Between Cloister and Cosmos: How Thomas Merton Found Himself Between Benedict of Nursia and Francis of Assisi

If you step back and use the See-Judge-Act method, you can almost see the pattern of his life as a kind of creative tension.

I have been thinking more about Merton lately. My own experiences, and trying to see how it all fits. We tend to forget how open and searching Thomas Merton was at the beginning of his Catholic life. He didn’t arrive with everything neatly decided. In fact, he was first drawn to the Franciscans—so much so that he was accepted into their novitiate before being asked to withdraw. That moment matters. It shows a man still listening, still discerning, still willing to be shaped. And it suggests that what first stirred him was a spirituality that was outward-facing, relational, and contemplative—something we recognize more clearly in him after the Fourth and Walnut experience.

If you step back and use the See-Judge-Act method, you can almost see the pattern of his life as a kind of creative tension. Benedict of Nursia gave him a structure—a grammar for living the monastic life. Francis of Assisi gave him something else entirely: a kind of poetry, a vision of radical simplicity and love for the world. And the pull toward the hermit life gave him a way to hold those two instincts together without having to resolve them too quickly, which leads me to say he would have been more himself in a Benedictine monastery in the US, maybe one just a hundred miles or so north.

As a Trappist monk, Merton didn’t reject his vocation. That would be too simple, and frankly, untrue. What he seems to have done instead is try to stretch it—gently but persistently—from the inside. His writings suggest that he felt deeply at home in a more Benedictine vision of monastic life, one that allowed for a wider, more humane engagement with the world. At the same time, he never lost that early Franciscan instinct: a desire for simplicity, fraternity, and a love that moves outward rather than closing in on itself.

You can see this especially in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, where he seems to lean toward what he understood as Benedict’s openness to the world, rather than the stricter enclosure he experienced in his own Cistercian setting. That tension never quite disappears—but it becomes fruitful.

So it may be fair to say that Merton didn’t outgrow his Trappist life so much as deepen it, even complicate it. He remained where he was, but kept widening the space—making room for Benedict’s balance, Francis’s joy, and the solitude of the hermit. And in doing so, he became more fully himself, not by choosing one path over another, but by learning how to live at their intersection.