The Imitation of Christ

Summary

The Imitation of Christ is a book of short devotional chapters written in Latin in the early fifteenth century and generally attributed to Thomas à Kempis, a canon of the monastery of Mount St Agnes in the Netherlands. It grew out of the Devotio Moderna, a reform movement among clergy and lay people in the Low Countries that valued humility, prayer, simple living and personal knowledge of Christ above learned debate. The work circulated anonymously in hundreds of manuscripts and, after the invention of printing, in thousands of editions; it has been translated into most of the world's languages and is often described as the most widely read Christian book after the Bible. The book has four parts. The first offers admonitions useful for the spiritual life: the reader is told to despise vain learning and worldly honour, to know his own weakness, to avoid idle talk, to bear patiently with others and to remember death and judgment. The second turns inward, describing the peace of a humble heart, the value of a good conscience, friendship with Jesus and the 'royal way of the holy Cross', the claim that suffering accepted in love is the path of every disciple. The third and longest part is a dialogue between the disciple and Christ, who speaks to the soul about grace and nature, self-denial, the vanity of seeking human praise and the freedom that comes from resting in God alone. Its most quoted chapter praises love as a great thing that makes every burden light. The fourth part is a guide to receiving Holy Communion with reverence and preparation, written for a reader who attends Mass. The style is plain and proverbial, full of echoes of Scripture and of short sentences easy to memorize. Readers have valued the Imitation for its honesty about temptation and its call to inner reform; critics, including some Protestant and modern readers, have found it too suspicious of the world, of learning and of ordinary human affection. Both Catholics and Protestants have printed and used it, including John Wesley, who published an edition, and figures as different as Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas More, who read it closely.

Top Lessons

• Knowledge and humility

  The opening chapters prefer a humble life to learned argument: what matters at the last judgment is what we have done, not what we have read. The point is not that study is bad but that knowledge without love is empty.

• Carrying the cross

  Book II argues that suffering cannot be avoided and that accepting it in love unites the disciple to Christ. The idea has comforted many readers and troubled others.

• Humility about knowledge

  The book warns that learning without humility and love profits little, and that self-knowledge comes before knowledge of the world.

• For the Christian reader

  The Imitation has been read by Catholics and Protestants alike for nearly six centuries as a school of humility and devotion to Christ. Students can read it as Thomas intended: slowly, a chapter at a time, as an aid to prayer and self-examination, testing its counsel against Scripture (Philippians 2:5–8; Luke 9:23).

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