The Imitation of Christ

It is four short books of counsel on the inner life, written in the 1420s for young monks at Mount St Agnes and circulated at first without a name on it. After the Bible it became the most widely read Christian book ever written. The style is closer to a notebook than a treatise — brief chapters, numbered paragraphs, and sentences plain enough to carry around for a day.

Its one theme is the gap between knowing about God and actually following him. One line holds the whole book: "I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it." Thomas à Kempis is suspicious of learning pursued for its own sake, and turns the reader again and again away from opinion and ambition toward humility, obedience, silence, and the small duties of an ordinary day.

It came out of the Devotio Moderna, a movement of communities in the Low Countries who believed the intellectual religion of the universities had lost its way and set about recovering a plain, practical devotion instead. That setting explains the book's distrust of cleverness and its preoccupation with obedience, silence, and faithfulness in small things — devotion meant to be practised, not merely discussed.

Thomas à Kempis spent some seventy years in a single house of the Devotio Moderna, copying manuscripts. His life was almost entirely hidden and uneventful by worldly measure, which is fitting for a book that prizes obscurity and inwardness over reputation. That long, quiet fidelity in one place is itself an argument for the way of life the book commends.

Book III turns from counsel into a dialogue in which Christ speaks and the disciple answers. The change of form draws the reader from reading about the inner life into something nearer to prayer, as the soul is addressed directly and given words to reply. It is the longest of the four books and, for many readers, the heart of the work.

Book IV leaves general counsel behind and becomes a sustained meditation on the sacrament of the Lord's Table, again in a dialogue between Christ and the soul. Readers who come only for the aphorisms of the first book sometimes stop before it; those who go on find that the earlier counsel was pointed toward it all along, as preparation for that meeting.

It has been read by more people, and more different kinds of people, than almost any Christian book outside the Bible — by monks and by soldiers, by John Wesley, and by a great many who were not sure they believed any of it. Its plainness lets it cross the lines of era, station and even conviction that stop most devotional books.

Not straight through. It was assembled as material for meditation, a chapter at a time, and it goes flat when hurried. The reward comes from taking a short chapter slowly and letting a single sentence stay with you through the day — the pace the book was built for, and the reason its lines still read as though written this morning.