Merton, Thomas (1915–1968)

Thomas Merton, Cistercian monk and writer, was born January 31, 1915, in Prades, France, to artists Owen Merton, from New Zealand, and Ruth Jenkins Merton, from the United States. He spent his early years living in France, England, and the United States. Orphaned by the death of his mother in 1921 and his father 10 years later, Merton—after an undistinguished year at Cambridge—moved permanently to the United States in 1934. As a student at Columbia University, where he came under the influence of several remarkable teachers, including Mark Van Doren, Merton was briefly attracted to the Young Communist League and participated in campus peace activities, but his college days were devoted more to literature than leftist politics.

After converting to Catholicism in November 1938, and after a stint teaching at St. Bonaventure's College, Merton entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, near Louisville, Kentucky, in December 1941. Before entering the Cistercian order, Merton considered applying for noncombatant conscientious objector status, arguing that modern war was inherently unjust and that he opposed killing those created in the image of God.

At the time he entered Gethsemani, Merton believed his monastic life would be dedicated to contemplation and prayer and that he would have little contact with the outside world or social activism. His abbot encouraged Merton (known as Fr. Louis) to focus his writing on Cistercian history and on his own spiritual autobiography—eventually published in 1948 as the widely read Seven Storey Mountain. As a result, he emerged as a well-known Catholic spiritual writer.

By the 1960s, however, Merton was again drawn to broader societal concerns and wrote extensively on a number of contemporary issues. He told Dorothy Day, leader of the Catholic Worker movement, that while he [Page 942]expected criticism—within the order and the church itself—he could no longer confine his writings to contemplation, meditation, and spirituality but had to address the overriding issues of the postwar world—civil rights and racism, peace and nonviolence, and ecology. Because of his prominence, Merton's views had an impact, especially in liberal Catholic circles, but more broadly as well.

Merton had long been interested in racial justice. In the summer of 1941, he worked at Friendship House, run by Catherine de Hueck in Harlem. By the early 1960s he was following closely the nonviolent efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr., and viewed the civil rights movement as a necessary response in a time of crisis, requiring radical change both in individual attitudes and public policy. Merton argued that integration alone was not the answer, but rather that the social structure must be fundamentally altered with—in monastic fashion—a sense of real community at the root. As developments within the civil rights struggle saw the rise of black militancy and violence, Merton linked this trend to the escalation of the war in Vietnam. In all matters, he argued in his 1968 book Faith and Violence, the true calling of the Christian was to work for effective ways to secure peace in the midst of violence. Merton also believed that racism in the United States was part of a much larger postwar colonialist mentality and a root cause of many of the problems of the late 20th century.

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