Introduction

Thomas Merton was the quintessential American outsider, who defined himself in opposition to the world in both word and deed and then discovered a way back into dialogue with it and compassion for it. He was not a spokesman for any particular group, cause, or idea, but rather the harbinger of a still yet to be realized contemplative counterculture— offering us a vision of an interior life free from rigid philosophical categories, narrow political agendas, and trite religious truisms.

Merton's early years reflected many of the collective experiences of twentieth-century life—loss, loneliness, and lack of meaning. He was born in 1915 in Prades, France, not far from the killing fields of World War I. The war forced his financially struggling expatriate parents to return to New York, where, six years later, his mother died of stomach cancer. Merton spent the rest of his childhood with his father, an aspiring watercolorist, traveling back and forth from the United States to Europe. He attended P.S. 98 in Douglaston, New York, the French Lycée at Montauban, and the Oakham prep school in England. In 1931 his father died of a brain tumor.

Two years later Merton entered Clare College, Cambridge, intending to pursue a career in diplomacy, but he actually spent most of his time going to parties and "indulging his appetites," as he wrote later. He lost his scholarship and got kicked out of the university for, among other things, fathering a child out of wedlock and participating in a drunken fraternity party, where, according to accounts, he was ritually crucified.

Merton returned to New York the next year and tried to shape up by joining the Communist Party. He took the so-called "Oxford Pledge" never to fight in any wars and participated in street protests against the war in Ethiopia. But though political radicalism gave his life the semblance of an ethical order, Merton was still morally and philosophically at sea amid the torrential instabilities of the thirties.

Slowly, however, he began to meet the men who would help him find himself. He studied with Mark Van Doren, a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and critic, and with Joseph Wood Krutch, a naturalist and environmentalist whose numerous books included The Modern Temper (1929) and a celebrated biography of Henry David Thoreau. Merton's circle of friends also grew to include the likes of Ad Reinhardt, who went on to become a famous abstract expressionist and minimalist painter, and Robert Lax, the celebrated avant-garde poet.

Inspired, Merton threw himself into his studies. Under Mark Van Doren's tutelage, he began reading for inspiration and spiritual illumination, searching for ideas he could experience and apply to his life rather than for mere historical and theoretical knowledge. He also joined the staff of the Columbia Jester, began writing a novel, and developed an interest in Eastern religions. One of his professors, a Hindu monk named Bramachari, suggested that he read the Western spiritual writers before studying the Eastern ones, and Merton never fully recovered from this suggestion. He read so deeply in the Western spiritual tradition that he was transformed from the inside out—converting to Catholicism two years later.

The dramatic turning point in Merton's life, however, didn't occur until April 1941. Although he had been studying Catholicism for several years and was thinking about becoming a priest, it wasn't until he visited the Abbey of Gethsemani that he discovered—in that peaceful, physically demanding community of cloistered monks—the alternative life he was looking for. That day he wrote in his journal,

I should tear out all the other pages of this book, and all the other pages of anything else I've ever written, and begin here.

This is the center of America. I had wondered what was holding the country together, what had been keeping the universe from cracking to pieces and falling apart. . . . This is the only real city in America—and it is by itself in the wilderness. It is an axle around which the whole country blindly turns and knows nothing about it. Gethsemani holds the country together the way the underlying substrata of natural faith that goes with our whole being and can hardly be separated from it, keeps living on in a man who has "lost his faith"—who no longer believes in Being and yet himself is, in spite of his crazy denial that he Who IS mercifully allowed him to be.

Merton decided then and there to enter the monastery (if the Trappists would have him), thus sealing his shift in allegiance from the secular literati with "their 'no' to everything that served as their pitiful 'yes' to themselves" to a life of contemplation in a religious community where time and transcendence merged in the holy present and grace fell as "gratuitous as rain."

His reasoning was really very simple: If bourgeois civilization was failing, then leave it; if the West had become blind to its spiritual heritage, then reclaim it; and if poverty and obscurity were the price one had to pay to live a life in accord with conscience, then wholeheartedly embrace them and don't look back.

Merton's decision to "leave the world" was really an extension of his new "examined" life. By entering the monastery, he was not only turning his back on the entire materialist and positivist thrust of contemporary civilization, but also questioning the effectiveness of the artistic counterculture and political radicalism that pretended to scorn it. Yet Merton never thought of his decision to enter a monastery as a rejection of the world so much as a refusal to participate in lies and support false actions.

As far as I can see, what I abandoned when I "left the world" and came to the monastery was the understanding of myself that I had developed in the context of civil society—my identification with what appeared to me to be its aims. Certainly, in the concrete, "the world" did not mean for me either riches (I was poor) or a life of luxury, certainly not the ambition to get somewhere in business or in anything else except writing. But it did mean a certain set of servitudes that I could no longer accept—servitudes to certain standards of value which to me were idiotic and repugnant and still are. Many of these were trivial, some of them were onerous, all are closely related. The image of a society that is happy because it drinks Coca-Cola or Seagrams or both and is protected by the bomb. The society that is imaged in the mass media and in advertising, in the movies, in TV, in best-sellers, in current fads, in all the pompous and trifling masks with which it hides callousness, sensuality, hypocrisy, cruelty, and fear.

After entering the order, Merton immersed himself even more deeply in monastic tradition. He gave up writing fiction for poetry, saints' lives, and ecclesiastical history. Under orders from the abbot, he wrote a spiritual autobiography that told the story of his transformation from skeptic to Trappist contemplative. The Seven Storey Mountain was published in 1948, shortly after the worst war in human history. The nuclear arms race was just beginning, and the civil rights movement was raising disturbing questions about America's commitment to democratic values. Merton's soul-searching autobiography offered a vision of life that transcended these confusions through an overt and complete rejection of the materialistic aspirations and moral compromises of contemporary civilization. To everyone's surprise, it became an international best-seller, catapulting him from the obscurity of his "silent life" into instant celebrity.

As the fifties progressed, Merton was deeply moved by Catholic peace activist Dorothy Day's refusal to participate in civil defense drills and by Martin Luther King's courageous nonviolent assault upon race prejudice and inequality. Merton published some of his lectures on contemplation and started to write essays directly addressed to his secular contemporaries. He also began a series of correspondences with a variety of thinkers that included the neo-Marxist Eric Fromm, the Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki, the Nobel laureate poet and critic of totalitarianism Czeslaw Milosz, and the Jewish scholar, mystic, and activist Abraham Heschel.

After the Cuban missile crisis had brought the world to the threshold of nuclear annihilation in 1962, the United States experienced a succession of political horrors that included the Kennedy assassination; the Watts, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., riots; and the escalating war in Vietnam. These events brought into question the existing social order, giving rise to public protests and disaffection among minorities and the young. As a result, Merton's reflections on the spiritual poverty of contemporary life began to take on a new social relevance. The controversial satirist Lenny Bruce began to read Merton's poetry in his nightclub act, and even the Black Power revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver quoted him at length in his controversial autobiography, Soul on Ice.

Meanwhile, Merton was reading Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, and Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society. Writing to James Forest, a war protester and member of Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker community, Merton succinctly summed up his take on all these books and developments:

It seems to me that the most basic problem is not political, it is apolitical and human. One of the most important things to do is to keep cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers and emphasizing the fact that these are largely fabrications and that there is another dimension, a genuine reality, totally opposed to the fictions of politics, the human dimension which politicians pretend to arrogate entirely to themselves. . . . Is this possible?

Merton spent the rest of his life trying to prove that it was indeed possible and attempting to give voice to this "genuine reality."

Collected here are some of the fruits of his efforts. The selections are organized in four parts, which to some extent parallel Merton's own development: Part One attempts to draw the distinction between our false and true selves, between the pseudo-identities we possess as conditioned members of society and the persons we truly are, known only by God. Part Two presents Merton's view of the state of the modern world as "a deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in man." Part Three focuses on his antidotes to cultural illusion, while Part Four explores the existential difficulties that emerge once one truly begins to engage in the struggle for justice and true sanctification.

This four-part structure somewhat belies the cyclical and improvisational nature of much of Merton's writing. He was never really a problem solver per se, and he seldom attempted to lay down the law theologically. His method, insofar as he can be said to have one, was far more personal, informal, and tentative: literary and phenomenological. He was, if you will, an explorer on the frontiers of human self-understanding—testing ideas out with his own life, coming back to them again and again to resolve certain ambiguities and refine his ideas—all the while creating within himself an ever more inclusive map of the cosmos. And although Merton never challenged the essential message of Christianity, he did rediscover truths we seemed to have lost and put them in new contexts by which they could be more fully appreciated and understood.

I have collected paragraphs here—as opposed to essays—partly because it is the most succinct way to introduce Merton's ideas, but more importantly because the paragraph was Merton's literary strength. He thought and composed in paragraphs that modeled his own reflective thought processes: single ideas growing thematically, lyrically, and dialectically out of themselves, making unexpected connections, and then emerging into surprising new epiphanies. If the rhetoric of Merton's longer works can sometimes be formidable, his paragraphs are always accessible, poignant, and revelatory.

Merton died by accidental electrocution while attending an international conference on monasticism in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1968, the very same year Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. His trip to the East had included meetings with the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh—the celebrated Vietnamese Zen Master who was nominated for a Nobel Prize by Martin Luther King and continues to teach meditation to this day. Merton's early death cut short his conversation with the East and silenced one of the twentieth-century's most creative and ecumenical thinkers.

Merton described his life's work this way:

My own peculiar task in my Church and in my world has been that of the solitary explorer who, instead of jumping on all the latest bandwagons at once, is bound to search the existential depths of faith in its silences, its ambiguities, and in those certainties which lie deeper than the bottom of anxiety. In those depths there are no easy answers, no pat solutions to anything. It is a kind of submarine life in which faith sometimes mysteriously takes on the aspect of doubt, when, in fact, one has to doubt and reject conventional and superstitious surrogates that have taken the place of faith.

By exposing the "conventional and superstitious surrogates" for faith, Thomas Merton taught us what it means to live a life of conscience in difficult times. He combined the rigor of the New York intellectuals with the probity of the Desert Fathers—speaking directly to our solitude through a rigorous examination of his own. By so doing, he closed the gap between our exterior, social selves and our interior, undetermined freedom. When we read his works, we have the strange sensation of being both found out and set free. For although he undermines our illusory ambitions, questions our values, and assaults our complacency, he also gives solace to our impoverished souls by reminding us of a larger, more inclusive, transcendent reality of which we are all a part.

—Robert Inchausti
San Luis Obispo, California