Abstract
Thomas Merton's Selected Essays is a carefully selected collection of the essays of Thomas Merton between 1947 and his death in 1968. The reader of this volume is in the hands of one of the foremost Merton scholars, Patrick O’Connell, who gives a very clear oversight of Thomas Merton the essayist in a relatively concise introductory essay. Many of Merton’s readers are no doubt already aware of many of Merton’s essays which he himself began publishing in collections, mostly in the final decade of his life, such as Disputed Questions, Raids on the Unspeakable, Faith and Violence, Mystics and Zen Masters, and numerous other collections that have appeared since his death such as Contemplation in a World of Action, Love and Living and The Monastic Journey, to name just a few. In his introduction O’Connell shows us Merton’s prodigious output as an essayist, writing over two hundred and fifty essays in total in approximately twenty years. The greater number of essays were written in the final decade of his life when, O’Connell tells us, he was publishing approximately eighteen essays a year, though in 1965 and 1967 he would publish twenty-six and thirty-three respectively. This weighty volume actually contains thirty-three essays spanning just over two decades, so authoring that number of essays in just one year is literally mindboggling, especially when Merton’s other output is taken into account too – books, letters, poems, conferences – as well as his commitment to the monastic round of prayer, his own meditation, and the life of the community at Gethsemani.
O’Connell’s selection gives us a taste of the range of subjects that Merton addressed in his essays – various aspects of the monastic life; a broad range of social issues, most notably war, peace and racial issues; literature, with a number of essays on authors that struck a chord with Merton such as Camus, Faulkner, Joyce and Pasternak. All too frequently Merton’s astute writings on racism are omitted from anthologies and from books about Merton’s life and thought. This is not the case in the Selected Essays as O’Connell’s collection is truly representative of Merton’s output, reflecting O’Connell’s grasp of the Merton canon. The range of Merton’s subjects are broad as are also the places where the essays were published, ranging from popular magazines such as Holiday and Harper’s, through academic journals like the Sewanee Review, to specifically religious magazines such as Jubilee, Ramparts and Commonweal, down to much smaller, more obscure publications.
It is fascinating to browse an appendix that O’Connell gives us of every single essay Merton wrote listed chronologically by year. In particular that fecund year 1967 provides an excellent example of the range of subjects that Merton addressed ranging from Isaac of Stella to Malcolm X, and from Auschwitz to Zen in Japanese Art. The volume certainly contains something for everyone but, more importantly, it serves as an excellent introduction to that Renaissance man, Thomas Merton, and, alongside recently published selections from Merton journals, correspondence and poetry, this volume should become a standard text in the Merton literary canon.
Paul M. Pearson
Thomas Merton Center