Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), and its substantially abridged British edition published as Elected Silence (1949), is the most influential spiritual autobiography of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world and one of the catalysts for the post-war Catholic intellectual revival in America. Written in three years of furious composition after Merton entered the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky in 1941, it recounts the journey of a brilliant, rootless young man through Columbia University, European artistic circles, and a series of ideological allegiances to the point of his conversion to Catholicism and his entry into the strictest monastic order in the Western church.
The title is drawn from Dante's Purgatorio, in which the mountain of purgatory is divided into seven terraces corresponding to the seven deadly sins. Merton uses the image autobiographically: his own life before his conversion and monastic entry had been a kind of purgatorial ascent through successive stages of worldliness and spiritual poverty, with each worldly success revealing its own inadequacy. Columbia in the 1930s, Communist Party sympathies, literary ambition, sexual freedom - all are described with unflinching honesty as the various forms his restlessness took before finding its true object.
The theological framework is broadly Augustinian. Colossians 3:3 - 'For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God' - is the hidden life Merton was seeking without knowing it: the life that is invisible from outside, inaccessible to worldly ambition, available only through the death to self that monastic vows formalize. This is not withdrawal from the world but the discovery of the world's true center.
Psalm 46:10 - 'Be still, and know that I am God' - is the contemplative imperative that Merton had been running from. The autobiography's drama is the progressive failure of everything else to provide what stillness provides: the direct knowledge of God that is available in silence and unavailable in noise.
Matthew 6:6 - 'When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret' - governs Merton's account of private prayer as the most real activity a human being can engage in, more real than the public activities of literary life and political engagement that had seemed central to him at Columbia.
John 14:23 - 'If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him' - is the promise that contemplative life inhabits: not the ecstatic experience of divine presence but the quiet indwelling, the making of a home.
The book was published by Harcourt, Brace and sold over 600,000 copies in its first year - an astonishing figure for a spiritual autobiography. It was followed by a flood of novitiate applications to Gethsemani and to monasteries across the country. Merton became, almost against his will, a public figure whose very hiddenness made him famous, and the tension between his vocation to solitude and his calling as a writer would animate his work for the remaining twenty years of his life.
Elected Silence, edited by Evelyn Waugh for the British market, cuts approximately a third of the original text while preserving its essential narrative and theological argument. Waugh's editorial instinct - removing what he considered excessive American informality - produced a leaner and in some respects more elegantly written text, though scholars generally prefer the complete original.
The Seven Storey Mountain shaped the imaginations of the generation of American Catholics who came of age in the 1950s and influenced the spiritual biographies of figures as different as Pope John Paul II, Dorothy Day, and the students who would form the Catholic Worker movement. It remains one of the indispensable documents of twentieth-century Christian spirituality.
The Seven Storey Mountain also inaugurated what became a significant genre in twentieth-century American Catholic writing: the conversion narrative as cultural criticism. Merton's journey to the monastery was simultaneously a rejection of the secular culture he had inhabited - Columbia University, Greenwich Village, the literary world of the 1940s - and an implicit argument that what secular culture was seeking, it could not find through its own resources. This cultural critique was sharpened in his subsequent books, particularly Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966) and Raids on the Unspeakable (1966), which engaged directly with the Cold War, racial justice, and the Vietnam War from the perspective of a contemplative who had not, as many assumed, simply withdrawn from the world.
Merton's death in Bangkok in 1968, electrocuted by a faulty fan in his hotel room while attending an interfaith conference on monasticism, gave his autobiography an ironic postscript: the man who had entered the monastery to leave the world behind died traveling the world in the name of monastic community. But the irony confirmed rather than contradicted the central argument of The Seven Storey Mountain - that the contemplative life is not an escape from the world but a different way of being present to it, and that the monk who prays is doing something for the world that the activist who marches cannot do alone.