Nice little profile of Thomas Merton (AKA “Brother Louis”) in the current New Yorker. You can read it all, here. The author of the article, Alan Jacobs, is a distinguished professor of humanities at Baylor University. He calls Merton “the proper patron saint of our information-saturated age.” I think that is just about right.
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Thomas Merton was born in 1915 in the French Pyrenees to a Quaker (American) mother and a father from New Zealand. Both his parents were artists. Young Tom was baptized into the Church of England. But like a lot of future monks, he spent much of his youth “drinking and bumming around the Continent” rather than studying at Cambridge where he had been admitted in 1933. Says Jacobs:
“He was frequently in legal trouble, and, worst of all, fathered a child outside of marriage—a child he never met.”
After moving to New York and re-starting his academic career at Columbia in 1935, Merton seemingly found his calling by studying The Great Books – specifically, Medieval Philosophy. He embraced Catholicism, but also retained an avid interest in Eastern mystical traditions along with an activist Left-leaning political bent. By 1941 he had joined the Trappist monastery known as the Abbey of Gethsemani, in Kentucky, where he spent the rest of his life. According to Jacobs:
“He entered the monastery three days after Pearl Harbor. He died a month after Richard Nixon’s election to his first term as President. It had been an eventful time.”
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Most famous of Merton’s literary works was his best-selling autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” written in 1948. Of it, Jacobs has this to say:
(It was) a magnificent advertisement for Catholicism in general and for monastic life in particular. Almost every monastery in America saw a massive upsurge in postulants in the years following the book’s publication, and all of the book’s considerable royalties went straight into the bank account of the abbey.
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Merton’s too-short life came to an improbable close in 1968 in a Bangkok hotel room. He went there at the request of his superiors to meet with monastic practitioners of various Eastern religious traditions. He was electrocuted after stepping out of the shower, slipping on a tiled floor, and grabbing onto a nearby electric fan. But before he died – again from Jacobs – he aspired to…
“…a certain convergence of commitments, a potentially harmonious joining of beliefs and practices that most people thought irreconcilable or, at best, inevitably separate. Perhaps the central question for him was: What contribution can the contemplative make to peacemaking, especially in a bellicose age?”
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Rest In Peace, Brother Louis.
