The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns

Thomas Merton

Macmillan, 1985 - 669 pages

Evelyn Waugh, at the start of Thomas Merton's monastic career, advised him to "write serious letters", and also urged him to make an art of it. This advice flowered in the sixties, especially after his monastic superiors ordered him to cease publishing anything on war and peace. "Monk concerned with peace. Bad image", Merton seethed in a letter, and launched his series of privately circulated mimeographed "Cold War Letters", one-third of which are published for the first time in this book. The Hidden Ground of Love is a rich collection of Merton's letters in a period of his greatest concern about religion's seeming powerlessness against global violence and nuclear war. Though the book concentrates primarily on the last decade of his 27 years as a Trappist, it opens with a few early letters to Catherine Doherty before he became a monk. His extraordinary growth as a mystic and religious thinker, deeply concerned about the materialistic world's drift toward the abyss, is revealed in these pages.

About the author

Born in France, Thomas Merton was the son of an American artist and poet and her New Zealander husband, a painter. Merton lost both parents before he had finished high school, and his younger brother was killed in World War II. Something of the ephemeral character of human endeavor marked all his works, deepening the pathos of his writings and drawing him close to Eastern, especially Buddhist, forms of monasticism. After an initial education in the United States, France, and England, he completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University. His parents, nominally friends, had given him little religious guidance, and in 1938, he converted to Roman Catholicism. The following year he received an M.A. from Columbia University and in 1941, he entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, where he remained until a short time before his death. His working life was spent as a Trappist monk. At Gethsemani, he wrote his famous autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain" (1948); there he labored and prayed through the days and years of a constant regimen that began with daily prayer at 2:00 a.m. As his contemplative life developed, he still maintained contact with the outside world, his many books and articles increasing steadily as the years went by. Reading them, it is hard to think of him as only a "guilty bystander," to use the title of one of his many collections of essays. He was vehement in his opposition to the Vietnam War, to the nuclear arms race, to racial oppression. Having received permission to leave his monastery, he went on a journey to confer with mystics of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. He was accidentally electrocuted in a hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, on December 10, 1968.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns; Volume 1 of Correspondence, Thomas Merton; Volume 1 of Merton, Thomas: Thomas Merton letters series
• Author: Thomas Merton
• Editor: William Henry Shannon
• Publisher: Macmillan, 1985
• ISBN: 0374519633, 9780374519636
• Length: 669 pages