Thomas à Kempis

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Thomas à Kempis was a German-born monastic copyist and devotional writer, remembered above all as the man most scholars hold to have written The Imitation of Christ — for centuries the most widely read Christian book after the Bible. Born Thomas Hemerken at Kempen, in the Rhineland, around 1380, he spent almost his entire adult life at the priory of Mount St. Agnes near Zwolle, in what is now the Netherlands, where he was professed as a canon regular and died in 1471, past ninety.

He belonged to the Devotio Moderna, the “modern devotion” begun in the fourteenth-century Low Countries by the preacher Geert Groote and carried on by the Brethren of the Common Life. It was a reform of feeling rather than doctrine: a turn away from the speculative theology of the schools toward a plain, methodical inner life — examination of conscience, the imitation of Christ’s humility, the reading and copying of edifying texts. Thomas was its characteristic product, a man who spent his days at the writing desk and counselled withdrawal from the noise of the world and the appetite for clever talk. “I would rather feel contrition,” runs the book that bears his stamp, “than know how to define it.”

The Imitation of Christ gathers four short treatises on the interior life: counsels on humility and detachment, on the consolations of the soul, and a long meditation on the Eucharist. Its tone is intimate and unsystematic, addressed to the individual before God, and its severity toward learning and reputation has struck readers across confessions — Catholics and Protestants alike, and later admirers well outside the church. The attribution to Thomas is the point on which scholarship is most cautious. The work circulated anonymously at first, and rival candidates were once urged, among them the chancellor Jean Gerson and a shadowy Italian abbot, Giovanni Gersen; the manuscript evidence, including a copy in Thomas’s own hand, has brought most modern scholars back to him, though the case has never been closed to everyone’s satisfaction.

What he was reaching for is legible in the writing itself. The Devotio Moderna held that the soul’s progress lay not in learning more but in wanting less — that the obstacle to God was the self’s noise, and the remedy a disciplined quiet. That conviction places Thomas in a long line of contemplatives who distrusted speculation in favour of the cleared interior room: the apophatic counsel of the Cloud of Unknowing, the desert fathers’ suspicion of the busy mind, the Sufi and Hindu insistence that knowledge of God is unlike knowledge of anything else. The resemblances are real and worth tracing; they are not identity, for Thomas’s whole concern is the imitation of one particular life, the figure of the suffering Christ, and that is not a generalisable program. He wrote less to be understood than to be used, and the book has been used, in many tongues, for six hundred years.

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