37 pages • 1 hour read
Thomas MertonThe Seven Storey Mountain
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1948A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 7 Summary: “Magnetic North”
Merton resumes classes at Columbia, and he continues to struggle with the nature of his religious intentions. But as he moves toward meditation, he found himself excited to join the religious life. Off-handedly, one of his friends, Dan, tells him about a Trappist monastery he’s founded in Kentucky called, Our Lady of Gethsemani, the monastery to which Merton would later devote his life. At this point, he has no interest in that monastery and continues his spiritual exercises and schooling.
He faces a series of what he perceives as challenges, like a poor man appearing in need of money testing whether he truly would live a life of poverty. These moments cause Merton to wonder how much of his morality is truly for the higher good or for its own sake. He teaches English at Columbia, which he enjoys, but he really wants to go to Mexico or Cuba to journey on a pilgrimage.
He comes down with appendicitis and this factors into another moral test: whether to try and move a drunk man out of the walkway, which might cause his appendix to burst before he could make it to the hospital. Filled with pride, he moves the man, who crawls right back. Merton made it to the hospital. He realizes the selfishness of his actions and understands himself as a spiritual newborn still learning his way.
He goes to Cuba where he indulges himself and also takes in the beauty of the churches, especially Our Lady of Cobre. He sees this trip as essential to the awakening of something inside him, a feeling especially strong after he hears Cubans praying together.
Meanwhile, his calling to the Franciscan priesthood is falling apart. He begins to think it isn’t a big enough sacrifice, and the Father doesn’t think he is cut out for the priesthood because he was only baptized a few years prior and he has a checkered history. Merton despairs that his calling seems to be slipping away.
Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “True North”
Merton’s brother John Paul expresses interest in joining the Marines while Merton teaches and writes, still called to his passion. His brother’s interest in joining the Marines fades, but the world has other plans: As World War II ramps up, Merton’s card is pulled for the draft. Ultimately, he is rejected for having too few teeth. In the meantime, he wrangles with the question of whether a war could be just. He travels across America, and he is amazed at the silent fortresses the monks live in. When he returns to the world, he is still taken by the silence practiced by the Trappists, and he decides he will become a monk. He returns to working on his book about World War II with a promise to himself to attend a summer retreat with the Trappists in Canada.
Part 3, Chapters 7-8 Analysis
Now that Merton sees how early he is in his journey and has embarked on a desire to become a priest, the experiences that led him to grow, including his failures, take on a retrospective significance. Even events that felt devastating and confusing in the moment are reframed in this important process of retrospection and meaning-making. As he embarks on his pseudo-pilgrimage to Cuba and closer to his spirituality, he finds himself enraptured by life.
His writing takes on a more sensory and vivid quality, almost as if the wonder and excitement he experiences are blooming off the page, like when he “opened a new worlds of joys, spiritual joys, and joys of the mind and imagination and senses in the natural order, but on the plane of innocence, and under the direction of grace” (305). The repetition of joy shines bright off the page, and positive words like “imagination,” “natural,” innocence,” and “grace” balanced with more pragmatic language like “mind,” “senses,” “plane,” and “direction” show how his devotion to these ideals is also a grounded balance based on his journey so far.
Merton’s childlike excitement is genuine, but it’s also precarious, which becomes apparent when Merton is denied from the priesthood due to his past experiences. Rather than shunning religion or turning on himself, he turns more to God, resolving that if he “could not live in the monastery, [he] should try to live in the world as if [he] were a monk in a monastery” (328). In other words, he wouldn’t let his past hold him back from a future with God. He wants to live the monk life, and one rejection doesn’t stop him. In fact, it propels him to where he is meant to be: the monastery in Kentucky.
Although he hits a deep low point emotionally and is devastated, he is able to climb through and compares himself to “a man that had come down from the rare atmosphere of a very high mountain” (364). This mountain imagery not only mirrors the title, The Seven Storey Mountain, but is also evoked in other places throughout the work. The recurring mountain-like purgatory calls back to Merton’s allusions to Dante’s Purgatorio. He is now out of Inferno but is still on the spiritual ascent. Rather than turning to vices or giving up, Merton faces his religion with a new conviction: He knows he needs to be a monk. He knows it the moment he enters the monastery and “the silence enfolded [him], spoke to [him], and spoke louder and more eloquently than any voice” (352). Merton will not chase accolades or validation anymore. He will look for and live for God, as his authentic self.
