The Seven Storey Mountain Summary

Later, as monasteries and the Roman Catholic Church as an institution became more powerful, a new type of ascetic movement developed, one that focused on the individual’s very personal, unmediated experience with God. Julian Norwich (1342-1416), an English Anchoress living in a cell attached to the Church of St. Julian, wrote about her mystical experiences with the divine after barely surviving from a horrible illness. In The Short Text, Julian discloses the “showings” she experienced such as her encounter with the Crucified Lord, the hazelnut of creation, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and in The Long Text, Julian reflects on her original visions from twenty years ago and interpret them in a new light, introducing the idea of Jesus as Mother,

One of the most influential American Christian ascetics was Thomas Merton (1915-1968). A convert to Catholicism, Merton accepted monastic vows from the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, in 1941. Here, Merton continued his cycle of ascetic transformation, and even documents this process in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. While inside the monastery, he perfects his physical body by engaging in fasting, celibacy, possession renunciation, praying, and wearing modest clothing. Through these practices, Merton realizes the true nature of his body as “the mirror of [God’s] tremendous Goodness and of His endless love” (410). According to Merton, after enough physical exercise, the body helps the ascetic comprehend that God is inside the body. Similarly to Merton’s developing spirituality, he mentions that his solitary confinement at the monastery was a representation “the four walls of my freedom” (410). Inside these walls, Merton would be able to cultivate a spiritually superior self that was basking in “[God’s] love, His wisdom, and His mercy” (424). As time progressed, Merton’s social role as a hermit manifested itself in popular writings. His spiritual purpose began to crystalize in his many writings that critiqued American society’s understandings of racial and economic inequality,

According to J. Moussaieff Masson in his essay, “The Psychology of the Ascetic,” internally, ascetics are driven to asceticism because they are addicted to pain. Masson suggests that all ascetics must have suffered some form of traumatic experience as a child, either “they were sexually seduced, or they were the object of overt or covert aggression, or they lost those closest to them early in their lives” (623). This experience as a child entices the ascetic to relive the experience over and over again through physical pain or discomfort as a way to punish his parents, who were “harsh and unloving” (623). Another reason ascetics may engage in these actions is because society needs them to. For example, Peter Brown in his article “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” discusses what were some of the reasons such a holy man, like Symeon, should develop. He concluded that the holy man arrived on the religious scene due to the insecurity of the depleting Roman Empire. He proposes that the holy man served as the rock of stability whenever the classical institutions were collapsing, as the father of society whenever the patriarchy was starting to quiver, and as the divine mediator whenever the function of oracle became obsolete. Overall, as Brown writes, “The holy man merely triumphed…with the habits and expectations of a new, more