Word: mertonism
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Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions; $3) is already riding to a whacking success in the high-altitude wake of an earlier book, The Seven Storey Mountain (TIME, Oct. 11), by the same young Trappist monk. Both books are the work of 34-year-old Thomas Merton, who has retired from the world to live under a monastic rule so strict that it forbids even the self-indulgence of talking. Trendspotters have begun to wonder whether some of the U.S. reading public, in its search for peace, subconsciously wishes it could follow...
...Seven Storey Mountain is the best-selling non-fiction book in the country. From the sedate lending libraries of New England to the bustling women's clubs of the West Coast, people are reading and talking about Poet Merton's sensitive, unhappy groping through the litter of modern civilization to find peace at last. Word-of-mouth endorsements are largely responsible for the demand; bookstores are accustomed to coping with those who did not quite catch the title and come in asking for "Seventh Storey Monk" or "Second Storey Mountain." Protestants and Catholics, businessmen and housewives...
Halfhearted Search. "America," Trappist Merton has written, "is discovering the contemplative life." British Novelist Evelyn Waugh- supports such a possibility. In a letter to Author Merton, Waugh said: "I believe there are thousands of men and women in the world who are temperamentally suited to monastic life but have no effective vocation simply because they are ignorant of the very existence of religious life. Indeed, a thesis might be developed to show that the health of society depends on a right balance between monks and laymen-the revolution of the 14th Century took place because the monasteries were full...
...according to booksellers, no discernible number of those who buy The Seven Storey Mountain feel themselves called to contemplation. In Boston, where booksellers estimate that 85% of Merton's buyers are Catholics, readers have objected that the faith he writes about is too emotional, and not sufficiently based on cold reason. Commonest objections of Boston Protestants: "A life of contemplation is all very fine, but it doesn't help solve any of the world's problems...
Some see a special significance in the fact that the U.S., where religion has most strikingly expressed itself in the activist tradition (i.e., hospitals, orphanages and other forms of good works), has taken so well to Merton's inward-looking brand of spirituality. Whether or not U.S. religious interests are growing more contemplative, they are certainly growing. Chicago Daily News Columnist Sydney J. Harris said of The Seven Storey Mountain: "This book shows how far we have traveled since the 'sos. First, we were the social revolutionaries, looking down our noses at Babbitts. Then we realized that social...