A Teacher
Thomas Merton
Contemplation as recovery of the true self in God
The transmission
Thomas Merton was born in 1915 in Prades, France, to artist parents, and after a restless, largely secular youth in France, England, and the United States he studied at Columbia University, where he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1938.
In 1941 he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, a Trappist (Cistercian) monastery of strict observance, taking the religious name Father Louis. His 1948 spiritual autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain became an unexpected bestseller and drew a wide readership into the contemplative life, making Merton one of the most influential Catholic writers of the twentieth century.
Over the following two decades Merton produced a large body of work on prayer, monastic spirituality, social justice, and peace, including New Seeds of Contemplation (1961), which reworked his earlier reflections into a mature meditation on contemplative awareness.
In his later years he became a leading figure in interreligious dialogue, corresponding with and meeting Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi contemplatives and writing on Zen. He died in 1968 in Bangkok, Thailand, while attending a monastic conference on East-West dialogue, accidentally electrocuted by a faulty fan, his death falling on the twenty-seventh anniversary of his entry into Gethsemani.
What they gave
The true self and the false self: Merton framed the spiritual task as the dissolution of the constructed, ego-driven “false self” and the discovery of the “true self” hidden in God, an inner identity that is itself a participation in the divine.
- Contemplation as awakening: He described contemplation not as a technique to acquire something but as a heightened, awakened awareness of a reality already present, a “spiritual wonder” and direct, intuitive knowing that surpasses discursive thought.
- Receptive surrender: His teaching centers on poverty of spirit and self-emptying, a letting-go in which the seeker stops grasping and allows grace to act, so that union is received rather than achieved.
- East-West contemplative dialogue: Merton drew explicit parallels between Christian contemplative stillness and the silence and self-naughting of Zen and other traditions, helping legitimate cross-traditional study of inner transformation.
In their words
A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying Him.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: the Spanish Carmelite mystic John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, the Desert Fathers of early monasticism, Augustine, and, in his later years, Zen Buddhism through figures such as D. T. Suzuki.
- Influenced: the Centering Prayer movement and its founders (notably Thomas Keating), Richard Rohr’s “true self / false self” framing, and the broad current of modern Christian-Buddhist and interreligious contemplative dialogue.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- The Seven Storey Mountain1948
- New Seeds of Contemplation1962
- Mystics and Zen Masters1967