The Imitation of Christ

Thomas à Kempis spent the last seventy years of his life in a small monastery in the Low Countries, copying manuscripts by hand. When he wrote a book of his own, he did not open with a definition of faith. He opened with a saying of Christ's about walking: whoever follows me will not walk in darkness.

That choice sets the terms for everything after it. To imitate Christ, for Thomas, is not to agree with a set of ideas about him. It is to follow, the way a student follows a teacher's life and not only his lectures.

And the promise attached to following is light. Not more information, but deliverance from what Thomas calls blindness of heart, which is a different thing from ignorance. Plenty of well-informed people have it.

Thomas noticed something anyone who has sat through years of sermons will recognise. Many people hear the Gospel again and again, he says, and feel almost no longing for it. The words are familiar. They simply do not bite.

His diagnosis is not that these people need a better explanation. It is that they do not have the mind of Christ, and hearing alone never supplies it. So his remedy runs the opposite way from what we expect: whoever wants to understand these words fully must strive to conform his whole life to them.

We usually assume understanding comes first and living follows. Thomas turns that round. The life is how you understand, and a teaching you only listen to stays strangely flat, however many times you hear it.

Why, according to Thomas, do many people who hear the Gospel often still feel little longing for it?

• No learned teacher has explained it to them
• They have heard it too seldom to take it in
• They do not have the mind of Christ✓Correct answer
• Its words are too difficult for ordinary people

Thomas says they feel little longing "because they have not the mind of Christ". His remedy is not more hearing or better teachers but conforming one's whole life to that mind: the understanding arrives through the living.

The example Thomas reaches for is the Trinity, the most prestigious subject a scholar of his century could argue about. What good is deep discussion of it, he asks, if you lack humility and so displease the very God you are discussing?

Then he makes it personal: "I had rather feel contrition than be skilful in the definition thereof." Contrition is sorrow for wrongdoing that actually turns a person around. You can define it beautifully and never once feel it.

The modern version is not hard to find. Someone can talk about forgiveness with real insight while nursing a ten-year grudge. Thomas is unmoved by the talk. Not deep words but a good life is what, in his phrase, makes a person dear to God.

It would be easy to read this as a monk sneering at books. That would be odd, since Thomas spent his life copying them, and this very chapter leans on three passages of Scripture in five short paragraphs.

What he actually does is rank. Suppose you knew the whole Bible and all the sayings of the philosophers, he writes. What would it profit you without the love and grace of God? Knowledge is not thrown out. It is put below love: worth having when it serves love, empty when it stands in for it.

That is a ranking a reader can still live by. Read as much as you like. Just notice the moment the reading has quietly become a substitute for the thing it describes.

Thomas says that even knowing the whole Bible would profit a person nothing without the love and grace of God.

True✓Correct answer

True, and he means it flatly. It sounds extreme from a man who copied Bibles for a living, which is the point: he ranks knowledge below love rather than discarding it.