Why this book
Thomas Merton wrote his own conversion story at the request of his monastic superiors, and the resulting book traces a specific, deliberate arc: restless, well-educated drift through boarding schools in France and England, an intellectually promising but morally chaotic period at Columbia University in New York, and then a decisive turn toward Catholicism that culminates, in 1941, in his entering the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in rural Kentucky committed to silence, manual labor, and a life largely closed off from the outside world. The title borrows directly from Dante's Purgatorio, where the soul climbs seven terraces of a mountain toward paradise, and Merton structures his own narrative along a similar shape — from what he frames as a kind of self-inflicted hell of secular ambition and appetite, through a painful process of moral correction, toward what he experiences, paradoxically, as genuine freedom inside a life of strict enclosure.
The stakes Merton lays out are directly counterintuitive by ordinary secular standards: he argues that the unlimited choice and self-direction prized by modern life is not actually freedom at all, but a kind of scattering, a self divided against itself by competing desires and social performances with no organizing center. Real liberty, in his account, requires the opposite of more options — it requires surrendering the self entirely to something outside its own preferences, which is why he can describe entering an enclosed, rule-bound monastery as the moment he finally became free rather than the moment he gave freedom up. The book doesn't ask readers to take this claim on faith alone; it walks through Merton's own specific, autobiographical reasoning for why he became convinced it was true.
Who should read it
Readers drawn to conversion narratives in the tradition of Augustine's Confessions, or anyone wrestling with whether modern secular life actually delivers the freedom it promises, will find a sharply argued, deeply personal case here. It will frustrate readers who find Merton's harsh judgment of his own pre-conversion life, and of secular society generally, overwrought or self-flagellating, and those looking for the more expansive, interfaith Merton of his later writing rather than this younger, more absolutist convert's voice.
About the author
Thomas Merton (1915–1968) entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky in December 1941 and remained a Trappist monk there for the rest of his life. The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948, became an unexpected bestseller and made him one of the most widely read Catholic writers of the twentieth century. His later work moved well beyond the narrower Catholic devotionalism of his early writing into sustained interfaith dialogue, particularly with Zen Buddhism through his correspondence with scholar D. T. Suzuki, producing books including Zen and the Birds of Appetite. He died in 1968 near Bangkok, Thailand, while attending an interfaith monastic conference, twenty-seven years to the day after he first arrived at Gethsemani.