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Sunday, October 02, 2011

The Seven Storey Mountain

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Seven Storey Mountain  
The Seven Storey Mountain, by Thomas Merton, book cover.jpg
1st edition
Author(s) Thomas Merton
Genre(s) autobiography
Publisher Harcourt Brace (1948)
Publication date October 11, 1948
ISBN 0-15-601086-0
OCLC Number 385657
Followed by Seeds of Contemplation (1949) [1]
The Seven Storey Mountain is the 1948 autobiography of Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk and a noted author of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Merton finished the book in 1946 at the age of 31, five years after entering the Gethsemani Abbey near Bardstown, Kentucky. The title refers to the mountain of Purgatory in Dante's Divine Comedy.
Seven Storey Mountain was published in 1948 and was met with surprising levels of public attention. The first printing was planned for 7,500 copies, but pre-publication sales exceeded 20,000. By May, 1949, 100,000 copies were in print, and according to the TIME it was amongst the best-selling non-fiction books in the country for the year 1949.[1][2] The original hardcover edition eventually sold over 600,000 copies,[3] and paperback sales exceed three million by 1984.[4] The book has remained continuously in print, and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. The 50th-anniversary edition published in 1998 by Harvest Books, included an introduction by Merton's editor, Robert Giroux, and a note by biographer and Thomas Merton Society founder, Fr. William Shannon.
Apart from being on National Review's list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century, it also mentioned in work 100 Christian Books That Changed the Century (2000) by William J. Petersen.[5]

Contents

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[edit] Summary

Seven Storey Mountain is an autobiography that reflects on the life of Thomas Merton and his quest for his faith in God leading to his conversion to Roman Catholicism at age 23. Subsequently he left behind a promising literary career and resigned as a teacher of English literature at St. Bonaventure College in Olean, N.Y, and entered The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky on December 10, 1941, a moment which he described in the book as, "..So Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me, and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom.". Later, Dom Frederic Dunne, the abbot at the abbey, who had received him as novice, suggested that Merton write out his life story, which he reluctantly began, but once he did, it started "pouring out". Soon he was filling up his journals with the work which led to the book which TIME later ascribed for having, "...redefined the image of monasticism and made the concept of saintliness accessible to moderns".[4][6][7]
In late in 1946, the partly approved text of The Seven Storey Mountain was sent to Naomi Burton, his agent at Curtis Brown literary agency, who then forwarded it the noted book editor, Robert Giroux at Harcourt Brace publishers. Giroux read it overnight, and the next day phoned Naomi with an offer, who accepted it on the monastery's behalf. With Merton having taken a vow of poverty, all the royalties were to go to the abbey community. Though soon a trouble arose, when an elderly censor from another abbey objected to Merton's colloquial prose style, which he found inappropriate for a monk. Merton appealed (in French) to the Abbot General in France, who concluded that an author's style was a personal matter, and subsequently the local censor also reversed his opinion, paving way for book's publication. In the summer of 1948, advance proofs were sent to Evelyn Waugh, Clare Boothe Luce, Graham Greene and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. All responded with compliments and quotations which were used on the book jacket and in some advertisements and the first printing run was increased from 5,000 to 12,500. Thus the book was out in October 1948 and by December it had sold 31,028 copies was declared a bestseller by TIME. The New York Times, however, refused to put it on the weekly Best Sellers list, on the grounds that it was "a religious book".[8]

[edit] Comparison with St. Augustine

In The Seven Storey Mountain Merton seems to be struggling to answer a spiritual call; the worldly influences of his earlier years have been compared with the story of St. Augustine's conversion as described in his Confessions. Merton’s Augustinian candor regarding his previous indulgence in the worldly practices of drinking alcohol and casual sexuality caused a censor from the Cistercian Order to delay publication in 1947, until the controversial passages were toned down.

[edit] Social reaction

Seven Storey Mountain is said to have struck a nerve amidst a society longing for renewed personal meaning and direction in the aftermath of a long, bloody war (World War II), and at a time when global annihilation was increasingly imaginable due to the development of atomic bombs and even more powerful thermonuclear weapons. The book has served as a powerful recruitment tool for the priestly life in general, and for the monastic orders specifically. In the 1950s, Gethsemani Abbey and the other Trappist monasteries experienced a surge in young men presenting themselves for the cenobitic life. It is a well-known bit of Catholic lore that many priests after the book's publication entered monasteries or seminaries with a copy in their suitcase.
Many readers were surprised to read that a young man with such a promising future of secular success would choose a solitary life. However, Merton put his mind to good use, becoming one of the most famous and revered spiritual authors in the world. One printing bears this accolade on the cover, from Graham Greene: "It is a rare pleasure to read an autobiography with a pattern and meaning valid for us all. The Seven Storey Mountain is a book one reads with a pencil so as to make it one's own." Evelyn Waugh also greatly (although not uncritically) admired the book and its author.

[edit] Later life and criticism

The more activist and ecumenical thinkers within the Roman Catholic Church were dismayed by the pietistic, condescending tones used in Seven Storey Mountain to refer to non-Trappist religious communities within the Catholic faith, and to non-Catholic forms of Christianity in general. The Roman Church later stepped away from these attitudes during the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. Thomas Merton, however, had been continuously expanding and maturing his spiritual perspectives, and soon realized the irony of the public's continuing interest in the figure that he presented in Seven Storey Mountain. In The Sign of Jonas, published in 1953, Merton says that “The Seven Storey Mountain is the work of a man I have never even heard of”. More reflectively, Merton penned an introduction to a 1966 Japanese edition of Seven Storey Mountain saying "Perhaps if I were to attempt this book today, it would be written differently. Who knows? But it was written when I was still quite young, and that is the way it remains. The story no longer belongs to me...." [9]
Thomas Merton died in 1968 of accidental electrocution while attending an international monasticism conference in Bangkok, Thailand. Various writers have noted the irony of his life’s tragic conclusion, given that Seven Storey Mountain closes by admonishing the reader to “learn to know the Christ of the burnt men” (see, e.g., Edward Rice, The Man in The Sycamore Tree, 1979; Rice was a close friend of Merton from his college years). The Seven Storey Mountain propelled Thomas Merton into a life of ironic contradictions: a man who left an urban intellectual career for a labor-oriented rural existence, only to be led back into the realm of international opinion and debate; a man who spurned the literary world for the anonymity of cenobitic life in a Trappist monastery, only to become a world-famous author; and a man who professed his devotion to remain fixed in the confines of a monastic cell, only to fulfill an urge to travel throughout Asia.

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