The Seven Storey Mountain

Merton’s journey throughout this book can appeal to a wide audience because it is a journey most people undertake at some point. His life poses repeatedly, sometimes despairingly, and often with wonder: What is the purpose of life? Merton’s search for meaning leads him down many paths, some which meander from what he eventually identifies as his purpose and others which catapult him forward, and by tracking this search for meaning, Merton creates a core theme that can resonate with readers, regardless of religious background.

In some of his lower points, while indulging in vices and engaging behaviors that didn’t serve him as a young adult, he “sees himself as “a true child of the modern world completely tangled up in petty and useless concerns with myself, and almost incapable of even considering or understanding anything that was really important to my own true interests” (181). He recognizes how self-centered his ideology was, and ironically, because his life orbited his most base interests and not his core values, he lacked self-awareness while being all too concerned with himself. This contempt for modern values is something echoed in other times when he hits new lows:

I imagined that I was free. And it would take me five or six years to discover what a frightful captivity I had got myself into. […] And so I became the complete twentieth-century man. I now belonged to the world in which I lived. I became a true citizen of my own disgusting century of poison gas and atomic bombs. A man living on the door sill of the Apocalypse, a man with veins full of poison, living in death (94).

The imagery he uses to paint a portrait of what he considers a modern man underscores how far he must go in his search for meaning. The stakes are high, and that is reflected in the dire word choice of “disgusting,” “poison gas,” “atomic bombs,” “Apocalypse,” and “death.” These words bear a strong negative connotation and signal the end of life. This reflects that, looking back on it, Merton doesn’t see himself as truly alive, at least not in the sense that matters: He’s living and breathing, but he’s not living his purpose, which means he is hardly living at all.

When he grasps the severity of how poorly he feels about himself and his life, he embarks on a new journey to find a new purpose and uses the metaphor of climbing a “seven-circled mountain […] steeper and more arduous than [he] was able to imagine” (242). The reference here is to Dante and the Divine Comedy. In that work, Purgatory is depicted as a “seven-storey” mountain, which functions as a metaphor for the Christian life of purgation, a process of spiritual purification.

The search for meaning that Merton describes in his own life draws consciously and carefully on the Western tradition of spiritual autobiography, above all, perhaps, on Augustine’s Confessions. In that work, Augustine presents his youth as a series of stumbles and misses on the way to God and illustrates his belief that all longing or desire is the desire for God, even if we don’t know it.

When Merton identifies his calling to Catholicism and specifically to the priesthood, he knows he has a long way to go, but he has a new mindset about this. Unlike the instant gratification that his old self wanted, he sees the importance of starting on this journey, or this spiritual ascent, even if he didn’t know exactly how he would get there or where it would lead.

Merton describes his journey as both one of self-discovery, or finding the true self, and finding God. He suggests that these are related. At the book’s end, he describes his worry that his old self—the selfish vain sinful one—is still a problem for him, and that it might be, in fact, the one that writes. The idea that the true self is an ethical task is an important sub-theme in the Seven-Storey Mountain, in the Epilogue, there are echoes of his past—doubts and uncertainties that have plagued him along the way—that indicate that his search for meaning isn’t over. The search goes on as long as life does.