Great things are done when men and mountains meet.
William Blake
He has not learned to think like a mountain
Aldo Leopold
A Sand County Almanac
Can Aldo Leopold’s ecological conscience become
effective in America today?
Thomas Merton
‘The Wild Places’
There is a long line and lineage of contemplatives in the West and East that have turned to the mountains, white peaks and ancient spires as places to slake a deeper thirst and find a site for the soul to know a more meaningful quies. This reality has been well tracked and traced in evocative and visual mountaineering classics such as The Mountaineering Spirit (1979) and Sacred Mountains of the World (1990). Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades (2002) makes these connections, also, and we know Merton had an affinity with the Beats. My missive, Thomas Merton and the Beats of the North Cascades (2005), connects the dots between Merton, the Beats and mountains. Even the most casual read through these books make it most clear that there is a connection between mountains and the contemplative quest for meaning and depth.
Thomas Merton wrote his MA degree on William Blake, and Blake realized great things occurred when men and mountains met. Such greatness could not be found in the hurly burly and jostling of the streets. Aldo Leopold, an American naturalist in the tradition of Thoreau and Muir, encouraged one and all, in his timeless class, A Sand County Almanac, to ‘think like a mountain’. Merton would have heartily approved of both Blake’s and Leopold’s attitudes towards the ancient rock sentinels. Merton knew the consequences of not learning to think like a mountain. The task of thinking like a mountain was part of Merton’s DNA and genetic code. This is why Merton, in his timely and timeless article, ‘The Wild Places’, held Leopold, Muir and Thoreau in such high regard. The mountains, more than most places, stand for what is still wild and cannot be tamed by the captains of industry. They also embody sacred sites of contemplative insight.
It is virtually impossible to miss, in the life and writings of Thomas Merton, the dominant metaphor and archetype of mountains in his journey. It is the rock hard guardians that are there in the beginning, they play a substantive role in Merton’s midlife, and in the final year of Merton’s life, mountains preside over Merton’s imagination and the places he visited. Merton was, of course, no mountaineer, and his interest in mountains was not that of a rock jock. Merton saw in the mountains, though, a path into the inner life, and it was just such a path that spoke much to him about the geography of the soul. But, let us begin at the beginning.
Merton’s initial biography, The Seven Storey Mountain, opens with mountains on front stage. Part One, Chapter One (Prisoner’s Base) begins with these words: ‘On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the water bearer, in a year of great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world’. Merton, in short, came into the world in the mountains. A few pages later Merton connects some important dots: ‘And Mother would paint in the hills, under a large canvas parasol, and Father would paint in the sun, and the friends would drink red wine and gaze out over the valley at Canigou, and at the monastery on the slopes of the mountain. There were many ruined monasteries in those mountains’. Merton in this passage and that which follows in the same paragraph makes it clear that there is a distinct connection between mountains, monasteries and the artistic and contemplative life. It is all there at the beginning for Merton. Mountains have an allure, a draw, a whispered wisdom that woo and wed Merton.
Merton’s parents died when he was young man, and he was soon in England. He began his university studies in the autumn of 1933 at Clare College, Cambridge, and he muddled through his short stay at Cambridge. It is significant to note that one of the few things that stayed with Merton while he was at Cambridge was the class he took with Professor Bullough on Dante’s Divine Comedy. The class walked Merton, canto by canto, from the depths of the inferno, up through purgatory into paradise. The dominating metaphor in Dante’s Divine Comedy is the mountain, and the use of the mountain as a means of understanding the ascent from lower to higher desires, lesser to higher goods, ego to self, false face to substantive reality. It was, in fact, the course by Professor Bullough on the Divine Comedy that offered Merton the title for his first autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. Mountains were there in the beginning, they were there with him at Cambridge, and Dante’s interpretation of mountains was there with Merton in his initiation into the world of autobiography.
The Seven Storey Mountain was a bumper crop seller, but Merton was on the move. He did not want to be pinned or exclusively identified with this youthful work. He had higher peaks to climb, more demanding ascents to make. Dante’s Divine Comedy, in many ways, attempted to put the sophisticated theology of Thomas Aquinas in poetic form, and he did so in a most readable and accessible manner. Merton attempted to do much the same thing in The Ascent to Truth (1951). Thomas Aquinas and John of the Cross are brought together in this work of contemplative theology as are other important mystical theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa, Bernard of Clairvaux, John Ruysbroeck, Teresa of Avila, Pascal and John of Saint Thomas. The point to be noted here, though, is that Merton has returned yet once again to the metaphor of mountains and the ascent to insight, wisdom and truth. Merton can never get far from mountains and the role they play in understanding the inner journey to ever greater depth and integrity.
There is much more that could be said about Merton’s affinity to mountains in the 1950s, but, living near the knobs of Kentucky as he did, the higher peaks did not press in so close. This did not mean that Merton did not turn again and again to the myth of the upward ascent. Merton’s well known and much commented on ‘Fire Watch’ article of 1952 stands within such an ascent genre.
It was in the last year of Merton’s life, though, that the mountains took on even greater prominence. They simply cannot be missed in Thomas Merton in Alaska: The Alaskan Conferences, Journals, and Letters (1988) and The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1968). Merton was in Alaska, of course, before he took to the East, but The Asian Journal was published just after Merton’s untimely death in 1968. It is impossible to miss, particularly in Merton’s journal entries in Alaska, his abiding fascination with the mountains. They draw and hold Merton, and almost each page of the journal entries from September 17-October 2 1968 describe, mention and ponder the meaning of mountains in Alaska. The Alaska Range, McKinley (the largest peak in North America), Redoubt and the Elias Range take on a compelling significance in the unfolding journal. Merton just can’t take his eyes from these ancient citadels that tower over valley and city, permanent and rock hard, as stable as the clouds are unstable and impermanent.
In many ways, the Alaskan pilgrimage in search of a potential hermitage, and Merton’s preoccupation with mountains on such a trip, was but a primer for the trip to Asia. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton is replete and thick with description tumbling over description on mountains. Kanchenjunga factors large in a literal, photographic and contemplative sense in Merton’s final reflections on mountains. Everest is there, but it cannot compete with the hold Kanchenjunga has on Merton. An essay on Merton and Kangenjunga could tell us much about how Merton understood the role of mountains in the mapping of the soul. There is an exquisite reflection on Kanchenjunga in Merton’s November 19/1968 journal entry. A photo of Kanchenjunga is below the text, and the massif of white peers through low lying trees.
Last Night I had a curious dream about Kanchenjunga. I was
looking at the mountain and it was pure white, absolutely pure,
especially the peaks that lie to the west. And I saw the pure
beauty of their shape and outline, all in white. And I heard a
voice saying—or got the clear idea of: “There is another side
to the mountain”.
Merton’s life began in the Pyrenees in France ‘in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain’, and they ended in the Himalayas. There is no doubt mountains offered Merton a way of understanding and interpreting his journey. It was mountains that pointed the way to ‘another side’. It was what was on the other side that, in an ongoing way, ever drew Merton.
The fact that mountains were, for Merton, a map into the deeper life means that, if Merton is ever going to be more fully understood, the role of mountains must play a prominent interpretive role. This is why Michael Mott’s biography was called The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, and why, Patrick Hart, in Merton’s Journals noted this obstinate fact. Run to the Mountain: The Journals of Thomas Merton: 1939-1941 and The Other Side of the Mountain: The Journals of Thomas Merton: 1967-1968 bring the circle full circle.
It is, in short, impossible to separate Merton from mountains. There is a symbiotic relationship between them. These guardians of old were with him in the beginning and he was with them at the end. Mountains were, in many ways, a mandala for Merton. The mandala of the mountains was ever there explaining to Merton how peak and valley, contemplation and action, Mary and Martha are one and the same and should never be separated and severed.
Ron Dart
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