The Imitation of Christ

Overview

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis (~1380-1471) is the most widely read Christian devotional work after the Bible. Estimates of its circulation are difficult to fix, but it has been translated into more languages than any other book except the Bible and has been in continuous print since the invention of the printing press. It was the bedside book of saints, generals, philosophers, and ordinary believers for six centuries, and its influence on Christian piety — Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox — is incalculable. Ignatius of Loyola, John Wesley, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Thomas Merton all acknowledged deep debts to it. Its appeal crosses confessional lines because it addresses something more fundamental than doctrine: the daily, unglamorous, interior work of becoming a person whose life is shaped by Christ rather than by ego.

The work comprises four books: Book I addresses the spiritual life in general, urging withdrawal from worldly vanity and cultivation of the interior life. Book II treats the inner life more specifically, teaching humility, patience, and the acceptance of suffering. Book III, the longest and most intimate, takes the form of a dialogue between the soul and Christ, exploring consolation, desolation, self-knowledge, and the surrender of self-will. Book IV treats the Eucharist as the summit of the spiritual life. The tone throughout is sober, practical, and deeply honest about human weakness. Thomas does not describe mystical raptures or visionary experiences; he describes the grinding, repetitive work of learning to prefer God’s will to one’s own in the small decisions that make up an ordinary day.

Thomas a Kempis was an Augustinian canon at the monastery of Mount St. Agnes near Zwolle in the Netherlands. He spent nearly his entire life in this community, copying manuscripts, writing devotional works, and practising the spirituality of the Devotio Moderna — a reform movement that emphasised interior devotion, personal meditation on the life of Christ, and moral earnestness over speculative theology and liturgical formalism. The Imitation is the quintessential expression of this movement: profoundly practical, suspicious of intellectual ambition, and relentlessly focused on the transformation of the will. “What good does it do you to be able to give a learned discourse on the Trinity, if you lack humility and so displease the Trinity?”

Key Themes

• Interiority Over Exteriority — The spiritual life is an interior reality. External observances, intellectual accomplishments, and social reputation are at best neutral and at worst obstacles. “The more recollected a man is, and the more simple of heart he becomes, the easier he understands sublime things, for he receives the light of knowledge from above.”
• Humility as Foundation — Humility is not one virtue among others but the foundation of all virtue. Self-knowledge — honest awareness of one’s weakness, inconstancy, and tendency to self-deception — is the precondition for all spiritual growth. “Be not ashamed to serve others for the love of Jesus Christ.”
• Detachment from Worldly Things — Attachment to created things produces restlessness and suffering. Peace comes only from desiring God alone. This is not hatred of creation but a reordering of desire so that created goods are received with gratitude rather than grasped with anxiety.
• The Cross and Suffering — Suffering is not merely to be endured but embraced as the royal road to transformation. Thomas is uncompromising on this point: there is no path to Christ that does not pass through the cross. “If you carry the cross willingly, it will carry you.”
• Consolation and Desolation — The spiritual life alternates between periods of consolation (when God’s presence is felt and prayer is easy) and desolation (when God seems absent and prayer is dry). Both are gifts: consolation strengthens, desolation purifies. The mature soul learns not to cling to consolation or flee desolation.
• Critique of Curiosity and Learning — Thomas is deeply suspicious of intellectual pursuit for its own sake. Knowledge that does not produce love and humility is vanity. “I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it.” This stance has been both the Imitation’s strength (its focus on transformation) and its limitation (its potential anti-intellectualism).
• Following Christ Through Imitation — The title is the method. The spiritual life consists in progressively conforming one’s will, desires, and actions to the pattern of Christ’s life — not through heroic acts but through daily, hidden, faithful obedience.
• The Eucharist as Union — Book IV treats the Eucharist as the supreme encounter between the soul and Christ. For Thomas, the sacrament is not merely a memorial but a real participation in Christ’s self-offering, and the soul must prepare for it through interior purification.

Historical Context

The Devotio Moderna arose in the late 14th century in the Low Countries, founded by Geert Grote (1340-1384) and organised through the Brethren of the Common Life and the Windesheim Congregation of Augustinian canons. It was a response to the perceived decadence of late medieval religious life — the formalism, the careerism, the reduction of spirituality to external observance. The movement emphasised meditation on the life and Passion of Christ, careful self-examination, and the practice of virtue in daily life. It produced a distinctive literary genre, the rapiarium or spiritual notebook, in which monks copied passages from Scripture and the Fathers for personal meditation. The Imitation grew out of this practice; its short, aphoristic chapters read like entries in a spiritual journal, refined over decades.

Thomas a Kempis entered Mount St. Agnes in 1399 and remained there until his death in 1471 — over seventy years. The attribution of the Imitation to Thomas was disputed for centuries (Jean Gerson, Giovanni Gersen, and others were proposed as authors), but modern scholarship has established Thomas’s authorship with reasonable certainty. The text was composed over a period of years, probably between 1418 and 1427, and circulated in manuscript before being printed from the 1470s onward.

The Imitation occupies an interesting position in relation to the Rhineland mystical tradition. Thomas was influenced by the same broad current of late medieval piety, but he is markedly less speculative than Eckhart, less visionary than Suso, and less psychologically complex than Tauler. His genius is in reduction: he strips the spiritual life down to its essentials and presents them with a clarity that has proved universally accessible. The Imitation is not a work of high mysticism; it is a work of transformed daily life, and that is precisely why it has reached more readers than any mystical treatise ever written.

Who Should Read This

Read the Imitation of Christ if you are interested in the concrete, daily practice of spiritual transformation rather than in speculative theology or mystical experience. Thomas a Kempis is the great master of spiritual realism — his portrait of the interior life is honest about failure, boredom, self-deception, and the long stretches of dryness that characterise any sustained spiritual practice. If you have ever felt that mystical literature describes experiences too exalted to be practical, the Imitation is the corrective.

It is also invaluable for understanding the devotional tradition that shaped Western Christianity from the 15th century onward. The Imitation influenced the Jesuits (Ignatius carried it everywhere), the Pietists, the Methodists, and countless other renewal movements. To read it is to encounter the common root of traditions that later diverged.

Be aware that the Imitation has significant limitations. Its suspicion of intellectual life can feel anti-intellectual. Its emphasis on suffering can shade into masochism if read without discernment. Its monastic perspective assumes a degree of withdrawal from the world that is neither possible nor desirable for most people. And its theology, while orthodox, is deliberately narrow — Thomas says almost nothing about creation, beauty, embodiment, or the social dimensions of the gospel. These are not reasons to avoid the text; they are reasons to read it as part of a larger conversation rather than as a complete spiritual programme.

Connections

• desert-fathers — The ancestral tradition of ascetic withdrawal and interior combat that Thomas inherits
• regeneration — The Imitation’s vision of spiritual transformation as a progressive rebirth of the inner person
• shadow-integration — Thomas’s insistence on self-knowledge and confrontation with one’s own weakness as the basis of spiritual growth
• theologia-germanica — A contemporary German text with closely related themes of self-surrender and inner transformation
• revelations-of-divine-love — Julian of Norwich as a contemporary voice with a more expansive and affirming theology
• cloud-of-unknowing — A contemporary contemplative manual pitched at a more advanced level of practice
• meister-eckhart-sermons — The speculative mystical tradition that the Imitation deliberately avoids but implicitly responds to

Further Reading

Full text: Imitation of Christ