Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Priest & Spiritual Writer
July 24 · d. 1471
also known as Thomas Hemerken, Thomas von Kempen
Thomas à Kempis was an Augustinian monk of the Rhineland near modern Holland who spent some seventy quiet years in a single monastery, copying Scripture and writing of the inner life. From that hidden cell came The Imitation of Christ, a small book on following Jesus, of such depth and simplicity that it has been read and loved by Christians, across every confession for centuries.
Thomas was born around the year 1380 at Kempen, a town in the Rhineland within the Holy Roman Empire (today in western Germany near the Dutch border). As a boy of twelve he was sent to Deventer, to the Brethren of the Common Life, a movement of plain, heartfelt devotion called the Devotio Moderna, the "modern devotion," which prized the love of God and the practical love of others over the intellectual cleverness of the medieval scholasticism. It marked him for life. Still a young man, around 1399 he entered the Augustinian monastery of Mount St Agnes where his brother was prior, not far from where he was reared in what is now the eastern Netherlands. There he took vows as a monk and was ordained a priest, and there he remained in the same house for the rest of his long life.
By every outward measure nothing happened to him. He held no high office, fought no great battle, traveled almost nowhere. He copied manuscripts, (the whole Bible four times over among them) taught the novices, and wrote. But in that stillness he saw into the depths, and the book that came of it has outlived empires. The Imitation of Christ turns the reader away from the noise of the world and the hunger for status toward the one thing needful, the following of Christ in humility and love. "Vanity of vanities," it begins, in William Benham's translation, "all is vanity, save to love God, and Him only to serve." It cared nothing for the proud learning of its age: "What doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility?" Better, Thomas wrote, "to feel contrition than be skilful in the definition thereof."
He died in 1471, about ninety years old, having scarcely left his cloister. Yet from his humble room his little book went out into all the world, and it has been carried by saints and sinners of every church ever since, translated into every European tongue, worn smooth in the hands of monks and merchants and kings. It is one of the great proofs that the deepest things are often done in the quietest places, that true wisdom comes not from worldly experiences but by being steeped in the very Word of God. A man spent his whole life hidden, immersed in Scripture and the simple care of the brothers God placed him with, copying and praying, loving and serving through an otherwise unremarkable life, and God used that man to speak to more hearts than the loudest of his age. In a pithy paraphrase of Proverbs 19:21 Thomas wrote the now immortal, “Man proposes, but God disposes.” God disposed that the obscure monk of Mount St Agnes should become one of the abiding teachers of the thoughtful Christian soul.
How we know Thomas is from his own writings and from the records of his monastery. Besides The Imitation of Christ he wrote lives of Gerard Groote and Florentius Radewijns, the founders of his movement, a chronicle of Mount St Agnes, and many sermons and devotional tracts; the documents of his Augustinian community supply the frame of his life. The authorship of the Imitation deserves an honest word: the book first circulated anonymously, and from the seventeenth century some scholars proposed other authors, chiefly Jean Gerson and Gerard Groote. But a manuscript of 1441 survives in Thomas's own hand and signature, the tradition of his own house is unbroken, and the weight of modern scholarship credits him as its author and compiler. He entered Mount St Agnes about 1399, was professed in 1406, ordained in 1413, and died there in 1471; he was never formally canonized, and his influence ran entirely through his book.
Thomas à Kempis is commemorated on July 24 in the Anglican calendars, including that of the Anglican Church in North America; he is not in the universal Roman calendar, but he is honored across the traditions, for his great work belongs to them all. The Imitation of Christ has been, after the Bible, among the most widely translated and printed of all Christian books, shaping the piety of Catholics, Protestants, and Anglicans alike for five centuries; John Wesley, Thomas More, and countless others carried it close. He is remembered as the flower of the Devotio Moderna, the movement of the Brethren of the Common Life, and as the patron, in effect, of the interior life: the witness that the following of Christ is learned not in disputation but in humility, silence, and love.
Further reading. Thomas's enduring work is The Imitation of Christ; the standard modern English is the Penguin Classics translation by Leo Sherley-Price, and William Benham's older translation is freely available in the public domain. His lives of Groote and Radewijns and his chronicle of Mount St Agnes survive but are little read outside scholarship.
Online resources. Benham's translation of the Imitation is at Project Gutenberg and the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
British (Received Pronunciation): Gerson /ˈɡɜːrsən/; Florentius /flɒˈrɛn.ʃəs/
Readings for a Monastic or Religious
Lamentations 3:22–33Psalm 1Hebrews 4:1–13 or Acts 2:42–47Mark 10:23–31
O God, your blessed Son became poor for our sake, and chose the Cross over the kingdoms of this world: Deliver us from an inordinate love of worldly things, that we, inspired by the devotion of your servant Thomas à Kempis, may seek you with singleness of heart, behold your glory by faith, and attain to the riches of your everlasting kingdom, where we shall be united with our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.