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  • Merton at One Hundred: Reflections on The Seven Storey Mountain
  • Lawrence S. Cunningham (bio), James Martin, SJ (bio), Monica Weis, SSJ (bio), and Julie Leininger Pycior (bio)

This gathering of four essays on the lasting significance of The Seven Storey Mountain commemorates the centenary of Thomas Merton’s birth. The contributors (Lawrence S. Cunningham, James Martin, SJ, Monica Weiss, SSJ, Julie Leininger Pycior) reflect upon the impact of Merton’s memoir on their scholarship and personal journey.

Lawrence S. Cunningham1

January 31, 2015 marked the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton. His fame as a spiritual writer and social critic is secure. Part of that fame can be attributed to the publication of his conversion story tracing out a life that led him from his somewhat vagabond childhood and bohemian youth to entrance, on the very eve of World War II, into the austere life of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance, known more familiarly as the Trappists.

When The Seven Storey Mountain was published in 1948, Thomas Merton (known in religion as Father Louis) was not yet ordained a priest but had been a monk at Kentucky’s Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey since December of 1941. The book, written at the urging of his abbot, became an unexpected best seller and Merton became a reluctant celebrity. The popularity of the book is a bit of an anomaly. In the postwar period, with the United States flushed with victory and soon to [End Page 69] become the world’s economic power, the era was, to borrow from Time magazine, the “American Century.” Yet here was book describing a young man who turned his back on that world, praising the ascetic life and championing the virtues of detachment, penance, and self-denial. That world denying tone and its message was a far cry from the therapeutic nostrums of Norman Vincent Peale’s power of positive thinking or the rococo piety of Fulton Sheen.

Merton had obviously touched a nerve. Not only did the account of his conversion to Catholicism and subsequent entry into the monastic life attract a vast readership, but any number of people of a certain age point to The Seven Storey Mountain as the remote inspiration for their own embrace of the religious life or the priesthood. That the book is still in print today (and translated into scores of languages) and found in most bookstores, it is also a standard offering on college syllabi. It is, in short, a classic conversion narrative with one being hard put to name a more influential one in our age.

In a sense, however, Merton’s autobiography fit a genre that had a distinguished genealogy in the modern period. Eliot, poetically, described his conversion from skeptical modernism (The Wasteland) to orthodox Christianity (Four Quartets). Any number of authors recounted their loss of faith in Marxism with some turning to religious faith as described in the famous anthology The God that Failed. In fact, Merton fits nicely into that pantheon of, mainly, English writers who reacted against modern unbelief by an embrace of the Catholic faith, such as the Maritains in France and writers ranging from Chesterton to Waugh in England and Dorothy Day in this country with perhaps C. S. Lewis providing the closest analogue of a writer who has had a continuing impact on society today like that of Merton.

Merton himself, in fact, recognized the limitations of The Seven Story Mountain. In a famous “fever chart” he sketched out in the last decade of his life, he gave it only satisfactory marks when judging his literary works. He once remarked that he resented being stereotyped as a world denying monk who never grew in the popular imagination beyond that 1948 portrait. Having read and taught Merton’s works for over fifty years, I would put the matter this way: The Seven Storey Mountain may well be his most famous book, but it hardly reaches to the level of his most powerful writing. His later work is free of the somewhat triumphalist tone of the recent convert; prose would become less prolix and the writing as even as a sympathetic critic as Evelyn Waugh would...

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