Merton's Mountainous Legacy

By Richard N. Ostling

A new wave of interest in the century's most celebrated monk

So Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me, and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom." Thus in his bestselling autobiography did Thomas Merton describe the moment he arrived to become a postulant at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey in rural Kentucky. It was the Advent season of 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor. By eerie coincidence, Dec. 10 was also the date of Merton's mysterious 1968 death. As the anniversary of his death and religious birth came round again this Christmas season, Merton disciples were enjoying a host of new material on the modern era's most renowned monk, including a major biography.

When Merton entered the monastery 43 years ago, Roman Catholic religious orders were faithful to the rigorous disciplines of old. A little-known New York writer and teacher whose life had been rakish though not quite dissolute, he converted from irreligion to Catholicism at 23 and stunned friends three years later by joining the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, commonly known as Trappists. The monks of Gethsemani lived on prayer, hard manual toil, vegetables and little else. Under the rule of silence, all conversation was forbidden.

"Oh, God! He'll never write again!" his literary agent said. But seven years after disappearing behind Gethsemani's walls, Merton produced The Seven Storey Mountain. The autobiography of conversion sold 300,000 copies in less than a year (more than 3 million as of 1984). That book was followed by 60 other volumes of meditations, poems, essays, criticism, history, translations, drawings and photographs. For masses of readers Brother Louis, as he was called by the Trappists, redefined the image of monasticism and made the concept of saintliness accessible to moderns. His treatise on meditation, New Seeds of Contemplation (1962), was deemed a spiritual classic. Moreover, the cloistered monk became a pioneering Catholic polemicist on civil rights and the immorality of nuclear war. Merton explored the spirituality of Eastern religions well before other Catholics.

Though not the cult figure he was during the 1950s and '60s, Merton still commands a following. Forty of his books are in print. Paulist Press is offering a videotape in which Michael Moriarty portrays the monk. Last June PBS televised a biography, and the film is still enjoying brisk sales and rentals. The show's producers have now recycled 20 of their interviews as Merton by Those Who Knew Him Best (Harper & Row; 191 pages; $12.95), a slight but engaging book.

The major item in the current wave of interest is the finely wrought new biography by Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Houghton Mifflin; 690 pages; $24.95). A professor of creative writing at Ohio's Bowling Green State University, Mott, 54, succeeded the late John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me), the original biographer named by Merton's literary executors. The author provides some fresh details about the 30 years that Merton treated in Seven Storey Mountain, but the book's most fascinating contribution involves the second half of Merton's life. The executors gave Mott exclusive access to his subject's extensive journals of 1956-68, which, at Merton's direction, will not be released until 1993.

Through the journals and Merton's correspondence with 1,800 people, Mott traces the spiritual, psychological and practical struggles that the ever questing monk underwent to preserve his vocation. In later years the greatest trial of the "man who wore no masks," in one critic's phrase, was his secret infatuation with a young Catholic nurse he had met while in a Louisville hospital. Mott discreetly refers to her as "S." and sympathetically but unflinchingly shows how Merton maneuvered around the rules and rationalized to continue the relationship, suffered through the inevitable crisis and preserved his vocation ("I want the life I have vowed").

Perhaps Merton's most important and ambivalent relationship, reports Mott, was that with his longtime abbot, James Fox. Merton constantly tested his superior, yet needed the constraints that he applied. Despite their conflicts, Dom James thought enough of Merton to make him his private confessor and Gethsemani's master of novices, training all candidates. Theirs was a cloistered game of spiritual power battled out between two strong-willed men. Fox, a graduate of Harvard Business School, brought the destitute monastery to financial stability with innovations such as the marketing of cheese and sausage made by the monks. But the resulting commercialization and modern necessities--machinery, even air conditioning--prompted Merton's scorn. On the other hand, Merton's involvement with the outside world seemed to Fox a violation of tradition in need of curbing.

When Merton first began writing, the Trappists debated whether one of their monks had any business being a published author, or even an intellectual. In 1963 the abbot general ordered Merton to cease his writings on war and peace. Merton seethed in a private letter: "Monk concerned with peace. Bad image." He obeyed the directive formally, but distributed mimeographed antiwar pieces. In 1967 all censorship was removed.

Merton fought for and was finally granted the chance to take his only prolonged trip away from the abbey--to Asia to study Eastern religions. While visiting a Catholic retreat center outside Bangkok, he was found dead, apparently electrocuted by a faulty fan. Mott acknowledges rumors of murder or suicide, but concludes that there is no solid evidence to rebut the probability of an accident that may have induced a heart attack.

In Mott's portrait, Merton seems to have shifted direction continually, insisting as a younger monk that the monastery shut out the "commotion and excitement" of the outside world, while in later years leading monasticism into a new engagement with the world beyond the walls and enunciating the moral duty to deal with issues of peace and social justice. Then, at the very end of his life, Mott writes, Merton came to feel that a "distorting element in the renewal of the church had led to a movement away from prayer, contemplation, the values of the tradition which had provided strength for almost 2,000 years, in favor of an activism that was wholly self-justifying." In Mott's view, there was no inconsistency. Merton was merely seeking a proper balance between prayer and action, not just for modernized monks but for all Christians.

--By Richard N.Ostling