The Seven Storey Mountain

Thomas Merton

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9780547543819
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

One of the most famous books ever written about a man's search for faith and peace. The Seven Storey Mountain tells of the growing restlessness of a brilliant and passionate young man, who at the age of twenty-six, takes vows in one of the most demanding Catholic orders—the Trappist monks. At the Abbey of Gethsemani, "the four walls of my new freedom, " Thomas Merton struggles to withdraw from the world, but only after he has fully immersed himself in it. At the abbey, he wrote this extraordinary testament, a unique spiritual autobiography that has been recognized as one of the most influential religious works of our time. Translated into more than twenty languages, it has touched millions of lives.
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Part

One

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One

Prisoner’s Base

On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers.

Not many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a forest of trees without branches along the river Marne.

My father and mother were captives in that world, knowing they did not belong with it or in it, and yet unable to get away from it. They were in the world and not of it—not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.

My father painted like Cézanne and understood the southern French landscape the way Cézanne did. His vision of the world was sane, full of balance, full of veneration for structure, for the relations of masses and for all the circumstances that impress an individual identity on each created thing. His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God’s creation to bear witness for itself. My father was a very good artist.

Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what’s in the ice-box and what’s in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce.

I inherited from my father his way of looking at things and some of his integrity and from my mother some of her dissatisfaction with the mess the world is in, and some of her versatility. From both I got capacities for work and vision and enjoyment and expression that ought to have made me some kind of a King, if the standards the world lives by were the real ones. Not that we ever had any money: but any fool knows that you don’t need money to get enjoyment out of life.

If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now.

If happiness were merely a matter of natural gifts, I would never have entered a Trappist monastery when I came to the age of a man.

II

My father and mother came from the ends of the earth, to Prades, and though they came to stay, they stayed there barely long enough for me to be born and get on my small feet, and then they left again. And they continued and I began a somewhat long journey: for all three of us, one way and another, it is now ended.

And though my father came from the other side of the earth, beyond many oceans, all the pictures of Christchurch, New Zealand, where he was born, look like the suburbs of London, but perhaps a little cleaner. There is more sunlight in New Zealand, and I think the people are healthier.

My father’s name was Owen Merton. Owen because his mother’s family had lived for a generation or two in Wales, though I believe they were originally Lowland Scotch. And my father’s father was a music master, and a pious man, who taught at Christ’s College, Christchurch, on the South Island.

My father had a lot of energy and independence. He told me how it was in the hill country and in the mountains of the South Island, out on the sheep farms and in the forests where he had been, and once, when one of the Antarctic expeditions came that way, my father nearly joined it, to go to the South Pole. He would have been frozen to death along with all the others, for that was the one from which no one returned.

When he wanted to study art, there were many difficulties in his way, and it was not easy for him to convince his people that that was really his vocation. But eventually he went to London, and then to Paris, and in Paris he met my mother, and married her, and never went back to New Zealand.

My mother was an American. I have seen a picture of her as a rather slight, thin, sober little person with a serious and somewhat anxious and very sensitive face. And this corresponds with my memory of her—worried, precise, quick, critical of me, her son. Yet in the family she has always been spoken of as gay and very lighthearted. My grandmother kept great locks of Mother’s red hair, after she died, and Mother’s happy laughter as a boarding-school girl was what never ceased to echo in my grandmother’s memory.

It seems to me, now, that Mother must have been a person full of insatiable dreams and of great ambition after perfection: perfection in art, in interior decoration, in dancing, in housekeeping, in raising children. Maybe that is why I remember her mostly as worried: since the imperfection of myself, her first son, had been a great deception. If this book does not prove anything else, it will certainly show that I was nobody’s dream-child. I have seen a diary Mother was keeping, in the time of my infancy and first childhood, and it reflects some astonishment at the stubborn and seemingly spontaneous development of completely unpredictable features in my character, things she had never bargained for: for example, a deep and serious urge to adore the gas-light in the kitchen, with no little ritualistic veneration, when I was about four. Churches and formal religion were things to which Mother attached not too much importance in the training of a modern child, and my guess is that she thought, if I were left to myself, I would grow up into a nice, quiet Deist of some sort, and never be perverted by superstition.

My baptism, at Prades, was almost certainly Father’s idea, because he had grown up with a deep and well-developed faith, according to the doctrines of the Church of England. But I don’t think there was much power, in the waters of the baptism I got in Prades, to untwist the warping of my essential freedom, or loose me from the devils that hung like vampires on my soul.

My father came to the Pyrenees because of a dream of his own: more single, more concrete, and more practical than Mother’s numerous and haunting ideals of perfection. Father wanted to get some place where he could settle in France, and raise a family, and paint, and live on practically nothing, because we had practically nothing to live on.

Father and Mother had many friends at Prades, and when they had moved there, and had their furniture in their flat, and the canvasses piled up in the corner, and the whole place smelling of fresh oil-paints and water-color and cheap pipe tobacco and cooking, more friends came down from Paris. And Mother would paint in the hills, under a large canvas parasol, and Father would paint in the sun, and the friends would drink red wine and gaze out over the valley at Canigou, and at the monastery on the slopes of the mountain.

There were many ruined monasteries in those mountains. My mind goes back with great reverence to the thought of those clean, ancient stone cloisters, those low and mighty rounded arches hewn and set in place by monks who have perhaps prayed me where I now am. St. Martin and St. Michael the Archangel, the great patron of monks, had churches in those mountains. Saint Martin-du-Canigou; Saint Michel-de-Cuxa. Is it any wonder I should have a friendly feeling about those places?

One of them, stone by stone, followed me across the Atlantic a score of years later, and got itself set up within convenient reach of me when I most needed to see what a cloister looked like, and what kind of place a man might live in, to live according to his rational nature, and not like a stray dog. St. Michel-de-Cuxa is all fixed up in a special and considerably tidy little museum in an uptown park, in New York, overlooking the Hudson River, in such a way that you don’t recall what kind of a city you are in. It is called The Cloisters. Synthetic as it is, it still preserves enough of its own reality to be a reproach to everything else around it, except the trees and the Palisades.

But when the friends of my father and mother came to Prades, they brought the newspapers, rolled up in their coat pockets, and they had many postcards carrying patriotic cartoons, representing the Allies overcoming the Germans. My grandparents—that is, my mother’s father and mother in America—were worried about her being in a land at war, and it was evident that we could not stay much longer at Prades.

I was barely a year old. I remember nothing about the journey, as we went to Bordeaux, to take the boat that had a gun mounted on the foredeck. I remember nothing about the crossing of the sea, nothing of the anxiety about U-boats, or the arrival in New York, and in the land where there was no war. But I can easily reconstruct the first encounter between my American grandparents and their new son-in-law and their grandson.

For Pop, as my American grandfather was called in the family, was a buoyant and excitable man who, on docks, boats, trains, in stations, in elevators, on busses, in hotels, in restaurants, used to get keyed up and start ordering everybody around, and making new arrangements, and changing them on the spur of the moment. My grandmother, whom we called Bonnemaman, was just the opposite, and her natural deliberateness and hesitancy and hatred of activity always seemed to increase in proportion to Pop’s excesses in the opposite direction. The more active Pop became and the more he shouted and gave directions, the more hesitant and doubtful and finally inert was my grandmother. But perhaps this obscure and innocent and wholly subconscious conflict had not yet developed, in 1916, to the full pitch of complications which it was to attain some fifteen years later.

I have no doubt that there was a certain amount of conflict between the two generations when Father and Mother determined that they were going to find their own kind of a house and live in it. It was a small house, very old and rickety, standing under two or three high pine trees, in Flushing, Long Island, which was then a country town. We were out in the fields in the direction of Kiljordan and Jamaica and the old Truant School. The house had four rooms, two downstairs and two upstairs, and two of the rooms were barely larger than closets. It must have been very cheap.

Our landlord, Mr. Duggan, ran a nearby saloon. He got in trouble with Father for helping himself to the rhubarb which we were growing in the garden. I remember the grey summer dusk in which this happened. We were at the supper table, when the bended Mr. Duggan was observed, like some whale in the sea of green rhubarb, plucking up the red stalks. Father rose to his feet and hastened out into the garden. I could hear indignant words. We sat at the supper table, silent, not eating, and when Father returned I began to question him, and to endeavour to work out the morality of the situation. And I still remember it as having struck me as a difficult case, with much to be said on both sides. In fact, I had assumed that if the landlord felt like it, he could simply come and harvest all our vegetables, and there was nothing we could do about it. I mention this with the full consciousness that someone will use it against me, and say that the real reason I became a monk in later years was that I had the mentality of a medieval serf when I was barely out of the cradle.

Father did as much painting as he could. He filled several sketch books and finished some water-colors along the waterfront in New York, and eventually even had an exhibition in a place in Flushing which was maintained by some artists there. Two doors away from us, up the road, in a white house with pointed gables, surrounded by a wide sweep of sloping lawn, and with a stable that had been turned into a studio, lived Bryson Burroughs, who painted pale, classical pictures something like Puvis de Chavannes and who, with some of the gentleness you could see in his work, was very kind to us.

Father could not support us by painting. During the war years we lived on his work as a landscape gardener: which was mostly plain manual labor, for he not only laid out the gardens of some rich people in the neighborhood, but did most of the work planting and caring for them: and that was how we lived. Father did not get this money under false pretenses. He was a very good gardener, understood flowers, and knew how to make things grow. What is more, he liked this kind of work almost as much as painting.

Then in November 1918, about a week before the Armistice of that particular World War, my younger brother was born. He was a child with a much serener nature than mine, with not so many obscure drives and impulses. I remember that everyone was impressed by his constant and unruffled happiness. In the long evenings, when he was put to bed before the sun went down, instead of protesting and fighting, as I did when I had to go to bed, he would lie upstairs in his crib, and we would hear him singing a little tune. Every evening it was the same tune, very simple, very primitive; a nice little tune, very suitable for the time of day and for the season. Downstairs, we would all fall more or less silent, lulled by the singing of the child in the crib, and we would see the sunrays slanting across the fields and through the windows as the day ended.

I had an imaginary friend, called Jack, who had an imaginary dog, called Doolittle. The chief reason why I had an imaginary friend was that there were no other children to play with, and my brother John Paul was still a baby. When I tried to seek diversion watching the gentlemen who played pool at Mr. Duggan’s saloon, I got into much trouble. On the other hand, I could go and play at Burroughs’ place, in their garden and in the room full of old lumber over the studio. Betty Burroughs knew how to join in games in a way that did not imply patronage, though she was practically grown up. But for friends of my own age, I had to fall back on my imagination, and it was perhaps not a good thing.

Mother did not mind the company I kept in my imagination, at least to begin with, but once I went shopping with her, and refused to cross Main Street, Flushing, for fear that the imaginary dog, Doolittle, might get run over by real cars. This I later learned from her record of the affair in her diary.

By 1920 I could read and write and draw. I drew a picture of the house, and everybody sitting under the pine trees, on a blanket, on the grass, and sent it to Pop in the mail. He lived at Douglaston, which was about five miles away. But most of the time I drew pictures of boats. Ocean liners with many funnels and hundreds of portholes, and waves all around as jagged as a saw, and the air full of “v’s” for the sea-gulls.

Things were stimulated by the momentous arrival of my New Zealand grandmother, who had come from the Antipodes to visit her scattered children in England and America, as soon as the war had ended. I think she brought one of my aunts along with her, but I was most of all impressed by Granny. She must have talked to me a great deal, and asked me many questions and told me a great number of things, and though there are few precise details I remember about that visit, the general impression she left was one of veneration and awe—and love. She was very good and kind, and there was nothing effusive and overwhelming about her affection. I have no precise memory of what she looked like, except that she wore dark clothes, grey and dark brown, and had glasses and grey hair and spoke quietly and earnestly. She had been a teacher, like her husband, my New Zealand grandfather.

The clearest thing I remember about her was the way she put salt on her oatmeal at breakfast. Of this I am certain: it made a very profound impression on me. Of one other thing I am less certain, but it is in itself much more important: she taught me the Lord’s Prayer. Perhaps I had been taught to say the “Our Father” before, by my earthly father. I never used to say it....