By James Stalker
No religious book perhaps, outside the canon of Scripture, has attained so wide a diffusion in the Christian Church as the De Imitatione Christi of Thomas a Kempis. The only other book, which may possibly compete with it in popularity, is the Pilgrim's Progress. But the hold on Christendom of the older work is probably more extensive than even that of Bunyan's masterpiece; for, whilst the picture of Giant Pope must be an obstacle to the access of the Pilgrim to sensitive Catholics, the Imitation is as much read among Protestants as in the Church which claims it as its own, and in the Greek Church it is as popular as in either of the communions of the West.
I.
To Protestants it has a peculiar interest from the very fact that it was not written by the pen of a Protestant. It belongs to the beginning of the fifteenth century, and its author flourished a hundred years before Luther. It thus belongs to the age which must be accounted the darkest in the whole history of Christianity, when the light of God was well-nigh extinguished by the errors of men. Protestants, indeed, hardly think of the century before the Reformation as a time when Christianity existed at all; so vast is the accumulation of corruption's which meets the eye, that the religion of Christ almost seems to have disappeared. But this single book corrects this impression. The Imitation of Christ is a voice rising out of the darkness to remind us that the Church of Christ never ceased to exist, but that God had His witnesses and Christ His lovers even in the era of deepest decay.
The Imitation itself, indeed, bears marks of the evil time in which it arose. There are elements of superstition in it which the modern mind rejects. But these relics of a corrupt age only make the profoundly Christian tone of the whole the more surprising. It throbs throughout with a devotion to Christ which will find its way to the hearts of Christians in every age:
0 my beloved Spouse Christ Jesus, most pure Lover,
Ruler of all creation, who will give me the wings
of true liberty to fly and repose in Thee?
O Jesus, Brightness of the eternal glory, Comfort of the pilgrim soul,
with Thee are my lips without a voice, and my very silence speaks to Thee.
How long delays my Lord His coming?
Let Him come to me, His poor servant, and make me glad.
Come, come, for without Thee there will be no glad day nor hour;
for Thou art my gladness, and without Thee my table is unspread.
Let others seek, instead of Thee, whatever else they please;
nothing else pleases me, or shall please me,
but Thou, my God, my Hope, my Eternal Salvation.
The book overflows with love to the Saviour expressed in this impassioned strain; and one very remarkable thing is that, on the whole, the soul goes straight to Christ without halting at those means of grace which were at that time so often substituted for the Saviour or feeling any need of the intercession of the Virgin or the saints, on which so much stress is laid in Catholic books of devotion. This is the healthiest feature of the whole production and must be welcome to every one who wishes to believe that even in that age, when the spirit was buried beneath the forms of worship, there were many souls that reached up through all obstacles to contact with the living Saviour.
II.
Obscure, as is the external history of the author of the Imitation* the reader comes to be on the most intimate terms with him. He is a mere shadow to the scientific historian; but to the devout student his personality is most distinct; his accent is separate and easily detected; and, notwithstanding the flight and passion of his devotion, there is in him something homely and kindly that wins our affection. Above all, we feel, as we open the book that we are entering into communion with one who has found the secret of life. Here is one who, after weary wanderings, such as we perhaps are still entangled in, and many conflicts, such as we may still be waging, has attained the peace of God; and he takes us aside and leads us by the hand to view the land of rest. This is the enduring charm of the book. We all carry in our hearts a secret belief that somewhere in the world there exists a paradise unvexed with the cares by which we are pursued and watered by the river of God; and whenever one appears whose air assures us that he has lived in that Eden and drunk of that river, we cannot help welcoming him and listening to his message.
But where is this happy land? It is not far away. It is in ourselves: " The kingdom of God is within you." Men seek happiness out of themselves-in riches or learning or fame, in friendships and family connections, in talking about others and hearing news. They roam the world in search of adventures; they descend to the bottom of the sea and tear out the bowels of the earth in pursuit of wealth; they are driven forth by turbulent passions in search of excitement and novelty; they fight with one another, because every one, dissatisfied himself, believes that his brother is making away with his share. But all the time they are stumbling over their happiness, which lies among their feet; they fly to the ends of the earth in search of it, and lo it is at home.
Whensoever a man desires anything inordinately, he is presently disquieted within himself. The proud and covetous are never at rest. The poor and humble in spirit live in abundance of peace. We might have much peace, if we would not busy ourselves with the sayings and doings of others, and with things which are no concern of ours. How can he remain long in peace who entangles himself with the cares of others; who seeks occasions of going abroad, and is little or seldom inwardly recollected? First keep thyself in peace, and then thou wilt be able to bring others to peace. A good peaceable man turns all things to good. Such an one is conqueror of himself, and lord of the world, a friend of Christ, and an heir of heaven.
These counsels sound like many that the world has heard from others of its teachers. They sound like the doctrines of the Stoic philosophers, which ended in making self an arrogant little god; they sound like the teaching of some in modern times who, looking on the raising of " the pyramid of their own being" as the chief end of existence, have sacrificed to culture the rights of others and the most sacred obligations of morality. The doctrine that the interior man is the supreme object of care may turn into a doctrine of arrogant selfishness. But a Kempis has guarded well against this perversion. He has no maxims more pungent than those directed against the undue exaltation of self. When he advises us to turn away from outward things to seek the true wealth and happiness within it is not in ourselves we are to find it, though it is within ourselves. We have to make an empty space within, that it may be filled with God, who is the only true satisfaction of the soul:
Know that the love of thyself doth hurt thee more than anything else in the world.
On this defect, that a man inordinately loves himself,
hangs almost all in thee that thou hast to root out and overcome;
and, when this evil has been once conquered and brought under,
soon will there be great peace and tranquillity.
Christ will come to thee, holding out to thee His consolation,
if thou prepare Him a fit dwelling within thee.
Many a visit does He make to the Interior man;
sweet is His communication with him, delightful His consolation,
great His peace, and His familiarity exceedingly amazing.
Give place, then, for Christ, and deny entrance to all others.
When thou hast Christ thou art rich, and He is sufficient for thee.
He will provide for thee and faithfully supply thy wants in all things,
so that thou needest not trust to men.
"Son," says Christ to us, "leave thyself, and thou shalt find Me."
III.
The merits of a Kcmpis are inimitable and imperishable; yet the book is not without defects more or less inseparable from the time and the circumstances in which it was written.
1. There is a defect of the limitation, which lies on the surface and has been often pointed out. Its author was a monk and needed a rule only for the little, monotonous world of the cloister; we live in the freedom and amidst the perils of a larger world, which needs an example, more universal. To a. Kcmpis and his brethren this world was the territory of the Evil One, from which they had fled; they wished to have no dealings with it and had no hope of making it better. "Thou oughtest," he says, "to be so far dead to the affections of men as to wish, as far as thou canst, to be without any human company." Even life itself appeared to him an evil: in one of his gloomiest pages he says expressly, " It is truly a misery to live upon earth." This happily is not our creed.
The world is not a blank to us, Nor blot; it means intensely, and means good.
To us it is God's world; and our vocation is to make God's will be done in all departments of its life and to make His Word run on all its highways and bye-ways. Monasticism was a confession on the part of Christianity of being beaten by the world; but today Christianity is planting its standard on every shore and going forth conquering and to conquer.
2. Another blemish which has been attributed to it is thus dealt with by Dr. Chalmers in one of his published Letters: " I have been reading Thomas a Kempis recently on the Imitation of Jesus Christ -a very impressive performance. Some would say of it that it is not enough evangelical. He certainly does not often affirm, in a direct and ostensible manner, the righteousness that is by faith. But he proceeds on this doctrine, and many an incidental recognition does he bestow upon it; and I am not sure but that this implies a stronger and more habitual settlement of mind respecting it than when it is thrust forward and repeated, and re-repeated with a kind of ultra-orthodoxy, as if to vindicate one's soundness, and acquit oneself of a kind of exacted homage to the form of sound words." **
This is both a generous and a just statement of a Kempis' position; though a simpler explanation of it lies in the fact that he lived a hundred years before the republication, at the Reformation, of this cardinal doctrine of the Pauline theology. But it is a point of the greatest practical importance to emphasize that in experience the true order is, that the imitation of Christ should follow the forgiveness of sins through the blood of His cross.***
3. There is another great Pauline doctrine, which hardly perhaps obtains in a Kempis the prominence, which belongs to it in connexion with his subject. This is the doctrine of union with Christ, which may be called the other pole Of St. Paul's system. St. Paul's whole teaching revolves between the two poles of righteousness through the death of Christ for us and holiness through the life of Christ in us. The latter truth is not absent from the pages of the Imitation; but its importance is not fully brought out.
For, beautiful as the phrase "the imitation of Christ" is, it hardly indicates the deepest way in which Christ's people become like Him. Imitation is rather an external process: it denotes the taking of that which is on one and putting it on another from the outside. But it is not chiefly by such an external copying that a Christian grows like Christ, but by an internal union with Him. If it is by a process of imitation at all, then it is imitation like that of a child copying its mother. This is the completest of imitations. The child reproduces the mother's tones, her gestures, the smallest peculiarities of her gait and movements, with an amazing and almost laughable perfection. But why is the imitation so perfect? It may be said it is because of the child's innumerable opportunities of seeing its mother, or because of the minuteness of a child's observation. But every one knows that there is more in it than this. The mother is in her child; at its birth she communicated her own nature to it; and it is to the working in the child of this mysterious influence that the success of the imitation is due. In like manner we may carefully copy the traits of Christ's character, looking at Him outside of us, as a painter looks at his model; we may do better still- we may, by prayer and the reading of the Word, live daily in His company, and receive the impress of His influence; but, if our imitation of Him is to be the deepest and most thorough, something more is necessary: He must be in us, as the mother is in her child, having communicated His own nature to us in the new birth.****
IV.
There is, however, a defect in the Imitation which the reader of today feels more than any of these: it lacks the historical sense, which is the guide of the modern mind in every kind of inquiry. Though the spirit of Christ pervades the book and many of its chapters are so full of the essence of His teaching that they might be appended as invaluable comments to His sayings, yet it presents no clear historical image of Him.
This would seem, however, to be the one thing needful for successful imitation. If we are to try to be like Christ, we must know what He was like. No painter could make a satisfactory copy of a figure of which he had himself only a vague conception. Yet no exact image of Christ will be found in a Kempis. To him Christ is the union and sum of all possible excellences; but he constructs Christ out of his own notions of excellence, instead of going to the records of His life and painting the portrait with the colours they supply. He specifies, indeed, certain great features of the Saviour's history, as for instance, that in becoming man He humbled Himself, and therefore we ought to be humble; or that He lived a life of suffering, and therefore we ought to be willing to suffer; but he does not get beyond these generalities.
Now, it is possible to construct out of the Gospels a more lifelike portrait than this. It is possible at present, as it has never been in any former age. Our century will be remembered in the history of Christian thought as the first, which concentrated its attention on the details of the Life of Christ. The works written on this subject in recent times have been without number, and they have powerfully affected the mind of the age. The course of Christ's life on earth has been traced from point to point with indefatigable patience and illustrated with knowledge from every quarter; every incident has been set in the clearest light; and we are now able to follow Him as it has never been possible to do before into every department of life-such as the family, the state, the Church, the life of prayer, the life of friendship, and so on-and to see exactly how He bore Himself in each. This is the method of knowing Him which has been granted to our age; and to be content to know Him merely as a vague image of all possible excellences would be to us like painting a landscape in the studio from mere general conceptions of mountains, rivers and fields, instead of going direct to nature.
Of course it is easy to exaggerate the value of a method. Infinitely more important always are the mind and heart working behind the method. The glowing love, the soaring reverence, the range and sublimity of thought in a Kempis, have brought the object home to him with a closeness and reality which fill every sympathetic reader with a sacred envy and will always enchain the Christian heart.*****
Yet, though an improved method is not everything, it is something; and if we feel our own devotion to be cold, and the wing of our thought feeble in comparison with others, all the more ought we to grasp at whatever advantage it may be able to supply. The imitation of Christ is a subject, which is constantly calling for reconsideration; for the evolution of history and the progress of knowledge place people on new points of view in relation to it. Each generation sees it in its own way, and the last word on it can never be spoken. The historical method of handling it is the one which falls in with those habits of thought which have been worn into the mind of our age by its vast conquests in other directions; and, though it will not make up for the lack of faith and love, it is a charisma which the Church is bound to use, and on the use of which God will bestow His blessing.
V.
It can hardly be said that evangelical thought has hitherto claimed this subject cordially enough as its own. The evangelical heart, indeed, has always been true to it. I have sometimes even thought that among the causes of the popularity of ae Kempis' book not the least potent is its mere name. The Imitation of Christ! the very sound of this phrase goes to the heart of every Christian and sets innumerable things moving and yearning in the soul. There is a summons in it like a ravishing voice calling us up sunny heights. It is the sum of all which in our best moments and in our deepest heart we desire.
But, whilst to Christian experience the imitation of Christ has always been inexpressibly precious, it has held, in evangelical preaching and literature, on the whole, only an equivocal position. The Moderatism which in last century nearly extinguished the religion of the country made much of the example of Christ. But it divorced it from His atonement, and urged men to follow Christ's example, without first making them acquainted with Him as the Saviour from sins that are past. The Evangelicals, in opposition to this, made Christ's atonement the burden of their testimony and, when His example was mentioned, were ever ready with, Yes, but His death is more important. Thus it happened that the two parties divided the truth between them, the example of Christ being the doctrine of the one and His atoning death that of the other. In like manner, when Unitarianism seemed for a time, through the high character and splendid eloquence of Charming, to be about to become a power in the world, it derived nearly all the attractiveness it ever possessed from the eulogies in which its preaching abounded of the pure lofty and self-sacrificing humanity of Christ. The evangelical Church answered with demonstrations of His divinity, scriptural and irresistibly logical no doubt, but not always very captivating. And thus a division was again allowed to take place, the humanity of Christ falling to the one party as its share and His divinity to the other.
It is time to object to these divisions. Both halves of the truth are ours and we claim the whole of it. The death of Christ is ours, and we rest in it our hopes of acceptance with God in time and in eternity. This is what we begin with; but we do not end with it. We will go on from His death to His life and, with the love begotten of being redeemed, try to reproduce that life in our own. In the same way, whilst glorying in His divinity, we will allow none to rob us of the attraction and the example of His humanity; for, indeed, the perfection of His humanity, with what this implies as to the value of His testimony about Himself, is the strongest bulwark of our faith that He was more than man.
* "The writer of the Imitatio Chrisii is not known, and perhaps never will be known, with absolute certainty. The dispute about the authorship has filled a hundred volumes, and is still so undecided that the voice of the sweetest and humblest of books has come to us mingled, for the last two and a half centuries, with one of the most bitter and arrogant of literary controversies, Of the nine or ten saints and doctors to whom at different times the work has been attributed, the pretensions of three alone can be now said to possess the least germ of probability. These three are a certain Gersen de Cabanis, Thomas Hemerken of Kempen, and Jean de Charlier de Gerson; and the claims of the first of the three . . . may now be considered to be set at rest. "The two, then, between whom rests the glory of the authorship-though in truth earthly glory was the last tiling for which the author would have wished-are Thomas a Kempis, sub-prior of the monastery of St. Agnes, in the diocese of Cologne, and Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, and one of the grandest figures of his time.
"The lives of both these saints of God fell in the same dreary epoch. It was that 'age of lead and iron,' of political anarchy and ecclesiastical degradation, of war, famine, misery, agitation, most intimate terms with him. He is a mere shadow to the scientific historian; but to the devout student his personality is most distinct; his accent is separate and easily detected; and, notwithstanding the flight and passion of his devotion, there is in him something homely and kindly that wins our affection. Above all, we feel, as we open the book that we are entering into communion with one who has found the secret of life. Here is one who, after corruption, which marked the close of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century. Thomas a Kempis, born in 1379, died at the age of ninety-two; Gerson, born in 1363, died at the age of sixty-one. They were thus contemporaries for forty-five years of their lives. But the destinies of the two men were utterly different. "Thomas, the son of an artisan, a quiet recluse, a copier of manuscripts, was trained at Deventer, and was received into a monastery in the year 1400 at the age of twenty-one. In that monastery of St. Agnes-valde devotus, libenter solus, nunquam otiosus-he spent seventy-one years of perfect calm, unbroken except by one brief period, in which he fled from his cell rather than acknowledge an archbishop to whom the Pope had refused the pallium. This was almost the sole event of a life in which we are told that it was his chief delight to be alone in angello cum libello.
"Far different from this life, 'in a little corner with a little book,' was the troubled, prominent, impassioned life of Jean Gerson, the Doctor Christianissimus. Rising while yet young to a leading position, he was appointed Chancellor of the University of Paris before the age of thirty, and, struggling against popes and councils, and mobs and kings, became the stormiest champion of a stormy time . . .. And when all his life seemed to have culminated in one long failure. Then forced to see how utterly little is man even at his greatest, and how different are the ways of man's nothing perfectness from those of God's all-completeness, the great Chancellor, who has been the soul of mighty councils and the terror of contumacious popes, takes obscure refuge, first in a monastery of Tyrol, afterwards under the rule of his brother at Lyons, and there, among the strict and humble Celestine monks, passes his last days in humility and submission. Far other thoughts than those of his tumultuous life had been revealed to him as he wandered, in danger and privation, among the mountains of Bavaria, -or, rather, those earlier objects had faded from the horizon of his soul like the burning hues of a stormy sunset; but as, when the sunset crimson has faded, we see the light of the eternal stars, so when the painted vapours of earthly ambition had lost their colouring, Gerson could gaze at last on those ' living sapphires ' which glow in the deep firmament, of spiritual hopes. He had been a leader among the schoolmen, now he cares only for the simplest truths. He had been a fierce gladiator in the arena of publicity, now he has passed into the life of holy silence. At his hottest period of strife he had cried out, ' Peace, peace, I long for peace; ' now at last there has fallen on his soul-not as the world giveth-that peace that passeth understanding."-Farrar in "Companions of the Devout Life"
** Correspondence of Rev. Thomas Chalmers, D.D., p. 81.
*** On this point see the singularly lofty and weighty statement of Martensen, On the Imitation of Christ and Justifying Faith, in his Christian Ethics, vol. i
**** "Christi Vorbild ist mehr als kahles, kaltes Tugendbeispiel, es ist erwaermende, erzundende Lebensgemeinschaft."-kogel, Predigten, i. 86.
***** In reading the Psalms, who has not coveted the nearness to God, which their authors attained, and the splendid glow of feeling which contact with Him produced in them? Who has not questioned whether he has ever himself penetrated so far into the secret of the Lord? Yet this does not blind us to the superior freedom and fulness of access to the divine presence allowed under the New Testament.
