Thomas Merton died in 1968 while attending a conference of eastern and western monks in Bangkok. Today, on the fiftieth anniversary of Mountain, I think again of Mark Van Doren’s words, which Tom and I as students heard in his classroom: “A classic is a book that remains in print.”
A Note to the Reader
by William H. Shannon
Founding President of the
International Thomas Merton Society
Published on October 4, 1948, The Seven Storey Mountain was an instant success. Hailed as a twentieth-century “version” of the Confessions of St. Augustine, it has for fifty years continued to sell and sell and sell. Evelyn Waugh, no easy critic, wrote prophetically that The Seven Storey Mountain “might well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience.” Graham Greene suggested that it was “an autobiography with a pattern and meaning valid for all of us.” Its readership has continued to expand, extending far beyond its country of origin. More than twenty foreign language translations have appeared, one of the most recent being Chinese.
Published just three years after the end of World War II, The Seven Storey Mountain struck an instant and sensitive nerve in America and eventually in other parts of the world. Its timing was perfect, coming as it did when, disillusioned by war and searching for meaning in their lives, people were ready to hear the well-told story of a young man whose search ended in remarkable discovery.
Yet, like every classic work, The Seven Storey Mountain may need some introduction for the new reader. Since it is being released in a special anniversary edition, this Note to the Reader may be able to anticipate some difficulties and offer some clarifications so that the reader can approach the book in a comfortable mood and with a clear understanding of what Thomas Merton is about as he narrates with youthful enthusiasm the story of his conversion to the Catholic faith.
I see three principal ways in which The Seven Storey Mountain may surprise or confuse readers: the outdated religious atmosphere that pervades it; the missing information a reader would like to have but on which the author is silent; the interpretation the writer gives to his story.
RELIGIOUS ATMOSPHERE
This book, written by a young monk wondrously happy in his early years in a Trappist monastery and writing while still under the glowing ardor of his conversion experience, is of course unabashedly Roman Catholic. But the Roman Catholic Church you encounter in this book is almost light years removed from the church that we recognize as the Roman Catholic Church today. Today’s church is the product of the revolution (not too strong a term) set in motion by the Second Vatican Council.
The pre—Vatican II church into which Merton was baptized was a church still reacting—even three centuries later—to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Characterized by a siege mentality, wagons-circled around doctrinal and moral absolutes, it clung to its past with great tenacity. An institution apart, it showed little desire to open itself to the questions and needs of a world undergoing huge and unprecedented changes. The church prided itself on the stability and unchangeable character of its teaching in this context of a world in flux. At the time Merton wrote his book, Roman Catholic theology had become a set of prepackaged responses to any and all questions. Polemical and apologetic in tone, its aim was to prove that Catholics were right and all others wrong. This arrogance and confident air of superiority are charmingly captured in a Brendan Beahan story about the Catholic bishop of Cork, Ireland, who, when informed by his secretary that the Church of Ireland bishop of Cork had died, smugly remarked: “Now he knows who is the real bishop of Cork.”
Today, fifty years removed from this rigid ecclesial atmosphere, it may be difficult to identify with Thomas Merton’s enthusiastic acceptance of the church’s triumphalist mentality. Yet, like many converts who found their way into the church after years of aimless wandering, he initially welcomed it lock, stock, and barrel. He was happy to replace the doubts and uncertainties of his past with the unquestioned and unquestioning certitude of the Catholic Church of the mid-twentieth century. Confident in his belief that he belonged to the “one true” church, he all too often speaks disparagingly about other Christian churches—mirroring the church’s complacent triumphalism himself. Even fifty years ago this triumphalism proved a problem for some readers of other religions, who sensed the book’s power but were bewildered by its narrow religiosity. One young woman, although obviously moved by her reading, lamented: “Why is he so vituperative about Protestants? Are they that bad?” Readers today will be better able to put this narrowness in historical perspective and thus be less bothered by it.
People continue to read The Seven Storey Mountain because the story of how Merton arrives at this certitude is so compelling. We are swept along with this young man as he seeks to make something out of his heretofore undisciplined life. Today, as we hover on the verge of a new millennium, we can identify with his searching, if not always with the specific direction it took. Merton’s personal magnetism, the enthusiasms of his convictions, the vivid narratives of this born writer, transcend the narrowness of his theology. His story contains perennial elements of our common human experience. That is what makes it profoundly universal.
MISSING INFORMATION
In the early summer of 1940 Thomas Merton, accepted by the Franciscan Order, was living in Olean and planning to enter the Franciscan novitiate in August. In the middle of the summer he was struck with a sudden anxiety. He realized that he had not told the novice director the complete story of his life. There were facts about his past that he had failed to reveal. He returned to New York City to “tell all,” hoping that his past would not matter. Apparently it did. He was instructed to withdraw his application to the Franciscans. His hopes were shattered. Brokenhearted, he looked for a job and was hired to teach at St. Bonaventure University.
In 1948—and later as well—readers had no inkling what he meant by “telling all.” Some years later the story emerged that, while at Clare College, Cambridge, Merton’s sexual drives, unaccompanied by any sense of their true human meaning, led to disaster not only for him but also for an unmarried woman who bore his child. Nothing further is known of her or the child. At one time (in February 1944) Merton did try to get in touch with her, but she seems to have disappeared.
After this devastating experience in New York City, Merton was convinced that he was forever barred from the Roman Catholic priesthood. He does not tell his readers the reason for this conviction, but it must have been based on the conversation he had had with the Franciscan novice director. The Seven Storey Mountain is silent about what was said in that conversation. More than a year later, however, a Franciscan priest at St. Bonaventure told him that he had been mistaken in thinking that his rejection by the Franciscans meant that he could never become a priest. There was no impediment to his ordination. This news freed him to go to the Trappist monastery in Kentucky, where in 1949 he was ordained a priest.
INTERPRETING THE MERTON STORY
Like many great works, the Merton story may be read on three different levels of meaning. First, there is the historical level: what actually happened in his life. Second, there is the remembered level: what Merton was able to recall of the events of his life. Memory is often selective, which means that the remembered past may not always coincide with the historical past. Finally, there is the level of monastic judgment. By this I mean that Merton wrote The Seven Storey Mountain as a monk. His monastic commitment colors the way Thomas Merton (his religious name was Father Louis) tells the story. The Seven Storey Mountain, I believe it can be said, is the story of a young man named Thomas Merton being judged by a monk named Father Louis. It is helpful to the reader to understand that at times the monk tends to be quite severe in his judgments of the young man.
Thomas Merton concludes his story with these words: Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi. They may be translated, “Let this be the ending of the book but by no means the end of the searching.” These are prophetic
words. The Merton of The Seven Storey Mountain did not disappear; he simply grew. His later writings are the story of his growth to maturity and openness to the future. Observing this growth is the delight that awaits those who go on from The Seven Storey Mountain to read his later works.
PART ONE
ONE
PRISONER’S BASE
ON THE LAST DAY OF JANUARY 1915, UNDER THE SIGN OF the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers.
Not many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a forest of trees without branches along the river Marne.
My father and mother were captives in that world, knowing they did not belong with it or in it, and yet unable to get away from it. They were in the world and not of it—not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.
My father painted like Cézanne and understood the southern French landscape the way Cézanne did. His vision of the world was sane, full of balance, full of veneration for structure, for the relations of masses and for all the circumstances that impress an individual identity on each created thing. His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God’s creation to bear witness for itself. My father was a very good artist.
Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what’s in the ice-box and what’s in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce.
I inherited from my father his way of looking at things and some of his integrity and from my mother some of her dissatisfaction with the mess the world is in, and some of her versatility. From both I got capacities for work and vision and enjoyment and expression that ought to have made me some kind of a King, if the standards the world lives by were the real ones. Not that we ever had any money: but any fool knows that you don’t need money to get enjoyment out of life.
If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now.
If happiness were merely a matter of natural gifts, I would never have entered a Trappist monastery when I came to the age of a man.
II
MY FATHER AND MOTHER CAME FROM THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, to Prades, and though they came to stay, they stayed there barely long enough for me to be born and get on my small feet, and then they left again. And they continued and I began a somewhat long journey: for all three of us, one way and another, it is now ended.
And though my father came from the other side of the earth, beyond many oceans, all the pictures of Christchurch, New Zealand, where he was born, look like the suburbs of London, but perhaps a little cleaner. There is more sunlight in New Zealand, and I think the people are healthier.
My father’s name was Owen Merton. Owen because his mother’s family had lived for a generation or two in Wales, though I believe they were originally Lowland Scotch. And my father’s father was a music master, and a pious man, who taught at Christ’s College, Christchurch, on the South Island.
My father had a lot of energy and independence. He told me how it was in the hill country and in the mountains of the South Island, out on the sheep farms and in the forests where he had been, and once, when one of the Antarctic expeditions came that way, my father nearly joined it, to go to the South Pole. He would have been frozen to death along with all the others, for that was the one from which no one returned.
When he wanted to study art, there were many difficulties in his way, and it was not easy for him to convince his people that that was really his vocation. But eventually he went to London, and then to Paris, and in Paris he met my mother, and married her, and never went back to New Zealand.
My mother was an American. I have seen a picture of her as a rather slight, thin, sober little person with a serious and somewhat anxious and very sensitive face. And this corresponds with my memory of her—worried, precise, quick, critical of me, her son. Yet in the family she has always been spoken of as gay and very lighthearted. My grandmother kept great locks of Mother’s red hair, after she died, and Mother’s happy laughter as a boarding-school girl was what never ceased to echo in my grandmother’s memory.
It seems to me, now, that Mother must have been a person full of insatiable dreams and of great ambition after perfection: perfection in art, in interior decoration, in dancing, in housekeeping, in raising children. Maybe that is why I remember her mostly as worried: since the imperfection of myself, her first son, had been a great deception. If this book does not prove anything else, it will certainly show that I was nobody’s dream-child. I have seen a diary Mother was keeping, in the time of my infancy and first childhood, and it reflects some astonishment at the stubborn and seemingly spontaneous development of completely unpredictable features in my character, things she had never bargained for: for example, a deep and serious urge to adore the gas-light in the kitchen, with no little ritualistic veneration, when I was about four. Churches and formal religion were things to which Mother attached not too much importance in the training of a modern child, and my guess is that she thought, if I were left to myself, I would grow up into a nice, quiet Deist of some sort, and never be perverted by superstition.
My baptism, at Prades, was almost certainly Father’s idea, because he had grown up with a deep and well-developed faith, according to the doctrines of the Church of England. But I don’t think there was much power, in the waters of the baptism I got in Prades, to untwist the warping of my essential freedom, or loose me from the devils that hung like vampires on my soul.
My father came to the Pyrenees because of a dream of his own: more single, more concrete, and more practical than Mother’s numerous and haunting ideals of perfection. Father wanted to get some place where he could settle in France, and raise a family, and paint, and live on practically nothing, because we had practically nothing to live on.
Father and Mother had many friends at Prades, and when they had moved there, and had their furniture in their flat, and the canvasses piled up in the corner, and the whole place smelling of fresh oil-paints and water-color and cheap pipe tobacco and cooking, more friends came down from Paris. And Mother would paint in the hills, under a large canvas parasol, and Father would paint in the sun, and the friends would drink red wine and gaze out over the valley at Canigou, and at the monastery on the slopes of the mountain.
There were many ruined monasteries in those mountains. My mind goes back with great reverence to the thought of those clean, ancient stone cloisters, those low and mighty rounded arches hewn and set in place by monks who have perhaps prayed me where I now am. St. Martin and St. Michael the Archangel, the great patron of monks, had churches in those mountains. Saint Martin-du-Canigou; Saint Michel-de-Cuxa. Is it any wonder I should have a friendly feeling about those places?
One of them, stone by stone, followed me across the Atlantic a score of years later, and got itself set up within convenient reach of me when I most needed to see what a cloister looked like, and what kind of place a man might live in, to live according to his rational nature, and not like a stray dog. St. Michel-de-Cuxa is all fixed up in a special and considerably tidy little museum in an uptown park, in New York, overlooking the Hudson River,
in such a way that you don’t recall what kind of a city you are in. It is called The Cloisters. Synthetic as it is, it still preserves enough of its own reality to be a reproach to everything else around it, except the trees and the Palisades.
But when the friends of my father and mother came to Prades, they brought the newspapers, rolled up in their coat pockets, and they had many postcards carrying patriotic cartoons, representing the Allies overcoming the Germans. My grandparents—that is, my mother’s father and mother in America—were worried about her being in a land at war, and it was evident that we could not stay much longer at Prades.
I was barely a year old. I remember nothing about the journey, as we went to Bordeaux, to take the boat that had a gun mounted on the foredeck. I remember nothing about the crossing of the sea, nothing of the anxiety about U-boats, or the arrival in New York, and in the land where there was no war. But I can easily reconstruct the first encounter between my American grandparents and their new son-in-law and their grandson.
For Pop, as my American grandfather was called in the family, was a buoyant and excitable man who, on docks, boats, trains, in stations, in elevators, on busses, in hotels, in restaurants, used to get keyed up and start ordering everybody around, and making new arrangements, and changing them on the spur of the moment. My grandmother, whom we called Bonnemaman, was just the opposite, and her natural deliberateness and hesitancy and hatred of activity always seemed to increase in proportion to Pop’s excesses in the opposite direction. The more active Pop became and the more he shouted and gave directions, the more hesitant and doubtful and finally inert was my grandmother. But perhaps this obscure and innocent and wholly subconscious conflict had not yet developed, in 1916, to the full pitch of complications which it was to attain some fifteen years later.