Surprised by Similarity: C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton on the Self

Although they never corresponded, and they never met, the Anglican professor C.S. Lewis and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton nevertheless wrote in strikingly similar terms of the “true self,” or a person redeemed by Christ, and a “false self,” the rebellious person one believes themselves to be, but is not. There is very little academic work on the confluence of Lewis and Merton, and none thus far that specifically addresses their shared concept of the self. The aim of this paper is to address this gap in scholarship and, through an intertextual investigation of each man’s major works, fill it. The study explores the following: 1) Lewis and Merton’s conceptualization of the “false self” as essentially nonexistent, an “entity” of either social construction of the ego 2) how Lewis’s “argument from desire” is essentially restated by Merton, especially regarding his description of the false self, 3) Lewis and Merton’s shared ideas of pseudo-spirituality as a refuge of the false self, and 4) the pain and anguish that one experiences when the false self is exposed and allowed to die, and 5) Lewis and Merton’s shared skepticism and embrace of the apophatic, or “negative” path to exposing self-deception, and permitting the true self to emerge.