Thomas à Kempis

Thomas Hemerken was born in 1379 or 1380 in Kempen, near the Rhine north of Cologne, from which he takes his name. As a boy he went to Deventer, in the Netherlands, where he came under the influence of the Brothers of the Common Life, the community of the Devotio Moderna, the “modern devotion” that Geert Groote had begun there a generation before.

He entered the house of Augustinian canons at Mount St. Agnes, near Zwolle, in the diocese of Utrecht, and spent some seventy years there, as a priest, a copyist of manuscripts and a writer of devotional works, sermons and chronicles of the community. He died there in 1471.

The Imitation of Christ circulated in Latin in the fifteenth century, first as four separate treatises, and was soon translated into the languages of Europe. Its authorship has long been debated: manuscripts name, among others, Bernard of Clairvaux and Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris. Most scholars now hold that Thomas is its author, or at least its compiler.

The four books move from the outward life to the inward. The first gives counsels for the spiritual life, the second concerns the inner life, the third, the longest, is a dialogue between Christ and the disciple on inward consolation, and the fourth is a devotion to the sacrament of the altar. Its short chapters, plain sentences and frequent echoes of scripture made it a book for daily reading, in religious houses and outside them, and it has been printed in more editions and languages than almost any other Christian book.