The Seven Storey Mountain

“The church had been fitted into the landscape in such a way as to become the keystone of its intelligibility. Its presence imparted a special form, a particular significance to everything else that the eye beheld. […] The whole landscape, unified by the church and its heavenward spire, seemed to say: this is the meaning of all created things: we have been made for no other purpose than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, and in proclaiming the glory of God.”

Merton’s description of the church’s location in the landscape emphasizes the centrality of spirituality to human life: God at the center of community and nature. He writes that “all created things” are given their meaning this way, and their meaning is to be useful to humans on their journey toward God. Merton is drawing on centuries of Western religious discourse about the relation between the world and the transcendent. One kind of relation discussed in theology is analogy. (See the quotation above for an example.) Important for the book’s overall plan, he also highlights the idea of an ascent. Recall that the “seven-storey mountain” of the book’s title comes from Dante.

“Is it any wonder that there can be no peace in a world where everything possible is done to guarantee that the youth of every nation will grow up absolutely without moral and religious discipline, and without the shadow of an interior life, or of that spirituality and charity and faith which alone can safeguard the treaties and agreements made by governments?”

This rhetorical question posed by Merton cuts through to a deeper concern of his: about how modern society and its influences work against the natural spiritual good of religion and serve only the larger systems that corrupt the individual.

“Since evil is the defect of good, the lack of a good that ought to be there, and nothing positive in itself, it follows that the greatest evil is found where the highest good has been corrupted. And I suppose the most shocking thing about France is the corruption of French spirituality into flippancy and cynicism; of French intelligence into sophistry; of French dignity and refinement into petty vanity and theatrical self-display; of French charity into a disgusting fleshly concupiscence, and of French faith into sentimentality or puerile atheism.”

Some passages in the book are more formal, discursive, and philosophical, like the excerpt here. His assertion that France has been corrupted or perverted by modernity is demonstrated by the conversion of positive values into negative traits that are reflective of modern times. This association ends with the transition from faith to atheism, a change that Merton undoubtedly sees as flawed, as France was long an epicenter of Catholicism.

“He was a tall, powerful, handsome man, with hair greying at the temples, and a big English chin and a broad, increased brow, with sentences like ‘I stand for fair-play and good sportsmanship’ written all over it.”

Although this description of the chaplain at Oakham may seem like an insignificant depiction of a minor character in Merton’s life, it hints at a kind of attitude that Merton resists as antithetical to a spiritual life. The chaplain stands for “good sportsmanship” and the importance of being a gentleman, or worldly values not spiritual ones.

“All the self-tortures of doubt and anxiety and imagination and hope and despair that you go through when you are a child, trying to break out of your shell, only to find yourself in the middle of a legion of full-armed emotions against which you have no defense!”

Once again, Merton humbles himself to the reader by showing how easily he was crushed by a love interest as a child. His painful emotional experience is relatively universal, and by showing himself in this vulnerable moment, he offers readers another bridge to connect with him.

“There are a lot of people like that. They do no little harm by virtue of their sheer, stupid inertia, lost in between all camps, in the no-man’s-land of their own confusion. They are fair game for anybody. They can be turned into fascists just as quickly as they can be pulled into line with those who are really Reds.”

Merton’s political and philosophical propensities come to the forefront here as he casts judgment on the people without a firm grounding in the world. It is not with irony but awareness that Merton turns this judgment on himself because he, too, turned to many different ideas, like communism, when searching for answers about the greater good. He had a desire to make the world better, but he later felt it was misapplied and motivated more by his desire to advance himself than to advance the good.

“Who prayed for me? One day I shall know. But in the economy of God’s love, it is through the prayers of other men that these graces are given.”

Merton demonstrates gratitude he didn’t know he should have at the time, which both shows how he is able to be self-aware retroactively and underscores the point of how great an impact one person’s actions can have on another, even though one or both parties may never know it. The term “economy” is an interesting word choice. Merton says that grace come to one from the prayers of others, not from one’s own prayers. In other words, we don’t “earn” by praying for it the grace that we receive; others pray, and we receive grace.

“And thus without knowing anything about it I became a pilgrim.”

This simple sentence captures how Merton was whisked away on a spiritual journey by virtue of living his life. He portrays himself as innocent and ignorant as he begins his journey, and the use of the word “pilgrim” is an intentional choice to show that, even though it’s not how he thought of it in the moment of the action, looking back on his experiences, he is able to see how that’s exactly what happened. This double consciousness—the Thomas Merton in the events being described and the Thomas Merton remembering them allows him to find, retrospectively, a choreography in the disparate movements of his life. Now that he has gone through this part of his spiritual journey, he can see when it began.

“But why dig up all this old scenery and reconstruct the stews of my own mental Pompeii after enough years have covered them up? Is it even worth the obvious comment that in all this I was stamping the last remains of spiritual vitality out of my own soul, and trying with all my might to crush and obliterate the image of the divine liberty that had been implanted in me by God?”

Merton’s evocation of the imagery of Pompeii is purposeful in that it shows the irreversible damage of his past actions. He cannot change them and is excavating the ashes to try and understand himself at his own expense. The allusion to Pompeii and the image of ashes also conjures another more subtle idea: that from these ashes, he may rise.

“I had seen enough of the things, the acts and appetites, that were to justify and to bring down upon the world the tons of bombs that would someday begin to fall in millions. Did I know that my own sins were enough to have destroyed the whole of England and Germany? There has never yet been a bomb invented that is half so powerful as one mortal sin—and yet there is no positive power in sin, only negation, only annihilation: and perhaps that is why it is so destructive, it is a nothingness, and where it is, there is nothing left—a blank, a moral vacuum.”

In Parts 1 and 2, the dramatic and horrifying events of World War II were unfolding as Merton was going through his own dark days before his conversion. They form a sort of external indicator of his spiritual state. Here, he discusses them together. He compares the evil power of sin to a bomb worse than imaginable, and without God’s sanctifying grace, it is more damning in his eyes. In lieu of love and God’s infinity, mortal sin yields a terrifying nothingness.

“It did not take very much reflection on the year I had spent at Cambridge to show me that all my dreams of fantastic pleasures and delights were crazy and absurd, and that everything I had reached out for had turned to ashes in my hands, and that I myself, into the bargain, had turned out to be an extremely unpleasant sort of person—vain, self-centered, dissolute, weak, irresolute, undisciplined, sensual, obscene, and proud. Even the sight of my own face in a mirror was enough to disgust me. […] My mind was already facing what seemed to be an open door out of my spiritual jail.”

Merton’s criticism of his younger self—pleasure-seeking and self-centered—may seem harsh, but it demonstrates how much he has grown. He uses the metaphor of a “spiritual jail” to show how what he thought were the freedoms he cherished actually restricted him in significant ways. For example, by giving into earthly pleasures and seeking easy gratification, he spent his energy on in-the-moment joys that were fleeting and unstable, rather than the stable, infinite source of God’s love.

“But they never come into the church. They stand and starve in the doors of the banquet—the banquet to which they surely realize that they are invited—while those more poor, more stupid, less gifted, less educated, sometimes even less virtuous than them, enter in and are filled at those tremendous tables.”

This image shows how salvation is accessible to those who embrace God’s love and understand the power of sanctifying grace. He dispels the notion that religious people are more deserving than others; rather, because they believe and enter, they can enjoy. A non-religious person, he argues, may be just as or more virtuous, intelligent, or any other positive trait, but without acceptance of God’s love, without stepping into that banquet hall, they will remain famished. Merton perhaps sees himself in this image at different points in his life, seeing God’s love nourish others but being utterly confounded by it and struggling with the logic and vices that kept him from faith and love.

“A mind full of tremendous and subtle intuitions, and every day he found less and less to say about them, and resigned himself to being inarticulate. […] Lax has always been afraid he was in a blind alley, and half aware that, after all, it might not be a blind alley, but God, infinity.”

Merton’s portrayal of Lax foreshadows his own silence as a monk in the Abbey of Gethsemani. As Lax becomes more connected to God and develops deeper understanding, he grows more silent and finds himself listening more and talking less. Lax’s fear of blindness, of total darkness, expands into an image of infinity. That alone can be as terrifying as it is powerful and moving.

“I think that if there is one truth that people need to learn, in the world, especially today, it is this: the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice. It is constantly being blinded and perverted by the ends and aims of passion, and the evidence it presents to us with such a show of impartiality and objectivity is fraught with interest and propaganda.”

This plain language lays a key purpose of Merton’s work bare for the reader: He, too, saw himself as an intellectual above the spiritual and religious domains, but he desperately wants others to understand how intellect is not infallible or incorruptible but instead is connected to a complex framework of influences that may not always be a person’s best interest. There is no such thing as pure intellect, and therefore, intellect isn’t some force above religion but one that becomes entangled with other things that can lead a person astray.

“That Christ was the Son of God. That, in Him, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God, had assumed a Human Nature, a Human Body and Soul, and had taken Flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth: and that this Man, Whom men called the Christ, was God. He was both Man and God: two natures hypostatically united in one Person or suppositum, one individual Who was a Divine Person, having assumed to Himself a Human Nature. And His works were the works of God: His acts were the acts of God. He loved us: God, and walked among us: God, and died for us on the Cross, God of God, Light of Light, True God of True God.”

Merton’s background as a teacher may be unsurprising at moments like these. He takes a concept as difficult to comprehend as the Holy Trinity and explains the idea in simple terms, not appealing to intellect but to that deeper level of understanding. Because Merton learned this and understands it, he is able to teach it to others. The final sentence’s repetition underscores his incredible reverence of God.

“I was beyond thinking about the intricate and filthy political tangle that underlay the mess. I had given up politics as more or less hopeless, by this time. I was no longer interested in having any opinion about the movement and interplay of forces which were all more or less iniquitous and corrupt, and it was far too laborious and uncertain a business to try and find out some degree of truth and justice in all the loud, artificial claims that were put forth by the various sides.”

This marks a significant shift in Merton’s thinking around politics and the world. Before, he wanted to be a force for change and very much found himself entrenched in the politics of modern society, like when he was an active communist. However, as he watched wars come and go and the ill effects they had on society and as he grew spiritually to become closer to God, he saw how people were artificially pitted against one another in the name of the war machine and political schemes larger and further from God than he’d ever imagined. He chooses to abstain from the political arena because of how inherently flawed it is.

“My opinion is that it is a very extraordinary thing for anyone to be upset by such a topic. Why should anyone be shattered by the thought of hell? It is not compulsory for anyone to go there. Those who do, do so by their own choice, and against the will of God, and they can only get into hell by defying and resisting all the work of Providence and grace. It is their own will that takes them there, not God’s.”

Merton doesn’t see anyone as being inherently above anyone else, and this is evident in his line of reasoning, which may seem harsh to non-Catholics. He tries to empower readers by asserting that a person must actively choose to resist God in order to go to hell. Obviously, this highlights some of Merton’s biases and lack of understanding toward other ways of reaching God and the different obstacles people face, but at the same time, it shows how much he sees free will perverted to serve the modern illusion of freedom that permits people to act in ways that are against God.

“The river glittered like steel. There was a clean wind in the street. It was one of those fall days full of life and triumph, made for great beginnings, and yet I was not altogether exalted: for there were still in my mind these vague, half animal apprehensions about the externals of what was to happen in the church.”

Merton uses figurative language to paint an image of the scene around him and show the dissonance of the change in the air with how he felt inside, still clinging to his old ways. The simile of something natural shining like a hardened metal and the clean wind on the streets shows both his “apprehensions” to the changes he’s about to undergo as well as how near the changes are.

“What mountains were falling from my shoulders. What scales of dark night were peeling off my intellect, to let in the inward vision of God and His truth!”

Merton’s dramatic imagery recalls the mountain that is the metaphor for his spiritual journey. The hyperbole of mountains falling from his shoulders demonstrates the tremendous weight that has been lifted from him. The peeling away of “scales of dark night” represent new capacity for vision and understanding and connection to God. These images together at once create the sense of an alleviated burden and a transformation into something more real, raw, and beautiful—a kind of shedding of old skin that was no longer serving Merton.

“And then once and for all, the voice within me spoke again, and I looked once again into the door which I could not understand, into the country that was meaningless because it was too full of meanings that I could never grasp.”

Merton’s statement here is straightforward: He cannot understand what he cannot understand. However, this also hints at a deeper statement: the notion that, without the language for or concept of something, it doesn’t exist because it can’t be perceived without being defined in some way. This is how Merton feels at this point because there are so many ideas he doesn’t understand.

“However, most of them clung with conviction to the Catholic faith, a loyalty which was resolute and inarticulate. It was hard to tell just how much loyalty was a matter of conscious faith, and how much it was based on attachment to their class and social environment: but they were all pretty definite about being Catholics.”

Merton’s portrayal of the Catholic students in the seminary shows how his definition of being Catholic is incongruent with the way some of his peers practiced it: claiming to be Catholic while not committed to the lifestyle or understanding the ideals of such. He calls out this practice of religion in name only, not to judge others, but to shine a light on himself: how he was once like this, doing good deeds for the sake of it without living a truly Catholic lifestyle, and how this doesn’t resonate with him. To him, being Catholic shouldn’t be a class or social attachment. This shallow sense of community is one of the reasons Merton expressed disinterest in the Quakers and Protestants, because their attention was more on each other than on God.

“Deep down, underneath all the perplexity, I had a kind of conviction that this was a genuine answer, and that the problem was indeed some day going to end up that way: I was going to be a Trappist.”

At this point, Merton identifies the core thread of his purpose. Even though in the moment he had no idea how he would arrive with the Trappist, he knew was going there. It was a meandering journey and took many turns he didn’t expect, but there is something mystical about how he was able to see the broader tapestry of his life without being able to see in the moment how the threads would intersect.

“Maybe in the end he will kill me, he will drink my blood. Nobody seems to understand that one of us has got to die.”

This dramatic shift in Merton’s tone may come across as shocking and dire. He externalizes the past version of himself he’s still battling and adds gravity to this battle with words like “kill,” “blood,” and “die.” He also isolates himself by saying “nobody seems to understand” and posing an ultimatum: It’s Merton the monk or Merton the man. This is a darker deviation from his previous self-expressions but circles back to the self-doubts and turmoil Merton has faced (and continues to face in this moment) during his spiritual journey.