The Several-Storied Thomas Merton

by Robert Royal

It is a timeworn literary conceit, but some writers seem to be several people. There always exists some disparity, of course, between writers and their work. Yet a kind of multiple personality disorder keeps turning up in writers—and writers with a religious bent seem particularly susceptible, as they keep in play not only complex human realities but divine realities as well. Dostoyevsky, Graham Greene, Walker Percy, and many other distinguished names attest to how common a phenomenon this is. But of all the great modern religious writers, no one harbored within himself a larger cast of dramatis personae than Thomas Merton.

First, there is Merton the Contemplative, who emerges in the 1948 autobiographical account of his conversion to Catholicism and entrance into a Trappist monastery, The Seven Storey Mountain. Merton had a true contemplative vocation, though he agonized about its authenticity at several points. The contemplative life formed the deepest (though not always the dominant) part of his personality. Merton came to contemplation partly because of a pure attraction to wordless union with the absolute, partly because of an intense desire to flee a sinful self and world. In most contemplatives, these two motives gradually coalesce. But in Merton they remained in stark and painful contrast.

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