Introduction
One of my favorite stories of Thomas Merton, the famous twentieth-century monk and spiritual writer, is of the time before his conversion to Catholicism when he went to see the Bengali yogi and Hinduism scholar, Mahanambrata Brahmachari. Brahmachari was in New York City after having attended the World Festival of Faiths in Chicago, staying on to earn a doctorate at the University of Chicago before returning to India. Merton was a recent Columbia University graduate, questing and floundering. He asked the Hindu monk for recommendations of religious texts he might read.
Merton was familiar with Christianity, having been raised in a canopy sort of Anglicanism. “I became very fond of Brahmachari, and he of me. We got along very well together, especially since he sensed that I was trying to feel my way into a settled religious conviction, and into some kind of a life that was centered, as his was, on God,” Merton wrote in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain.1
Brahmachari was prescient and wise. He told his young protege to look to the mystical classics in his own tradition rather than wander like a tourist into the religions of the East. Start with Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, the scholar said. “You must read those books.” It changed Merton’s life.2
Perhaps Brahmachari learned to appreciate The Imitation of Christ from his Bengali elder, the groundbreaking Vivekananda, a disciple of Ramakrishna, who introduced Hinduism and Vedanta to the West in 1893 at the Parliament of the Religions, in the building on Michigan Avenue that’s now the Art Institute of Chicago. Vivekananda loved and translated The Imitation of Christ into Bengali in 1899. He wrote in his introduction to that translation of the parallels between The Imitation and the most important scripture of his own tradition, the Bhagavad Gita.3 Both texts, he said, were songs of God.
I also remember how Thomas à Kempis, the author of The Imitation of Christ, impacted lives of other literary and philosophical luminaries, even some more notorious characters. England’s King Henry VIII, for instance, was known to praise Kempis’s book, even though its message of love seems to have been lost on him in action. The last of his six wives, Catherine Parr, summarized the principles and prayers of The Imitation in her own Prayers or Meditations, the first book in English by a woman published under her own name, in 1545. In the English colonies of the New World, Kempis was published in Germantown (Maryland) twenty-seven years before the Revolution.
The Imitation of Christ once formed people the way that Bible reading did. The great atheist philosopher, Bertrand Russell was under its sway as a young man, before he found his atheist convictions. Russell’s exact contemporary across the Channel, Marie Françoise-Thérèse Martin (they were born just eight months apart), was under its sway too. Russell would soon discover Spinoza, instead, while Thérèse Martin committed long passages of Kempis to memory, quoting them in times of need, and incorporating the teachings into her own great work, The Story of a Soul. Thérèse we know today as St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
Around the same time, Leo Tolstoy was spending an increasing amount of time with Kempis in Russia, finding more in the obscure German-Dutch master’s little book than in the stories that had already made Tolstoy famous throughout the world. One hint of Kempis’s influence on the great novelist appears in book five, chapter three of War and Peace: “On reaching Petersburg Pierre did not let anyone know of his arrival, he went nowhere and spent whole days reading Thomas à Kempis, whose book had been sent to him by someone unknown. One thing he continually realized as he read that book: the joy, hitherto unknown to him, of believing in the possibility of attaining perfection and in the possibility of active brotherly love among men.”4
“The joy … of believing in the possibility of attaining perfection and in the possibility of active brotherly love.” That’s the appeal of this classic work. Is this possible in human life?
They say The Imitation of Christ has been read by more people than any other book but the Bible, since first appearing in manuscript copies in about 1425. Kempis wrote and published it anonymously. He intended his book to be a series of devotional and mystical explanations and applications of what is found in the New Testament gospels and epistles. Those ideas about perfection and love began there. If it’s really possible, how?
In one of the notebooks found after his death, Franz Kafka jotted, “Everyone carries a room about inside them.”5 He understood what Kempis did, that perhaps this perfection is more real inside of us than when we go out into the world. Similarly, the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said, “At the heart of our universe, each soul exists for God, in our Lord.”6 That’s the easy part—in the soul. What about when we are with other people?
Kempis’s message is that humility is essential, and real trust in God is possible. Witness this quote from Book Three: “If I humble myself to nothingness, if I shrink from all self-esteem and account myself as the dust which I am, Your grace will favor me, Your light will enshroud my heart.… I am nothing but total weakness. But if You look upon me for an instant, I am at once made strong and filled with new joy.” As a twenty-first century person who still turns to this fifteenth-century spiritual classic, I want to help you hear this in a context of relevance.
We worry about so much, and for good reason. We face so much danger. So we occupy ourselves with distractions, to avoid thinking or feeling too much. This shared anxiety is the context for Kempis’s book. He wants you not to resign, but to engage more deeply. He summarizes this early on, succinctly: “Sorrow opens the door to many a blessing which dissoluteness usually destroys.”7
Kempis is reminding us not to let the world have a grip on us. To not allow the suffering and vicissitudes to control us. To remain steadfast in the knowledge and experience of God, whose love is within us.
Next, he points and pushes us to be where we need to be to see, hear, and understand this divine love. For instance, be deliberate with your life by recognizing that one day you will die. “The present is very precious; these are the days of salvation; now is the acceptable time.”8 Zeal and diligence, too, come highly recommended. This is a book designed to challenge every spiritual underachiever. And all of this is before we get to the meat of Kempis’s teaching in Books Two and Three, where he advises on how to have and cultivate an interior life.
Meditation and peace. Achieving purity of mind. Finding the joy of a clear conscience. Friendship with Jesus, who knows our suffering. Hearing truth that speaks without words in our souls. We need these lessons as much as any human beings ever have.
Rereading The Imitation of Christ now, and remembering how I first read it at the age of eighteen, I’m reminded that we read differently depending on our stage in life. At eighteen, I did not love the world the way I do at fifty-five. At eighteen, I didn’t see how ethics and spiritual practice are more important than theology. The primary theme of The Imitation of Christ is conversion, and that’s the work of a lifetime, and the duty of every person who wants to be a decent human being.
—Jon M. Sweeney is a Catholic, rabbi spouse, editor, and author. He’s written many books including Thomas Merton (St. Martin’s Essentials) and Feed the Wolf.
1. Of the Contempt of Worldly Vanities
1. “HE that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” Those are the words of Christ; by which we are taught, that it is only by a conformity to his life and spirit, that we can be truly enlightened and delivered from all blindness of heart: let it, therefore, be the principal employment of our minds to meditate on the life of Christ.
2. The doctrine of Christ infinitely transcends the doctrine of the holiest men; and he that had the Spirit of Christ, would find in it “hidden manna, the bread that came down from heaven:” but not having his Spirit, many, though they frequently hear his doctrine, yet feel no pleasure in it, no ardent desire after it; for he only can cordially receive, and truly delight in the doctrine of Christ, who continually endeavours to acquire the Spirit, and imitate the life of Christ.
3. Of what benefit are thy most subtle disquisitions into the mystery of the blessed trinity, if thou art destitute of humility, and, therefore, a profaner of the trinity? It is not profound speculations, but a holy life, that makes a man righteous and good, and dear to God. I had rather feel compunction, than be able to give the most accurate definition of it. If thy memory could retain the whole Bible, and the precepts of all the philosophers, what would it profit thee, without charity and the grace of God? “Vanity of vanities! and all is vanity,” except only the love of God, and an entire devotedness to his service.
4. It is the highest wisdom, by the contempt of the world to press forward toward the kingdom of heaven. It is, therefore, vanity to labour for perishing riches, and place our confidence in their possession: it is vanity to hunt after honours, and raise ourselves to an exalted station: it is vanity, to fulfil the lusts of the flesh, and indulge desires that begin and end in torment: it is vanity to wish that life may be long, and to have no concern whether it be good: it is vanity to mind only the present world, and not to look forward to that which is to come; to suffer our affections to hover over a state in which all things pass away with the swiftness of thought, and not raise them to that where true joy abideth for ever.
5. Frequently call to mind the observation of Solomon, that “the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing;” and let it be thy continual endeavour to withdraw thy heart from the love of “the things that are seen,” and to turn it wholly to “the things that are not seen:” for he who lives in subjection to the sensual desires of animal nature, defiles his spirit, and loses the grace of God.
2. Of Humility with Respect to Intellectual Attainments
1. EVERY man naturally desires to increase in knowledge; but what doth knowledge profit, without fear of the Lord? Better is the humble peasant, that serveth God, than the proud philosopher, who, destitute of the knowledge of himself, can describe the course of the planets. He that truly knows himself, becomes vile in his own eyes, and has no delight in the praise of man. If I knew all that the world contains, and had not charity, what would it avail me in the sight of God, who will judge me according to my deeds?
2. Rest from an inordinate desire of knowledge, for it is subject to much perplexity and delusion. Learned men are fond of the notice of the world, and desire to be accounted wise: but there are many things, the knowledge of which has no tendency to promote the recovery of our first divine life; and it is, surely, a proof of folly, to devote ourselves wholly to that, with which our supreme good has no connexion. The soul is not to be satisfied with the multitude of words; but a holy life is a continual feast, and a pure conscience the foundation of a firm and immoveable confidence in God.
3. The more thou knowest, and the better thou understandest, the more severe will be thy condemnation, unless thy life be proportionably more holy. Be not, therefore, exalted, for any uncommon skill in any art or science; but let the superior knowledge that is given thee, make thee more fearful and more watchful over thyself. If thou supposest, that thou knowest many things, and hast perfect understanding of them, consider, how many more things there are, which thou knowest not at all; and, instead of being exalted with a high opinion of thy great knowledge, be rather abased by an humble sense of thy much greater ignorance. And why dost thou prefer thyself to another, since thou mayest find many who are more learned than thou art, and better instructed in the will of God?
4. If thou would learn and know that which is truly useful, love to be unknown, and to be held in no estimation: for the highest and most profitable learning, is the knowelge and contempt of ourselves, and to have no opinion of our own merit; and always to think well and highly of others, is an evidence of great wisdom and perfection. Therefore, though thou seest another openly offend, or even commit some enormous sin, yet thou must not from thence take occasion to value thyself for thy superior goodness: for thou canst not tell how long thou wilt be able to persevere in the narrow path of virtue. All men are frail, but thou shouldst reckon none so frail as thyself.
Copyright © 2023 by Jon M. Sweeney
