Twentieth century

The twentieth century in this book is not presented as a single, self-contained spiritual age. It is a period in which older traditions of Christian mysticism remained active: monks still sang the offices, modern writers sought language for direct experience of God, and a twentieth-century reader could turn to medieval mystics for guidance. Its significance lies in this meeting of inherited practice with modern religious inquiry and public life.

Monastic life and modern vocation

In the late 1950s, a seminary student repeatedly visited the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist-Cistercian monastery in Kentucky. Professor D. Bard Thompson took his first-year class there to encounter the living institution behind their studies of medieval monasticism. The visits included the Divine Offices, meals in the guest house, a tour, and a conversation with a monk about monastic life. About 250 monks lived there at the time. Their silence and warm welcome made an impression, while the sight of people who had relinquished family and careers for poverty, chastity, obedience, and prayer challenged students whose sense of vocation was strongly oriented toward social action.

The narrator drove on five of these visits. On two, Thomas Merton spent the afternoon with the students, answering their questions patiently and in good humor. The narrator did not yet know Merton’s standing as a spiritual writer, but later read and taught most of his books. The encounter gives the period a striking continuity: a contemporary monk could be met in person, while the life of monastic commitment that he embodied reached back through centuries of Christian practice.

Mysticism under modern pressures

The students’ religious questions unfolded alongside the civil rights movement. African American students from Fisk and Tennessee A & I universities were engaged in sit-ins in downtown Nashville, and one of the seminary class’s own members trained students in Gandhian nonviolence. After testing the city’s segregation laws, that classmate was dismissed from the university. The remaining students felt a conflict between completing their degrees and leaving in protest; most stayed. In this setting, the Gethsemani visits disclosed a dimension of Christian life that social activism alone had not supplied. The book presents the tension without treating contemplation and public responsibility as simple opposites.

Modern mystical experience is likewise distinguished from extraordinary spectacle. Rufus Jones was wary of expectations of supernatural messages; Hildegard of Bingen had visions, while Bernard of Clairvaux described an encounter with God without sensory experience. Thomas Merton’s account of an experience in Cuba also affirmed God’s immediate presence without a sensory event. Across these different cases, the decisive issue is not whether a person sees or hears something unusual, but whether the experience discloses divine presence. The book’s account of the period therefore places inward experience beside critical examination rather than equating mysticism with visions.

Writing, study, and inherited traditions

Thomas Merton’s formation as a monk and writer supplies a concrete chronology. On March 19, 1944, he completed his novitiate and took simple vows, committing himself to remain for three more years. That year his first book, Thirty Poems, appeared, and at his abbot’s urging he began The Seven Storey Mountain, an autobiography about the life that preceded his entrance into the monastery. Published on October 4, 1948, after revisions by Cistercian censors and suggestions from his friend Robert Giroux, the book grew from modest initial sales into a bestseller. Its title invokes Dante’s Purgatorio and the seven levels of purgatory that Merton understood as an image of his passage from his former life to monastic life.

The twentieth century also appears through journals and spiritual reading. Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings began with notes from his adult life in 1925, although the entries before 1953 are not precisely dated. Brief passages combining prose and poetry record a vocation pursued through silence and self-development; Hammarskjöld described the notes as signposts he had begun setting up after reaching a point where he needed them. Merton, meanwhile, read the fourteenth-century mystic John of Ruusbroec. In The Sign of Jonas, he recalled his confessor’s advice to read Ruusbroec, and later described walking in the monastery garden with Ruusbroec’s work. The older writer thus remained a practical guide within modern monastic life, not merely a historical subject.

Experience, discipline, and change

The book’s modern accounts also show how mystical life can develop through sustained practice. At Solesmes Abbey, Simone Weil learned George Herbert’s poem “Love” by heart and recited it as a prayer when her headaches were severe. During one recitation she experienced Christ’s presence, which she described as arising amid suffering without the participation of her senses or imagination. Her religious feeling grew more prominent, but her social concern did not diminish. Later, she and a friend learned the Lord’s Prayer in Greek, and Weil attempted to recite it each morning with absolute attention, starting over whenever her concentration failed. This discipline led her to understand prayer as the orientation of the soul’s attention toward God.

Together, these examples give the twentieth century a double character. Mystical experience may arrive without spectacle, yet its consequences extend into writing, disciplined prayer, intellectual study, and decisions about social responsibility. The period’s spiritual lives are not isolated from their circumstances: the students’ monastic visits coincided with conflict over segregation, while Merton’s autobiography made a personal passage into religious life widely readable. The book uses such cases to show older Christian questions being lived anew in modern settings, without suggesting that they have become easy to resolve.