Thomas Merton does not approach the problem of evil either as a systematic theologian or as an analytic philosopher. He is neither a biblical scholar in the strict sense, nor is he by any means an ethicist. In fact, Merton regarded ethics with some measure of uneasiness, concerned for the potential they contained to “devaluate and reject life,” that is, to put abstraction above people.

Merton would shun the notion of spiritual master as a way of introducing him. For all his writing on the spiritual life, he was suspicious of an overly self-conscious or zealous approach to it. Merton regarded inward spiritual pride as misleading and ineffectual in terms of saving our souls as an outward show of virtue. Accordingly, he wrote to those interested in how he lived: “The spiritual life is something that people worry about when they are so busy with something else they think they ought to be spiritual.” While teaching in the monastery, he asserted: “There's no point in becoming spiritual—[that’s] a waste of time.” To those who suspected him of being a practitioner of Zen, he coolly advised: “If you see a meditation, kill it.”

Merton renounced the man who wrote a best-selling autobiography with the same name as his. The secular idea of success carried no more weight for him than its spiritual counterpart. In explaining his response to someone who had sought his contribution to a kind of Chicken Soup for the Soul book focused on how to be a success, Merton wrote: “I swore I had spent my life strenuously avoiding success… . If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”

When asked to describe his life, Merton responded: “What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breath.” This is not a mocking or evasive statement. It is rather one through which he dissolves the duality of mind and self, or self and the image of self.