Merton, Thomas
MERTON, THOMAS (1915–1968), Roman Catholic monk, author, and poet. Merton pursued a career that may be divided into three distinct phases: secular, monastic, and public. The secular career encompasses the first twenty-six years of his life and culminates with his entrance into the abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, in 1941. The basic elements that influenced his later life were set in place during this period. Merton was born on 31 January 1915 in Prades, France, the first child of artist Ruth Jenkins Merton of Zanesville, Ohio, and artist Owen Merton of Christchurch, New Zealand. The family moved to New York City the next year to escape World War I. The loss of his mother while still a child, his father at age sixteen, and a younger brother in World War II, contributed to Merton's sense of the tragic contingency of human life and, possibly, to his decision to enter monastic life. The influence from two parents who were artists and instinctive pacifists bore fruit in their son's pursuits as writer, poet, and prophet of nonviolence.
Merton attended school in the United States, Bermuda, France, and England before commencing higher education. He entered Clare College of Cambridge University on scholarship and completed his undergraduate education at Columbia University in New York. His friendships with Professor Mark Van Doren, the Pulitzer Prize poet, and fellow student Robert Lax, the future poet, helped to develop his already existing interests in mysticism, poetry, and monasticism. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1938, completed an M.A. in literature from Columbia in 1939, and entered the abbey of Gethsemani in 1941 while working on a never-completed Ph.D. thesis on Gerard Manley Hopkins and teaching English at Saint Bonaventure University in New York State.
The second phase of Merton's career is his life as a monk of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance. The rigor of this life is characterized by perpetual silence, a lifelong vegetarian diet, and many hours of daily prayer starting at 2:00 AM. The purpose of this regimen is the development of a contemplative life. Many of those who knew Merton well believe he became a mystic during these years. The last three years of his life were also lived as a hermit, removed from the communal life of the monastery.
The third phase of Merton's life, the public career, is somewhat coincident with the second and is marked by an intense involvement in writing, social protest, and Asian spirituality. The most famous of his sixty books is Seven Storey Mountain, an autobiography about a personal search that brings him from unfocused activism to contemplation and from a life of self-indulgence to self-discipline. The writings of Merton include eight volumes of poetry and some six hundred articles.
If a career in writing was unconventional, Merton's involvement in social protest was even less part of the monastic model. He objected vehemently to the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, violations of the rights of black Americans, and the dehumanizing effects of technology. This protest caused him difficulty at times with readers who favored a pietistic style of writing, with church superiors, and with members of his monastic community. He persevered in putting his views forward, however, believing that mystics owed their contemporaries the value of their own unique witness.
In the final years of his life, Merton was committed to Hindu and Buddhist spiritual wisdom without diminishing his attachment to Catholic Christianity. Zen Buddhism, most especially, appealed to Merton because of its emphasis on experience rather than doctrine. Merton searched for God through participation in the ancient spiritualities of Asia on a long journey to the East that was his personal pilgrimage and a metaphor of his life. He died of accidental electrocution in Bangkok, Thailand, on December 10, 1968.
Bibliography
The authorized biography of Thomas Merton, Michael Mott's The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Boston, 1984), is an exhaustively researched and yet readable study. It may suffer from lack of a central interpretive theme but sets a standard for subsequent work on Merton. Merton: A Biography by Monica Furlong (New York, 1980) is a reliable account, although little attention is given to Merton's monastic vocation or his involvement with Asian spirituality. Thomas Merton: Monk and Poet, by George Woodcock (New York, 1978), is a perceptive analysis of the creative dynamics in Merton's literary work. The author, himself a poet and novelist, is sensitive to the religious dimension of Merton's life. My own book, The Human Journey: Thomas Merton, Symbol of a Century (New York, 1982), draws out the correlations between Merton's personal life and the tensions and aspirations of the twentieth century. It traces the appeal of Merton to his capacity to assimilate the problems and promise of his own time.
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