Thomas Merton

Among Merton's most widely-read works is his bestselling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). Merton was a keen proponent of interfaith understanding, exploring Eastern religions through study and practice. He pioneered dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual figures.

• Honorific Prefix — The Reverend • Name — Thomas Merton • Honorific Suffix — OCSO • Born — 31 January 1915 • Birthplace — Prades, Pyrénées-Orientales, France • Died — 10 December 1968 • Place of death — Mueang Samut Prakan, Thailand • Citizenship — United States • Education — Columbia University • Occupation — * Trappist monk • author • Religion — Christianity (Roman Catholic) • Church — Latin Church • Writings — The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)

Thomas Merton was born in Prades, Pyrénées-Orientales, France, on January 31, 1915, to parents of Welsh origin: Owen Merton, a New Zealand painter active in Europe and the United States, and Ruth Jenkins Merton, an American Quaker and artist. They had met at a painting school in Paris. He was baptized in the Church of England, in accordance with his father's wishes. Merton's father was often absent during his son's childhood. During World War I, in August 1915, the Merton family left France for the United States. They lived first with Ruth's parents in Queens, New York, and then settled near them in Douglaston. In 1917, the family moved into an old house in Flushing, Queens, where Merton's brother, John Paul, was born on November 2, 1918. The family was considering returning to France when Ruth was diagnosed with stomach cancer. She died from it on October 21, 1921, in Bellevue Hospital. Merton was six years old and his brother not yet three. In 1926, when Merton was eleven, his father enrolled him in a boys' boarding school in Montauban, the Lycée Ingres. In the summer of 1928, he withdrew Merton from Lycée Ingres, saying the family was moving to England.

In October 1933, Merton, age 18, entered Clare College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate to study French and Italian. He was unhappy at Clare College, preferring loafing over studying, and fathered a child whom he never met, although he later signed at least two official court documents stating that he had "no children". In January 1935, Merton enrolled as a sophomore at Columbia University in New York City. There he established close and long-lasting friendships with the painter Ad Reinhardt, poet Robert Lax, commentator Ralph de Toledano, and the law student John Slate. He also befriended the publisher Robert Giroux. Merton attended an 18th-century English literature course during the spring semester taught by Mark Van Doren, a professor with whom he maintained a lifetime friendship. At Columbia, he joined the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and the Philolexian Society. • Illustration — Corpus Christi Church, W. 121st St., where Merton first attended Mass In January 1938, Merton graduated from Columbia with a B.A. in English. In June, his friend Seymour Freedgood arranged a meeting with Mahanambrata Brahmachari, a Hindu monk visiting New York from the University of Chicago. Merton was impressed by him. While Merton expected Brahmachari to recommend Hinduism, instead he advised Merton to reconnect with Christianity. He suggested Merton read the Confessions of Augustine and The Imitation of Christ. Merton read them both. In August 1938, he attended Mass at Corpus Christi Church, located near the Columbia campus. He began to read more extensively in Catholicism. On November 16, 1938, Thomas Merton underwent the rite of confirmation at Corpus Christi Church and received Holy Communion. On February 22, 1939, Merton received his M.A. in English from Columbia University. Merton decided he would pursue his PhD at Columbia and moved from Douglaston to Greenwich Village. He then discerned a call to religious life.

After converting to Catholicism, Merton was accepted by the Franciscan Order, and intended to enter the Franciscan novitiate until he was instructed to withdraw his application. Dejected, he looked for a job and was hired to teach at St. Bonaventure University, founded by the Franciscans on the outskirts of Olean, New York. During this period Merton renounced any remnants of an unchaste lifestyle and delved into prayer and spirituality. Merton found a welcoming atmosphere and spiritual guidance from Franciscan mentors like Fathers Irenaeus Herscher, Thomas Plassman, and Philotheus Boehner, while joining the Third Order (Secular Franciscans) as a way to live out Franciscan ideals. He attended St. Mary of the Angels Church in Olean to pray and to go to confession. At the close of 1941, he stopped into St. Mary of the Angels one last time to pray the stations of the cross before boarding the train taking him to the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani.

• Illustration — Thomas Merton's hermitage at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani On December 10, 1941, Thomas Merton arrived at the Abbey of Gethsemani and spent three days at the monastery guest house, waiting for acceptance into the order. On December 13 he was accepted into the monastery as a postulant by Frederic Dunne, Gethsemani's abbot since 1935, and given the religious name Mary Louis. Merton had a severe cold from his stay in the guest house, where he sat in front of an open window to prove his sincerity. During his initial weeks at Gethsemani, Merton studied the Trappist sign language and daily work and worship routine. In March 1942, during the first Sunday of Lent, Merton was accepted as a novice. In June, he received a letter from his brother John Paul stating he was soon to leave for the war and would be coming to Gethsemani to visit before leaving. On July 17 John Paul arrived in Gethsemani. John Paul expressed his desire to become a Catholic, and by July 26 was baptized at a church in nearby New Haven, Kentucky, leaving the following day. This would be the last time the two saw each other. John Paul died on April 17, 1943, when his plane failed over the English Channel. A poem by Merton to John Paul appears in The Seven Storey Mountain.

• Illustration — The grave of Thomas Merton. His grave marker reads "Fr. Louis Merton, died Dec. 10, 1968". According to his book The Seven Storey Mountain, the youthful Merton loved jazz, but by the time he began his first teaching job he had forsaken all but peaceful music. Later in life, whenever he was permitted to leave Gethsemani for medical or monastic reasons, he would catch what live jazz he could, mainly in Louisville or New York City. In April 1966, Merton underwent surgery to treat debilitating back pain. While recuperating in a Louisville hospital, he fell in love with Margie Smith, a student nurse assigned to his care. (He referred to her in his diary as "M.") He wrote poems to her and reflected on the relationship in "A Midsummer Diary for M." Merton struggled to maintain his vows while being deeply in love. It is not known if he ever consummated the relationship.

On December 10, 1968, Merton was at a Red Cross retreat facility named Sawang Khaniwat in Samut Prakan, a province near Bangkok, Thailand, attending a monastic conference. After giving a talk at the morning session, he was found dead later in the afternoon in the room of his cottage, lying on his back with a standing fan having fallen and lying across his body. A police test revealed that a "defective electric cord was installed inside its stand.... The flow of electricity was strong enough to cause the death of a person if he touched the metal part." His associate, Jean Leclercq, stated: "In all probability the death of Thomas Merton was due in part to heart failure, in part to an electric shock." Since there was no autopsy, there was no suitable explanation for the wound in the back of Merton's head, "which had bled considerably". Arriving from the cottage next to Merton's, the Primate of the Benedictine order and presiding officer of the conference, Rembert Weakland, anointed Merton. Merton's body was flown back to the United States on board a US military aircraft returning from Vietnam. He is buried at the Gethsemani Abbey. The Spring 2024 issue of The Catholic Historical Review published "The Official Thai Reports on Thomas Merton's Death". The official cause of death was a natural cause, "sudden heart failure" and not "accidental electrocution". The police report states that Merton was dead before he came into contact with a faulty fan that was found lying across his body.

Merton was first exposed to and became interested in Eastern religions when he read Aldous Huxley's Ends and Means in 1937, the year before his conversion to Catholicism. Throughout his life, he studied Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Sufism in addition to his academic and monastic studies. While Merton was not interested in what these traditions had to offer as doctrines and institutions, he was interested in what each said of the depth of human experience. He believed that for the most part, Christianity had forsaken its mystical tradition in favor of Cartesian emphasis on "the reification of concepts, idolization of the reflexive consciousness, flight from being into verbalism, mathematics, and rationalization". Of all of the Eastern traditions, Merton wrote most about Zen. Having studied the Desert Fathers and other Christian mystics, he found parallels between the language of Christian mystics and Zen philosophy. In 1959, Merton began a dialogue with D. T. Suzuki which was published nearly ten years later in Merton's Zen and the Birds of Appetite as "Wisdom in Emptiness". Merton wrote then that "any attempt to handle Zen in theological language is bound to miss the point", calling his final statements "an example of how not to approach Zen". Merton struggled to reconcile the Western and Christian impulse to catalog and put into words with the ideas of Christian apophatic theology and the unspeakable nature of the Zen experience. Zhong Fushi mentions having met Merton, who allegedly said to him, "Zen, is a way of perceiving the substantial reality of all things—their goodness, their beauty, and their oneness (ichinyo)." Zhong interpreted this as Merton aligning Zen Buddhism with an enlightenment of the Aristotelian-Thomistic transcendentals common to everything that has or is or will exist. In keeping with his idea that non-Christian faiths had much to offer Christianity in experience and perspective and little or nothing in terms of doctrine, Merton distinguished between Zen Buddhism, an expression of history and culture, and Zen. By Zen, Merton meant something not bound by culture, religion or belief. Merton was influenced by Aelred Graham's book Zen Catholicism of 1963.

section Merton also explored Native American spirituality. He wrote a series of articles on Native American history and spirituality for The Catholic Worker, The Center Magazine, Theoria to Theory, and Unicorn Journal. He explored themes such as Native American fasting and missionary work.

Merton's life was the subject of The Glory of the World, a play by Charles L. Mee. Roy Cockrum, a former monk who won the Powerball lottery in 2014, helped finance the production of the play in New York. Prior to New York the play was shown in Louisville, Kentucky. In the 2017 movie First Reformed, written and directed by Paul Schrader, Ethan Hawke's character (a middle-aged Protestant minister) is influenced by Merton's work. The title of the 2004 film Original Child Bomb comes from Merton's poem of the same name.