Mark Van Doren

Mark Van Doren, a professor of literature at Columbia University, mattered to Thomas Merton less as a source of abstract doctrine than as a teacher whose love of his subject opened literature onto the central questions of human life. Merton remembered Van Doren’s teaching as one of the most formative experiences of his college years.

Identity and Teaching

Van Doren taught literature at Columbia University. Merton was impressed both by the material in Van Doren’s course on eighteenth-century literature and by the way he taught it: his evident love for the subject made the classroom itself an encounter with literature, not merely a survey of it. The account presents that quality of teaching as a major influence on Merton.

The Unexpected Shakespeare Class

One semester, Merton signed up for a history course but discovered that he had gone to the wrong room. Van Doren was about to begin teaching Shakespeare, and Merton decided to stay. The accidental change of classroom brought him into a course he later judged the best he had taken in college. Its importance lay not just in the literature covered, but in the range of human concerns it brought into view.

Influence on Merton

Merton associated Van Doren’s Shakespeare course with an education in what was fundamental: life and death, time and love, sorrow and fear, wisdom and suffering, and eternity. The list signals the scale of Van Doren’s influence in Merton’s recollection: literature could hold together questions that might otherwise seem divided between academic study and spiritual reflection. The evidence does not make Van Doren responsible for Merton’s later religious decisions; it identifies him specifically as a teacher whose approach to literature helped Merton recognize the enduring human stakes within it.