Thomas Merton was not only one of the most influential Catholic authors of the late twentieth century but also perhaps the best known religious figure of the period.

It is ironic that Merton, who was a Trappist, a member of one of the more reclusive religious orders in the Church, who also felt drawn to the life of a hermit, should have been so public and publicly recognised a figure.

Some of his critics thought this a contradiction, but Merton saw it as flowing from his humanism, which was a fundamental part of his vocation as a monk. To be a monk, he once said in the latter part of his life, is to be a human being, that is, it is to replicate what Jesus was, what God became when God decided to be other than Himself. No nobler vocation could be imagined.

Merton has several claims on our indebtedness, but his wide and deep humanism was one of the reasons for his popularity while he lived, and why he continues to attract admirers almost 40 years after his death. Christianity is a humanism, Pope Paul VI declared in Populorum Progressio.

And his namesake in the letter to the Philippians outlined its basic features: “[W]hatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is good  and pure…whatever can be thought virtuous or worthy of praise – think of these things (Phil 4:8).

Merton wrote some 40 books, encompassing theology, spirituality, poetry, literary criticism, and social activism, not to mention a voluminous correspondence. He was not a systematic thinker – there is no Merton “system” – but all that he wrote was informed by a passion to show dimensions of human life and activity in the light of God, though a consciousness refined by contemplation.

The true aim of humanism, Merton thought, was a full humanity. This was the ultimate reason for his social activism. In his time, it was not yet a truism, as it has become for us, that the God of love is also necessarily a God of justice.

Catholics – Christians generally – could not claim to love their neighbour when their neighbours, the black disenfranchised people of the Southern USA, were denied their fundamental rights.

Merton was an early prophet in the forefront of the movement for social justice in pre-civil rights USA, and the source of his involvement was the vision of humanity that stemmed from faith.

For the individual, on the other hand, the true aim of humanism was a genuine self-identity. “[I]f you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I’m living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person. The better answer he has, the more of a person he is.”

For Merton as for the desert Fathers and other writers we have looked at, the true self was not the self-revealed by introspection. Nor was it the individualism that culture today inclines us to settle for, and which we take so much unreflective pride in.

 The true self was the self “hidden with Christ in God.” Made in the image of God was our truest self-description is, and awareness of the self that was this image was the fruit of poverty of spirit, prayer, and selfless love.

The soil in which these habits were cultivated was silence and solitude. It’s not too difficult for people today, however abstractly, to appreciate the value of silence. Solitude, on the other hand, conjures up the idea of estrangement, from oneself and others. It seems the antithesis of community and solidarity. How could it generate any positive value?

The difficulty rests on a misperception. Solitude is not loneliness. As the late Henri Nouwen emphasised, an important dimension of our vocation as Christians is to convert our loneliness into solitude. Solitude is awareness of our participation in Being. “True solitude is a participation in the Being of God…whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere…”

It’s the reason why the contemplative tradition had always understood solitude as availability for God, with silence as its gateway. Merton once observed of his own longing: “What I need is the solitude to expand in breadth and depth and to be simplified out under the gaze of God more or less the way a plant spreads out its leaves in the sun.”

Of such experience a broad and expansive freedom is born. You can be at the centre of things wherever you are. Travel is not necessary. This experience was the source of the “no-whereness” and “no-mindedness” of the Desert Fathers, captured again, according to Merton, in the spiritual freedom of St Francis and the Franciscans: “You could be a pilgrim, you could be a hermit, and you could be a pilgrim for a while and a hermit for a while and then a scholar for a while. Then you could go to the Muslims in North Africa and get yourself martyred if you had the grace! And so forth.”

Contemplation also progressively refined Merton’s reflection on Christ. It may seem sometimes that the authors we have looked at have forgotten about the Incarnation in their preoccupation with the impossibility of imaging God. That too is a misperception.

St Paul reminds us that “[I]f once we knew Christ in the flesh, that is not how we know him now” (2 Cor 5:16). The only Christ we know is the risen Lord, accessible to us in faith. We grow in knowledge of this Christ to the extent that we are configured to him, and this comes not only from keeping his word, but from putting on his mind, and making our home in him.

By definition this is not an undertaking in isolation. If we have the mind of Christ, we also share his fellowship with others. “Whatever I have written,” Merton once noted, “I think all can be reduced in the end to this one root truth: that God calls human persons to union with Himself and with one another in Christ.”

In a famous and often quoted passage, Merton recollected how this sense of union once flashed upon him suddenly in an unlikely place:“In Louisville (Kentucky), at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realisation that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” 

Contemplative practice also influenced Merton’s approach to ecumenism. In his early monastic days before the Second Vatican Council, Merton’s Catholicism had a priggish superiority, which made him embarrassed to recall it in later years.

The later Merton had a different awareness, a breadth of view that incorporated the outlook of Gaudium et Spes and the mission formula of St Paul. “To be truly Catholic is not merely to be correct according to an abstractly universal standard of truth, but also and above all to enter into the problems and joys of all, to understand all, to be all things to all men.”

For obvious reasons, Merton felt the closest affinity with the monastic and contemplative traditions of other faiths. What he sought to do was clarify his own living tradition, “the tradition of wisdom and spirit that is found not only in western Christendom but in (Eastern) Orthodoxy, and also, at last analogously, in Asia and in Islam.”

Merton took more easily to the Buddhist tradition, to Zen Buddhism in particular, than to Hinduism. On the other hand, he had great admiration for Mahatma Gandhi and for his devotion to satyagraha or soul-force.

Like many others, he though Gandhi grasped the ethic of the Gospel better than many Christians, applying “Gospel principles to the problems of a political and social existence in such a way that his approach to the problems was inseparably religious and political at the same time.”

Merton’s ecumenism also had cultural side. He was eager to correspond, and wherever possible, to have direct contact with all persons who strove for greater humanisation. They too, whether they knew it or not, were “in Christ.” The point was interestingly confirmed in a letter Merton wrote to the black American novelist, James Baldwin.

Merton said he thought Baldwin was right on target in his analysis of the racial crisis in America. He disagreed with him only in Baldwin’s insistence that he did what he did as a non-Christian or anti-Christian. To the contrary, Merton insisted, what Baldwin did was “fundamentally religious, genuinely religious, and therefore has to be against conventional religiosity.” 

In a later piece, “The Power and Meaning of Love”, Merton clarified the basis for his insistence and the foundation underlying his perspective: “I must learn that my fellow man, just as he is, whether he is my friend or my enemy, my brother or a stranger from the other side of the world, whether he be wise or foolish, no matter what may be his limitations, is Christ.”

Merton’s many-sided vision continues to captivate and instruct readers of different faiths and cultures across the world. The briefest review of websites devoted to him today is witness enough not just to the power of a contemplative life but to the wisdom and creative energies that contemplation can unleash.