The Imitation of Christ

Four short books of counsel on the inner life, written in a style closer to a notebook than a treatise: brief chapters, numbered paragraphs, sentences you can carry around for a day. Its single subject is the gap between knowing about God and following him — “I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it” is the whole book in a line.

It came out of the Devotio Moderna, a movement of communities in the Low Countries who thought the intellectual religion of the universities had lost its way and set about recovering a plain, practical devotion instead. That setting explains its suspicion of learning for its own sake, and its preoccupation with obedience, silence and small duties. Thomas à Kempis spent some seventy years in one house of the movement, copying manuscripts.

The fourth book is often a surprise: it leaves counsel behind and becomes a sustained meditation on the sacrament, in a dialogue between Christ and the soul. Readers who come for the aphorisms of book one sometimes stop before it; readers who go on find that the earlier counsel was pointed at it all along.

It has been read by more people, and more different kinds of people, than almost any Christian book outside the Bible — by monks, by soldiers, by Wesley, and by a good many who were not sure they believed any of it. It is also not a book to read straight through: it was assembled as material for meditation, a chapter at a time, and it goes flat when hurried.