Asceticism in the Writings of Thomas Merton

In his book The Ascetic Self Gavin Flood offers a familiar view of asceticism as the restricting of the “instinctual impulses of the body” so as to come closer to the goal of “human perfection.”¹ While adhering to this view in a fundamental sense, Thomas Merton believed that the perfection sought was not an abstract ideal but rather an attempt to restore the original integrity and beauty of the self through the imitation of Christ. Although he accepted Western Christianity’s traditional emphasis on the importance of asceticism, Merton’s view of asceticism was also distinctively his own even from his earliest writings. Although, for example, Merton had actively embraced Christianity and Roman Catholicism as a young man in the 1930s, his earlier exposure to writers like William Blake and Aldous Huxley had a profound influence on his thinking about Christian spirituality. Merton came to Catholicism with a mind well furnished with reading in philosophy as well as in ancient and modern literature. The effect of this reading was to make him into a humanist and to make him wary of some of the most punishing and demeaning aspects of Christian asceticism. In particular, from his reading of Blake, about whom he wrote a master’s thesis, Merton had absorbed a disdain for an asceticism that focused on the gravity of sexual sins. In the case of both Blake and Huxley, as is revealed in Merton’s well-known autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), he came to see the primary importance of asceticism as a liberating of the self from fragmentation and dividedness. For Merton, the self had to be united in order to effectively give itself in love to others and to God.

In Seasons of Celebration (1965), a book that contained essays stretching back a decade and a half, Thomas Merton noted that, although the Roman Catholic Church had in the second half of the twentieth century relaxed some of the fasting laws in Lent, the individual Catholic was obliged to practice acts of self-denial and charity in order to “die to himself ” and then go on to live in the “Spirit of the Risen Christ.”² The emphasis upon death in ascetic theology stemmed from the earliest history of Christianity, as Owen Chadwick pointed out, during which, in the midst of the persecution of Christians, believers fully expected to give their lives in imitation of Christ and in the expectation that the world would soon be coming to an end. Thus, the virtues cultivated by the early Christians were those that led to these ends and that further led to contempt for the goods of this world.³ In particular, Chadwick argued, the early monks, attempting to emulate the first Christians, did so by emphasizing otherworldliness and in particular gravitated toward an asceticism that disciplined the flesh and honored celibacy.⁴ Merton, who was aware of Chadwick’s writings, made much the same point in lecturing to monastic novices about early Christianity. Martyrdom and virginity, he observed, were considered by the early Christians to be the “supreme forms” of union with Christ involving the sacrifice of all that the world “holds dear.”⁵

Merton pointed out that in the sixth century St. Benedict, the father of modern monasticism, moderated the ascetical excesses of the early monks transforming monasticism through a balanced life into a vocation that “ordinary men could stand.”⁶

St. Benedict shifted the whole impact of asceticism to the interior—from the flesh to the will. His monks had plenty to eat and plenty of time to sleep. He reduced the choral offices of the Egyptians by about two thirds and sent the community out to work in the fields for seven or eight hours a day. Extraordinary mortifications were forbidden or discouraged. Virtue consisted in not attracting attention rather than in doing things that were conspicuous. The sacrifices that really mattered to him were those that were exacted in secrecy from the deepest veins of selfhood.⁷

Another major influence on monasticism, and thereby on Christian asceticism, came from Greek philosophy. Led by Clement and...