Later Life and Criticism
The more activist and ecumenical thinkers within the Roman Catholic Church were dismayed by the pietistic, condescending tones used in The Seven Storey Mountain to refer to non-Trappist religious communities within the Catholic faith, and to non-Catholic forms of Christianity in general. The Roman Church later stepped away from these attitudes during the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. Thomas Merton, however, had been continuously expanding and maturing his spiritual perspectives, and soon realized the irony of the public's continuing interest in the figure that he presented in The Seven Storey Mountain. In The Sign of Jonas, published in 1953, Merton says that “The Seven Storey Mountain is the work of a man I have never even heard of.” More reflectively, Merton penned an introduction to a 1966 Japanese edition of The Seven Storey Mountain saying "Perhaps if I were to attempt this book today, it would be written differently. Who knows? But it was written when I was still quite young, and that is the way it remains. The story no longer belongs to me...."
Thomas Merton died in 1968 of accidental electrocution while attending an international monasticism conference in Bangkok, Thailand. Various writers have noted the irony of his life’s tragic conclusion, given that The Seven Storey Mountain closes by admonishing the reader to “learn to know the Christ of the burnt men” (see, e.g., Edward Rice, The Man in The Sycamore Tree, 1979; Rice was a close friend of Merton from his college years). The Seven Storey Mountain propelled Thomas Merton into a life of ironic contradictions: a man who left an urban intellectual career for a labor-oriented rural existence, only to be led back into the realm of international opinion and debate; a man who spurned the literary world for the anonymity of cenobitic life in a Trappist monastery, only to become a world-famous author; and a man who professed his devotion to remain fixed in the confines of a monastic cell, only to fulfill an urge to travel throughout Asia.
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“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
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