Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography

1. Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain

1 Thomas Merton’s The Seven StoreyMountain A HALF-CENTURY after its publication, zyxwv The Seven Stovey Mountain remains the most popular of Merton’s fifty books. Why is this life story, with all its youthful exaggerations, stylistic lapses, and revealing omissions, so readable!l I would suggest that Merton’s practice as a young novelist and poet helps to explain the power and popularity of his autobiography. The autobiography embodies in a rudimentary but sophisticated narrative Merton’s resolution of a profound personal crisis. In a later book, Cofqectuves zyxw o f a Guilty Bystaizder, he explains that zyxwv “. . . a personal crisis is creative and salutory if one can accept the conflict and restore unity on a higher level, incorporating the opposed elements in a higher unity” (189). This literary structure of “incorporating the opposed elements in a higher unity” describes Merton’s version of the circular journey of his life. This picture of a circularjourney of “opposed elements” moving up the “seven storey mountain” of his purgatorial life holds the central plot of the autobiography together. It also holds the imagination of the readers as they follow the journey and discover that it contains the major traits of modern spiritual autobiographies-Merton’s directional image, his narrative sections, his parental conflicts, his insights through mediators, his confrontations with death, the sequence of his conversions , and his use ofwriting. Unlike the other, middle-aged autobiographers in this study, Merton began writing his life story when he was only in his late * Recent studies of Merton’s The zyxwvut Sever2 Storey zyxwvut Moirritain have tried to reread his life story by focusing on what he omits from the final text. Cooper, Kountz, Mott, Padavano, Shannon, and others have provided many insights into Merton ’s unhappy childhood, his idealization of his father, his one-sided portrait of his godfather, his exaggerated view of life at Cambridge, and his lack of details about his contemplative prayer and his sexual life. But we still have much to learn from the structures and patterns of the autobiography itself. THOMAS MERTON zyxwvuts 33 zyx twenties. Yet he chose as a title a circularjourney form-the spiral seven-storey mountain of the Piivgatorio, which describes the middle portion of Dante’s journey. Ironically, or perhaps prophetically , Merton’s age of twenty-nine when he begins his story in 1944 turns out to be just past the midpoint of his life (1915-68). The twenty-seven years of his pre-monastic life narrated in Tlze Seven Storey Mountain make up the first half of his life story. Yet his relative prematurity, both as an autobiographer and as a monk, suggests why many of the “opposed elements” of the narrative are eventuallyresolved in a “higher unity” that itself will undergo further circling in his subsequent autobiographical writings. In brief, Merton’s early encounters with death precipitate many premature conflicts that lead to a lifelong series of unexpected spirals on hisjourney. MERTON’S DIRECTIONAL IMAGE: THE CAPTIVE TRAVELER Merton’s fundamental childhood experience was one of abandonment to captivity. These feelings derived from the death of his mother when Tom was six, and the frequent travels of his father, leading up to the latter’s death when Tom was sixteen. But the imagery of exile and captivity flowing from the experience of abandonment begins with the opening paragraph. Here Merton describes his birth in the middle of “a great war” where he is a “prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born,” a world that is “the picture of Hell” full of “self-contradictory hungers.” Thus, he is born not into a purgatory but into a hell, the one place that has abandoned God and feels itself abandoned in turn. This description is followed by a sentence describing soldiers abandoned in trenches of the First World War. This section, in turn, leads into the pages portraying his father and mother, both of whom are simultaneously “captives” of the infernal world and “lifted above” it by their vocation as artists (3).This image of simultaneous captivity and freedom leads into the primary dynamic selfimage of Merton himself throughout the autobiography-a travelingprisoner in search offreedom and home. Like his mother, who had journeyed from America, and his father, from New Zealand to 34 CIRCUITOUS JOURNEYS zyxwvu Prades in southern France where Torn was born, Merton in...