Imago Christi: The Example of Jesus Christ

No religious book perhaps, outside the canon of Scripture, has attained so wide a diffusion in the Christian Church as the De Iinitatione 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 l6 IMAGO CHRISTl.

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 corruptions 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:

O 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; forThou 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 3 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

*”The writer of the Imitatio Christi 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 thing for which the author would have wished — are Thovias a Kempis, sub-prior of the monastery of St. Agnes, in the diocese of Cologne, and Jean Gerso?i, 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 personaUty 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, nuttquaf?i 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 libcllo.

“Far different from this life, ‘in a little corner with a little book,’ was the troubled, prominent, impassioned life of Jean Gerson, the Doctor Christianissbnus. 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 faiuire... then forced 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

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