"Love follows knowledge."
"Beauty above all beauty!"
– St. Catherine of Siena

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, Post 4





This is my final post on The Imitation of Christ.  At the end is my book review I posted on Goodreads.  I gave the book three stars.




You can find Post 1 on this read, here
You can find Post 2 here.  
You can find Post 3 here

Still on Book 3, “Internal Consolation”:



Comment 8:
So I’ve been critical, as you’ve seen my comments, calling à Kempis “semi-gnostic.” If he values the spirit over the corporeal so much, why isn’t he fully gnostic? Let’s look carefully at why he considers the spiritual so much more important. In Book Three, chapter 35, he says through the Voice of Christ:

If you look for rest in this life, how will you attain to everlasting rest? Dispose yourself, then, not for much rest but for great patience. Seek true peace, not on earth but in heaven; not in men or in other creatures but in God alone. For love of God you should undergo all things cheerfully, all labors and sorrows, temptations and trials, anxieties, weaknesses, necessities, injuries, slanders, rebukes, humiliations, confusions, corrections, and contempt. For these are helps to virtue. These are the trials of Christ's recruit. These form the heavenly crown. For a little brief labor I will give an everlasting crown, and for passing confusion, glory that is eternal....


The key sentence I think there is “For these are helps to virtue.” Later in chapter 54 of that book, he creates a dichotomy between “nature,” which stands of the corporeal, and “grace,” which stands for the spiritual. I’m not going to quote it, but it’s quite a list of contrasts between nature and grace. He concludes that rhetorical tour de force with this:

The more, then, nature is held in check and conquered, the more grace is given. Every day the interior man is reformed by new visitations according to the image of God....


So then the mortifications of the body he advocates are a process of personal reform to build virtue. How is this different than Gnosticism? In Gnosticism the body is just evil. In à Kempis the body is a temptation from which you can succumb to sin. There is a subtle distinction. If you want to ensure yourself of purity, if you want to ensure virtue, radically eliminate the temptations. Actually even more than elimination. Train your body through asceticism and excoriations to not find pleasure in the corporeal. It’s not that the corporeal is evil for à Kempis, though his language sometimes slips to sound that way, but something to be feared. It’s a view of Christianity that suggests you need to suffer in order to love, and to be ready for when real suffering comes your way you induce suffering to yourself to build strength.

In the fifty-fifth chapter, he brings this to full expression:

Thus nature itself, which You created good and right, is considered a symbol of vice and the weakness of corrupted nature, because when left to itself it tends toward evil and to baser things. The little strength remaining in it is like a spark hidden in ashes. That strength is natural reason which, surrounded by thick darkness, still has the power of judging good and evil, of seeing the difference between true and false, though it is not able to fulfill all that it approves and does not enjoy the full light of truth or soundness of affection.


It is not that nature is evil but that it tends to evil if left unchecked

Commnet 9:
In Book Three à Kempis provides the objective of all this discipline. In chapter 49 he tells us through the voice of Christ, “You must put on the new man. You must be changed into another man.” He builds on that in chapter 53, again through the voice of Christ:

If you completely conquer yourself, you will more easily subdue all other things. The perfect victory is to triumph over self. For he who holds himself in such subjection that sensuality obeys reason and reason obeys Me in all matters, is truly his own conqueror and master of the world.


And then augments this point further in chapter 56, again in the voice of Christ:

My child, the more you depart from yourself, the more you will be able to enter into Me. As the giving up of exterior things brings interior peace, so the forsaking of self unites you to God. I will have you learn perfect surrender to My will, without contradiction or complaint.


The subjugation of oneself for the self of Christ is the spiritual objective of every Christian. à Kempis is right on target with this. We get this from St. Paul in Galatians, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). I think it’s Fulton Sheen who phrases it as every Christian needs a heart transplant, replacing one’s heart with that of Christ’s. St. Catherine of Siena actually has a mystical experience where her heart is exchanged with Christ’s heart.

What’s in question, then, is how one arrives at this objective. The à Kempis way is strict asceticism and withdrawal from the world. However, St. Paul wasn’t a recluse. While Christ had his 40 days in the desert, he also had the wedding feast at Cana, Passover dinners, and engaged large crowds for healing and feeding. The history of Christian spirituality is varied on how to achieve this heart replacement. The desert fathers start this asceticism and reclusion. The monastics modify it by segregating themselves away from the heart of the world but certainly more engaged than the desert hermits. In the twelfth century you start getting the itinerant orders, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Carmelites (to a lesser degree), and then later followed by the Jesuits who engage society. And from the sixteenth century on to ours we get what I’ll call the charitable orders, the Vincentians, the Sisters of Charity, the Little Sisters of the Poor, the orders who embrace society to feed, educate, and cure the needy. One can say this culminates in Mother Teresa’s brand of spirituality. So then one can see the trajectory of Christian spirituality as going from the desert to the multitude, just as in the course of Christ’s journey.

The à Kempis way is quite narrow, and even anachronistic for its own time. However, for those that are attracted to this brand of spirituality, the book is a perfect guide. Most of us, mix and match our forms of spirituality, and so we still can get many benefits from his advice.

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Note: I did not have any comments on Book 4, “An Invitation to Holy Communion.”

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Final Review

I may be an outlier when it comes to The Imitation of Christ.  I don’t find it engaging, either as a devotional or as a guide.  This was my second read and it remains at three stars. 

Yes, there are parts that very spiritual.  That’s why it’s three stars and not one.  But there are also parts that are dry, very dry, parts where the advice is extremely ascetic, parts where the recommendations require disengagement from the world, and parts I felt that were semi-gnostic.  One has to balance the spiritual with the corporeal, and not everything involved with the corporeal is bad or harmful for one’s soul.  Ultimately, if we are granted heavenly existence, our bodies will be reunited with our souls, and so our bodies are not inherently base.  In many places à Kempis presents the flesh as detestable.  This didn’t sit well with me.

Perhaps part of the extreme ascetic and disengagement from the world was because of the times it was written.  In the early 15th century, Europe was still undergoing the Black Plague, the Church was in schism, and there was a lot of social turmoil.  It was a difficult time, and what is strange is that in a time of declining monasteries, the authors of were advocating a return to monastic life.  This was completely understandable.  It was the Benedict Option of its day.  One can understand it but it feels anachronistic for today.

Besides disengagement, the authors (there are more than one under the Thomas à Kempis nom de plume) do provide consolation for a devout life.  They do coach and inspire.  This is the most read devotional in the Christian world other than the Bible, and is a must read. 



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