Thomas Merton is a writer, to use the language of the Enneagram, who engages the reader head, heart, and gut. Further to the point, he is a human being who was engaged in his own life, head, heart, and gut. He was not a philosopher, nor an abstract or analytic thinker; nor would he have claimed to be a theologian, at least in the systematic sense. Because he regularly dealt with theological matters, he more than once found himself criticized because he did not bring system to what he wrote. But Evagrius would have recognized him as a theologian, because he was a man of prayer, and this for Evagrius was what made a person a theologian. He wasn’t in any major sense a novelist, although he did publish one novel, My Argument with the Gestapo, and he did write some early novels that he had no luck in getting published. He was certainly a poet, but he did not confine his poetry to those short pieces of very condensed writing that we call poems. His prose, confounding our neat categories, is full of poetry, not only in the sense of those chunks of it that jump out at us as found poems, but in his ability to combine an image with a phrase in a way that activates both sides of our brains. As well as being a poet, he was a gifted essayist, as demonstrated by the recent publication of Thomas Merton: Selected Essays.