…underlying all life is the ground of doubt and self-questioning which sooner or later must bring us face to face with the ultimate meaning of our life. This self-questioning can never be without a certain existential “dread”—a sense of insecurity, of “lostness,” of exile, of sin…. It is the profound awareness that one is capable of ultimate bad faith with himself and with others: that one is living a lie. 

—Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer

Monk. Writer. Convert. Peace activist. Spiritual mentor. Student of Zen. Bestselling author. Mystic. Bob Dylan fan.

These are just a few of the labels we associate with Thomas Merton. While “existentialist” is not high on any such list for most readers, a lifetime of re-reading Merton has convinced me that the existential note ringing through his body of work is key, not only to making sense of his wide-ranging thought, but to any real understanding of the man himself. This is especially true of the last decade of his life, amid his increasing emphasis on the role of dread in a mature spiritual life. 

Before any discussion of the existential character of Merton’s work, we need to get a sense of what the notoriously slippery term Existentialism actually concerns itself with. Not only does a flat dictionary definition not get us very far down that road; it is not in keeping with the Existentialist spirit to begin with. It will prove more helpful to look at an instance of the existential point of view as it organically appears in an artistic context (as it frequently does). 

The well-known and oft-quoted closing lines of “The Summer Day,” by Mary Oliver, offer a good example of this kind of organic existential encounter: 

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Both the initial exhilaration of being reminded you actually have a “wild and precious life” to spend and the subsequent sense of foreboding or regret at the risk implied capture the essence of the existential situation. It is worth noting that the rest of the poem addresses, among other things, the question of our creator, prayer and the place of attention in a life fully lived—all things the Existentialist theologian Paul Tillich refers to as matters of “ultimate concern.” 

That shadowy undercurrent of narrowing possibility implied beneath the life-enchantment that the poem’s closing lines leave us with is a foretaste of the dread Merton refers to, what Søren Kierkegaard describes as “the dizziness of freedom” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s brand of Existentialism deems to be a “nausea.”

Another commonplace example of existential dread is captured in the popular notion of the “Sunday Scaries” or “Sunday Night Blues” that many workers and students feel as their weekend comes to an end, especially those who feel stuck with a sense of futility or deep alienation from the work they are about to shoulder for another week or those experiencing an acute sense of hopelessness that their wages will ever allow them to “catch up” and pursue a more aligned life. Those weeks all add up, we sense, to a lifetime that we do not get back. 

Of course, these examples only hint at the phenomenon of dread examined by the mystics and philosophers Merton’s work draws on, like St. John of the Cross and Gabriel Marcel. The important thing to note is how even these everyday examples deal with the texture of one’s existence—thus existential—in both its exhilarating possibilities and the finite bounds of what exactly your one particular, precious and oftentimes scary life might amount to before it comes to an end. 

For most of us, this dread is assiduously avoided, even as it nonetheless lingers just out of sight until some vulnerability exposes it and pulls it into consciousness. But for anyone seriously seeking an encounter with reality in all its fullness, including the presence, or pointed absence, of the living God, Merton states ever more clearly over the course of his life that this darkness will be an inescapable bridge to be crossed. In Merton’s view, this mystical brand of awe, full of aridity and shadow, is precisely the experience that exposes the ultimate nothingness of oneself-for-oneself, and makes the seeker painfully aware of the need for mercy and meaning beyond their own efforts. 

Existential dread, then, is a pivot point in Merton’s spirituality, where the experience of the humanly finite “authentic self” points beyond itself to the mystical grace of the truly authentic self in the God of infinite possibility. Closely associated with this central encounter with dread is the idea that one’s response to it, or to existential challenges like the one presented by Oliver’s poem, must never be “borrowed” or “off the shelf”  from a given source or formula, but arrived at authentically from one’s own experience and a deeply honest discernment. 

For Merton, as with all Existentialists, the real answers to life’s questions must be lived, not simply stated or formulated as concepts; they are intimately personal commitments, ever open to evolving, and to be amended as needed to be “true” in the flesh to who we continue to become. It is easy to see why courage and self-deception emerge as central themes not just for Merton, but for existential thinkers at large. 

Existentialist roots

For most Merton readers this note of gravitas surrounding the issue of authenticity will be more than familiar and will probably strike many as self-evidently true. Still, many may wonder whether Merton actually embraced the “Existentialist” label outright. The clearest evidence that he did is in his essay “Learning to Live,” written in 1966 and published posthumously in Love and Living, where he finally states baldly: “Speaking as a Christian Existentialist” as he goes on to expound on his familiar notion of discarding the “masks” of our exterior selves to arrive at a “mature personal identity.”

A year earlier, in 1965, he published the essay “Notes on Christian Existentialism” in The Critic, later collected in Mystics & Zen Masters as “The Other Side of Despair” (a clear nod to Kierkegaard). The essay, a less personal and somewhat noncommittal survey of sorts, is notable for its debt to the Catholic Existential philosopher Gabriel Marcel, and includes a brilliant examination of Flannery O’Connor, highlighting what Merton deems her superior “existential intuition.”

In a letter to his editor, Robert Giroux, mentioning the essay, Merton expresses misgivings about the Trappist censors having issues with the topic of Existentialism, and one senses his caution around attempting to ally himself too closely with the label in public print.

During this same period, he was preparing the slim volume Contemplative Prayer, his final personally approved publication, where he examines the concept of dread in a decidedly existentialist light throughout, returning to the terms dread and existential some 50 times in a book of barely 100 pages. The book was published first as The Climate of Monastic Prayer in the same year as his death, 1968.

Much of this work turns out to have roots in manuscripts begun in the late 1950’s, a period that saw him nearly own up to the Existential stamp of his thought in the title of a major work, Existential Communion. Instead, in 1961, Merton came out with the oft-overlooked The New Man, which bore the previous title as early as 1954 before it was reconsidered and refashioned. Still, the published result is heavily preoccupied with Existential themes and bookended by an examination of the Existential religious context as it explicitly relates to Christian mystical experience and the apophatic tradition (the spiritual approach that seeks God through recognizing ways in which the divine is beyond human understanding). 

Unmediated encounter

If this all amounts to the mature culmination of the existential trajectory in Merton’s work, where does it all begin? 

Certainly, biographically speaking, the answer lies in the early death of his mother and his subsequent boyhood in the French provinces with his struggling artist father. But in terms of his adult spiritual conversion, the evidence lies in what many familiar readers might consider an unlikely event.

The episode in question will be recognizable to Merton fans as the “Imprimatur” episode of 1937, related in some detail in the book that began it all, his monumental 1948 spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. In it, the college-aged Merton excitedly purchases a book on medieval philosophy by Étienne Gilson before boarding a train for Long Island. Having settled into his seat, he sets about opening his prize—only to find an imprimatur on the copyright page, indicating that publication of the book has been authorized by a bishop who finds nothing in it contrary to Catholic morals. It smacks to the “pagan” Merton of intellectual dishonesty, if not outright censorship. He recalls being tempted to throw the book out the window of the train “at the houses of Woodside.” 

When he finally does pick it up again, he finds something far different from the officially-approved, pious “old man in the sky” idea of God he anticipated (then characterized by him as “a vague rather superstitious hangover from an unscientific age”). What he discovers instead is Gilson’s rendering of the ancient concept of aseitas, in which God is recognized as “Being Itself” and existing “beyond all sensible images and all conceptual determinations.”

With this, the intellectually and spiritually ripe Merton experiences an epiphany that would, in his own words, “revolutionize my whole life…. What a relief it was for me, now, to discover not only that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God.”

It is a fair question to ask how this seemingly abstract notion might be considered “existential.” The answer is not in the formulation on the page, but in the real-life effect of such a framing for the person, Merton, in the material world. Not unlike the reader of the Mary Oliver poem, Merton realizes he might directly encounter God anywhere now, not just in the pages of the Bible or in a church pew. God’s unmediated presence is suddenly everywhere and in everything, including himself. 

An unconstrained God

This unconstrained view of God would prove to be the only acceptable window into the church for Merton, the budding Existentialist, and the same secular, intellectual compunction that made him spurn the imprimatur in Gilson’s book would go on to play a crucial role in the development of his pioneering thought—in tandem with the more usual moral compunction driven by his awareness of sin and subsequent reckoning with dread. 

As I sometimes tell my students, the Christian Existentialist is much like a certain type of house cat that loves his home but takes any closed door encountered in his comings and goings as a personal affront—an impingement on his sacred autonomy! Thomas Merton was just such a cat, following an inner demand that insisted on his seeking the most authentic and intimate rapport possible with his God and his conscience.

Having entered the church through the window of Gilson’s aseitas in the West, and peeked at new visions through the windows of Zen in the East, Merton’s restless spirit seems to have settled somewhere under our front porch, so to speak, and become an unlikely part of the modern church’s foundation. We would do well to engage more with this aspect of Merton going forward, as he appears to be just the type of hearty, resident stray our drafty 21st-century church needs today more than ever.