything when I entered the Trappist monastery my books, my interest in my country, my politics, in the dictatorship of Latin America, Nicaraguan politics, in Semoza, in everything and Merton made me see that I didn’t have to renounce anything.

Cardenal took Merton’s instruction back with him to Nicaragua where he founded a community and became involved in politics and eventually became the Minister of Culture.

W. H. Ferry said

He was appalled by the kind of conversation that were going on in Catholic circles about Just War and the use of the “H” bomb…[He was] a religious mystic who really couldn’t escape the real world and wouldn’t allow his conscience to escape the real world. It must have been a conflict his whole life between retreat and attack in the real world.

Merton made no qualms about matters of social conscience. He said in no uncertain terms, “It is my intention to make my life a rejection a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and tyranny.” There were many who did not care for Merton’s work. In the 1950’s with the killing of the Birmingham children he became involved and outspoken concerning the cause of human liberties. He began to see that race and war and the way of looking at these issues would bring tumultuous change to the face of America. He wrote a text called The Cold War Letters, which was censored by the government, Merton simply published them privately, that is he gave them to friends and they were circulated that way. In fact Merton wrote of American society in these letters,

With the race troubles in the south one can see the beginnings and perhaps more than the beginnings of a Nazi mentality in the United States. There is a powerful and influential alliance of businessmen and government officials who consider everyone who disagrees with them a communist, a traitor and a spy. The atmosphere is not unlike what I remember of the Germany of 1932.

Particularly in the church many did not care for Merton’s work, but he also had his advocates there. Archbishop Jean Jobot, the Vatican Secretary for Non-Christians said about Merton that,

He [was] a kind of prophet, a kind of prophet I think in the future he will be in the history of spirituality, he would more of a man who, I wouldn’t say opened new ways, but rediscovered old ways that we had forgotten.

In 1965 he was the first American Trappist monk to ever be allowed to live in complete seclusion as a hermit.

It was because of this endorsement and recognition of Merton’s influence and his long time involvement in the study of Eastern philosophy and religious life that he was invited to give a talk to the first ever convention of interfaith dialogue between eastern and western monks in Singapore on December 10 1968. This allowed Merton to take a journey that he had long only dreamt of, to go to the East and meet the Dalai Llama.

While in northern India on his way to meet the Dalai Llama, he came to know his guide, Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk who said of Merton, “I was impressed by his capacity of dialogue. I think right in that night he wrote the statement that Nhat Hanh is my brother.” So Merton begins to break down the boundaries of eastern and western monasticism. Merton does get to go on to meet the Dalai Llama, and in his meeting with this man he so impresses the Dalai Llama the he give Merton this endorsement,

I think of a good human being …honest…if you apply different religion, different belief in right way. They all have same aim to turn a good human being better… I think if the man still living today, I think he’d be one of my comrades to do something as men of peace.

From his meeting with the Dalai Llama, he proceeded to Paella Norua in Sri Lanka to visit the great Buddha’s. There he is reported to have had the single greatest experience of his spiritual life. From Sri Lanka he went to his conference in Bangkok. The conference, a major historical event, the first interfaith dialogues between Eastern and Western Monks was held in the Red Cross Conference Center in Singapore on December 10 1968. During this conference he quoted early Marx and commented on the idea that “ you have a basically Christian idea against alienation. At least I believe this is what we have been trying to do in monasteries and I think the only place this can work is in a monastery.” His words were not received with equanimity. He retired to his room for a bath. Later that afternoon he was found electrocuted in his bathtub with and electric fan laying on him. His body was shipped to Gethsemani onboard an Air Force jet with the bodies of U. S. armed forces personnel who had died in Vietnam. He, a man of peace, who was born in times of War, had died during a time of War had traveled with its victims on his last journey.

Thomas Merton, a seemingly unpreposing simpe Trappist Monk did have a profound impact on the American consciousness through his writing and his interpersonal contact with so many others. He helped to shape the mind of several generations of advocates for peace and protesters of war, nuclear holocaust and racism. Thomas Merton was perhaps the greatest spiritual mind of the twentieth century.

Works Cited

Baker, James T, Thomas Merton Social Critic. Lexington, University of Kentucky, 1971

Furlong, Monica, Merton A Biography. San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1980

Malits, Elena, The Solitary Explorer thoms Merton’s Transforming Journey. San

Francisco, Harper and Row, 1980

Merton, Thomas, A Catch of Anti-Letters, Kansas City, Sheed Andrews and McMeel,

1978

- - - . Essential Writings, Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 2000

- - -. Figures for an Apocalypse. Norfolk: New Direction, 1947

- - -. The Hidden Ground of Love. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985

- - - . Honorable Reader. New York, Crossroad, 1989

- - -. The Intimate Merton. New York, Harper Collins, 1999

- - -. Mystics and Zen Masters. New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1967

- - -. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York, New Directions, 1961

- - -. No Man Is an Island. San Diego, Harvest Book, 1955

- - -. The Nonviolent Alternative. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971

- - -. On Nuclear Weapons. Chicago, Loyola University Press, 1988

- - -. On Peace. New York, McCall, 1975

- - -. The Road to Joy. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989

- - -. The Secular Journal of Thomas Meront. New York, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy,

1959

- - -. The Seven Storey Mountain. San Diego, Harvest Book, 1999

- - -. The Sign of Jonas. New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1953

- - -. A Thomas Merton Reader. New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961

- - -. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. New York, New Directions Book, 1968

 

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