Thomas a Kempis

Thomas Hemerken was born at Kempen in the Rhineland and sent at about twelve to Deventer, where the Brethren of the Common Life ran a house for poor scholars. The Brethren were the institutional face of the Devotio Moderna, a movement of interior reform started by Gerard Groote which held that the machinery of scholastic theology had become an obstacle, and that what mattered was the ordering of a life: reading slowly, examining oneself, working, and keeping silence.

He absorbed it completely. At about twenty he joined the community of Canons Regular at Mount St Agnes near Zwolle, where his older brother was prior, and he stayed for roughly seventy years. He was ordained, served as sub-prior more than once, and spent the greater part of his working life as a copyist. He copied a complete Bible four times, along with missals and other books, in a clear hand that survives.

He also wrote a good deal himself: chronicles of his own house, sermons to novices, and lives of Groote and the first Brethren, which are the principal source for the movement's early history. None of that would have made him known outside the Low Countries. He is one of the most widely read Christian authors in history because of a small book of four parts, gathered from booklets he had written for novices, which he transcribed into a manuscript in 1441.

The Imitation of Christ has been translated into more languages than any Christian book except the Bible, and its manner is the reverse of impressive. It is short, plain, addressed to one reader, and openly suspicious of learning: it would rather feel compunction, it says, than be able to define it, and asks what use it is to argue profoundly about the Trinity if you lack humility and so displease the Trinity. Four books move from general counsel through interior life to a long meditation on communion.

Its severity is real and is why it has both attracted and repelled. It counsels withdrawal, distrust of company and of one's own judgement, and the expectation of consolation withdrawn. It has been the daily book of an enormous range of readers who otherwise had nothing in common.

The authorship has been argued for six centuries. Thomas's claim rests on a manuscript in his own hand signed and dated 1441, which is strong evidence and not decisive, since a copyist's autograph proves he copied it. The French and Italian traditions long attributed it to the chancellor Jean Gerson, and a serious case has been made for Gerard Groote himself, partly on the argument that an underlying Middle Dutch rhythmic text lies beneath the Latin. The majority position remains that Thomas wrote it, out of the movement's common stock of material, and the atlas records the attribution as contested rather than settled.