The Work
The Seven Storey Mountain was published in 1948 by Harcourt, Brace and Company (New York). It is an autobiography of approximately 400 pages, covering Merton's life from his birth in France in 1915 through his entrance into the Cistercian (Trappist) monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Kentucky, in December 1941, and his first years as a monk. The title alludes to Dante's Purgatorio, in which souls ascend the seven-storied mountain of Purgatory by shedding the seven deadly sins. The British edition, published as Elected Silence (1949), was significantly abridged by Evelyn Waugh.
The book was a publishing sensation. It sold 600,000 copies in its first year - unprecedented for a spiritual autobiography - and reached the bestseller lists that autumn. It has never been out of print. It has been translated into twenty-seven languages. Time magazine noted that it had 'captured the imagination of the reading public in a way that few religious books have done in many years.' It is widely regarded as the most important spiritual autobiography in English since John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) and the most widely read Catholic memoir of the twentieth century.
Biblical Engagement
Scripture is present throughout The Seven Storey Mountain not primarily as a text that Merton cites and expounds but as a living voice that he hears, especially through the liturgy of the hours (the Divine Office), which surrounds a monk's entire day with the Psalms and the New Testament.
Psalm 42:1-2 ('As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God') is the emotional key to the book. Merton describes his pre-conversion life as a progressive awareness of a thirst he could not identify and could not satisfy - through relationships, literature, political activism, or artistic ambition. The monastery is the place where this thirst is finally named and where its proper object - God - is finally sought with full deliberateness.
Galatians 2:20 ('I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me') provides the christological grammar of Merton's conversion experience and his early monastic life. The Pauline substitution - the old self crucified, Christ living in the believer - is enacted liturgically in the monastic rhythm of death and resurrection that structures each day's Office.
John 1:1-14 (the Prologue) is read by Merton through a distinctly contemplative lens: the Logos who was 'in the beginning with God' and who became flesh is the same Logos who speaks in Scripture, who is encountered in lectio divina (sacred reading), and who is present in the silence of contemplative prayer. The monastery is, for Merton, the place where the Johannine vision of God-with-us is most fully enacted.
The Psalms as a whole - not individual verses but the entire Psalter as the prayer of the church - are central to the book's understanding of monastic life. Merton describes the Divine Office as a discovery that prayer is not something he produces but something he enters: the church's prayer, Christ's prayer, has been going on forever, and the monk's vocation is to step into it. This understanding of the Psalms as the prayer of Christ himself - a tradition going back to Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos - transforms Merton's understanding of what Scripture is and how it works.
The wisdom books - Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job - inform Merton's extended meditation on the emptiness of worldly ambition and the vanity of the intellectual life pursued for its own sake. Ecclesiastes 1:2 ('Vanity of vanities, all is vanity') is a recurrent presence in Merton's account of his Columbia University years, when he was simultaneously brilliant, praised, and spiritually empty.
Author & Context
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was born in Prades, Occitanie, France, to Owen Merton, a New Zealand landscape painter, and Ruth Jenkins, an American Quaker. He lost his mother to cancer at age six and spent an itinerant childhood in France, England, and the United States. He was educated at Oakham School in Rutland and Clare College, Cambridge (which he left after a turbulent year), and then at Columbia University in New York, where he received his BA and MA in English literature.
Merton's Columbia years (1935-1941) were intellectually brilliant and personally chaotic. He wrote for the campus literary magazine, befriended an extraordinary circle of students and professors including Robert Giroux (his future editor) and Mark Van Doren, and discovered a growing interest in Hinduism, mysticism, and Catholic theology through his encounter with the Thomistic philosophy of Etienne Gilson and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. His conversion to Catholicism, received in baptism on November 16, 1938, was the culminating experience of these years.
After graduation, Merton taught English at St. Bonaventure University in Olean, New York, before entering the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in December 1941. He was professed as a monk in 1944 and ordained a priest in 1949. He remained at Gethsemani for the rest of his life, eventually living as a hermit in the monastery's forest. He died in Bangkok in December 1968, accidentally electrocuted by a faulty fan while attending a conference on Christian-Buddhist dialogue.
The autobiography was written at the command of his abbot, Dom Frederic Dunne, who recognized both its literary merit and its potential to bring souls to the faith. Merton wrote it between 1944 and 1946, drawing on journals and letters. His literary skill - sharpened by his Columbia training and his deep reading in Augustine, Dante, Hopkins, Blake, and Joyce - is evident throughout: the book is not only a spiritual document but a work of considerable literary accomplishment.
Structure and Narrative
The book follows Merton's life chronologically, but its temporal structure is shaped by a spiritual teleology: every event of his pre-monastic life is narrated retrospectively as a stage in a providential journey toward God. This Augustinian narrative structure - in which the restless heart finally rests in God - gives the book its retrospective coherence while sacrificing some of the contingency of lived experience.
Part 1 covers childhood and adolescence: the death of his mother, his father's influence, his years in France and England. Part 2 covers the Columbia years: intellectual awakening, moral chaos, the beginning of religious interest. Part 3 covers the conversion and the decision to enter the monastery. Part 4 covers the first years of monastic life, including Merton's ordination and his growing vocation to the contemplative life.
The book's literary high points include the description of his first visit to Gethsemani at Easter 1941 (months before his entrance), which he experienced as a homecoming; his account of the death of his father from a brain tumor in 1931, which is both a devastating personal loss and the event that first opened him to the reality of spiritual experience; and his description of the night of his reception into the Catholic Church.
Critical Reception
The book's reception was extraordinary. Catholic readers experienced it as a vindication of their faith's intellectual and spiritual seriousness. Protestant readers found it - as one reviewer noted - 'remarkably free of the institutional Catholic tone that usually discourages Protestant readers.' Secular literary critics praised its prose style, its intellectual honesty, and its vivid characterization. Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Clare Boothe Luce all gave enthusiastic endorsements.
Subsequent critical assessments have been more complex. Merton's later journals reveal that he found the book's triumphalist tone embarrassing - the confident, achieved conversion of the autobiography does not fully represent the ongoing spiritual struggle that his later journals document. His friend and editor Robert Giroux later noted that Merton had written the book at a moment of genuine spiritual brightness that was not permanently sustained. Feminist critics have noted that Merton's treatment of women in the autobiography is largely dismissive - his mother, his girlfriends, and female acquaintances are ciphers compared to the male figures who shape his intellectual development.
Theological Significance
The book's theological significance lies in its fusion of the Augustinian conversion narrative with the distinctively twentieth-century experience of intellectual and artistic modernity. Merton was simultaneously a child of the secular twentieth century - shaped by Freud, Marx, Eliot, and Joyce - and a man who found his identity only in the most ancient form of Christian life: monastic contemplation. This fusion made his testimony uniquely credible to readers who could not have responded to a traditional piety but who recognized in Merton's intellectual formation and cultural milieu something of their own experience.
The book's theology of contemplation - its insistence that the deepest human calling is not activity but attentive receptivity to the God who is always already present - draws on the entire tradition of Christian mysticism and gives it a mid-century American idiom. Merton's later work - New Seeds of Contemplation (1962), Contemplative Prayer (1969), The Asian Journal (1973) - developed this theology in dialogue with Zen Buddhism and Hindu Vedanta, making him the first major American voice for Christian-Buddhist contemplative dialogue.
Legacy
The book's legacy is pervasive. It initiated the twentieth-century lay contemplative revival in American Catholicism and had significant influence on the broader Protestant spiritual formation movement. It is the single work most cited by people who entered Catholic or monastic life in the 1950s and 1960s as the catalyst for their vocation. Its influence can be traced in the work of Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington, and the centering prayer movement; in the Catholic Worker movement's spirituality; and in the new monasticism of figures like Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.
Merton's subsequent engagement with race (his friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement), with Vietnam War opposition, and with Eastern religion made him one of the most publicly significant Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century. His death in Bangkok at the age of fifty-three cut short a theological development that had become one of the most interesting and controversial in the Western church.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Psalm 42:1-2 (the thirst for God), Galatians 2:20 (crucified with Christ), John 1:1-18 (the Word who became flesh), Augustine's Confessions (Book I, 'Our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee'), Psalm 46:10 ('Be still, and know that I am God'), and 1 Kings 19:11-13 (Elijah's encounter with God in the still small voice).
Further Reading
- Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (1984) - the authorized biography, comprehensive and psychologically penetrating. - Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1962) - the mature theological development of the contemplative vision first articulated in The Seven Storey Mountain. - William H. Shannon, Silent Lamp: The Thomas Merton Story (1992) - a more accessible biographical account than Mott, with excellent attention to the theological development.