Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton, religious name M. Louis, was an American Trappist monk, theologian, mystic, poet, and social activist. Born on January 31, 1915, in Prades, Pyrénées-Orientales, France, he lived through a century marked in his own life by war, loss, conversion, and withdrawal into monastic discipline. From 1941 until his death on December 10, 1968, he lived at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky, where he became a professed member of the community.

Merton is best known for his bestselling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948, and for a body of writing that grew with remarkable speed inside the monastery. Over 27 years, he wrote more than 50 books, mostly on spirituality, social justice, and pacifism, along with many essays and reviews. His poetry also found readers: Thirty Poems was published in 1944 by New Directions, followed by A Man in the Divided Sea in 1946. Even before The Seven Storey Mountain appeared, his writing had begun to draw notice beyond monastic circles.

His early life was unusually international and unsettled. His father, Owen Merton, was a New Zealand painter active in Europe and the United States; his mother, Ruth Jenkins Merton, was an American Quaker and artist. The family left France for the United States during World War I, living in Queens and then Flushing, New York. Ruth died of stomach cancer in 1921, when Merton was six. Later, he was sent to the Lycée Ingres, a boys’ boarding school in Montauban, France, before his father withdrew him in 1928 and said the family was moving to England.

Merton’s student years helped form the writer he became. He entered Clare College, Cambridge, in 1933 to study French and Italian, but he was unhappy there. In 1935 he enrolled at Columbia University, where he built close friendships with figures including Ad Reinhardt, Robert Lax, Ralph de Toledano, John Slate, and Robert Giroux. He also studied with Mark Van Doren, who remained a lifelong friend. After graduating with a B.A. in English in 1938, Merton met Mahanambrata Brahmachari, a Hindu monk visiting New York. Brahmachari did not point him toward Hinduism, but urged him to reconnect with Christianity and read Augustine’s Confessions and The Imitation of Christ. That same year, Merton began attending Mass at Corpus Christi Church and was confirmed there as a Catholic.

Before entering Gethsemani, Merton was accepted by the Franciscan Order but was told to withdraw his application. He then taught at St. Bonaventure University, where Franciscan mentors guided his prayer and spiritual life, and he joined the Third Order, the Secular Franciscans. On December 10, 1941, he arrived at Gethsemani; three days later he was accepted as a postulant. At first he worried that writing might conflict with monastic life, but his superior, Frederic Dunne, assigned him to translate religious texts and write biographies of saints. From that tension came books that joined inward discipline with public concern. His words still speak because they come from a life that did not separate contemplation from questions of justice, peace, and understanding across faiths.