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 — Hemerken means “little hammer,” and the Latinizing pen chose for him the name of the town — 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 on 25 July 1471, past ninety. The arc is one of the least eventful in the whole record of Christian letters, and the man understood that to be the point. He left no journeys, no councils, no controversies he sought. He sat at a desk.

As a boy of about twelve he was sent down the long road to Deventer, where a brother-house of the Brethren of the Common Life kept a hostel for poor scholars. There, under Florens Radewijns — successor to the movement’s founder, the preacher Geert Groote — he was schooled in Latin, in the copying of texts, and in the daily anatomy of the conscience that the Brethren made their discipline. His elder brother John had gone before him to Mount St. Agnes, an Augustinian house of the Windesheim Congregation set on a low hill above the Ijssel; Thomas followed, entering first as a donatus around 1399, taking the novice’s habit in 1406, and his vows the year after. Ordained priest around 1413, he served twice as subprior and for years as master of novices. The rest was the writing desk. He copied the whole Bible at least four times over — one five-volume copy survives at Darmstadt — and produced, alongside the famous book, a stream of sermons, chronicles, lives of the early Brethren, and small treatises on the solitary life, all in the same low, even voice.

A reform of feeling, not of doctrine

He belonged to the Devotio Moderna, the “modern devotion” begun in the fourteenth-century Low Countries by Geert Groote — a Deventer cleric who, after a conversion in middle life, gave up his prebends, preached repentance, and gathered around himself laymen and clergy willing to live a common life without the formal vows of a religious order. After Groote’s death in 1384 the movement divided into two channels that ran side by side: the loosely organized Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life, who lived in shared houses, supported themselves by copying manuscripts, and took no vows; and the more regular Windesheim Congregation of Augustinian canons, of which Mount St. Agnes was a house. Thomas stood at the cloistered end of this stream.

What the Devotio Moderna reformed was not the church’s teaching but the texture of the inner life. It set itself deliberately against the speculative theology of the schools — against the appetite for distinctions, disputations, and clever talk that the middle ages had raised to a profession. In its place it put a plain, methodical interior asceticism: rigorous daily examination of conscience, fixed meditation on one’s own sin and death and on the Passion of Christ, the patient imitation of his humility, and the reading and copying of edifying texts kept close at hand. Many of the devout kept a rapiarium, a personal notebook into which they gathered the sentences that had pierced them — the book of one’s own conversion, assembled line by line. The whole architecture of the movement was one of methodical feeling: not new things to think, but a trained way to want, and to want less. Thomas was its characteristic product, a man who spent his days at the desk and counselled withdrawal from the noise of the world. I would rather feel contrition, runs the book that bears his stamp, than know how to define it. The Latin is sharper still — Opto magis sentire compunctionem quam scire eius definitionem — and the whole program is folded into it: the definition is the school’s; the contrition is the soul’s; and the soul is what matters.

This places him in a recognizable lineage and at a recognizable distance from it. A century before, in the Rhineland to his south, Meister Eckhart had preached the birth of God in the ground of the soul in language so daring that it drew condemnation; his Dominican heirs Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso had recast that speculative fire into pastoral and affective forms, and Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae became a staple of the Devotio Moderna’s reading — Groote himself recommended it. From this current of Rhineland mysticism the Modern Devotion inherited a temper but pruned the metaphysics. Where Eckhart reached for the abyss of the Godhead beyond all images, Thomas reaches for nothing the unlearned cannot hold. There is no apophatic ladder in him, no coincidentia oppositorum such as the canon Nicholas of Cusa — himself a pupil of the Brethren at Deventer a generation later — would draw out of the same soil. There is only the near figure of the suffering Christ and the small, daily work of conforming a life to it.

The four books

The Imitation of Christ — De Imitatione Christi — gathers four short treatises, composed across the 1410s and 1420s and brought together in a single hand. The first counsels on humility, detachment, and the vanity of mere learning; it opens with the line that gives the whole work its motto, that to follow Christ is worth more than to discourse subtly on the Trinity. The second turns inward, to the cultivation of the interior life and the peace that comes of asking little. The third and longest is a sustained dialogue between Christ and the disciple on inner consolation — the voice of the Lord answering the voice of the soul, in alternating short chapters that read less as argument than as antiphon. The fourth is a long meditation on the Holy Communion, on the soul’s approach to the Eucharist in reverence and self-distrust — not a manual of the rite but a sustained contemplation of what it asks of the one who receives it. Its devotion to the suffering and present Christ runs parallel to the later affective pieties of Latin Christianity, including the Sacred Heart, though Thomas’s register is barer than any of them.

The tone throughout is intimate and unsystematic, addressed to the individual before God rather than to a school or a council. The chapters are short, the sentences plain, the imperatives gentle and unrelenting. There is almost no quotation of the authorities, almost no architecture of distinctions; the book proceeds by aphorism and direct address, a voice at the elbow rather than a lectern. Its severity toward learning and reputation — what doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility — has struck readers across the confessional lines that opened in the century after Thomas died. Martin Luther and the Lutheran tradition read it; the Catholic Reformation made it a staple of the spiritual exercises; later Pietists and the Methodists of John Wesley — who translated it himself — pressed it into the service of the awakened heart. Admirers gathered well outside the church entirely. It has been printed in more editions, and turned into more tongues, than any Christian book save the Bible.

The man behind the book

The attribution to Thomas is the one point on which the scholarship has been most cautious, and the caution has a long history. The work circulated anonymously at first, copied and recopied through the houses of the Devotio Moderna and beyond, and the early manuscripts and printed editions carried it now under one name, now under another, now under none. Three claimants accumulated. One was the chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson, a theologian of real eminence whose name attached itself to the book in France and lent it authority. A second was a shadowy Italian Benedictine, Giovanni Gersen, said to have been abbot of a house at Vercelli in the early thirteenth century — a figure most scholars now regard as very nearly a phantom, a “Gersen” conjured out of a misread “Gerson,” whose claim sustained a long and partisan controversy between religious orders all the same. Against both stands the manuscript evidence, and above all a single book: a codex now in the Royal Library at Brussels, dated 1441 and written, the great weight of opinion holds, in Thomas’s own hand, gathering the four treatises together over his signature. That autograph has brought most modern scholarship back to him. The case has never been closed to everyone’s satisfaction — authorship disputes of this kind rarely are — but the hand at Brussels is the fact the dissent must explain away.

What he was reaching for is legible in the writing itself, more plainly than in any biography. 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 its restless reaching, and the remedy a disciplined quiet. That conviction sets Thomas in a long company of contemplatives who distrusted speculation in favor of the cleared interior room: the apophatic counsel of the Cloud of Unknowing, the desert fathers’ suspicion of the busy mind, the long ascetical monasticism of the Latin West from Augustine of Hippo and Bernard of Clairvaux onward. Yet Thomas is not a mystic of ascent in the manner of Bonaventure’s graded itinerarium of the mind into God, nor a theorist of any path at all. The bridal and chivalric figures of the earlier mystics are gone; so is the speculative ground of the soul. His whole concern is the imitation of one particular life — the figure of the suffering Christ, near and concrete, to be copied as a scribe copies a text he loves, word by word, until the hand forgets it is working.

The text and its readers

The 1441 Brussels autograph (Royal Library MS 5855–61) is the load-bearing witness, and it has set the terms of the modern editorial recovery; Charles Ruelens published a facsimile of it in 1879, and William C. Creasy’s The Imitation of Christ: A New Reading of the 1441 Latin Autograph Manuscript (Mercer University Press, 1989) works directly from it against the accretions of later editions. The standard modern gateway to the movement that produced Thomas is John Van Engen’s Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings (Classics of Western Spirituality, Paulist Press, 1988), which translates Groote’s own writings and the early Brethren’s lives and supplies the English rendering of the contrition line carried above; Van Engen’s later Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) is the fullest social history of the movement. The older reference accounts remain serviceable on the bare facts and the authorship quarrel: the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article on the Imitation of Christ lays out the Gerson–Gersen–Kempis contest as it stood when it was still hot, and the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912 gives the conventional biography. The deepest modern placement of Thomas in his spiritual lineage is Bernard McGinn’s The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (Crossroad, 2005), the closing volume of his history of Western Christian mysticism, which reads the Devotio Moderna as the late, lay-accessible distillation of the Rhineland current. The medieval Latin text in its critical form was established by Michael Joseph Pohl in his seven-volume edition of the Opera Omnia (Freiburg, 1902–1922), still the scholarly base for the canon of Thomas’s authentic works.

The book asks for almost nothing a reader cannot do at once, and nothing it promises lies beyond the smallest cell. The whole of its counsel turns on a single reversal: that the way to gain is to be willing to lose, that the way to be filled is to empty the room. A man who has truly learned to renounce himself, it says, is free — free of the opinions of others, free of the hunger for the next thought, free even of the consolations he came seeking. The contemplative of this stripe does not climb toward God along a ladder of ideas; he subtracts, patiently, the noise between himself and a presence already near, until wanting less has become its own quiet possession and there is finally room for the one thing he was after.

→ In the library: The Cloud of Unknowing — the anonymous English contemplative treatise of the same temper

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