Justified True Belief

(●) A monk who belonged to one small house on a hill for seventy-two years wrote The Imitation of Christ, the most widely read Christian book after the Bible. + Somewhere around 1420, in a monastery on a low rise outside the Dutch town of Zwolle, a middle-aged canon sat down to write out some practical counsel for the teenagers in his care. A canon of this sort is a priest under vows who lives alongside other priests, sharing their table and their hours of prayer. He was not writing a book. He was doing what a novice master does, the brother whose job is to train the newcomers: short chapters, plain sentences, one thought at a time, meant to be read slowly and then lived rather than discussed. He put no name on it. Those booklets became The Imitation of Christ. By one count it had gone through 745 separate printed editions before the year 1650, and by that date no book except the Bible had been carried into more languages. Ignatius of Loyola told the men making his Spiritual Exercises, the weeks-long course of directed prayer and self-examination he wrote for them, to read it. Thomas More kept it near. John Wesley met it as a young man at Oxford and said the religion of the heart appeared to him in a stronger light than ever it had before, and then printed his own edition of it. Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists and Orthodox have all copied it out, argued about it, and gone on reading it. The man who wrote it is one of the least eventful figures in church history, and that turns out to be the interesting part. He rose no higher than subprior, the second in charge of a house of a few dozen men, and he fought nobody, founded nothing, and travelled almost nowhere apart from the three years a quarrel over a bishopric drove his community off the hill. A portrait long kept at Geertruidenberg carries a motto that may well be his own, half Latin and half Dutch: everywhere I have sought rest, and found it nowhere save in little nooks with little books.

(●) c. 1380 AD: Born Thomas Hemerken, a craftsman’s son, in the small Rhineland town of Kempen. + The family name was Hemerken, which in the local speech meant "little hammer," and Latin writers duly turned it into Malleolus. His father Johann worked with his hands; his mother Gertrud is remembered as keeping a school for the town’s small children. Kempen sat in the territory of the archbishop of Cologne, a walled market town of no importance to anyone outside it. The year of his birth is not recorded. Sources give 1379 or 1380, and 1380 has become the convention, so every age given for him afterwards is an approximation of an approximation. What the records do preserve is that there were at least two sons, and that the elder, John, was about fourteen years ahead of Thomas. That gap would decide most of what happened to the younger brother, because John left home first, and Thomas followed him. The name the world knows him by is simply the place: Thomas of Kempen, Thomas à Kempis. He signed himself that way, and after Deventer he never lived within a hundred miles of the town again.

(●) 1392 AD: At thirteen he set out for the schools of Deventer, and a movement called the Modern Devotion took him in. + He arrived expecting to find his brother and did not. John had left six years earlier with five companions to found a new house of canons at Windesheim, and the boy had to go on another fifteen miles to find him. John received him kindly, and sent him back to Deventer with a letter of introduction to a priest named Florens Radewijns. Radewijns was the practical head of the Brethren of the Common Life, and what he ran was unlike anything else in Europe. The Brethren took no monastic vows. They lived together in ordinary houses, kept poverty, chastity and obedience as far as their state allowed, refused to beg, and earned their bread by copying books and teaching children. Everything they earned went into one purse. The movement behind them was called the devotio moderna, the Modern Devotion: a revival that had begun in the preaching of a Deventer deacon named Geert Groote, who died in 1384, and whose whole complaint against the church of his day was that religion had become something people discussed. Groote wanted it lived, by ordinary people, starting on Monday. His early biographers say that Radewijns placed the boy in the care of a devout woman of the town, presented him to the rector of the school, and paid his first fees out of his own pocket, and that the schoolmaster sent the money back when he learned where it had come from. Thomas stayed seven years, much of it living in Radewijns’ own house, and he came out of those years with two things: the conviction that a holy life beats a clever one, and a beautiful hand for copying manuscripts.

(●) 1399 AD: He climbed the hill to Mount St Agnes, and never really came down again. + In the autumn of 1399, with Radewijns’ blessing, Thomas presented himself at a new priory on the Agnietenberg, the hill of St Agnes, just outside Zwolle. It belonged to the Windesheim congregation of canons regular, and the difference between them and the Brethren matters. Canons regular are priests who live in community under a rule, in this case the rule of St Augustine: vows, a common table, and the daily round of prayer. The Brethren were a halfway house for people who wanted that life without the vows; Windesheim was the vowed version, founded so that Brethren who wanted to go further would have somewhere to go. The prior was his brother John. The priory was one year old and had almost nothing: no cloister finished, no garden, no benefactors, no money. Thomas waited a long time for every step a young man in his position would ordinarily take on schedule. He was not clothed as a novice until 1406, seven years after he arrived, and to be clothed is simply to be handed the habit and received into the community as a man in training. He was not ordained a priest until 1413. Later writers who wanted the Imitation to belong to a grander name seized on those two dates and read them as evidence that Thomas was slow, a dull man whose own house saw no reason to hurry him along. Poverty is the better explanation, and the dates track the building work. The cloister was finished in 1406 and the church was consecrated in 1412, and the community simply could not receive and ordain men faster than it could house them. He was elected subprior twice, and made procurator, the officer who handles the money, once. An early biographer says the brethren gave him the accounts because he loved the poor. They took them back after a while, having presumably discovered that a love of the poor and a head for bookkeeping are not the same gift.

(●) c. 1418–1427 AD: Writing counsel for the novices in his charge, he filled four small booklets that the world would read as one book. + Part of the subprior’s job was to form the young men entering the house, and most of what Thomas wrote grew out of that duty. The four booklets came out of it too. The first offers plain counsels for a beginner; the second turns inward, to the life of the heart; the third, much the longest, is a conversation between Christ and the soul, with the two voices trading paragraphs; the fourth is on the Lord’s Supper. They circulated separately at first, anonymously, from about 1418, and readers put them together in different orders for years before the arrangement settled. In 1441 Thomas finished copying out a codex in his own hand, containing the four books and nine shorter treatises, and signed and dated it at the end. That volume still exists in the Royal Library in Brussels. An autograph, a manuscript written by the author himself, is the strongest evidence a medieval book can offer about who wrote it, and this one has been photographed, printed in facsimile, and studied line by line. Copying was not a chore he escaped once he became an author. He wrote out the whole Bible by hand, four times over by the usual reckoning, and one of those copies survives at Darmstadt in five volumes. He also copied a missal for the community, the volume that holds everything a priest says and reads at the altar through the year, and treatise after treatise from the fathers, Bernard of Clairvaux above all. A man who has copied out the entire Bible with a quill has read it in a way that no reader with a printed copy quite manages, and it shows: the Imitation is stitched through with Scripture on almost every page.

(●) 1429 AD: A quarrel over a bishopric emptied the monastery, and the exile ended at his dying brother’s bedside. + The see of Utrecht fell vacant. A see is a bishop’s seat, meaning both his office and the stretch of country it governs, and in the fifteenth century an empty one was as much a political prize as a spiritual charge. The pope and the local powers backed different candidates, and Pope Martin V laid the whole territory under an interdict. An interdict is a penalty that falls on a place rather than a person: the public sacraments stop, the churches fall silent, and everyone in the district feels it whether or not they had any part in the quarrel. The Windesheim canons kept it, which is to say they obeyed it and let their own church go quiet, and that made them thoroughly unpopular with their neighbours. In 1429 the community of Mount St Agnes left the hill rather than break with Rome. They spent the years of exile at Lunenkerk in Friesland, in a canonry, which is a house of canons living the same rule they lived, and they reformed it and brought it into their own congregation before they came home in 1432. More than a year of that stretch Thomas spent somewhere else entirely. His brother John, now at the convent of Bethany near Arnhem, was failing, and Thomas was sent to nurse him. He stayed until John died in November 1432. It is the one glimpse the records give of him doing something for a single named person, and it is worth pausing on: the man whose book counsels the reader to sit still in a corner spent the better part of two years in a sickroom, wiping a face and holding a hand, because it was his brother. He was elected subprior again in 1448 and served until age released him. He was still writing the priory’s chronicle within months of his death, more than seventy years after he first walked up the hill.

(●) 1471 AD: He died at about ninety-one, in the very years his book first came off a printing press. + He died at Mount St Agnes on 25 July 1471. The house kept its own record: the brother who took up the chronicle after him wrote that Thomas died on the feast of St James the Greater, after Compline, in the ninety-second year of his age, and he was careful to note the spot in the eastern cloister where they buried him. Compline is the last service of the day, sung before the community falls silent for the night, so he died after the house had finished praying; and a man in the ninety-second year of his age is ninety-one. Later reference books have wandered off that entry, one printing 1 May and another 8 August, but the men who buried him had no reason to get the day wrong. The timing is one of those coincidences that would look invented in a novel. The first printed edition of the Imitation of Christ came from a press at Augsburg, dated by cataloguers to somewhere between 1471 and 1473. The presses were less than twenty years old. A book written by hand for a few dozen novices on a Dutch hillside met the machine that would carry it to every country in Europe at almost the exact moment its author was laid in the ground, and there is no evidence he ever knew. The priory was destroyed after the Reformation. His remains were eventually moved into Zwolle and now rest in a shrine there under an inscription that says the honour is paid to him rather than to his memory, since his name outlasts any monument. Maximilian Henry, Prince-Bishop of Cologne, began collecting the papers for his beatification, the first formal step on the road to being declared a saint, and died in 1688 before finishing. Nothing further was ever done, so the most read devotional writer in Christian history has never been canonised.

What He Taught

(T1) Christ is to be copied, not merely discussed, and a good life pleases God more than a clever explanation of him. + Most of us have met the sort of person Thomas is writing against. He can lay out the doctrine of the Trinity on a whiteboard, correct your terminology, and name the heresy you have just slipped into, and he is unbearable to live with. His wife is exhausted. His children avoid him. Thomas opens his first chapter by asking, in effect, what exactly all that learning has done for him. The word he uses for the alternative is one worth learning, because it runs through everything he wrote. The old translations render it compunction, and it means the sharp inward sorrow a person feels when he sees his own sin clearly, the sting that makes a man go and put something right rather than go and look something up. Thomas says flatly that he would rather feel that sting than be able to define it. None of this is an attack on study, and he says so a few pages later. It is an attack on study that has come loose from obedience. The New Testament makes the same cut in fewer words: "This knowledge puffs up, but love builds up" (1 Corinthians 8:1), and "be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves" (James 1:22). What is new in Thomas is not the principle but the relentlessness: he will not let the reader past a single chapter without asking whether the last one changed anything.

(Q) "For verily it is not deep words that make a man holy and upright; it is a good life which maketh a man dear to God. I had rather feel contrition than be skilful in the definition thereof." + Source: Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ I.1 (Benham translation). The sentence just before it asks what profit there is in deep discussion of the Holy Trinity if a man lacks humility and so displeases the Trinity he is discussing. Benham’s "contrition" translates the Latin compunctio, the word the older English versions keep as "compunction" (T1).

(T2) A humble knowledge of yourself is a surer road to God than a deep search after learning. + Think of the colleague who can tell you the weaknesses of everyone in the office, accurately, in order, and has never once noticed his own. He is not stupid. He has simply pointed the whole of his considerable attention outward, and the one subject he was best placed to study is the one he has never opened. Thomas turns that around. The knowledge he wants first is not knowledge of God, or of doctrine, or of other people, but of the self, and he wants it because he thinks it is the only knowledge that reliably produces humility. A man who has taken an honest look at what he is actually like stops needing to be the most impressive person in the room, and once that need is gone a great deal becomes possible that was not possible before. He is careful not to overshoot, and the qualification he adds matters, because it is the sentence critics of the Imitation most often forget he wrote. Learning is not to be blamed. Nothing good is to be despised. His point is one of order, not of contempt: a good conscience and a holy life are worth more than all of it, and where a man pursues knowledge instead of good living, he goes astray and bears little fruit. A few lines further on he carries that order all the way to the end of the world, and says that at the Day of Judgment we will be asked not what we have read but what we have done, and not how well we have spoken but how holily we have lived. It has probably made more theologians uncomfortable than any other sentence in the book.

(Q) "A lowly knowledge of thyself is a surer way to God than the deep searching of man’s learning. Not that learning is to be blamed, nor the taking account of anything that is good; but a good conscience and a holy life is better than all." + Source: Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ I.3 (Benham translation). A few lines further on in the same chapter he presses it home: "Of a surety, at the Day of Judgment it will be demanded of us, not what we have read, but what we have done; not how well we have spoken, but how holily we have lived." Then he asks where all the famous masters and teachers are now, and answers that others have taken their places and hardly think of them (T2).

(T3) The kingdom of God is an inward country, and a man reaches it by turning, not by travelling. + A man takes a new job in a new city because the old one was making him miserable, and within eight months he is miserable in the new one, for reasons that are word for word the reasons he gave before. Everyone has watched this happen, usually to themselves. The trouble packed itself in the suitcase. Thomas opens his second book with the text his Latin Bible gave him, that the kingdom of God is within you, and builds everything on it. Christ, he says, does not need to be fetched from anywhere. He comes to the man who prepares a room for him inside, and he brings his own peace with him, which is a peace that circumstances did not supply and therefore cannot remove. The practical counsel that follows is unglamorous: stop expecting so much from people, who change and pass away, and stop being surprised when they disappoint you. Two things are worth carrying with a modern reader down that road. One of them concerns the text he was reading. His Latin read intra vos, "within you," at Luke 17:21; the ESV renders the same words "the kingdom of God is in the midst of you," which is if anything the harder saying, since Jesus is telling the Pharisees that the kingdom is standing in front of them. The other concerns the danger, which is real enough. Turning inward is also the road that ends, in our own day, at the discovery of the self, and that is emphatically not where Thomas is going. The room is prepared for a guest. Everything good that happens in it happens because Christ comes, and the soul’s work is to make space and wait.

(Q) "Learn to despise outward things and to give thyself to things inward, and thou shalt see the kingdom of God come within thee." + Source: Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ II.1 (Benham translation). The chapter is headed "Of the inward life" and opens by quoting Luke 17:21. A few lines later Thomas tells the reader to prepare his heart as for a bridegroom, "for so He saith, if any man loveth me he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him," which is John 14:23 (T3).

(T4) Many want the kingdom of Jesus and few will carry his cross. + A team wins, and the stands are full and the shirts sell out. The team loses eleven straight, and the same stands have gaps in them you could park a bus in. Nobody thinks this is wicked. It is just what crowds are, and Thomas’ point is that most religious enthusiasm is exactly that sort of crowd, including his own and including his reader’s. The chapter that says so is a short, hard drumbeat of contrasts: many companions at his table, few at his fasting; many who marvel at the miracles, few who will follow him into the shame of the cross; many who bless God warmly for as long as the comforts keep arriving. Then he sharpens it past the point of comfort by asking whether people who serve God only when it feels good are not, strictly speaking, mercenaries, hired hands working for the wages of consolation. The test he proposes is the withdrawal of feeling. When God hides himself and gives no sweetness at all, what is left? If nothing is left, then what was there was never love of God; it was love of what God was handing out. Thomas is not inventing this. It is Job’s question and the Lord’s own condition of discipleship: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23). What he adds is the honesty to say out loud how few of us pass.

(Q) "Jesus hath many lovers of His heavenly kingdom, but few bearers of His Cross. He hath many seekers of comfort, but few of tribulation. He findeth many companions of His table, but few of His fasting." + Source: Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ II.11 (Benham translation). The chapter is headed "Of the fewness of those who love the Cross of Jesus," and the opening drumbeat runs on for several more pairs before Thomas turns to what happens when Jesus withdraws his consolations and the fair-weather followers scatter (T4).

(T5) Love makes a heavy burden light, and nothing else does. + Sit up three nights running with a stranger’s child and you will be counting the hours. Sit up three nights with your own and the hours do not disappear, but they weigh differently, and the difference is not in the child, the chair, or the clock. Anyone who has nursed someone they love knows the phenomenon exactly, and it is the whole of what Thomas means. The third book is a dialogue: Christ speaks, and the soul answers, chapter by chapter. The passage on love comes as the soul’s own outpouring, and it is the warmest writing in the book, from a man usually described as austere. Love bears the burden and makes it no burden. Love makes bitter things taste sweet. Love flies, runs, and is glad. Love often keeps no measure at all but breaks out past every measure, attempts more than it is able, and pleads no impossibility, because it reckons anything lawful to be possible. That last clause is the one to notice, because it explains why the book has been read for six hundred years by people with no interest in monasteries. Thomas is not describing a technique for making duty tolerable. He is saying that love changes what a person is capable of, and that the reason it can do this is that love was born of God and cannot come to rest anywhere short of God. The strain of the Christian life, on this account, is very largely the strain of doing it without loving.

(Q) "Love is a great thing, a good above all others, which alone maketh every heavy burden light, and equaliseth every inequality. For it beareth the burden and maketh it no burden, it maketh every bitter thing to be sweet and of good taste." + Source: Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ III.5 (Benham translation). The chapter is headed "Of the wonderful power of the Divine love." A few lines later comes the summary the passage is remembered for: "Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing loftier, nothing broader, nothing pleasanter, nothing fuller or better in heaven nor on earth, for love was born of God and cannot rest save in God above all created things" (T5).

(Q) "And let not the weight of the writer be a stumbling-block to thee, whether he be of little or much learning, but let the love of the pure Truth draw thee to read. Ask not, who hath said this or that, but look to what he says." + Source: Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ I.5 (Benham translation). He wrote it about the reading of Scripture, in a chapter arguing that a reader should come for truth rather than for clever phrasing. It became, without his intending anything of the kind, the standing instruction for how his own book would be received: it went out with no name on it, and for two hundred years readers who had no idea who wrote it did exactly what this sentence told them to do.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The book went out with no name on it, and the church spent centuries arguing about who wrote it. + Anonymity was not modesty on Thomas’ part so much as ordinary practice: devotional pieces circulated in and out of religious houses as common property, copied by whoever wanted them. So the booklets went out from about 1418 and were promptly credited to whichever great name a given scribe found plausible. Bernard of Clairvaux was suggested, and Bonaventure, and Pope Innocent III, and Jean Gerson the chancellor of Paris, and at one point Thomas’ own brother John. Then in 1441 Thomas signed and dated a manuscript of the whole thing in his own hand, and for two hundred years the question was more or less closed. It reopened in the seventeenth century, spectacularly. French and Italian scholars pressed the case for Gerson, or for an Italian Benedictine abbot of Vercelli named Giovanni Gersen, and the quarrel ran on for generations with real heat on both sides. An English candidate, Walter Hilton of Thurgarton, was floated and dropped. The evidence has settled the matter about as well as such matters can be settled. No manuscript names Gersen during his supposed lifetime or for thirty years after; his very existence is hard to document. Against that stand contemporaries in Thomas’ own order who name him, manuscripts from his lifetime that carry his name, the signed autograph in Brussels, and the internal evidence: the same Dutch turns of phrase, the same rhythmic punctuation, the same working vocabulary of the Modern Devotion, all recurring in works nobody disputes are his. Modern scholarship treats the authorship as effectively settled.

(†) It crossed the Reformation line, and men who agreed on nothing else read the same chapters. + Very few Christian books have a record like this one, and the pattern is odd enough to be taken case by case. - England, before the break with Rome. William Atkynson put Books I to III into English in 1503, and Book IV was added the next year in a version made from the French by Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of King Henry VII. A grandmother of the Tudor dynasty translating a Dutch monk is not what most people picture when they think of late medieval England. - The Catholic Reformation. Ignatius of Loyola wrote the Imitation into the Spiritual Exercises themselves: "For the Second Week and so on, it is very helpful to read at intervals in the books of the Imitation of Christ, or of the Gospels, and of lives of Saints," the second of the two notes he set down after the exercise on the Kingdom of Christ (Mullan translation). Thomas More read it. Teresa of Ávila and Francis de Sales stand in the same line of use. - The Evangelical revival. John Wesley recorded in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection that in 1726 he met with Kempis’ Christian’s Pattern: "The nature and extent of inward religion, the religion of the heart, now appeared to me in a stronger light than ever it had done before." He went further than reading it: his own abridged edition, published in 1735, was among the first books he ever put into print, and he revised it more than once across his life. Why should a book written by a vowed canon for vowed novices travel like that? Because of what it leaves out. It argues no disputed question. It settles nothing about papal authority, or the number of the sacraments, or how a sinner is justified. It talks about pride, self-deception, the appetite for approval, the wish to be thought wise, the fear of being overlooked, and the difficulty of loving God when he gives you nothing back, and on those subjects a Jesuit and a Methodist turn out to have precisely the same problems.

(†) The road he maps runs away from other people, and a reader who follows it as written will go astray. + A book this loved earns an honest accounting, which means saying both what it leaves out and where its counsel, taken exactly as written, would lead a reader wrong. - Company treated as a leak. "As oft as I have gone among men, so oft have I returned less a man," he quotes with approval, and adds that the greatest saints avoided the company of men as far as they could and chose to live in secret with God (I.20). As a description of how chatter erodes attention, that is shrewd. As a rule of life it will not stand beside a Lord who was accused of eating with the wrong people, or beside his prayer for his disciples: "I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one" (John 17:15). - Creation treated as a distraction. The counsel to despise outward things (T3) is aimed at grasping, and Thomas means the grasping rather than the things. But he rarely says the other half out loud, and a reader can finish the book without ever meeting it: "everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving" (1 Timothy 4:4). Food, work, marriage and friendship are not obstacles that a serious Christian tolerates. They are gifts, and gratitude for them is itself obedience. - The cloister as the norm. The book was written for men who had taken vows, and its picture of a serious Christian life keeps that shape: silence, enclosure, a cell, no dependents. A married reader with three children and a job cannot follow much of it literally, and the book never tells him what the same obedience looks like where he actually stands. - Almost nothing about the neighbour. For all its severity about self-love, the Imitation has strikingly little to say about serving anyone, and nothing at all about carrying the gospel to those who have not heard it. Set beside "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8), it is very strong on the third clause and quiet about the first two. Two things are worth holding alongside that ledger. He wrote for a particular audience and never claimed otherwise, and the wisest of his readers have always read him as a corrective rather than a complete rule. And he did not himself live the caricature: the same man spent the better part of two years nursing his dying brother, kept the accounts because his brethren thought he loved the poor, and wrote a treatise on consoling the poor and the sick. The counsel is narrower than the life.