9. More than this: the tradition existed in Thomas à Kempis’s own monastery shortly after his death. For John Mauburne became a canon in Mount St Agnes within a few years of Thomas’s death, and he states more than once that Thomas wrote the Imitation.
10. The earliest biographer of Thomas à Kempis was an anonymous contemporary: the Life was printed in 1494, but it exists in a MS. of 1488. The biographer says he got his information from the brethren at Mount St Agnes, and he states in passing that Bk. III. was written by Thomas. Moreover, he appends a list of Thomas’s writings, 38 in number, and 5-8 are the four books of the Imitation.
It is needless to point out that such a list must be of vastly greater authority than those given by St Jerome or Gennadius in their De Viris Illustribus, and its rejection must, in consistency, involve methods of criticism that would work havoc in the history of early literature of what king soever. The domestic tradition in the Windesheim Congregation, and in Mount St Agnes itself, has a weight that cannot be legitimately avoided or evaded. Indeed the external authority for Thomas’s authorship is stronger than that for the authorship of most really anonymous books—such, that is, as neither themselves claim to be by a given author, nor have been claimed by any one as his own. A large proportion of ancient writings, both ecclesiastical and secular, are unquestioningly assigned to writers on far less evidence than that for Thomas’s authorship of the Imitation.
Internal arguments have been urged against Thomas’s authorship. It has been said that his certainly authentic writings are so inferior that the Imitation could not have been written by the same author. But only if they were of the most certain and peremptory nature could such internal arguments be allowed to weigh against the clear array of facts that make up the external argument in favour of à Kempis. And it cannot be said that the internal difficulties are such as this. Let it be granted that Thomas was a prolific writer and that his writings vary very much in quality; let it be granted also that the Imitation surpasses all the rest, and that some are on a level very far below it; still, when at their best, some of the other works are not unworthy of the author of the Imitation.
In conclusion, it is the belief of the present writer that the “Contestation” is over, and that Thomas à Kempis’s claims to the authorship of the Imitation have been solidly established.
The best account in English of the Controversy is that given by F. R. Cruise in his Thomas à Kempis (1887). Works produced before 1880 are in general, with the exception of those of Eusebius Amort, superannuated, and deal in large measure with points no longer of any living interest. A pamphlet by Cruise, Who was the Author of the Imitation? (1898) contains sufficient information on the subject for all ordinary needs; it has been translated into French and German, and may be regarded as the standard handbook.
It has been said that the Imitation of Christ has had a wider religious influence than any book except the Bible, and if the statement be limited to Christendom, it is probably true. The Imitation has been translated into over fifty languages, and is said to have run through more than 6000 editions. The other statement, often made, that it sums up all that is best of earlier Western mysticism—that in it “was gathered and concentered all that was elevating, passionate, profoundly pious in all the older mystics” (Milman) is an exaggeration that is but partially true, for it depreciates unduly the elder mystics and fails to do justice to the originality of the Imitation. For its spiritual teaching is something quite different from the mysticism of Augustine in the Confessions, or of Bernard in the Sermons on the Song of Songs; it is different from the scholastic mysticism of the St Victors or Bonaventure; above all, it is different from the obscure mysticism, saturated with the pseudo-Dionysian Neoplatonism of the German school of Eckhart, Suso, Tauler and Ruysbroek. Again, it is quite different from the later school of St Teresa and St John of the Cross, and from the introspective methods of what may be called the modern school of spirituality. The Imitation stands apart, unique, as the principal and most representative utterance of a special phase of religious thought—non-scholastic, non-platonic, positive and merely religious in its scope—herein reflecting faithfully the spirit of the movement initiated by Gerhard Groot (q.v.), and carried forward by the circles in which Thomas à Kempis lived. In contrast with more mystical writings it is of limpid clearness, every sentence being easily understandable by all whose spiritual sense is in any degree awakened. No doubt it owes its universal power to this simplicity, to its freedom from intellectualism and its direct appeal to the religious sense and to the extraordinary religious genius of its author. Professor Harnack in his book What is Christianity? counts the Imitation as one of the chief spiritual forces in Catholicism: it “kindles independent religious life, and a fire which burns with a flame of its own” (p. 266).
The best Latin edition of the Imitation is that of Hirsche (1874), which follows closely the autograph of 1441 and reproduces the rhythmical character of the book. Of English translations the most interesting is that by John Wesley, under the title The Christian’s Pattern (1735).
(E. C. B.)