Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton (born January 31, 1915, Prades, France—died December 10, 1968, Bangkok, Thailand) was a Roman Catholic monk, poet, and prolific writer on spiritual and social themes, one of the most important American Roman Catholic writers of the 20th century.

Merton was the son of a New Zealand-born father, Owen Merton, and an American-born mother, Ruth Jenkins, who were both artists living in France. He was baptized in the Church of England but otherwise received little religious education. The family moved to the United States during World War I, and his mother died of stomach cancer a few years later, in 1921, when Merton was six years old. He lived variously with his father and his grandparents before he was finally settled with his father in France in 1926 and then in England in 1928. As a youth, he largely attended boarding schools in England and France. After a year at the University of Cambridge, he entered Columbia University, New York City, where he earned B.A. (1938) and M.A. (1939) degrees. Following years of agnosticism, he converted to Catholicism during his time at Columbia and began exploring the idea of entering religious life. After teaching English at Columbia (1938–39) and at St. Bonaventure University (1939–41) near Olean, New York, he entered the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani near Louisville, Kentucky. The Trappists are considered one of the most ascetic of the Roman Catholic monastic orders, and there Merton grew as a mystic and pursued imaginative spiritual quests through dozens of writings. He was ordained a priest in 1949.

Merton’s first published works were collections of poems—Thirty Poems (1944), A Man in the Divided Sea (1946), and Figures for an Apocalypse (1948). With the publication of the autobiographical Seven Storey Mountain (1948), he gained an international reputation. His early works are strictly spiritual, but his writings of the early 1960s tend toward social criticism and touch on civil rights, nonviolence and pacifism, and the nuclear arms race. Many of his later works reveal a profound understanding of Eastern philosophy and mysticism unusual in a Westerner. Toward the end of his life he became deeply interested in Asian religions, particularly Buddhism, and in promoting interfaith dialogue. During a trip to Asia in 1968, he met several times with the Dalai Lama, who praised him as having more insight into Buddhism than any other Christian he had known. It was during this trip that Merton was fatally electrocuted by a faulty wire at an international monastic convention in Thailand.

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Merton’s only novel, My Argument with the Gestapo, written in 1941, was published posthumously in 1969. His other writings included The Waters of Siloe (1949), a history of the Trappists; Seeds of Contemplation (1949); and The Living Bread (1956), a meditation on the Eucharist. Further posthumous publications included the essay collection Contemplation in a World of Action (1971); The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1973); seven volumes of his private journals; and several volumes of his correspondence.