Thoughts in Solitude
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude shares the author’s reflections on a solitary life, as well as the importance of quiet reflection. Merton writes that inner solitude is closely tied to personal integrity, and thus implies responsibility and freedom.
Thoughts in Solitude is a timeless book, as society affords people increasingly less privacy. Merton argues that inner solitude is both a necessity for personhood and acceptance of God’s gift free of grace.
This timeless work will be enjoyed by anyone seeking to understand solitude or deepen their practice of quiet reflection.
Explore more on the contemplative Christian life with the Thomas Merton Collection (7 vols.).
- Presents Merton’s perspectives on solitude
- Relevant in an age of decreasing privacy
- Timeless classic on the spiritual life
- Part 1 - Aspects of the Spiritual Life
- Part 2 - The Love of Solitude
Top Highlights
“This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly. That war is our wilderness. If we wage it courageously, we will find Christ at our side. If we cannot face it, we will never find him.” (Pages 22–23)
“What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?” (Pages 35–36)
“The desert is therefore the logical dwelling place for the man who seeks to be nothing but himself—that is to say, a creature solitary and poor and dependent upon no one but God, with no great project standing between himself and his Creator.” (Pages 20–21)
“St Thomas says [I–II, Q.34, a.4] that a man is good when his will takes joy in what is good, evil when his will takes joy in what is evil. He is virtuous when he finds happiness in a virtuous life, sinful when he takes pleasure in a sinful life. Hence the things that we love tell us what we are.” (Page 24)
“Living is not thinking. Thought is formed and guided by objective reality outside us. Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new.” (Page 30)
Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. In 1949, he was ordained to the priesthood. Merton is regarded as one of the most influential Catholic writers of the twentieth century. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 70 books, including his widely acclaimed autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain.
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