The Imitation of Christ — who's who

Born Thomas Hemerken in Kempen, Rhineland, around 1380. Educated from age thirteen under the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer. Entered Mount St. Agnes in 1399, where his older brother John was prior. Took final vows 1407. Served twice as sub-prior. Copied the entire Bible four times by hand. Wrote dozens of devotional treatises besides the Imitation. Died 25 July 1471 at ninety-one. The autograph manuscript of the Imitation, in his own hand, dated 1441, survives in the Royal Library in Brussels.

Born 1340 in Deventer, son of a wealthy merchant, educated at Paris, returned to Deventer as a brilliant preacher. Conversion around 1374. Founded the Brethren of the Common Life. Called his movement "modern devotion" — practical piety over scholastic elaboration, the imitation of Christ in daily life as the whole of the spiritual life. Died of plague in 1384 at forty-four, attending to the sick. Thomas was eight when Groote died; he was educated by Groote's direct followers.

Born around 1350, originally a priest at Utrecht. Drawn into the Devotio Moderna by Groote in the late 1370s. After Groote's death organized the Brethren of the Common Life and founded the congregation of Windesheim, of which Mount St. Agnes was a daughter house. Thomas wrote a long affectionate biography of Florens. The spirituality of the Imitation is the spirituality of the school Florens ran at Deventer in the years Thomas studied there.

Thomas's older brother, born around 1365 in Kempen. Entered religious life at Deventer some twenty years before Thomas. Was the founding prior of Mount St. Agnes when Thomas joined the community in 1399, and remained Thomas's superior, mentor, and closest family connection for the next thirty years. He died in 1432. The Imitation was written during roughly the years that John was prior.

The book is named for him and the bulk of Book Three is written in his voice. Thomas's Christ is not the philosophical Christ of high scholasticism nor the cosmic Christ of the contemplative tradition. He is the Christ of the Gospels: patient, humble, attentive to ordinary people, severe with hypocrisy. The imitation of this Christ — his patience, his humility, his willingness to suffer — is the explicit programme of the whole book.

The interlocutor of Book Three, formally a young monk asking the questions a beginner would ask, functionally the reader. His questions are the questions any honest reader would put to the practice: how do I know if I am making progress? Why does grace come and go? How should I bear the failures of those around me? The reader who lets the disciple's questions stand for his own questions, and who reads Christ's answers as addressed to him, has used the book as Thomas intended.