The Noisy Planet of Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton at Gethsemani, by Edward Rice

The library has strengthened its Catholic literary collections with a magnificent series of letters by Thomas Merton, the celebrated monk, poet, and author of The Seven Storey Mountain. The Merton letters constitute one of the great spiritual correspondences of this century; its only peer at Georgetown is the series from Cardinal Newman to Henry William Wilberforce. Interestingly enough, purchase of both collections was made financially possible by generous alumni: the Newman material with funds provided by Bishop Jeremiah F. Minihan (C'25) in 1954; the Merton letters with a generous donation from James V. Kimsey (C'61).

With this help the library was able to secure more than one hundred letters from Merton to his Columbia classmate and lifelong friend, the writer and photographer Edward Rice. The letters begin in 1940, the year before Merton entered the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani, Kentucky, and continue until his death in Bangkok in 1968. They bear eloquent witness to Merton's extraordinary personal growth, and in them all manner of things are discussed. His writing, his reading, his contemplative experiences, his friends, war, peace, and Eastern religions are only a few of the more frequently mentioned subjects.

Rice, whose own generosity also helped in making this great acquisition possible, founded and edited the Catholic journal Jubilee, for which Merton occasionally wrote. In a letter of November, 1960, Merton discussed censorship problems with his superiors on an issue that has great relevance to Georgetown and its collections:

Well, I now have the final supreme decision about the Teilhard de Chardin article. It is that this must not make the appearance. It must not put forth the snout. It must remain in the hole or warren. It must go the way of all other well meaning attempts to say T de C is all right. The Jesuits have not bless T de C. Nobody has bless T de C. Rather they have muttered at him, nay, mumbled. It has been handed down by the Magisterium, says a prof in Rome, Lord only knows who, but he made the decision, it has been handed down he says that the Catholic reviews should make the silence with regard to T de C. Hence you being a Catholic review must make the profound silence with regard to this article. We are in profound silence, and I for my own part in most profound silence being more profoundly silent than anybody else on the face of this rather noisy planet.