Christianity · Christian mysticism · Catholicism

Thomas Merton

1915 – 1968Historically documented person

Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani (Kentucky), priest, poet and essayist. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), drew thousands of post-war readers towards monastic life, and works such as New Seeds of Contemplation turned Christian contemplation into a question of personal identity. In his last decade he championed nonviolence and civil rights, rendered Zhuangzi into English and entered into dialogue with Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. He died in Thailand in 1968, during his only journey to Asia.

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works: 132works
editions: 219editions
quotes: 8quotes
videos: 11videos
images: 7images

La ermita de Thomas Merton en Getsemaní · CC BY 2.0

In their words

«On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world.»

The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), parte I, cap. 1, primera frase

To begin, one work

The Seven Storey Mountain

Their central idea

Human beings habitually live identified with a false self, made of desires, roles and appearances, which tries to assert itself against others and against God; spiritual life consists in letting that mask fall so as to discover the true self, which is not possessed but received from God and coincides with one's own vocation.

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Biography

6 min read

An orphan between two continents

Thomas Merton was born on 31 January 1915 in Prades, at the foot of the French Pyrenees, the son of two painters: the New Zealander Owen Merton and the American Ruth Jenkins, raised in a Quaker milieu. The war drove the family to New York in August 1916. Ruth died of cancer in 1921, when the boy was six, and from then on Merton's childhood was a succession of addresses: his grandparents' house in Douglaston, Bermuda, the medieval village of Saint-Antonin, the boarding school of the Lycée Ingres in Montauban, the English schools of Ripley Court and Oakham. In 1931 his father too died, of a brain tumour, and the adolescent passed into the guardianship of his London godfather.

The 1933 academic year at Clare College, Cambridge, was the lowest point of that drift. Merton himself described it in his autobiography as a time of drink and disorder; his biographers have further documented that he fathered a child there whom he never knew. His tutor advised him not to return. In January 1935 he enrolled at Columbia University in New York, where at last he found a place: the teaching of Mark Van Doren, a lifelong friendship with the poet Robert Lax and the painter Ad Reinhardt, the student magazines, and a master's thesis on William Blake.

Conversion

The turn had an unexpected origin. In 1938 a friend introduced him to Mahanambrata Brahmachari, a Hindu monk passing through New York, and Merton expected from him an invitation to the East. Brahmachari told him instead to read Augustine's Confessions and The Imitation of Christ. Those books, together with Étienne Gilson's The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, led him to the small Corpus Christi church beside the campus, where he was received into the Catholic Church on 16 November 1938. After a frustrated attempt to join the Franciscans, he taught English at St. Bonaventure College and, following a Holy Week retreat in Kentucky, resolved to become a Trappist.

On 10 December 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, he knocked at the door of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani. He was given the name Brother Mary Louis—Father Louis to his brethren—and would never again live outside the monastery. He took simple vows in 1944 and solemn vows in 1947, and was ordained priest in 1949.

The monk who wrote

Merton's paradox is that the order of silence made him the most widely read monk of the century. His abbot, Frederic Dunne, asked him to write, and from that obedience came The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948 by Harcourt Brace. The autobiography of a worldly young man who flees to La Trappe struck a chord with a generation marked by the war and became an extraordinary bestseller; in the following years the Trappist houses of the United States received a wave of vocations that his biographers link to the book. There followed Seeds of Contemplation (1949), The Waters of Siloe, The Sign of Jonas—his monastic journal—and No Man Is an Island.

Within the abbey he served as master of scholastics and, from 1955 to 1965, as master of novices. His conferences on Cassian, the Desert Fathers, the Benedictine Rule and Christian mysticism, recorded on tape and preserved in his notes, are still being published in a multi-volume series. New Seeds of Contemplation (1961), a deep rewriting of his 1949 book, condensed his central idea: contemplation is neither a technique nor an exceptional state but the awakening of the true self, hidden in God, over against the false self built out of desire and appearance.

Opening to the world

On 18 March 1958, on a shopping corner in Louisville, Merton lived the experience he himself regarded as the end of his 'separation' from the world: the sudden evidence that he loved all the passers-by and that no one was alien to him. He noted it in his journal and reworked it years later in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. From then on his writing turned to nuclear war, racial segregation and, later, Vietnam. In 1962 his superiors forbade him to publish on peace; he went on writing mimeographed letters to correspondents around the world, known today as the Cold War Letters.

At the same time he cultivated an unprecedented dialogue with the East. He corresponded with D. T. Suzuki, whom he visited in New York in 1964; he published The Way of Chuang Tzu (1965), a free rendering of the Taoist classic, Mystics and Zen Masters (1967) and Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968). In 1966 he received the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh at Gethsemani and wrote in his defence the article 'Nhat Hanh Is My Brother'. His correspondence with Boris Pasternak, Czesław Miłosz, Ernesto Cardenal—once his novice—, Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King fills five volumes.

The hermitage and love

In August 1965 he obtained permission to live as a hermit in a small cinder-block house in the abbey woods. Solitude, however, brought him the most unexpected trial: in the spring of 1966, recovering from back surgery in a Louisville hospital, he fell in love with a young student nurse, whom his journals call 'M.'. The relationship, lived with an anguish he himself put on record, ended that summer, after the abbot learned of it. Merton had forbidden the publication of his journals until twenty-five years after his death; when they appeared, in seven volumes between 1995 and 1998, they revealed a man more contradictory and more human than the one of the autobiography.

Asia and the end

In October 1968, with the consent of the new abbot, Flavian Burns, Merton flew to Asia to attend a congress of Benedictine and Cistercian monks in Bangkok. In India he met the Dalai Lama three times—the Dalai Lama would write in his autobiography that Merton had shown him the true meaning of the word 'Christian'—and near Darjeeling he talked for hours with the Dzogchen master Chatral Rinpoche. On 2 December, before the stone Buddhas of Polonnaruwa in Ceylon, he recorded having pierced 'through the surface' of things in an illumination he summed up by saying that everything is emptiness and everything is compassion.

On 10 December 1968, exactly twenty-seven years after his arrival at Gethsemani, he delivered in the morning the lecture 'Marxism and Monastic Perspectives'. In the afternoon he was found dead in his room at the Red Cross centre in Samut Prakan, with an electric fan lying across his body. The version made public by his brethren was accidental electrocution; the official Thai reports, edited in 2024 in The Catholic Historical Review, attribute the death to heart failure preceding contact with the appliance. There was no autopsy, and the unexplained head wound has fed murder theories that most scholars regard as unfounded. He was buried at Gethsemani on 17 December.

Legacy

Merton left more than fifty books published in his lifetime and a posthumous flow of journals, letters, poems and conferences that is not yet exhausted. His work largely founded the lay contemplative spirituality of the second half of the twentieth century and the monastic dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism. In 2015 Pope Francis cited him before the United States Congress as 'a man of prayer' and 'a man of dialogue', alongside Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day. His archive is held at the Thomas Merton Center of Bellarmine University in Louisville, and the rights to his work are administered by the Merton Legacy Trust for the benefit of the abbey.

Sources: Mott, Michael. The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984 (biografía autorizada por el Merton Legacy Trust). · Merton, Thomas. The Seven Storey Mountain. Nueva York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948. · Merton, Thomas. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. Ed. Naomi Burton Stone, Patrick Hart y James Laughlin. Nueva York: New Directions, 1973 (incluye el epílogo de Patrick Hart y los apéndices VII, «Marxism and Monastic Perspectives», y VIII, carta de los delegados trapenses al abad Flavian Burns). · Shannon, William H.; Bochen, Christine M.; O'Connell, Patrick F. The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia. Maryknoll (NY): Orbis Books, 2002. · Merton, Thomas. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Garden City (NY): Doubleday, 1966.

Timeline

A life, year by year

Each point is a documented event. Click to read it, with its source and degree of certainty.

19151928194219551968

January 31, 1915age 0Prades (Francia)

Birth in the Pyrenees

Born to Owen Merton, a New Zealand painter, and Ruth Jenkins, an American artist of Quaker upbringing, who had met while studying painting in Paris.

DocumentedThomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University. «Thomas Merton: Chronology of Life and Publications».

After their death

1995 – 1998Publication of the complete journals
September 24, 2015Cited by Pope Francis before Congress

January 31, 1915 · age 0
Birth in the Pyrenees
Born to Owen Merton, a New Zealand painter, and Ruth Jenkins, an American artist of Quaker upbringing, who had met while studying painting in Paris.
Documented
October 21, 1921 · age 6
Death of his mother
Ruth Jenkins dies of stomach cancer. The boy learns of it by letter; the loss opens an itinerant childhood between the United States, Bermuda, France and England.
Documented
1926 – 1928 · age 11
Boarding at the Lycée Ingres
His father enrols him at the lycée in Montauban while painting in Saint-Antonin; in 1928 they move to England (Ripley Court and, from 1929, Oakham).
Documented
1931 · age 15
Death of his father
Owen Merton dies of a brain tumour. The adolescent is placed under the guardianship of his godfather, the physician Tom Bennett.
Documented
October 1933 – 1934 · age 18
A disordered year at Clare College
He reads modern languages at Cambridge; a year of excess that he would later judge harshly. He loses his scholarship and returns to the United States.
Documented
January 1935 – 1939 · age 19
Columbia: Van Doren, Lax and literature
He studies English literature under Mark Van Doren and forms lifelong friendships with Robert Lax and Ad Reinhardt. Graduating in 1938, he takes his master's degree in 1939 with a thesis on William Blake.
Documented
November 16, 1938 · age 23
Received into the Catholic Church
After months of reading—Gilson, Augustine, à Kempis—and the advice of the Hindu monk Mahanambrata Brahmachari, he is baptised and receives his first communion.
Documented
1940 – 1941 · age 25
Teaching among the Franciscans
Turned away by the Franciscan novitiate, he teaches English at St. Bonaventure and becomes a Franciscan tertiary. A Holy Week retreat at Gethsemani (1941) settles his vocation.
Documented
December 10, 1941 · age 26
Arrival at Gethsemani
He knocks at the door of the Trappist abbey; on 13 December he is admitted as a postulant and given the name Brother Mary Louis.
Documented
April 17, 1943 · age 28
Death of his brother John Paul
His only brother, an RCAF airman baptised months earlier in Kentucky, dies after his plane comes down at sea. Merton writes for him the poem that appears in his autobiography.
Documented
March 19, 1944 · age 29
Simple vows and Thirty Poems
He takes temporary vows; that same year James Laughlin publishes his first book, Thirty Poems, at New Directions.
Documented
1948 · age 33
The Seven Storey Mountain
Harcourt Brace publishes the autobiography, written under obedience to his abbot. It becomes a publishing phenomenon and the most widely read conversion narrative of post-war America.
Documented
May 26, 1949 · age 34
Ordination to the priesthood
He is ordained priest on Ascension Day; that year he publishes Seeds of Contemplation and The Waters of Siloe.
Documented
1955 – 1965 · age 40
Master of novices
After four years as master of scholastics, he directs the formation of novices for a decade; his recorded conferences and notes are now published as a series.
Documented
March 18, 1958 · age 43
The Fourth and Walnut revelation
In a Louisville shopping street he suddenly realises that he loves all the passers-by and that they are not alien to him; he records it in his journal and reworks it in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966).
Documented
1961 · age 46
New Seeds and the turn towards the world
He publishes New Seeds of Contemplation and begins writing against nuclear war; in 1962 his superiors forbid him to publish on peace, and his texts circulate as the 'Cold War Letters'.
Documented
June 1964 · age 49
Meeting D. T. Suzuki
With exceptional permission he travels to New York to meet the great interpreter of Zen, with whom he had corresponded since 1959.
Documented
August 1965 – 1968 · age 50
Hermit in the abbey woods
He gives up the office of novice master and moves full time into the cinder-block hermitage built on the monastery grounds.
Documented
March 1966 · age 51
Love for 'M.'
After back surgery he falls in love with a young student nurse; the relationship, which ends that summer, is documented in the sixth volume of his journals.
Documented
May 28, 1966 · age 51
Visit of Thich Nhat Hanh
He receives the Vietnamese monk during his peace tour and afterwards writes 'Nhat Hanh Is My Brother', a plea against the Vietnam War.
Documented
October 15, 1968 · age 53
Departure for Asia
With leave from the new abbot, Flavian Burns, he flies to Asia to attend a monastic congress and an interreligious meeting in Calcutta.
Documented
November 4, 1968 · age 53
Three audiences with the Dalai Lama
On 4, 6 and 8 November he talks with the young Dalai Lama about epistemology, meditation and monastic life; in the following weeks he meets Chatral Rinpoche.
Documented
December 2, 1968 · age 53
Before the Buddhas of Polonnaruwa
Barefoot before the great stone figures of the Gal Vihara he lives what he describes as an aesthetic and spiritual illumination unlike any in his life.
Documented
December 10, 1968 · age 53
Death in Bangkok
In the morning he delivers the lecture 'Marxism and Monastic Perspectives'; in the afternoon he is found dead in his room with an electric fan lying across his body. The Thai reports speak of heart failure; accidental electrocution was the version made public by his brethren.
Documented
December 17, 1968
Burial in the monastic cemetery
His body, flown home on a military aircraft returning from Vietnam, is buried beneath a white cross identical to those of the other monks.
Documented
1995 – 1998
Publication of the complete journals
Once the twenty-five-year embargo he himself had imposed has expired, HarperSanFrancisco publishes his journals from 1939 to 1968 in seven volumes.
Documented
September 24, 2015
Cited by Pope Francis before Congress
Francis names him alongside Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day as one of four Americans who embody the best of the nation: 'a man of dialogue'.
Documented

Works

Essential works

The works without which their legacy cannot be understood.

Written work · 1948

The Seven Storey Mountain

Autobiography of Merton's first twenty-six years, from his birth in Prades to his entry into Gethsemani, written at the suggestion of Abbot Frederic Dunne. The title alludes to Dante's mountain of Purgatory. The story of a wandering youth, of his parents' deaths, of Cambridge and Columbia, and of a conversion lived as a homecoming, it became one of the most widely read religious books of the twentieth century and moved thousands of readers towards monastic life. In Britain it appeared abridged as Elected Silence (1949), with a foreword by Evelyn Waugh.

Not available View the book

10 editions

Written work · 1949

Seeds of Contemplation

A collection of short reflections on the interior life, prayer and detachment, written in the wake of John of the Cross. Its direct language, free of scholastic apparatus, made it an immediate classic; Merton revised it in 1949 and rewrote it thoroughly in 1961 as New Seeds of Contemplation.

Not available View the book

4 editions

Written work · 1961

New Seeds of Contemplation

A complete rewriting of Seeds of Contemplation, twenty years after his entry into the monastery. Merton removes the cloistered tone of the first version and develops the opposition between the false self and the true self, contemplation as awakening to reality, and unity with other human beings. Chapters such as 'Things in Their Identity', 'Pray for Your Own Discovery' and 'The General Dance' have made it his most widely read spiritual book and a reference text of contemporary Christian spirituality.

Not available View the book

6 editions

Written work · 1966

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

A notebook drawn from the journals of 1956–1965: reflections on technology, race, war, Barth, Gandhi and the Council. It contains the account of the Fourth and Walnut revelation and the page on the 'point vierge', the untouched centre of the human being.

Not available View the book

3 editions

Complete works (132)

See all 132 works in the library

Quotations

Quotations located in a specific work. Each carries its provenance and its level of confidence.

On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world.

VerifiedThe Seven Storey Mountain (1948), parte I, cap. 1, primera frase

1 / 8

Essential ideas (editorial summary)

Out of respect for copyright, these ideas are summarised in our own words and are not presented as literal quotations.

Human beings habitually live identified with a false self, made of desires, roles and appearances, which tries to assert itself against others and against God; spiritual life consists in letting that mask fall so as to discover the true self, which is not possessed but received from God and coincides with one's own vocation.
Contemplation is neither an extraordinary state reserved for mystics nor a technique of concentration but an awakening to reality as it is, in which God is present; it is a gift that cannot be manufactured, though it can be prepared for through silence, simplicity and attention.
Authentic solitude is neither flight from the world nor contempt for others: whoever truly withdraws discovers a deeper solidarity with all human beings, and monastic enclosure, far from separating, ought to make the monk more responsible for the sufferings of his time.
Christian nonviolence is not an effective tactic for obtaining results but a form of truth born of humility and respect for the adversary; whoever practises it must therefore give up measuring its worth by immediate success and rest on the truth of what is done.
Fruitful dialogue between religions does not take place at the level of doctrines, where the differences are real, but at the level of contemplative experience: the Christian monk and the Buddhist monk can recognise each other in a shared search for inner freedom without either renouncing his tradition.
Mass technological civilisation produces a bureaucratic sanity capable of planning genocide without losing its composure; against it, the poet, the monk and the outsider fulfil the prophetic task of recalling what cannot be measured or sold.
At the centre of each person there is an untouched point, prior to sin and illusion, which belongs entirely to God; recognising this 'virgin point' in oneself and in others is the foundation of all compassion.

Last words

Witnessed and documented words

«I will conclude on that note. I believe the plan is to have all the questions for this morning's lectures this evening at the panel. So I will disappear.»

I will conclude on that note. I believe the plan is to have all the questions for this morning's lectures this evening at the panel. So I will disappear.

These are his last documented public words: the close of his lecture 'Marxism and Monastic Perspectives', delivered at ten in the morning of 10 December 1968 at the monastic congress in Samut Prakan and transcribed in Appendix VII of The Asian Journal; there is also a filmed recording of the end of the talk, whose transcriptions circulate with small variants. According to Patrick Hart's epilogue, based on the reports and on delegates' testimony, after lunch he told a companion that he was tired and looking forward to a siesta; there are no witnesses to anything he said afterwards. The irony of 'I will disappear' has been noted by all his biographers.

Source: Merton, Thomas. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. Ed. Naomi Burton Stone, Patrick Hart y James Laughlin. Nueva York: New Directions, 1973 (incluye el epílogo de Patrick Hart y los apéndices VII, «Marxism and Monastic Perspectives», y VIII, carta de los delegados trapenses al abad Flavian Burns).

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What their work answers

Twelve great human questions and what their texts allow us to answer, with references. We never put words in their mouth.

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?
God is not an object: he is the hidden ground of love who calls
A personal GodStated explicitly
Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, confesses a personal, Trinitarian and incarnate God, but insists that he is not one object among others nor something that can be possessed by concepts. In New Seeds of Contemplation, contemplation is the living awareness that life and being proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source, known not as a thing but as a presence that calls the person by name. In his last years, in dialogue with Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, he stressed the apophatic character of this God and called him, in his letters, the hidden ground of love. For Merton the Absolute remains someone, but is found in the darkness of faith rather than in evidence.
Compare this question with other teachers
Who am I? Is there a true self?
The false self is an illusion; the true self is hidden in God
The ego is a construction of thoughtStated explicitly
The distinction between the false self and the true self runs through Thomas Merton's work. In New Seeds of Contemplation, the false self is the person we want to be and who cannot exist, because God knows nothing about him: a self made of desires, social image and the urge to assert oneself against others, living in the illusion of separation. The true self, by contrast, is not manufactured: it is hidden in God and discovered in discovering him. Hence his formula: for him, to be a saint means to be himself. In his last years he compared this doctrine with the Buddhist anatman and with Zen, without identifying them.
Compare this question with other teachers
Why do we suffer?
We suffer by living in a false self, cut off from our truth
Ignorance of what we areStated explicitly
Thomas Merton locates the root of human suffering in alienation: the human being builds a false self that lives by asserting itself against others, protects itself with possessions, prestige and violence, and therefore feels separated from God, from others and from itself. New Seeds of Contemplation identifies that false self with sin: it is to refuse the identity God gives. In his writings on peace and racism he extends the diagnosis to society, where collective illusion produces war. In Calcutta, in 1968, he put it this way: we are already one, but we imagine we are not. Awakening to what we are is the beginning of healing.
Compare this question with other teachers
What happens after death?
Christ is risen: the new life begins already
Eternal life and resurrectionStated explicitly
Thomas Merton professes the Christian faith in resurrection and eternal life, to which he devoted the short Easter meditation He Is Risen, published posthumously. In it he insists that the resurrection is not merely a future event or a consolation for later, but the presence of the living Christ who calls us to live already as new men, free from the fear of death. In The New Man he develops the same idea: life in Christ is a present participation in his victory. His journals also show a keen awareness of his own death, which overtook him in Bangkok in December 1968, during his journey to Asia.
Compare this question with other teachers
How is liberation or salvation attained?
Contemplation is a gift: awakening to God's life in us
Through grace and loveStated explicitly
For Thomas Merton, liberation is discovering the true self hidden in God, and that discovery cannot be manufactured. New Seeds of Contemplation opens by affirming that contemplation is a gift: an awakening to the real in all that is real, a response to a call from the One who has no voice. The human being can dispose himself —with silence, solitude, prayer, asceticism and detachment from his false self— but cannot produce by technique what can only be received. In Contemplative Prayer he warns against turning prayer into a search for experiences. Freedom comes when the false self yields and the person allows himself to be found by mercy.
Compare this question with other teachers
Is a teacher necessary?
The director helps one see; the true director is the Spirit
Helpful but not indispensableStated explicitly
Thomas Merton wrote Spiritual Direction and Meditation (1960) and was for years master of novices at Gethsemani. For him, the spiritual director is neither a guru nor an administrator of techniques, but someone who helps recognise and follow the action of the Holy Spirit in the soul, who is the true director. Direction is especially valuable in monastic life and in moments of discernment, but it does not replace personal responsibility. In The Wisdom of the Desert he recovered the figure of the abba of the Desert Fathers, who guides with few words and by example, and in his last years he took a respectful interest in the master–disciple relationship in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism.
Compare this question with other teachers
Is the world real?
A tree gives glory to God by being a tree
A good and real creationStated explicitly
Thomas Merton defends the goodness and holiness of creation against a spirituality that despises the world. In New Seeds of Contemplation, in the chapter on things in their identity, he writes that a tree gives glory to God by being a tree, because in being what God wants it to be it obeys him; each creature is holy in its singularity. Hagia Sophia contemplates divine wisdom as a hidden fullness in all visible things. In The Asian Journal, before the Buddhas of Polonnaruwa, he notes that all matter and all life are charged with dharmakaya, and that everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. The world is real, good and transparent to God.
Compare this question with other teachers
What is love?
They were mine and I theirs: love discovers we are already one
Love of God and neighbourStated explicitly
In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton recounts that in 1958, on a street corner in downtown Louisville, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the realisation that he loved all those strangers, that they were his and he theirs. That experience corrected the idea that the monk is a being apart. For Merton, Christian love is neither sentimentality nor philanthropy: it is sharing in God's love, which seeks the good of the other for the other's sake and recognises Christ in every person. No Man Is an Island develops that idea, and his writings on nonviolence, racism and war turn it into a political demand. Love reveals the hidden unity.
Compare this question with other teachers
Are we free, or is everything determined?
We are free to be real or unreal
Real free willStated explicitly
Thomas Merton understands freedom as the possibility of becoming who one is. In New Seeds of Contemplation he writes that God leaves us free to be whatever we like: we can be real or unreal, true or false; the choice is ours, and our vocation is to work together with God in creating our own identity. Holiness is not a destiny fixed in advance, but a free response to a call. The famous prayer in Thoughts in Solitude —I have no idea where I am going, I do not see the road— expresses that freedom lived without guarantees, trusting that the desire to please God does in fact please him. In his social writings he extends responsibility to collective decisions.
Compare this question with other teachers
Why meditate or pray?
Contemplation is not a technique: it is waking to the real
Meditation is not a techniqueStated explicitly
Thomas Merton lived monastic prayer —choral office, lectio divina, the psalms— and explained it in Praying the Psalms. But he insists that contemplation is not the fruit of a method. In New Seeds of Contemplation he defines it as the highest expression of the human being's intellectual and spiritual life: a spontaneous and grateful awakening to reality and its Source, which cannot be taught or produced. In Contemplative Prayer he warns against turning prayer into a search for experiences or special states, and in his dialogue with Zen he stresses that it is a matter of seeing, not obtaining. Practice disposes, but what matters happens without technique.
Compare this question with other teachers
Can reason know the ultimate?
Contemplation goes beyond concepts, without despising them
The ultimate lies beyond the mindStated explicitly
Thomas Merton studied Thomas Aquinas and John of the Cross and devoted The Ascent to Truth (1951) to them, arguing that reason and faith have their place and that Christian mysticism is not irrational. But his doctrine of contemplation places ultimate knowledge beyond concepts: in New Seeds of Contemplation, contemplation is not the vision of an object or clear knowledge, but a dark knowing that transcends reason and in which God is known as unknown. In his dialogue with Zen, in Zen and the Birds of Appetite, he valued the direct experience prior to the division between subject and object. Thought points; the ultimate is received.
Compare this question with other teachers
Withdraw from the world or transform it?
From monastery to world: contemplation turns prophetic
Contemplation in actionStated explicitly
Thomas Merton's trajectory is a journey out and back. The Seven Storey Mountain recounts his flight from the world to the Trappist abbey of Gethsemani in 1941, presented as renunciation. But from the late fifties, after the Louisville experience, he understood that the monk is not separate from others, and wrote against nuclear war, racism and the Vietnam War in Seeds of Destruction, Faith and Violence and his Cold War Letters. In 1965 he withdrew to a hermitage within the monastery. Contemplation in a World of Action argues that solitude, far from distancing, makes presence in the world more lucid and its critique freer.
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Affinities & tensions

Affinities and tensions

Calculated question by question from their positions. The reason for each agreement or clash, on click.

Thinks most like

Thinks most unlike

Anecdotes and stories

Testimony1938

The Hindu monk who sent him to Augustine

In June 1938 his Columbia friend Seymour Freedgood introduced him to Mahanambrata Brahmachari, a Bengali monk who had come to the United States for a congress of religions and lived on the hospitality of his hosts. Merton, then reading avidly on Eastern mysticism, expected this serene man to propose some Indian path. Brahmachari told him something else: that the West had many beautiful books of Christian spirituality, and that he should read Augustine's Confessions and The Imitation of Christ. Merton told the episode in The Seven Storey Mountain with evident gratitude: a monk of another religion sent him back to his own. Months later he was received into the Catholic Church. The scene has become an emblem of the interreligious dialogue that would mark his last years, and Merton recalled it on his Asian journey thirty years later.

Origin of the story: Merton's own account in The Seven Storey Mountain (part II). There is no other independent source for the content of the conversation.

Source: Merton, Thomas. The Seven Storey Mountain. Nueva York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948.

Documented1941

Three days before the door of Gethsemani

Merton arrived at the Abbey of Gethsemani on 10 December 1941, with a suitcase and his decision taken after that year's Holy Week retreat. Before being admitted he spent three days in the guest house; according to his own account and his biographers', he sat by an open window in the depths of the Kentucky winter, as if to prove the sincerity of his vocation, and entered the enclosure with a heavy cold. On 13 December Abbot Frederic Dunne received him as a postulant and gave him the name Brother Mary Louis. The date would acquire a symmetry his contemporaries did not fail to note: twenty-seven years later, on 10 December 1968, he died in Thailand.

Origin of the story: The dates are recorded in the Thomas Merton Center chronology and in Patrick Hart's epilogue to The Asian Journal; the detail of the window comes from the autobiographical account and is repeated in his biographies.

Source: Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University. «Thomas Merton: Chronology of Life and Publications».

Testimony1958

Fourth and Walnut

On 18 March 1958 Merton went to Louisville on abbey business. At the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the heart of the shopping district, he suddenly experienced—so he wrote—that he loved all those people, that they were his and he theirs, and that the idea of a holiness separate from the rest of mankind was a dream. He noted it the next day in his journal and rewrote it years later in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, adding that there was no way of telling those passers-by that they were all 'walking around shining like the sun'. The episode is the hinge between the monk of flight from the world and the writer committed to peace and civil rights. Today a "Thomas Merton Square" sign and a historical marker mark that corner.

Origin of the story: Merton's own testimony: journal entry of 19 March 1958 (A Search for Solitude) and reworked version in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966). The Louisville plaque is documented on Wikimedia Commons.

Source: Merton, Thomas. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Garden City (NY): Doubleday, 1966.

Documented1966

A Vietnamese monk at Gethsemani

On 28 May 1966 Thich Nhat Hanh, who was touring the United States calling for an end to the Vietnam War, visited Gethsemani accompanied by representatives of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The two monks talked for hours about monastic life, meditation and the war. Merton later told the novices that from the way Nhat Hanh closed a door or entered a room one could recognise a true monk. Shortly afterwards he published 'Nhat Hanh Is My Brother', a brief and vehement text in which he declared himself more united to that Buddhist than to many of his Christian compatriots, and asked that his voice be heard and his life protected should he return to Vietnam.

Origin of the story: The visit is documented in Merton's journals (Learning to Love) and in the article published in Jubilee in August 1966; the remark about the way of closing a door comes from the recollection of Gethsemani novices reported by his biographers (indirect testimony).

Source: Merton, Thomas. «Nhat Hanh Is My Brother» (Jubilee, agosto de 1966), recogido en Faith and Violence. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.

Documented1966

'M.'

In March 1966, after back surgery at St. Joseph's Hospital in Louisville, the fifty-one-year-old Merton fell in love with the student nurse who looked after him, whom his journals call only 'M.'. For weeks there were letters, phone calls from the hermitage, furtive meetings and poems; Merton wrote for her a long text, 'A Midsummer Diary for M.'. The relationship ended in the summer, after Abbot James Fox learned of it through a telephone call overheard at the switchboard. Merton renewed his monastic commitment and remained at the hermitage. He himself arranged for these journals to be published: when they appeared in 1997, many readers discovered that the author of Seeds had known at first hand the tearing between human love and vocation.

Origin of the story: Main source: the sixth volume of his journals (Learning to Love, 1997), edited by Christine M. Bochen, which includes the 'Midsummer Diary'. Michael Mott's biography (1984) had already reported the episode with access to those papers.

Source: Merton, Thomas. Learning to Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom. The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 6 (1966–1967). Ed. Christine M. Bochen. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

Testimony1968

'There must be something wrong here': Chatral Rinpoche

In mid-November 1968, near Darjeeling, Merton sought out the Nyingma master Chatral Rinpoche and found him at a tiny nunnery beside the road, supervising the painting of a fresco. According to his journal, Chatral looked like a vigorous old peasant with a week's growth of beard and a red woollen cap. They talked for more than two hours about Dzogchen, emptiness, the dharmakaya and the risen Christ; the interpreter laughed, repeating that these were 'hermit questions'. Chatral told him he had meditated in solitude for thirty years without attaining perfect emptiness, and Merton answered that he had not either. On parting he called him a rangjung sangay, a 'natural Buddha', and, surprised at getting on so well with a Christian, laughed that there must be something wrong here. Merton noted that if he were to choose a Tibetan guru, Chatral would be the one.

Origin of the story: Merton's own account in The Asian Journal, mid-November 1968 entry (a photograph of the meeting is reproduced in the book). No account by Chatral has been published.

Testimony1968

Barefoot before the Buddhas of Polonnaruwa

On 2 December 1968, in Ceylon, Merton visited the ruins of Polonnaruwa with a priest of the diocese of Kandy. The vicar general lagged behind, protesting against 'paganism'; Merton took off his shoes and approached the great figures of the Gal Vihara alone: the seated Buddha, the reclining Buddha and the standing figure tradition identifies with Ananda. Days later he wrote that he was suddenly jerked out of the habitual vision of things, that everything had become clear because what matters is clear, and that never in his life had he felt beauty and spiritual validity so joined. He concluded that his Asian pilgrimage had found its meaning. He died eight days later, and the Polonnaruwa page has since been read as his spiritual testament.

Origin of the story: Account written by Merton a few days after the visit (the entry reads 'I visited Polonnaruwa on Monday. Today is Thursday'), published in The Asian Journal (1973).

Disputed1968

Death in Bangkok: the fan and the questions

On 10 December 1968 Merton gave his lecture in the morning, lunched with several delegates and withdrew to his room in a shared cottage at the Red Cross centre in Samut Prakan. About an hour later two of the monks who shared the cottage, with help, forced the door, bolted from the inside, and found him lying on the floor with a standing fan, still running, across his body. A Korean prioress who was a physician certified his death; one of the abbots received a shock when trying to remove the appliance. No autopsy was performed. The official version spread in the West was accidental electrocution; the Thai police and medical reports, edited in 2024 in The Catholic Historical Review, speak of heart failure preceding contact with the fan. In 2018 Hugh Turley and David Martin argued that he was murdered; specialists, among them Paul R. Dekar, consider that thesis to lack evidence.

Origin of the story: The circumstances come from Patrick Hart's epilogue and the letter of six Trappist delegates to Abbot Flavian Burns (The Asian Journal, Appendix VIII); the Thai reports were published in The Catholic Historical Review (2024). The murder thesis comes from Turley and Martin (2018), and its critique from Dekar's review in The Merton Seasonal.

Source: «The Official Thai Reports on Thomas Merton's Death». The Catholic Historical Review 110, n.º 2 (primavera de 2024): 384–396.

Teachings

The notions that structure their thought, explained in context.

True self and false selfyo-verdadero-y-yo-falso

This is the key to Merton's whole spiritual anthropology, developed above all in New Seeds of Contemplation and The Inner Experience. The false self is the identity we build in order to exist before others: made of successes, possessions, pleasures, prestige and also of displayed virtues. Merton sometimes calls it the 'outer self' or 'empirical self' and compares it to bandages wrapped around an emptiness: the more it is adorned, the clearer it becomes that there is no one inside. Sin, in this language, is less the breaking of a rule than the decision to live identified with that fiction. The true self, by contrast, is not manufactured: it is the person as God knows and calls him, the place where identity and vocation coincide. That is why Merton can say that for him to be a saint means to be himself. Contemplation is the process by which the false self fades and the true self emerges, which is not an isolated substance but a relation: in finding himself, the contemplative finds God and others.

It is rooted in the patristic tradition of the image of God, in Bernard and John of the Cross, but also engages existentialism and the Buddhist anatman, which Merton came to know through D. T. Suzuki.

Source: Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. Nueva York: New Directions, 1961.

Contemplationcontemplacion

Merton defines contemplation as the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual life: life fully awake, a grateful awareness that life, being and God are a present reality. It is not, he insists, a trance, a pious emotion, the product of a concentration technique or a privilege of mystics; nor is it discursive thought about God. It is a gift, a dark and loving intuition in which the subject ceases to see himself as the centre. Merton distinguishes an 'infused' contemplation, which is pure grace, from a contemplative disposition that can be cultivated through silence, simplicity of life, liturgy and reading. His great contribution was to take contemplation out of the monastery: in Seeds and in The Inner Experience he argues that every Christian is called to it and that it can be lived amid work and the city, provided one renounces the will to dominate.

It draws on the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, John of the Cross and the Cistercian tradition, and anticipates the renewal of lay contemplative prayer (centering prayer, Christian meditation) in the following decades.

Source: Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. Nueva York: New Directions, 1961.

Le point viergele-point-vierge

Merton took the French expression point vierge ('virgin point') from the Islamicist Louis Massignon, who used it of Sufi mystical experience, and made it one of his central images. In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander he describes a point of nothingness at the centre of the human being, untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth that belongs entirely to God and is not at our disposal. That point, he says, is God's signature in us: the poverty, indigence and dependence that constitute us. It is not reached by effort; it is recognised. Merton links the image to dawn: the moment before daybreak when the birds wake and ask permission to exist. The concept explains why contemplation leads to compassion: if there is an untouched centre in every person, no one is finally alien or finally lost.

The fruit of his correspondence with Massignon (1959–1962) and his reading of the Sufi mystics, it is one of the clearest bridges between his Christian mysticism and Islam.

Source: Merton, Thomas. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Garden City (NY): Doubleday, 1966.

Solitudesoledad

Solitude was for Merton a vocation and a problem throughout his life: it drew him towards the Carthusians and the Camaldolese and led to the hermitage of 1965. In 'Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude' (Disputed Questions) and in Thoughts in Solitude he distinguishes authentic solitude from individualistic isolation: the true solitary neither flees others nor thinks himself superior to them, but rejects 'diversion'—in Pascal's sense—and the collective identities mass society imposes. That renunciation places him, paradoxically, in a deeper solidarity with everyone, because he shares with them a radical poverty before God. Merton also warns against solitude as romantic escape: the hermitage is not an aesthetic refuge but a place of poverty, prayer and work.

It inherits the eremitic tradition of the Desert Fathers, Guigo the Carthusian and the Camaldolese, and anticipates the eremitic renewal within cenobitic orders after Vatican II.

Source: Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. Nueva York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1958.

Nonviolenceno-violencia

From 1961 onward Merton became one of the clearest Catholic voices against nuclear war and later against the Vietnam War. His nonviolence has a theological rather than a political foundation: if every person is the image of God and in each there is an untouched centre, violence is a form of lying about the other. In Gandhi on Non-Violence and Faith and Violence he argues that nonviolence is justified not by its effectiveness but by its truth, and that it demands humility: whoever practises it must be ready to learn from the adversary and not present himself as pure. He also denounced structural violence—racism, poverty—and the complicity of Christians who bless war. His writings circulated in the peace movement and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and he supported objectors such as Jim Forest and the Berrigan brothers, though he disagreed with some actions he judged too spectacular.

It belongs to the tradition of Christian pacifism (Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker) and to Gandhi's thought, and precedes the conciliar teaching of Gaudium et spes on war.

Source: Shannon, William H.; Bochen, Christine M.; O'Connell, Patrick F. The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia. Maryknoll (NY): Orbis Books, 2002.

Contemplative dialogue between religionsdialogo-contemplativo-interreligioso

Merton was one of the pioneers of what came to be called intermonastic dialogue. His position, worked out in Mystics and Zen Masters, Zen and the Birds of Appetite and the Calcutta and Bangkok talks, carefully distinguishes levels: at the level of doctrines and institutions the differences are real and should not be dissolved into easy syncretism; at the level of contemplative experience, by contrast, the Christian and the Buddhist monk can recognise each other in a shared search for inner freedom and transformation of consciousness. What interested him in Zen was precisely what is not doctrine: a direct way of seeing, without interposed concepts, which he compared to Christian apophatic theology and Eckhart's spiritual poverty. In Calcutta he summed up his conviction by saying that the deepest communion is not expressed in words: we do not discover a new unity but an older unity we had forgotten.

It developed in contact with D. T. Suzuki, John C. H. Wu, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama and Chatral Rinpoche, and lies at the origin of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue founded after his death.

Source: Merton, Thomas. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Nueva York: New Directions, 1968.

Videos

Recordings, interviews and documentaries. Videos play from YouTube; they are not hosted here.

Thomas Merton's final talk.
Original recording· EN· 1968
Witnify
Silence & Contemplation (PM) | Merton in His Own Words (2013)
Original recording· EN· 2013
Festival of FaithsOfficial channel
His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaks on Thomas Merton and common ground for all religious traditions
Lecture· EN· 1994
Festival of FaithsOfficial channel
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama Remembering Thomas Merton
Interview· EN· 2013
nunncenterOfficial channel
The Dalai Lama reacts to Merton's death
Documentary· EN· 2013
Morgan AtkinsonOfficial channel
Thomas Merton's Legacy at Bellarmine
Documentary· EN
bellarmineuniversityOfficial channel
Thomas Merton and "M": What Merton's Affair with a Nurse Taught Him About Love and Humanity
Lecture· EN
Curran Center for American Catholic StudiesOfficial channel
Thomas Merton: Session 1
Lecture· EN
Center for Action and ContemplationOfficial channel
Bishop Barron on Thomas Merton, Spiritual Master
Analysis· EN
Bishop Robert BarronOfficial channel
Fiestas Teología 2024. Conferencia de Fernando Beltrán sobre Thomas Merton
Lecture· ES· 2024
UPSALAMANCAOfficial channel
Los diarios de Thomas Merton
Analysis· ES
Grupo de Comunicación LoyolaOfficial channel

Gallery

Images with verified licences. Each keeps its authorship and attribution.

Connections

Influences, discipleships and affinities. Documented relations are distinguished from similarities identified by analysis.

Ideas akin to
Simone Weil
Merton devoted the essay 'Pacifism and Resistance in Simone Weil' (Faith and Violence) to her; both joined mysticism and commitment to the oppressed.
Similarity identified by analysis
Met
Thich Nhat Hanh
They met at Gethsemani on 28 May 1966; Merton then wrote 'Nhat Hanh Is My Brother'.
Documented relation
Met
The 14th Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso)
Three audiences at Dharamsala on 4, 6 and 8 November 1968; the Dalai Lama remembered him in his autobiography.
Documented relation
Influenced by
John of the Cross
The Ascent to Truth (1951) is a study of his mystical theology; his doctrine of the dark night runs through all of Merton's work.
Documented relation
Influenced by
Augustine of Hippo
Reading the Confessions, on Brahmachari's advice in 1938, was decisive for his conversion.
Documented relation
Influenced by
Thomas à Kempis
He read The Imitation of Christ in 1938 on Brahmachari's advice, on the road to his conversion.
Documented relation
Influenced by
Zhuangzi
He re-created passages of the Zhuangzi in English in The Way of Chuang Tzu (1965), one of his favourite books.
Documented relation
Influenced by
Meister Eckhart
In Zen and the Birds of Appetite he compares Eckhart's spiritual poverty with Zen experience.
Documented relation
Influenced by
Francis of Assisi
Before entering La Trappe he was a Franciscan tertiary and taught at the Franciscan college of St. Bonaventure.
Documented relation
Ideas akin to
Teresa of Ávila
Merton was formed by the Spanish Carmelite mystics; the affinity with Teresa is one of tradition rather than concrete documented influence.
Similarity identified by analysis

Linked from other profiles

Sources

Bibliography and catalogues consulted for this profile.

«The Official Thai Reports on Thomas Merton's Death». The Catholic Historical Review 110, n.º 2 (primavera de 2024): 384–396.
Wikidata, «Thomas Merton» (Q335011).
Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University. «Thomas Merton: Chronology of Life and Publications».
Mott, Michael. The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984 (biografía autorizada por el Merton Legacy Trust).
Merton, Thomas. The Seven Storey Mountain. Nueva York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948.
Merton, Thomas. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. Ed. Naomi Burton Stone, Patrick Hart y James Laughlin. Nueva York: New Directions, 1973 (incluye el epílogo de Patrick Hart y los apéndices VII, «Marxism and Monastic Perspectives», y VIII, carta de los delegados trapenses al abad Flavian Burns).
Wikipedia (en), «Thomas Merton».
Wikipedia (en), «Thomas Merton bibliography».
Shannon, William H.; Bochen, Christine M.; O'Connell, Patrick F. The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia. Maryknoll (NY): Orbis Books, 2002.
Merton, Thomas. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Garden City (NY): Doubleday, 1966.
Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. Nueva York: New Directions, 1961.
Merton, Thomas. Learning to Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom. The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 6 (1966–1967). Ed. Christine M. Bochen. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.
Dekar, Paul R. Reseña de Hugh Turley y David Martin, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation (2018). The Merton Seasonal 43, n.º 4 (2018).
Papa Francisco. Discurso ante la sesión conjunta del Congreso de los Estados Unidos, Washington, 24 de septiembre de 2015. Santa Sede.
Open Library, autor «Thomas Merton» (OL26986A): obras y ediciones con ISBN.
Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. Nueva York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1958.
Merton, Thomas. The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters on Religious Experience and Social Concerns. Ed. William H. Shannon. Nueva York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985.
New Directions Publishing, ficha de autor «Thomas Merton».
Merton, Thomas. A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk's True Life. The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 3 (1952–1960). Ed. Lawrence S. Cunningham. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.
Merton, Thomas. The Way of Chuang Tzu. Nueva York: New Directions, 1965.
Merton, Thomas. «Nhat Hanh Is My Brother» (Jubilee, agosto de 1966), recogido en Faith and Violence. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.
Merton, Thomas. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Nueva York: New Directions, 1968.
Wikipedia (es), «Thomas Merton».
Furlong, Monica. Merton: A Biography. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980.
Dalái Lama (Tenzin Gyatso). Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama. Londres: Hodder & Stoughton; Nueva York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Rights holder: Merton Legacy Trust (constituido por el propio Merton en 1967), en beneficio de la abadía de Getsemaní; las ediciones concretas pertenecen a sus editoriales
Official site: merton.org

Pending confirmation

What this profile has not yet been able to settle. We would rather say so than fill it in.

No hay en Wikimedia Commons ningún retrato fotográfico de Merton con licencia libre verificable: el único («Merton photo.jpg») declara PD-US-no notice sin fuente original fiable y se ha descartado; las fotos conocidas son de John Howard Griffin, Sibylle Akers y otros, con derechos vigentes.
Localizar ISBN de las ediciones españolas actuales de La montaña de los siete círculos, El signo de Jonás y Ningún hombre es una isla (Edhasa, Sudamericana, PPC) y de Nuevas semillas (Sal Terrae: año de edición).
Confirmar año y traductor de las ediciones francesa (Seuil) y alemana (Benziger) de No Man Is an Island registradas en Open Library.
Contrastar la paginación exacta de las citas en las primeras ediciones (New Seeds, Conjectures, Thoughts in Solitude).
Autoría del artículo «The Official Thai Reports on Thomas Merton's Death» (Catholic Historical Review 110/2, 2024): no consignada en los catálogos consultados.
Muchas obras menores (opúsculos de la abadía, ediciones de bibliófilo) tienen descripción breve por falta de información verificable más detallada.
Sin textos para la sala de lectura: toda su obra tiene derechos vigentes (Merton murió en 1968).

Researched on 2026-10-25