A review from the paperback edition says: “Thomas Merton’s early years gave no clue as to the vast richness of spirit and intellect he would develop through out his life and share through his writings. He was the son of an itinerant painter, had an upbringing with little or no religious character, was a nondescript student, a rabble rouser.. not even a Catholic.. who at a point in his early manhood left the fast life of New York and knocked on the doors of a Kentucky monastary, to give over his life to austere celibacy and contemplation.. and profound internal enrichment. Seven Story Mountain has been compared to the Confessions of Augustine, but these books are of different timber. Merton’s is a story told at a personal level, of a spiritual journey in a modern context. It does not try to compete with Augustine’s intense intellectual and theological reasoning, preferring to dwell on the peace and joy of religious life, and more generally the meaning and responsibilities of all lives. You can’t read this book without being charmed and blessed by the proximity to this rare bit of humanity and devotion in our very secular and material age.” I have used “On Becoming A Saint” and “The Death Of His Father: Suffering” in other posts. The former is one that Fr. Barron devotes a great deal of time to in “The Strangest Way”; the latter spoke to me profoundly on the value of faith and I have marshaled it as an argument in posts such as The False Gods of Expedient Mercy. Reading selections follow:
On Becoming A Saint
Therefore, another one of those times that turned out to be historical, as far as my own soul is concerned, was when Lax and I were walking down Sixth Avenue, one night in the spring. The Street was all torn up and trenched and banked high with dirt and marked out. with red lanterns where they were digging the subway, and we picked our way along the fronts of the dark little stores, going downtown to Greenwich Village. I forget what we were arguing about, but in the end Lax suddenly turned around and asked me the question:
“What do you want to be, anyway?”
I could not say, “I want to be Thomas Merton the well-known writer of all those book reviews in the back pages of the Times Book Review,” or “Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of Freshman English at the New Life Social Institute for Progress and Culture,” so I put the thing on the spiritual plane, where I knew it belonged and said:
“I don’t know; I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic.”
“What do you mean, you want to be a good Catholic?”
The explanation I gave was lame enough, and ex pressed my confusion, and betrayed how little I had really thought about it at all.
Lax did not accept it.
“What you should say”– he told me — ”what you should say is that you want to be a saint.”
A saint! The thought struck me as a little weird. I said:
“How do you expect me to become a saint?”
“By wanting to,” said Lax, simply.
“I can’t be a saint,” I said, “I can’t be a saint.” And my mind darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities: the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility which makes men say that they cannot do the things that they must do, cannot reach the level that they must reach: the cowardice that says: “I am satisfied to save my soul, to keep out of mortal sin,” but which means, by those words: “I do not want to give up my sins and my attachments.”
The World Is A Moral Universe
More than that: since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs. I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.
A Law Of Nature
It is a law of man’s nature, written into his very essence, and just a much a part of him as the desire to build houses and cultivate the land and marry and have children and read books and sing songs, that he should want to stand together with other men in order to acknowledge their common dependence on God, their father and Creator. In fact, this desire is much more fundamental than any purely physical necessity.
Saints We Grow Up With
It is a great pleasure for me to remember such good and kind people and to talk about them, although I no longer possess any details about them. I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints, And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within, and from habitual union of their souls with God in deep faith and charity.
Arguing Faith
So I began to justify Protestantism, as best I could …I gave them the argument that every religion was good: they all led to God, only in different ways, and every man should go according to his own conscience, and settle things according to his own private way of looking at things.
They did not answer me with any argument…Monsieur Privat said quietly and sadly, “Mais c’est impossible.”
It was a terrible, a frightening, a very humiliating thing to see their silence and peacefulness and strength turned against me, accusing me of being estranged from them, isolated from their security, cut off from their protections and from the strength of their inner life by my own fault, by my own willfulness, by my own ignorance, and my uninstructed Protestant pride.
One of the humiliating things about it was that I wanted them to argue, and they despised argument, it was as if they realized, as I did not, that my attitude and my desire of argument and religious discussion implied a fundamental and utter lack of faith, and a dependence on my own lights, and attachment to my own opinion.
What is more, they seemed to realize that I did not believe in anything and that anything I might say I believed would be only empty talk…
Descartes Proof Of His Own And God’s Existence
He told us that as far as he was concerned that [Descartes proof of his own and God’s existence] was the foundation of what religion meant to him….any proof of what is self-evident must necessarily be illusory. It there are no self-evident first principles, as a foundation for reasoning to conclusions that are not immediately apparent, how can you construct any kind of a philosophy? If you have to prove even the basic axioms of your metaphysics, you will never have a metaphysics, because you will never have any strict proof of anything, for your first proof will involve you in an infinite regress, proving that you are proving what you are proving and so on, into the exterior darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. If Descartes thought it was necessary to prove his own existence , by the fact that he was thinking, and that his thought therefore existed in some subject, how did he prove that he was thinking in the first place? But as to the second step, that God must exist because Descartes had a clear idea of him – that never convinced me, the or at any other time, or now either. There are much better proofs for the existence of God than that one.
The Death Of His Father: Suffering
We went into the ward. Father was in his bed, to the left, just as you went in the door.
And when I saw him, I knew at once there was no hope of him living much longer His face was swollen. His eyes were not clear but, above all, the tumor had raised a tremendous swelling on his forehead.
I said: “How are you, Father?”
He looked at me and put forth his hand, in a confused and unhappy way, and I realized that he could no longer even speak. But at the same time, you could see that he knew us, and knew what was going on, and that his mind was clear, and that he understood everything.
But the sorrow of his great helplessness suddenly fell upon me like a mountain. I was crushed by it. The tears sprang to my eyes., Nobody said anything more.
I hid my face in the blanket and cried. And poor father wept, too. The others stood by. It was excruciatingly sad. We were completely helpless. There was nothing anyone could do…
What could I make of so much suffering? There was no way for me, or for anyone in the family, to get anything out of it. It was a raw wound for which there was no adequate relief. You had to take it, like an animal. We were in the condition of most of the world, the condition of men without faith in the presence of war, disease, pain, starvation, suffering, plague, bombardment, death. You just had to take it, like a dumb animal. Try to avoid it if you could. But you must eventually each the point where you can’t avoid it any more. Take it. Try to stupefy yourself, if you like, so that it won’t hurt so much. But you will always have to take some of it. And it will all devour you in the end.
Indeed the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being that is at once the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves.
The State Of A Soul Without Grace
Religious people, those who have faith and love God and realized what life is and what death means, and know what it is to have an immortal soul, do not understand how it is with the ones who have no faith, and who have already thrown away the soul. They find it hard to conceive that anyone cold enter into the presence of death without some kind of compunction. But they should realize that millions of men die the way I was then prepared to die, the way I then might have died…”Surely you thought of God and wanted to pray to Him for mercy?”
No. As far as I remember, the thought of God, the thought of prayer did not even enter my mind, ether that day, or all the rest of the time that I was ill, or that whole year, for that matter….
I wish I could give those who believe in God some kind of an idea of the state of a soul like mine was in then. But it is impossible to do it in sober, straight, measured, prose terms. And in a sense, image and analogy would be even more misleading, the very fact that they would have life in them, and convey the notion of some real entity; some kind of energy, some kind of activity. But my soul was simply dead. It was blank, a nothingness. It was empty, it was a kind of a spiritual vacuum, as far as the supernatural order was concerned. Even its natural faculties were shriveled husks of what they ought to have been.
A soul is an immaterial thing. It is a principle of activity, it is an “act”, a “form”, an energizing principle. It is the life of the body, and it must also have a life of its own. But the life of the soul does not inhere to any physical, material subject. So to compare a soul without grace to a corpse without life is only a metaphor. But it is very true.
The First Time He Prays
I was in my room. It was night. The light was on. Suddenly it seemed to me that Father, who had now been dead more than a year, was there with me. The sense of his presence was as vivid and as real and as startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me. The whole thing passed in a flash, but in that flash, instantly, I was overwhelmed with a sudden and profound insight into the misery and corruption of my own soul, and I was pierced deeply with a light that made me realize something of the condition I was in, and I was filled with horror at what I saw, and my whole being rose up in revolt against what was within me, and my soul desired escape and liberation and freedom from all this with an intensity and an urgency unlike anything I had ever known before. And now I think for the first time in my whole life I really began to pray — praying not with my lips and with my intellect and imagination, but praying out of the roots of my life and of my being, and praying to the God I had never known, to reach down towards me out of His darkness and help me to get free of the thousand terrible things that held my will in their slavery.
The Self-Consciousness of Converts
Another thing Catholics do not realize about converts is the tremendous, agonizing embarrassment and self-consciousness which they feel about praying publicly in a Catholic Church. The effort it takes to overcome all the strange imaginary fears that everyone is looking at you, and that they all think you are crazy or ridiculous, is something that costs a tremendous effort. And that day in Santa Sabina , although the Church was almost empty, I walked across the stone floor mortally afraid that a poor devout old Italian woman was following me with suspicious eyes. As I knelt to pray, I wondered if she would run out and accuse me at once to the priests, with scandalous horror, for coming and praying in their church – as if Catholics were perfectly content to have a lot of heretic tourists walking about their churches with complete indifference and irreverence, and would get angry if one of them so far acknowledged God’s presence there as to go on his knees for a few seconds and say a prayer!
God Sheds Enough Light Into The Soul
For in my greatest misery, He would shed enough light into my soul to see how miserable I was, and to admit that it was my own fault and my own work. And always I was to be punished for my sins and by my sins themselves s and to realize, at least obscurely, that I as being so punished and burn in the flames of my own hell, and rot in the hell of my own corrupt will until I was forced at last, by my own intense misery, to give up my own will.
Sanctifying Grace
There is a paradox that lies at the very heart of human existence. It must be apprehended before any lasting happiness is possible in the soul of a man. The paradox is this: a man’s nature, by itself, can do little or nothing to settle his most important problems. If we follow nothing but our natures, our own philosophies, our own level of ethics, we will end up in hell.
This would be a depressing thought, if it were not purely abstract, because in the concrete order of things God gave man a nature that was ordered to a supernatural life. He created man with a soul that was made not to bring itself into perfection in its own order, but to be perfected by Him in an order infinitely beyond the reach of human powers. We were never destined to lead purely natural lives, and therefore we were never destined in God’s plan for a purely natural beatitude. Our nature, which is a free gift of God, was given to us to be perfected and enhanced by another free gift that it is not due it.
This free gift is “sanctifying grace.” It perfects our nature with the gift of a life, an intellection, a love, a mode of existence infinitely about its own level. If a man were to arrive even at the abstract pinnacle of natural perfection, God’s work would not even be half done: it would be only about to begin, for the real work is the work of grace and the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost….
When a ray of light strikes a crystal, it gives a new quality to the crystal. And when God’s infinitely disinterested love plays upon a human soul, the same kind of a thing takes place. And that is the life of sanctifying grace.
The Church: Men Leading Other Men
Christ established His Church, among other reasons, in order that men might lead one another to Him and in the process sanctify themselves and one another. For in this work it is Christ Who draws us to Himself through the action of our fellow men
Aseitas
“Aseitas – the English equivalent is a transliteration: aseity — simply means the power for a being to exist absolutely in virtue of itself, not as caused by itself, but as requiring no cause, no other justification for its existence except that its very nature is to exist. There can be only one such Being: that is God. And to say that God exists a se, of and by and by reason of Himself, is merely to say that God is Being Itself. Ego sum qui sum. And this means that God must enjoy ‘complete independence not only as regards everything outside but also as regards everything within Himself’”
Merton Quotes Etienne Gilson
St. Bonaventure’s Ininerarium
Beyond all sensible images, and all conceptual determinations, God affirms Himself as the absolute act of being in its actuality. Our concept of God is a feeble analogue of a reality which overflows it in every direction, can be made explicit only in the judgment: Being is Being, and absolute positing of that which, lying beyond every object, contains in itself the sufficient reason of objects. And that is why we can rightly say that the very excess of positivity which hides that divine being from our eyes in nevertheless the light which lights up all the rest: ipsa caligo summa est nostrae mentis illuminatio
Merton Quotes St. Bonaventure’s Ininerarium
This Very Darkness Is The Supreme Illumination Of Our Mind
But just as the eye, intent on the various differences of color, does not see the light through which it sees other things, or if it does see, does not notice it, so our mind’s eye, intent on particular and universal beings, does not notice that being which is beyond all categories, even though it comes first to the mind, and through it, all other things. Wherefore it appears most true that as the eye of the bat is disposed towards the light, so the eye of our mind is disposed towards the most evident things of nature. Thus our mind, accustomed as it is to the opaqueness in beings and the phantasms of visible things, appears to be seeing nothing when it gazes upon the light of the highest being. It does not understand that this very darkness is the supreme illumination of our mind, just as when the eye sees pure light, it seems to be seeing nothing.
Catholic Philosophy vs. The Dead Letter of Scripture
The truth is that the concept of God which I had always entertained, and which I had accused Christians of teaching to the world, was the concept of a being who was simply impossible. He was infinite and yet finite; perfect and imperfect; eternal and yet changing – subject to all the variations of emotion, love, sorrow, hate, revenge, that men are prey to. How could this fatuous, emotional thing be without beginning and without end, the creator of all? I had taken the dead letter of Scripture at its deadest, and it had killed me according to the saying of St. Paul “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.”….What a relief it was for me, now, to discover not only that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God, but also that we should no allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of Him. The result was that I acquired an immense respect for Catholic philosophy and for the Catholic faith.
Vital Faith
As William Blake worked himself into my system, I became more and more conscious of the necessity of a vital faith, and the total unreality and insubstantiality of the dead, selfish rationalism which had been freezing my mind and will for the last seven years…I was to become conscious of the fact that the only way to live was to live in a world that was charged with the presence and reality of God…To say that is to say a great deal and I don’t want to say it in a way that conveys more than the truth…it was still more for me a statement of intellectual realization than anything else; and it had not struck down into the roots of my will. The life of the soul is not knowledge; it is love; since love is the act of the supreme faculty, the will, by which man is formally united to the final end of all his strivings – by which man becomes one with God.
Understanding The Virtues
Now at last I came around to a sane conception of virtue – without which there can be no happiness, because virtues are precisely the powers by which we can come to acquire happiness: without them, there can be no joy, because they are the habits which coordinate and canalize our natural energies and direct them to the harmony and perfection and balance, the unity of our nature with itself and with God, which must, in the end, constitute our everlasting peace.
Intellect
I think if there is one truth that people need to learn, in the world, especially today, it is this: the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice. It is constantly being blinded and perverted by the ends and aims of passion, and the evidence it presents to us with such a show of impartiality and objectivity is fraught with interest and propaganda. We have become marvelous at self-delusion; all the more so because we have gone to such trouble to convince ourselves of our own absolute infallibility.
Hell
Why should anyone be shattered by the thought of hell? It is not compulsory for anyone to go there. Those who do, do so by their own choice, and against the will of God, and they can only get into hell by defying and resisting all the work of Providence and grace. It is their own will that takes them there, not God’s. In damning them He is ony ratifying their own decision, a decision which He has left entirely to their own choice. Nor will He ever hold our weakness alone responsible for our damnation. Our weakness should not terrify us : it is the source of our strength. Power is made perfect by infirmity, and our very helplessness is all the more potent a claim on that Divine Mercy Who Calls to Himself the poor, the little ones, the heavily burdened.
The Precarious Nature Of Intellectual Conversion
The conversion of the intellect is not enough. And as long as the will, the domina voluntas did not belong completely to God, even the intellectual conversion was bound to remain precarious and indefinite. For although the will cannot force the intellect to see an object other than it is, it can turn it away from the object altogether and prevent it from considering that thing at all…”Where your treasure is , there will your heart be also.” [Matthew 6:21 and Luke 12:34]
Thomas Merton’s Advice To You
Whoever you are, the land God has brought you is not like the land of Egypt from which you came out. Your can no longer live here as you lived there. Your old life and your former ways are crucified now, and you must not seek to live anymore for your own gratification, but give up your own judgment into the hands of a wise director, and sacrifice your pleasures and comforts for the love of God and give the money you no longer spend on those things to the poor…Above all eat your Daily Bread without which you cannot live, and come to know Christ whose Life feeds you in the Host, and He will give you a taste of joys and delights that transcend anything you have ever experienced before and which will make the transition easy.
The Requirement of Sainthood
All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let Him do it? All you have to do is desire it.
Translating Beliefs Into Actions
What was this curse that was upon me that I could not translate belief into action, and my knowledge of God into a concrete campaign for possessing Him, Whom I knew to be the only true good? No, I was content to speculate and argue and I think the reason is that may knowledge was too much a mere matter of natural and intellectual consideration. After all, Aristotle placed the highest natural felicity in the knowledge of God which was accessible to him, a pagan: and I think he was probably right. The heights that can be reached by metaphysical speculation introduce a man into a realm of pure and subtle pleasure that offers the most nearly permanent delights you can find in the natural order. When you go one step higher and base your speculations on premises that are revealed, the pleasure gets deeper and more perfect still. Yet even though the subject matter may be the mysteries of the Christian faith, the manner of contemplating them, speculative and impersonal, may still not transcend the natural plane, at least as far as practical consequences go. In such case you get, not a kind of intellectual and esthetic gluttony – a high and refined and even virtuous form of selfishness. And when it leads to no movement of the will towards God, no efficacious love of Him, it is sterile and dead, this mediation, and could even accidentally become, under certain circumstances, a kind of sin – at least an imperfection.
Daily Communion
It was in one of the confessionals, that a priest one day told me ,very insistently “Go to communion every day, every day.” By that time I had already become a daily communicant, but his words comforted me and strengthened me, and his emphasis made me glad. And indeed I had reason to be, for it was those daily Communions that were transforming my life almost visibly, from day to day.
Saints
It is a wonderful experience to discover a new Saint. For God is greatly magnified and marvelous in each one of His saints: differently in each individual one. There are no two saints alike: but all of them are like God, like Him in a different and special way. In fact, if Adam had never fallen, the whole human race would have bee a series of magnificently different and splendid images of “God, each one of all the millions of men showing forth His glories and perfections in an astonishing new way, and each one shining with his own particular sanctity, a sanctity destined for him from all eternity as the most complete and unimaginable supernatural perfection of his human personality.
His Brother, John Paul
One thing I would say about my brother, John Paul: My most vivid memories of him, in our childhood, all fill me with poignant compunction at the thought of my own hard-heartedness, and his natural humility and love.
I suppose it’s usual for elder brothers, when they are still children, to feel themselves demeaned by the company of a brother, four or five years younger, whom they regard as a baby, and tend to patronize and look down upon.
So when Russ and Bill and I (older brothers all) made huts in the woods out of boards and tar paper . . . we severely prohibited John Paul, and Russ’ younger brother Tommy and their friends from coming anywhere near us. If they did try to come and get into our hut, or even to look at it, we would chase them away with stones.
“When I think now about that part of my childhood, the picture I get of my brother John Paul is this: standing in a field a hundred yards away from our hut, is this little perplexed five-year-old kid in short pants and a kind of leather jacket, standing quite still; his arms hanging down at his sides.
He is gazing in our direction, afraid to come any nearer on account of the stones, as insulted as he is saddened, and his eyes full of indignation and sorrow. And yet he does not go away. We shout at him to go away, beat it, go home, and wing a couple more rocks in that direction. We tell him to play some other place. He does not move.
And there he stands, not sobbing, not crying, but angry and unhappy and offended and tremendously sad. And yet he is fascinated by what we are doing, nailing shingles all over our new hut. And his tremendous desire to be with us and to do what we are doing will not permit him to go away.
The law written in his nature tells him he must be with his elder brother and do what he is doing, and he cannot understand why this law of love is being so wildly and unjustly violated in his case.
Many times are like that, and in a sense, this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us, for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. We `will’ to separate ourselves from that love; we reject it entirely and absolutely, and will not acknowledge it, because it does not please us to be loved . . . “
[Thomas Merton immediately recalls an astounding event] When our `gang’ tried to antagonize the extremely tough Polish kids who had formed a gang in nearby Little Neck (approaching their headquarters) and “from a very safe distance we would challenge them to come out and fight” (but) “nobody came out – perhaps (that day) there was nobody home.”
But then came the day, Merton recalls, “one cold and rainy afternoon, when we observed that numbers of large and small figures, varying in age from 10 to 16, most of them very brawny” gathered outside the Merton home, “20 or 25 of them. There were four of us.”[hiding inside].
The climax of the situation came when Frieda, our German maid, told us that she was very busy with housecleaning and we must all get out of the house immediately. Without listening to our extremely nervous protests, she chased us out the back way . . . we made our way through back yards to the safety of Bill’s house” [a block away, with a clear view across a field, of the Merton home].
And then an extraordinary thing happened. The front door of our house opened. My little brother John Paul came walking down the steps with a certain amount of dignity and calm. He crossed the street (and) walked toward the Little Neck gang. They all turned towards him. He kept on walking and walked right into the middle of them.
One or two of them took their hands out of their pockets. John Paul just looked at them, turning his head to one side and then the other. And he walked through the middle of them and no one ever touched him.
And so he came to the house where we were. We did not chase him away.
The book closes with a poem written by Thomas Merton upon learning of his brother’s death in the North Sea:
I learned that John Paul was severely injured in the crash but managed to keep himself afloat, even tried to support the pilot who was already dead.
He was very badly hurt; maybe his neck was broken. He lay in the bottom of the dinghy in delirium. He was terribly thirsty. He kept asking for water. But they didn’t have any. It didn’t last too long. He had three hours of it and then he died. His companions had more to suffer, and were finally picked up and taken to safety five days later. On the fourth day they had buried John Paul at sea.
The chapter concludes with Thomas Merton’s poetic requiem for his “dear brother” asking their Maker to,
“Take my breath . . .
and buy yourself a better death . . .
And buy you back to your own land
The silence of Whose tears shall fall
Like bells upon your alien tomb.
Hear them and come,
They call you home.”
