MERTON, THOMAS

Trappist monk, poet, and author; b. Jan. 31, 1915, Prades, France; d. Dec. 10, 1968, Bangkok, Thailand. The son of artists, his father, Owen Merton from New Zealand and his mother Ruth Jenkins Merton from America, Merton pursued his studies in Europe and America in literature, particularly in poetry, in which art he was first recognized and came to excel. Imbued with a strong social sense which led him simultaneously to espouse basic charity and to test an attraction to monasticism, he became a Catholic in 1938, and in 1941 entered the Trappist abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky.

The publication of his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, in 1948 brought him into international prominence. He began a series of writings on various spiritual subjects which was constantly to try his monastic vocation as they made him a famous celebrity. He was one of the first, and among the few in his time, to reemphasize the primary value of the contemplative life and to ground it in sound scholarship and social concern. Through his writings and example, he inspired and trained a generation of Christian contemplatives, not only in the Bernardian Cistercian tradition of strict monasticism with a watchful eye on the outside world, but also in the Carmelite tradition of St. John of the Cross. In his last years he lived out the same contradiction—a hermit yet one whose advice and friendship were sought by many great men, notably Jacques Maritain, a principal adviser of Pope Paul VI. As perhaps the most famous monk in the world at the time, and while investigating the ideologies and resources of Far Eastern spirituality, he died suddenly in Bangkok, at the first Pan-Asian Monastic Conference, an international congress on the future of monasticism, half a world away from the hermitage he had sought and found in Kentucky, and at the very height of his spiritual perception.

Merton's own works are numerous. Among the more significant are Asian Journal (New York 1972); Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City 1968); Faith and Violence (South Bend 1968); New Seeds of Contemplation (New York 1972); No Man Is an Island (Garden City 1955); Selected Poems (Garden City 1967); Seven Storey Mountain (Garden City 1970); The New Man (New York 1981) and The Climate of Monastic Prayer (Kalamazoo, Mich. 1973).

Bibliography: j. finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere: A Search for God through Awareness of the True Self (Notre Dame, Ind. 1978). p. hart, ed. The Message of Thomas Merton (Kalamazoo, Mich. 1981). m. mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Boston 1984). m. b. pennington, Thomas Merton Brother Monk: The Quest for True Freedom (San Francisco 1987). w. h. shannon, "Something of a Rebel": Thomas Merton, His Life and Works: An Introduction (Cincinnati, Ohio 1997). l. cunningham, Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision (Grand Rapids, Mich.1999). r. g. waldron, Walking with Thomas Merton: Discovering His Poetry, Essays, and Journals (New York 2001). For a convenient collection of extracts from Merton's principal writings, see Thomas Merton: Essential Writings, ed. c. m. bochen (Maryknoll, N.Y. 2000)

[j. kritzeck/eds.]