At the Base of the Mountain

Harcourt Brace’s recent 50th anniversary issue of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain comes as a timely examination of a Catholic monk through his opus one. Merton of course isn’t the typical monk. But as an atypical monk who writes to and communicates with the society of his times from within the walls of his monastery, we have someone who acknowledges the world’s ways and seeks to come to terms with it in relation to his own personal seclusion. In this spiritual autobiography, we see how a worldly young man becomes smitten by a love for the God who directs him to re-draw the terms of his world.

The person that comes through, however, isn’t the mystic contemplatives are often assumed to be. Instead it is Tom Merton as schoolboy, pseudo-Communist, agitated go-getter and repentant believer who enters these pages. Merton undertook this autobiography in these terms, “I suppose I put down what was in me, under the eyes of God, who knows what is in me.” And indeed in its entirety, Merton was brutally honest with himself and his reader. At the height of his burning desire for God, much of his own understandable weaknesses came in for sharp reproach. But as “Note to the Reader” at the beginning of the book cautions, “[this] is the story of a young man named Thomas Merton being judged by a monk named Father Louis (Merton’s name as a religious).” Bearing in mind Merton’s sense of strict virtue, the reader would be able to appreciate Merton’s moving testimony to the struggle to follow Christ amid our contemporary wilderness in those terms.

Within and Without Walls

As the website to Merton’s former monastery (yes, even monasteries are connected these days) points out, there are some of us who would canonise the man. But more than the obvious spiritual wealth, the story of his faith journey is valuable for its understanding of our 20th century socio-economic juggernaut. His admittance to being part of the selfish and irresponsible society between the two world wars reminds the reader to face up to our own prevalent materialism. The world Merton forsook remains entrenched in our daily lives. And therein lies the strength of this work. Rather than allow readerly indulgence into the escapism of biographies, its incisive prose prompts the reader to consider our many social ills. Merton describes Post-war Harlem in these terms,

Harlem itself, and every individual Negro in it, is a living condemnation of our so-called “culture”...The brothels of Harlem, and all its prostitution, and its dope-rings, and all the rest are the mirror of the polite divorces and the manifold cultured adulteries of Park Avenue.

Merton’s gift is to raise a tenable spiritual truth amid the numbing socio-economic jargon that society has dressed social inequality in. And this is a rare and wonderful addition to the spiritual strength we often sought in spiritual guides. Social conscience is never far away from the surface of this work and acts as parables pricking the reader into examining his polite hypocrisies.