ABSTRACT
Certainly no discussion of Kierkegaard’s reception by twentieth-century AngloAmerican theologians would be complete without examining his reception by Thomas Merton (1915-68). As a monastic of the Order of Cistercians of Strict Observance (O.C.S.O.), Merton made his debut as a writer with the publication of his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948).1 Yet he resisted the stereotype of the monk as an individual who is socially withdrawn and secluded from culture within the monastery. Instead, he deliberately engaged it.2 The restless alienation that characterized the Zeitgeist of American culture after World War II, sometimes referred to as the “Kierkegaardian Age of Anxiety,” is a theme that stretches throughout his literary corpus.3 As a scholar, he undoubtedly read Kierkegaard alongside, and not merely through, the lenses of Albert Camus (1913-60), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80),
1 Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, New York: Harcourt Court Brace Jovanovich 1948. 2 His specifically autobiographical works include not only his infamous The Seven Storey Mountain but also The Sign of Jonas, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2002 [1953]; Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Garden City, New York: Doubleday 1966; The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, edited from Merton’s notebooks by Naomi Burton, Brother Patrick Hart, and James Laughlin, New York: New Directions 1975 [1974]; also included in this number is his lesser known The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton, New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudhay 1959; and Day of a Stranger, with introduction by Robert E. Daggy, Salt Lake City, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith 1981. Not to be missed in conjunction with his autobiographical works are The Journals of Thomas Merton, vols. 1-7, ed. by Patrick Hart et al., San Francisco: Harper 1995-99. A number of excellent biographies of Merton’s life are available, but of particular value and comprehensiveness is that of Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1984, and a slightly less dense but more intimate, Jim Forest, Living With Wisdom: A Life of Thomas Merton, 2nd ed., Maryknoll, New York: Orbis 2008 [1991]. In addition, Victor A. Kramer, Thomas Merton, Boston: Twayne Publishers 1984 provides an excellent overview of Merton’s published works as a whole. To these works I refer the reader for a more comprehensive bibliography of books and articles by (and about) Thomas Merton. 3 George Kotkin observes that Kierkegaard’s popularity, not only in America but throughout the rest of the English-speaking world was almost single-handedly the result of the efforts of the Episcopal Minister Walter Lowrie (though in this regard he was aided by
Kierkegaard stood apart. He saw the latter as a luminary who laid the groundwork for all subsequent existential critiques of modernity that followed, and provided a basis for self-understanding that would enable the individual to recover what it means to be an authentic human being.5
