The Imitation of Christ — themes & analysis

The opening chapter of the book states the thesis on which everything else depends, and Thomas restates it on almost every page. The whole of the Christian life, he argues, is contained in the imitation of Christ — not in the elaboration of doctrine about Christ, not in the contemplation of Christ in the abstract, not in feelings about Christ, but in the imitation of his actions, his patience, his humility, his way of meeting people. The position is more demanding than it sounds.

Thomas is writing in the late phase of medieval scholasticism, when the great theological systems of Aquinas and Scotus had been refined for two centuries and were taught in every university in Europe. The Devotio Moderna movement out of which the book comes was, in part, a reaction against the elaboration: a return to what Geert Groote called "the simplicity of Christ." Thomas's first chapter states the position directly. "What good does it do you to discuss the Holy Trinity in learned terms, if you lack humility and so displease the Trinity? Truly, lofty words do not make a man holy and just; only a virtuous life makes him dear to God. I would rather feel compunction than know its definition." The line is one of the most quoted in Christian literature.

Theological knowledge, Thomas does not deny, is real knowledge and worth pursuing in its place. What he denies is that it is the spiritual life. The spiritual life is what one does with one's time, one's body, one's words, one's small daily encounters with the people one happens to live with. The imitation is the practice of meeting those things as Christ would have met them — patiently, humbly, without seeking honour, without lashing out, without clinging to one's own sense of being right. The standard is exact and is not lowered for ordinary believers.

Thomas is writing for monks, but the moves he describes are not monastic in any specialized sense; they are what every Christian is asked to do every day, and the discipline of doing them is the whole of the discipline. The book has endured because what it offers is genuinely simple and genuinely hard. The people who think they have already understood it have understood the least.

Where to follow it: Ch 1 (the opening thesis), Ch 3 (truth vs. words), Ch 25 (the close of Book One), Ch 37 (the royal road of the cross).

Thomas returns to the contrast between self-knowledge and vain knowledge so often that the contrast becomes the structural backbone of Book One. The world, he says, is full of men who know a great deal about everything except themselves. They have read the Fathers and disputed the schoolmen and quoted Aristotle and produced commentaries on the Sentences, and they have not yet looked clearly at their own anger, their own vanity, their own pleasure in being thought wise. "A humble peasant who serves God is better than a proud philosopher who studies the courses of the heavens and neglects himself."

Thomas is not against knowledge as such. He is against the use of knowledge as a substitute for self-knowledge — the way a learned man can hide from his own moral situation behind the elaboration of his learning, can persuade himself that his erudition is itself a form of virtue, can feel superior to the unlettered believer whose actual life is plainer and harder than his own. The corrective Thomas proposes is constant self-examination. The reader is asked, again and again, to look at himself: at his irritability when crossed, at his pleasure in praise, at his desire to be noticed, at his quiet contempt for those he considers below him.

The exercise is not a wallow in introspection; it is the precondition of any honest spiritual progress. Thomas knows what he is asking. He knows that the man who has spent twenty years building a reputation for piety will resist nothing more strongly than the demand that he look at how much of that reputation he has been seeking for its own sake. The book is patient about this. It does not flatter the reader and it does not despair of him. It simply keeps returning to the question: what do you actually know about yourself, and how would you know if you were wrong?

Where to follow it: Ch 2 (the humble peasant), Ch 3 (knowing the truth), Ch 14 (rash judgment), Book 3 Ch 8 (low opinion of yourself).

The doctrine that gave the book its grip on every later century, including the most secular, is the doctrine of the cross. Thomas means it almost literally. The Christian life is the imitation of Christ; the centre of Christ's life was the cross; therefore the Christian life will be cruciform — marked, in some real sense, by suffering accepted rather than fled. Book Two, Chapter 12 — "Of the Royal Road of the Holy Cross" — is the locus classicus. "Many are weary of carrying the cross; many fear that they may have a heavy one to bear; but it is the will of God that we should bear our cross with him."

Thomas does not romanticize suffering and does not suggest that the believer should seek it. What he insists on is that the suffering will come, in every life, and that the question is what one does with it when it comes. The standard responses — anger, self-pity, the search for someone to blame, the demand that the world owe one a different deal — are, on Thomas's reading, refusals of the cross. The acceptance of the cross is the choice to receive what comes as material for the imitation rather than as an interruption of it.

The argument is hard and is not softened by any modern translation. But it is also, as a piece of psychological observation, very acute. Thomas knows that the moments of greatest spiritual distortion are the moments of resistance to suffering one cannot in fact escape — that the energy spent in refusing to accept what cannot be avoided is the energy that hardens the heart, embitters the temper, makes the next encounter with another human being worse than it needed to be. The royal road is the way of the saints, on his account, because they have learned to receive what comes without firing the second arrow.

The doctrine has been read in every century since by people facing things Thomas could not have imagined — soldiers in trenches, prisoners in camps, the dying in hospitals. The book does not tell them their suffering means anything in particular. It tells them what to do with it.

Where to follow it: Ch 12 (adversity as teacher), Ch 37 (the royal road, Book 2 close), Book 3 Ch 18 (bearing suffering after Christ), Book 3 Ch 47 (hardship for eternal life).

Several chapters of Book One are addressed to a problem Thomas regards as one of the most ordinary obstacles to the spiritual life and one of the least discussed. The reader, he assumes, talks too much. He spends his time in idle conversation, in news and gossip and complaint, in the assessment of other people's behaviour, in the rehearsal of his own grievances, in the exchange of opinions about matters he knows little about. The damage of this is cumulative. Each conversation in itself is a small thing; the cumulative effect of a life lived in talk of this kind is a self that has become unable to hear anything but its own voice.

Thomas's recommendation is simple and rigorous: silence, and the love of solitude. Chapter 20 of Book One gives the practice. "Seek a suitable time for thy meditation, and think frequently of the mercies of God to thee." Sit in your cell. For the lay reader, the equivalent is to find the equivalent of the cell in one's own life — a half hour each morning before the household wakes, a walk taken alone, a refusal to fill every silence with the radio or the phone. The point is not the solitude as such but the silence the solitude makes possible. The interior conversation Thomas describes in Book Two cannot begin until the exterior conversation has been quieted.

The same principle applies to speech. Thomas is repeatedly precise about the kinds of talk to be avoided: the rehearsal of other people's faults, the news from court, the complaint about how one has been treated, the praise of oneself, the explanation of one's own merits. The discipline is the government of the tongue — the willingness to leave a great deal unsaid, the willingness to listen rather than respond, the willingness to wait. The reader who finds the doctrine antiquated should consider how much of his own day is given to the kinds of talk Thomas warns against, and how much of his own peace is being eaten by them.

Where to follow it: Ch 10 (danger of many words), Ch 11 (seeking peace), Ch 20 (solitude and silence), Book 3 Ch 39 (not consumed by busyness).

Book Three occupies more than half the book and is unlike anything that comes before it. The format changes: Thomas steps back, and what we read is a sustained dialogue between the disciple — a young monk, asking the questions an honest beginner in the spiritual life would ask — and Christ, answering in the first person. Fifty-nine chapters in this form. The disciple's questions are the questions any serious reader would put to the practice the book is recommending: how do I know if I am making progress? What should I do when I cannot pray? Why does grace come and go? How should I bear the failures of those around me?

Thomas places the questions in the disciple's mouth and the answers in Christ's voice. The structure has been one of the most imitated devotional forms in Christian literature; later spiritual classics from Teresa of Avila to John of the Cross to Francis of Sales work in some version of it. What makes the Imitation's version distinctive is its tone. Christ's voice in Book Three is not the cosmic or philosophical Christ of high scholasticism. He is direct, almost blunt, and more likely to correct the disciple than to comfort him.

The reader who allows the dialogue to become his own — who lets the disciple's questions stand for his questions, and who reads Christ's answers as addressed to him — has used the book the way Thomas meant it to be used. Book Three is the part of the Imitation most frequently read in isolation; it is also the part that makes the least sense without the foundations laid in the first two books. The humility, the self-examination, the willingness to sit in silence — all of it is preparation for the conversation in Book Three.

Book Four, the shortest section, is continuous with Book Three in spirit: eighteen chapters of preparation for receiving communion, the encounter with Christ taken from the private interior dialogue to the public liturgical act. Thomas treats them as two forms of the same encounter.

Where to follow it: Book 3 Ch 1 (Christ's inner voice), Book 3 Ch 5 (divine love), Book 3 Ch 13 (humble obedience), Book 4 Ch 1 (how dare I approach?).