Book summary “The Seven Storey Mountain”: summary

Introduction

You often feel the weight of spiritual restlessness and modern ideological confusion without knowing where to turn for peace. Society offers endless distractions, but your soul demands a deeper truth and a lasting purpose. You wonder how to escape the cycle of intellectual vanity and worldly ambition that leaves you empty.

An acclaimed spiritual autobiography charting a young man's journey from secular disillusionment and intellectual confusion to monastic conversion and absolute surrender to God.

The book traces this transformation across seven distinct stages, moving from an artistic childhood in France and America through secular rebellion at Columbia University to final enclosure within the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani.

As you read, you will find answers to several vital questions:

• How does a life detached from conventional material values navigate moral failure?
• What draws an intellectual mind from modern philosophy to rigorous Catholic theology?
• How do you overcome personal vanity to embrace total contemplative surrender?

1. Early Years and Family Background

Thomas Merton was born on January 31, 1915, in Prades, France, near the Spanish border. His father, Owen Merton, was a New Zealand-born artist who painted like Cézanne. His American mother, Ruth, harbored high ambitions for perfection in art, housekeeping, and life. Their artistic integrity elevated them above the material obsessions of modern society.

Thomas Merton was born in France to artistic parents outside conventional materialist values, experiencing early loss and progressive child-rearing avoidance of grief.

Owen Merton painted landscapes in the Pyrenees and later survived in America through landscape gardening and manual labor, eventually working as an organist in Douglaston.

Birth and Artistic Heritage

The father evolved from a traditional landscape gardener into an internationally recognized, original watercolorist whose work gained critical acclaim. Freed by circumstances, the father developed an artistic style that became more abstract, original, and simple, eventually earning the respect of prominent critics like Roger Fry and holding successful exhibitions in London and New York. The Brooklyn Museum purchased early Bermuda water-colors resembling Winslow Homer, while later exhibitions in London at the Leicester Galleries showcased his fully developed original style in 1925.

Geographical birth in France connects the narrator to a rich heritage of European intellectual, spiritual, and artistic tradition. Returning to France brought the narrator back to the historical fountains of Western culture, where landscape, architecture, and daily life harmonize into a unique perfection of proportion and taste. Traveling by train through Orléans, Limoges, and down into the Midi and Aquitaine, the narrator experienced an immediate and deep sense of coming home.

Loss of Mother

Merton's mother died of stomach cancer when he was a young child, an event handled with typical modern avoidance of morbid reality. Due to prevailing progressive child-rearing ideas meant to keep children optimistic and clear-minded, Merton was not taken to the hospital to see his dying mother or taken to her cremation. Instead, he learned of her impending death via a personal written note delivered to him, generating a heavy, unnatural adult grief. Merton read his mother's farewell note while sitting under the maple tree in the back yard in Douglaston around 1921.

2. School Years and Moral Environment

Attendance at a French public secondary school exposed Merton to collective cruelty, contrasting sharply with the supernatural simplicity of rural Catholic life.

Lycée Brutality

When you mass children together in a boarding school, an aggressive wolf-pack mentality often emerges. Individual children may be peaceful outside, but institutions strip away moral and religious discipline.

On his first day at the Lycée Ingres in Montauban, Merton was beaten, kicked, and subjected to insults by his peers. This behavior demonstrated how high intellectual and cultural potentials can corrupt into severe cynicism and vice. Merton came to view such crowds as a mystical body of the devil, proving the old Latin maxim that the corruption of the best is the worst.

The Privats and Spiritual Peace

True spiritual peace and sanctity are achieved by living ordinary lives and routine tasks in a completely supernatural manner through deep union with God.

Monsieur and Madame Privat offered a stark contrast to the brutal environment of the Lycée. This ordinary rural couple possessed a profound peace, simplicity, and charity whose faith structured their entire existence without pretense or possessiveness.

Monsieur Privat stood about 5 foot 3 or 4 inches tall and hosted Merton at their small farm in Murat. At the age of 12, during his recovery, they treated him with delicate solicitude and nourished him.

Merton attempted to defend Protestantism to the Privats using the modern argument that all religions are equally valid ways to God. They simply rejected the notion as impossible, exposing his uninstructed pride and lack of faith through their silent, unshakeable rectitude.

In May 1928, Father unexpectedly arrived at the Lycee in Montauban on a sunny morning. He told Merton to pack his things because they were going to England. Leaving the harsh institutional school environment provided an overwhelming sense of liberation, like a prisoner having chains struck from his hands.

3. Adolescent Rebellion and Secular Search

The collapse of a temporary religious phase during adolescence can lead young people to reject spiritual authority and dedicate themselves to self-worship.

As you grow older and encounter the brutal realities of schools, you shed natural faith, reject religion entirely, and choose to guard an empty temple dedicated to your own will. Merton entered Oakham in autumn 1929, spent three and a half years navigating school life, and eventually identified as a complete twentieth-century man living on the doorsill of the apocalypse. At age fifteen, his independence was secured.

Loss of Faith

Lacking faith and having substituted true spiritual life with human opinions and pamphlets, Merton's soul was a spiritual vacuum. When faced with severe blood-poisoning and the shadow of death at age seventeen, he felt only a proud, indifferent apathy, caring nothing for God or survival. While recovering from having a bad tooth extracted without novocain due to severe infection, Merton lay in the school sick-room feeling the chill presence of death without offering a single prayer.

Cambridge Years and Intellectual Vanity

University life at Cambridge masked deep moral decay and spiritual emptiness beneath a veneer of youthful boisterousness. You find that despite the charm of the English spring and historic colleges, your time at Cambridge is characterized by reckless hedonism and blind appetites that crush spiritual vitality and enslave you to corruption, known as a mental Pompeii and a vast and complicated charade breathing the sweet stench of corruption. Merton's acquaintance Mike, a noisy and hearty student from Wales, ultimately hanged himself in the showers under the Old Court at Clare after struggling with heavy passions and despair across the standard duration of three years.

Unsatisfied with a hedonistic past and seeking a way to repair selfishness, you gravitate toward Marxism during your transition to America, blaming capitalist society for the evils observed and convincing yourself that abolishing capitalism automatically cures human unhappiness. Four years had elapsed since Merton first read the Communist Manifesto, browsing through the New Masses in artist studios while romanticizing the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Classless Society, and Soviet Russia as a refuge for art and bourgeois workers.

4. Columbia University and Intellectual Awakening

Under the guidance of Mark Van Doren and the study of scholastic philosophy, you engage with rigorous literature and confront the reality of grace.

Literary Integrity at Columbia

Mark Van Doren taught English literature by treating texts purely as literature. He engaged students through probing questions that educed their own explicit ideas. His integrity and avoidance of political biases preserved the authentic value of the works he taught.

Mark Van Doren's eighteenth-century English literature class in Hamilton Hall was attended by Robert Gibney and Merton. Van Doren practiced a virtual scholasticism in his teaching methods.

Discovery of Aseity and Scholasticism

Reading Etienne Gilson's The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy revealed that God is the pure act of existing requiring no external cause. This insight overcame previous rejections of religious dogma based on naive misconceptions.

Merton purchased Etienne Gilson's The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy at Scribner's bookstore on Fifth Avenue in February 1937, initially feeling disgusted by the imprimatur before discovering the concept of aseitas inside, spending five or ten loose dollars in the process.

The theological concept of aseity provides a precise, rational, and non-anthropomorphic definition of God as Being Itself.

Reading Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism helped resolve internal conflicts regarding art and morality. The book explained intuitive perception through affective identification with the object contemplated, illuminating the concept of connatural knowledge. Merton applied these insights to understand William Blake's rebellion against naturalism in both art and the moral order governed by Urizen.

Aldous Huxley's writings on mysticism demonstrated that a supernatural spiritual order and experimental contact with God are accessible through detachment, prayer, and asceticism. Huxley argued in Ends and Means that humanity's reliance on violent and material means makes good ends impossible, necessitating the liberation of the spirit from physical urges. Merton bought and read Aldous Huxley's Ends and Means in late 1937 after hearing about it from Bob Lax, which prompted him to ransack the university library for books on Oriental mysticism.

You might experiment with specific techniques found in these explorations:

• Lie flat in bed without a pillow with arms at your sides and legs straight out
• Relax all muscles progressively by telling yourself you have no feet, legs, or knees

Attending Catholic Mass for the first time brought an overwhelming sense of a vital, living tradition centered entirely on God. Merton visited Corpus Christi Church in New York for the eleven o'clock Sunday Mass, where he was deeply struck by the packed congregation of ordinary people genuinely absorbed in prayer and the solid, consistent doctrine preached by the priest. Merton observed a young girl praying with a serious, undisturbed absorption that revealed prayer as the true purpose of the gathering.

5. Conversion and Baptism

Following a sudden realization of his moral misery in Rome and ongoing intellectual convergence in New York, Merton embraced Catholicism and received baptism.

While alone in his room at night, Merton experienced the vivid presence of his dead father, which instantly revealed the misery and corruption of his own soul and drove him to pray out of the very roots of his being.

Merton wept and talked to his father and to God as though his father had been sent to him out of Purgatory.

Following his intense night of realization, Merton experienced true contrition and walked into a Dominican church where he took holy water, knelt at the altar rail, and prayed the Our Father despite feeling intense public embarrassment.

Merton visited Santa Sabina on the Aventine, took holy water, knelt at the altar rail, and said the Our Father slowly.

The Roman Turning Point

While reading about Hopkins's path to Catholicism, Merton experiences an intense internal prompting that overcomes his hesitation, leading him to immediately seek out a priest.

Merton leaves his room in the rain, walks to the Corpus Christi rectory, and asks Father Ford if he can become a Catholic.

You can follow these steps to formalize your faith:

• Go to the altar of Our Lady to receive abjuration of heresy and schism
• Stand at the threshold of the baptistery and answer the ritual questions about faith and eternal life
• Renounce Satan and his pomps and works in a triple vow
• Proclaim belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit by answering Credo
• Receive the exorcism, the blessing, the salt of wisdom on the tongue, and the pouring of water
• Enter the confessional to confess sins species by species
• Receive First Communion at the altar rail

Merton details his baptismal ceremony at Corpus Christi church where he abjured heresy, made a triple vow renouncing Satan, recited the Creed, received the exorcism, was marked with the sign of the cross, and had salt placed on his tongue before water was poured on his head. He then immediately went to confession and received his First Communion.

Merton describes standing at the threshold of the baptistery on November 16, 1938, with his friends acting as witnesses, where Ed Rice served as his godfather while Lax, Seymour, and Gerdy attended quietly.

Baptism at Corpus Christi

Merton reflects on how he mistakenly entered the Christian life as if it were ordinary life plus a supernatural mode, avoiding mortal sin while still living for self-satisfaction. Without a high ideal like the priesthood, spiritual direction, or devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, he slipped into the ranks of tepid, sluggish Christians.

Merton notes that for the first four or five months after baptism, he did not even know how to say the Rosary properly, and he neglected seeking regular spiritual direction from Father Moore.

You must avoid these pitfalls after conversion:

• Do not rely solely on an intellectual conversion of the intellect
• Seek constant and complete spiritual direction from a wise director
• Participate in daily Communion and frequent confession
• Develop a deep devotion and sense of dependence on the Mother of God
• Engage in systematic mortification of natural passions and the flesh

During a walk down Sixth Avenue amidst subway construction, Robert Lax challenged Merton's complaints about his inability to be a saint. Lax asserted that the sole requirement is simply wanting to be a saint and consenting to let God make you what He created you to be.

When Lax asked Merton what you wanted to be, Merton replied that he wanted to be a good Catholic, prompting Lax to push him further to desire sanctity.

You can pursue sanctity directly:

• Refuse to use false humility as an excuse for spiritual cowardice
• Directly desire to be a saint rather than merely aiming to avoid mortal sin
• Consent to let God make you what He created you to be

6. Spiritual Trials and Vocation Discernment

Merton balanced teaching at St. Bonaventure's with intensive spiritual exercises and vocational discernment, ultimately overcoming false humility and worldly literary vanity.

Ignatian Exercises and Writing

You can deepen your inner life through structured devotional practices that re-center busy minds on God. Merton spent a month performing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius for one hour each day in his darkened Perry Street room, sitting cross-legged on the floor like Mahatma Gandhi.

• Take one quiet hour each day for a month
• Darken the room by pulling down the blinds so there is just enough light to see pages and a Crucifix
• Sit in a stable position such as cross-legged on the floor
• Consider the fundamental end of man and contemplate the mysteries of the life of Christ
• Apply the senses to meditations such as hearing and smelling the torments of hell
• End with a colloquy and a brief retrospective examination

Merton later secured a job teaching English literature to ninety sophomores in three big classes at St. Bonaventure's College. Surrounded by friars, students, and the physical peace of the hills, he experienced a massive surge in productivity and brought a trunkful of books, a typewriter, and an old portable phonograph to his room in the red-brick dormitory.

Rejection and True Discernment

A vocation to the cloister requires genuine sacrifice and deep internal readiness rather than serving merely as a refuge from the world's miseries. Merton traveled to New York to speak with Father Edmund after a sudden loss of peace, leading to the heartbreaking realization that he was unfit for the priesthood at this stage due to his past twenty-five years.

Merton decided to live as closely as possible to the monastic life by purchasing four black-leather-bound, gold-edged volumes of the Breviary at Benziger's and beginning to pray the canonical office on the Erie train heading toward Olean.

• Purchase a set of Breviaries to follow the canonical office daily
• Join a Third Order secular for spiritual benefits and guidance
• Seek a teaching position in a Catholic institution to live under the same roof as the Blessed Sacrament

When facing impending military service and preparing to enter a monastery, Merton systematically stripped away his secular ties. He ripped up the manuscripts of three finished novels and one half-finished novel and threw them into the incinerator.

7. Monastic Life and Contemplative Surrender

A contemplative monastery functions as a school where souls learn true happiness through healing their nature in the likeness of God via disinterested love.

Entering a contemplative monastery means leaving the active world behind to face the reality of a cold, austere environment and a community of imperfect individuals. You arrive at Gethsemani during a cold Kentucky winter, enter a dead garden, and immediately face the physical hardships of unheated stone buildings, severe silence, and the daily friction of living alongside other human beings who possess faults and bad tempers. Brother Matthew at the gate of Gethsemani recognizes Merton and confirms he has been praying for him.

Postulants transition through standardized steps of clothing, receiving the oblate habit and later the full novice habit, which strips away their secular identity. You exchange secular clothing for fifteenth-century undergarments, a white robe, a scapular, and a shapeless oblate cloak, receiving the religious name Frater Louis while the Fat Boy from Buffalo becomes Frater Sylvester.

• Hand over fountain pens, wristwatches, and loose cash to the Treasurer
• Sign documents promising not to sue the monastery for back wages for manual labor
• Get measured for monastic robes in the tailor shop

Entering Gethsemani

Cistercian monasteries function as intense powerhouses of physical labor and active contemplation rather than pure intellectual contemplation. Daily routine involves heavy physical work such as planting, haying, and harvesting wheat, where manual labor under the scorching summer sun serves as a profound form of penance and self-punishment. During summer, novices clear fields, pitch hay in stifling hot barns that resemble purgatory, and work through swarms of flies in the choir.

• Fling yourself into manual business and work up a sweat
• Mutter "All for Jesus! All for Jesus!" between teeth to turn work into contemplation
• Dismantle damp wheat shocks and spread them in the sun to dry before rebuilding them

The Theology of Contemplation

Thomas Aquinas and modern popes establish that the contemplative life is intrinsically superior to the active life and constitutes the heart of spiritual fruitfulness.

Trappist monasteries maintain a rigorous penitential discipline during Lent, combining physical fasting with manual labor and theological study. During Lent, monks abstain from mail and follow a strict fasting schedule, eating nothing until noon and receiving only a minimal evening collation. Merton translates books and articles from French at a long table in the novitiate scriptorium, assisted by a secretary who types his translated pages.

• Eat nothing until noon, receiving regular bowls of soup and vegetables along with bread
• Have a light evening collation consisting of a piece of bread and a two-ounce dish of applesauce

10 Key Ideas

1. Thomas Merton was born in France to artistic parents outside conventional materialist values, experiencing early loss and progressive child-rearing avoidance of grief.
2. Attendance at a French public secondary school exposed Merton to collective cruelty, contrasting sharply with the supernatural simplicity of rural Catholic life.
3. The collapse of a temporary religious phase during adolescence can lead young people to reject spiritual authority and dedicate themselves to self-worship.
4. Under the guidance of Mark Van Doren and the study of scholastic philosophy, you engage with rigorous literature and confront the reality of grace.
5. Following a sudden realization of his moral misery in Rome and ongoing intellectual convergence in New York, Merton embraced Catholicism and received baptism.
6. Merton balanced teaching at St. Bonaventure's with intensive spiritual exercises and vocational discernment, ultimately overcoming false humility and worldly literary vanity.
7. A contemplative monastery functions as a school where souls learn true happiness through healing their nature in the likeness of God via disinterested love.
8. True spiritual peace and sanctity are achieved by living ordinary lives and routine tasks in a completely supernatural manner through deep union with God.
9. The theological concept of aseity provides a precise, rational, and non-anthropomorphic definition of God as Being Itself.
10. Thomas Aquinas and modern popes establish that the contemplative life is intrinsically superior to the active life and constitutes the heart of spiritual fruitfulness.