The Devotio Moderna and the Imitation of Christ

According to the Life that Thomas à Kempis wrote of him, Geert Groote was a citizen of Deventer who studied at Paris, became a master of arts at eighteen and held church benefices, until a Carthusian prior who had been his friend persuaded him to change his life (Thomas à Kempis, Life of Gerard Groote, chs. 1–5 (Arthur, pp. 5–11)). He resigned his benefices and left his house to a community of poor women. He took deacon’s orders so that he could preach, and refused the priesthood out of awe of it (Chronicle of Mount St Agnes, part 2, ch. 3 (Arthur, pp. 160–161)). He preached at Deventer, Zwolle, Utrecht, Leiden, Delft, Amsterdam and other towns, often twice in a day (Thomas à Kempis, Life of Gerard Groote, ch. 15 (Arthur, p. 44)). When opponents among the clergy obtained an edict that forbade him to preach, he obeyed it (Thomas à Kempis, Life of Gerard Groote, ch. 9 (Arthur, pp. 20–21)).

Groote paid students to copy books of theology and used their visits to win them to a devout life (Thomas à Kempis, Life of Gerard Groote, ch. 9 (Arthur, pp. 20–21)). For those who wished to live together he laid down that they should earn their living by the work of their hands and, “as far as might be, live in common”; he allowed begging only in evident need. He also planned a monastery of canons regular, moved by his regard for John Ruysbroeck and his house at Groenendaal in Brabant (Thomas à Kempis, Life of Gerard Groote, ch. 15 (Arthur, pp. 45–46)). He died at Deventer in a time of plague, on the feast of Saint Bernard in 1384, in his forty-fourth year, and named the priest Florentius as his successor (Thomas à Kempis, Life of Gerard Groote, ch. 16 (Arthur, pp. 46–49)) (Chronicle of Mount St Agnes, part 2, ch. 3 (Arthur, pp. 160–161)).

In 1387 the first church at Windesheim, near Zwolle, was consecrated, and six men took the habit of canons regular there; all but one had been disciples of Groote (Chronicle of Mount St Agnes, part 2, ch. 6 (Arthur, pp. 167–168)). A letter on the founding of Windesheim, which its translator ascribes to a later prior of that house, calls what Groote began “the New Devotion”. It says that the house of Florentius was the first of the congregations of clerks, and Groote’s own house at Deventer the first of the congregations of women (Chronicle of Mount St Agnes, appended letter of William Vornken, sections 2–8 (Arthur, pp. 210–214)). Thomas came to Deventer as a schoolboy and was taken in by Florentius. He remembered priests and clerks who put what they had into a common stock, obeyed a rector, and “laboured carefully in copying books” (Thomas à Kempis, Life of John Gronde, ch. 1 (Arthur, pp. 169–171)).

Thomas Hemerken of Kempen was invested as a canon in 1406 at Mount St Agnes near Zwolle. Its first prior, his brother John, had been one of the six at Windesheim (Chronicle of Mount St Agnes, part 2, ch. 6 (Arthur, pp. 167–168)) (Chronicle of Mount St Agnes, years 1399 and 1406 (Arthur, pp. 35, 41)). The brother who continued the house chronicle after Thomas’s death in 1471 says that he copied the Bible that the community used and composed “divers little books” for the young, plain in style (Chronicle of Mount St Agnes, continuation, year 1471 (Arthur, pp. 143–144)).

The Imitation of Christ is a short Latin work in four books. It begins from Christ’s words about following him (John 8:12) and sets a good life above learning: “I had rather feel contrition than be skilful in the definition thereof”, and a peasant who serves God is better than a philosopher who neglects himself (Imitation of Christ 1.1–2). The third book praises love, “a good above all others” (Imitation of Christ 3.5); the fourth opens with the reverence in which Christ is to be received in communion (Imitation of Christ 4.1).

A manuscript now in the Royal Library at Brussels contains the four books and other treatises. It ends with a Latin note that it was finished and completed in 1441 by the hand of brother Thomas of Kempen (per manus fratris Thome Kempis) at Mount St Agnes near Zwolle (Brussels autograph of 1441, colophon, as printed by Ruelens, pp. 6–7). The note shows that Thomas wrote the volume out in that year. It does not say who composed the Imitation. From 1604 the work was claimed for others, among them Jean Gerson, chancellor of Paris, and those who denied it to Thomas pointed out that the note names only a copyist. Charles Ruelens, keeper of manuscripts at Brussels, answered with an argument of Bishop Malou of Bruges: Thomas set the four books at the head of a volume of his own writings and did not mix in the works of others. Ruelens adds that an older copy, with a note dated 1425, names Thomas as author (Brussels autograph of 1441, Ruelens’s introduction, pp. 6, 11–12).