ABSTRACT
In his last address, given on the morning of his death in 1968, omas Merton compared Marxist and monastic perspectives on change. He recognized that monks and the Marxist students who were so active in the 1960s shared critical attitudes toward the contemporary world and its structures, but he insisted: ‘e dierence between the monk and the Marxist is fundamental insofar as the Marxist view of change is oriented to the change of substructures, economic substructures, and the monk is seeking to change man’s consciousness.’ Reecting on the fact that the monk still lives on the earth, Merton observed that ‘e monk belongs to the world, but the world belongs to him insofar as he has dedicated himself totally to liberation from it in order to liberate it.’1
