Face to Face: the Growth of the Self in Thomas Merton

Abstract

The late Trappist monk and prolific author, Thomas Merton was intensely concerned with the self – or to be more precise, with a desire to break free from the tyranny of the self he took to be his identity. His early years in France and England were marked by a sense of loss and dislocation. After leaving Cambridge for Columbia, his subsequent life in America and decision to be baptised a Catholic at the age of 23 eventually led to his taking vows as a Cistercian monk. Given the name Frater Louis, the ‘world’ with all its temptations and unresolved issues had been left safely behind along with his old identity. Or so he thought. In fact, Merton’s years as a Trappist would lead to a best-selling autobiography written under obedience to his abbot with many more books to follow. Compared at the time of its publication to St Augustine’s Confessions, it would lead to his international renown as Thomas Merton. He voiced his disquiet over what he called ‘this shadow, this double, this writer who […] followed me into the cloister … I cannot lose him.’
 In time, Merton came to the realisation through lived experience and his voracious reading of the Bible, St Augustine, the mystics, the individuation process propounded by Jung, Zen Buddhism and others that the ‘self’ he was trying to escape was, in fact, largely a ‘false’ self driven by the ego. This paper traces Merton’s journey from the that self to the authentic self which is found in God, in transcendence. Obsession with ‘the self’ as understood in the 21st century makes a study of Merton’s path to selfhood that much more vital. The advent of the ‘Selfie’, the self-promotion that social media affords and the examples of narcissistic individuals in positions of power gives the lie to lives where self-consciousness is confused with self-realisation. Nothing, as Merton discovered, could be further from the truth.