THIRTY YEARS after his death in December 1968 and 50 years after the publication of his autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain," Thomas Merton stands as one of the 20th century's towering thinkers - and one of its most enigmatic.
As a Trappist priest and monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky, which he entered in 1941, Merton produced more than 50 books of prose and poetry. He wrote more than 4,000 letters, many of them collected in five volumes that began appearing in 1985 with "The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters on Religious Experience and Social Concerns." An ever-widening shelf of biographies offers factual coverage and intimate probings of a life remarkable on one level for its breadth and depth, and on another for its intellectual twists and turns.
The outward biographical details are easily recited. Born in France in 1915. Orphaned in adolescence. Attended Columbia University in the mid-1930s. Entered the Trappists at 26. Died in Bangkok in December 1968 after addressing a gathering of nuns and monks, the apparent victim of a faulty electric fan in his room.
The inward details are not so easily grasped. Merton's life has all the markings of a classic conversion story, as he moved from a worldly life of godless hedonism to one of ascetic spirituality. In the 1940s, the Trappists, an international order that follows the fifth-century Rule of St. Benedict, combined the toughness of the Marine Corps with the rigors of the French Foreign Legion. They slept in their monastic habits, rose at 2 a.m., communicated by sign language, ate simple unspiced food, performed manual labor, and at the end of their cloistered lives were buried in pine boxes hours after their deaths.
The account of Merton's conversion to this no-frills religion is told "The Seven Storey Mountain," a best-seller that went into more than 200 printings in three years, after 600,000 copies were sold in the first year. The book - portraying a somewhat self-conscious, undisciplined, sermonizing man - would be rejected by Merton. In Paul Wilkes' 1984 film biography, Merton is quoted as saying, "Life is not so simple as it once looked in 'Seven Storey Mountain.' Unfortunately, the book was a best-seller and has become a kind of edifying legend or something. That is a dreadful fate. It is a youthful book, too simple, too crude. I'm doing my best to live it down, I rebel against it, and maintain my basic human right not to be turned into a Catholic myth for children in parochial schools I"
If Merton threw off the pieties of his early monastic days - as found in such books as "The Silent Life" and "The Waters of
Siloe" - he also lurched into the social upheavals of the 1960s, starting with the struggles against war and racism. The monk who withdrew from the world now withdrew from his withdrawal. He all but took a vow of total engagement: "It is my intention to make my entire life a rejection, a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and political tyranny." Influenced by Gandhi, Merton embraced nonviolence. His peace writings are collected in "The Nonviolent Alternative" and other works. "While nonviolence, is regared as somehow sinister, vicious and evil," he wrote, "violence I is not only tolerated but approved by American society."
Despite such forcefulness, Merton did not become a pacifist. This was a major disappointment to many on the left in the 1960s who were protesting the killing in Vietnam. Merton couldn't bring himself to reject the "just war" theory, a contamination that has been renounced by the Quakers, Bruderhofs and Mennonites but never the Catholic church.
Another inconsistency sprung from Merton's decision in 1965 to become a hermit by moving to a backwoods cabin on monastery property. Far from being alone, he became something of a social butterfly by entertaining a stream of visitors, from Joan Baez and Ira Sandperl to Daniel Berrigan and Jacques Maritain. He socialized by mail, in letters to an astonishing array of people, including Benjamin Spock, Erich Fromm, Czeslaw Milosz, Rachel Carson, nuns, bishops, schoolchildren and scores of admirers. To some, he poured out his restless heart. To others, he offered succor.
For all the asceticism of the Trappists, monastic life at Gethsemani during Merton's day - and as it continues in the 1990s at the order's dozen other U.S. monasteries - retained its ++ share of comforts and securities not guaranteed to the rest of humanity. Among these were healthy meals prepared by a cook, meaningful work, free health care, ample clothing, plenty of time for reading, walks in the woods and hardly a fret, much less a furrowed brow, about troublesome kids or in-laws, gridlocked traffic, street crime, junk mail, taxes, tax forms, neighbors' barking dogs or long checkout lines. St. Catherine of Siena must have had Trappists in mind when she cooed, "All the way to heaven is heaven."
In Merton, something is there for everybody. He gave up the world and then couldn't get enough of it. He vowed obedience and then chafed at Trappist regulations. He celebrated Western Christianity but spent the last days in the Far East probing Zen Buddhism. He was addicted to writing but said, "Most of my own books I can't stand."
In 1966, Merton described himself in an article in Commonweal: "This is simply the voice of a self-questioning human person who I struggles to cope with turbulent, mysterious, demanding, exciting, frustrating, confused existence."
Merton was right about that. He was one of us, after all.
Colman McCarthy directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C. He teaches courses on nonviolence at six Washington-area schools.
Pub Date: 12/13/98