TRINITY · 24 JULY Canon Regular & Confessor
Thomas à Kempis
Canon Regular & Confessor · Author of the Imitation of Christ · c. 1380–1471
à Kempis — ah KEM-pis · Imitatio Christi — ih-mih-TAH-tee-oh KRIS-tee · Devotio Moderna — deh-VOH-tee-oh moh-DER-na · Zwolle — ZVOL-eh · Geert Groote — GAIRT GROH-teh
O God, who by thy servant Thomas didst gather up the wisdom of the ages into a book that every soul might carry; Grant that we may seek thee not in the loftiness of speculation but in the humility of daily following, knowing that it is better to know thee than to know all things else; through Jesus Christ our Lord, whom to follow is more than all philosophy.
What is the most widely read Christian book after the Bible? By any measure — the number of translations, the number of editions, the breadth of readers across centuries and confessions — it is the Imitatio Christi (ih-mih-TAH-tee-oh KRIS-tee), the Imitation of Christ, and its author was a Canon Regular of the Augustinian congregation of Windesheim in the Netherlands, a man of no particular distinction in the eyes of the world, who spent seventy years in one monastery at Zwolle (ZVOL-eh) and died in 1471 at the age of ninety-one without ever leaving it. Thomas à Kempis (ah KEM-pis) is the last figure of the medieval series and in one sense the most representative: not the dazzling intellectual like Aquinas, not the revolutionary like Francis, not the mystic of extraordinary experience like Rolle, but the quiet man who gathered everything the tradition had built and distilled it into a book short enough to carry in one hand, simple enough to be read by anyone who could read at all, and profound enough to have changed more lives than almost any other piece of Christian writing in history. John Wesley read it. Thomas More read it. Thomas Becket supposedly carried it. The Imitation is what the whole medieval tradition looks like when it has been reduced to its simplest, purest, most portable form.
He was formed by the Devotio Moderna (deh-VOH-tee-oh moh-DER-na) — the Modern Devotion — a lay and clerical renewal movement founded by Geert Groote (GAIRT GROH-teh) in the Netherlands in the late fourteenth century, which emphasised personal interiority, vernacular piety, the reading of scripture and the Fathers in translation, and the daily examination of conscience. The Brethren of the Common Life, the lay wing of the movement, ran schools throughout the Low Countries and northern Germany — Erasmus was educated in one — and the Windesheim congregation of Augustinian canons was its monastic wing. Thomas entered the monastery at Mount St Agnes near Zwolle as a young man and remained there until he died, copying manuscripts, writing devotional works, directing novices, and living the Devotio Moderna’s programme of interior renewal with a completeness that few of his contemporaries achieved. He copied the entire Bible four times by hand. The discipline of the copying hand was itself a form of prayer.
The Imitation is organised in four books: on the spiritual life, on interior conversation, on interior consolation, and on the sacrament of the altar. Its tone throughout is intimate, urgent, and unsentimental — the voice of a man who has observed himself and his fellow monks for decades and has no illusions about the gap between what spiritual people say and what they do. What doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility? The opening sentences strike immediately at the disease of the educated religious: the preference for talking about God over actually following him. What is striking about the Imitation in the context of this archive is how much it assumes and how little it explains: it does not argue for the faith but speaks from entirely within it, taking for granted everything that Ignatius and Athanasius and Aquinas had established, and asking simply: given all this, how do we actually live? It is the question that comes after all the theology has been done, and Thomas’s answer is the same in every chapter: follow Christ, examine yourself, seek God in the interior silence, and do not be deceived by the noise of your own learning. He is the smallest of all the figures in the archive, and the most necessary. Without him the whole series might be mistaken for an intellectual project. He reminds us that it is a way of life.
His feast on 24 July falls deep in Trinity-tide, in the long green weeks of ordinary faithfulness — which is the only season in which the Imitation can be properly read, because it is a book for exactly those weeks. Not for the drama of Holy Week or the exaltation of Easter, not for the penitential urgency of Lent or the expectant watching of Advent, but for the ordinary day when nothing remarkable is happening and the soul must simply attend to God without the assistance of liturgical drama. Thomas à Kempis is the patron of the unremarkable Tuesday, the uneventful morning, the prayer that feels like nothing and is offered anyway. He lived ninety-one years in one monastery and wrote the most enduring devotional book in the Christian tradition. The tradition in which we live, the archive we have been building, the Lauds we prayed this morning — it all comes down, finally, to this: the soul before God, the will bent toward Christ, the ordinary day made holy by the quality of attention brought to it. Thomas à Kempis is the last word of the medieval series, and the first word of every day.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant Thomas à Kempis didst gather the wisdom of the ages into a book that the simplest soul might carry and the wisest find inexhaustible; Grant that we may not mistake learning for following, or knowledge for love, but may seek thee in the hidden life of daily obedience, until the day when all our seeking ends in thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.