Author

Thomas Merton

American Trappist monk and writer on contemplation, who opened Christian monasticism to the wisdom of Asia.

1915–1968

Also known as Father Louis

Biography

Thomas Merton was born in 1915 in Prades, in southern France, to an American mother and a New Zealand father, both artists, and was orphaned young. After a restless youth in France, England and New York, where he studied at Columbia University, he became a Catholic in 1938, and in December 1941 entered the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, taking the name Father Louis.

His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), became a bestseller and drew many to monastic life. Over the next twenty years he wrote dozens of books on prayer and contemplation, among them Seeds of Contemplation (1949), revised as New Seeds of Contemplation (1961), as well as poetry and essays on war, racism and nonviolence. From 1965 he lived as a hermit on the abbey’s grounds.

Merton corresponded and met with D. T. Suzuki, Thich Nhat Hanh and other teachers, and in 1968 travelled to Asia, where he met the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. He died in Bangkok on 10 December 1968, during a conference of monastics, apparently electrocuted by a faulty electric fan. His journal of the journey was published as The Asian Journal.

Major works

New Seeds of ContemplationBook, 1961Merton’s revised meditations on contemplative prayer: the true and false self, solitude and community, faith and the dark knowledge of God, written for anyone, monk or not, who seeks the inner life.

Philosophical ideas

Scholarship

Contemplation is the awakening of the true self in God, beyond the false self of ambition and image; it is a gift, not a technique.

The contemplative does not escape the world but sees it truly, and finds there the responsibility to resist violence and injustice.

Cite this entry

Chicago (bibliography): “Thomas Merton.” Author. The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society. Last modified November 7, 2026. https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/authors/thomas-merton.
Chicago (note): “Thomas Merton,” author, The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, last modified November 7, 2026, https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/authors/thomas-merton.
MLA: “Thomas Merton.” The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, 7 Nov. 2026, www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/authors/thomas-merton.
BibTeX: @misc{authors-thomas-merton, title = {{Thomas Merton}}, howpublished = {The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society}, note = {Author. Last modified November 7, 2026}, year = {2026}, url = {https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/authors/thomas-merton} }

Related authors

Often compared with: Simone Weil
Thomas à Kempis

Related concepts

Related traditions

Christian MysticismTraditionThe contemplative and mystical currents of Christianity, East and West, centred on union with God in love.

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Questions

Must the contemplative leave the world?The desert or the marketplace: whether the life of contemplation requires withdrawal, or is to be lived in the midst of ordinary life.