The Manual of the Christian, Containing the Psalms belongs to the devotional literature of the late medieval Church, the work of Thomas à Kempis, the Augustinian canon whose name is inseparable from The Imitation of Christ. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica entry from which this account is drawn treats him as a writer formed by the mystical theology and practical piety of the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer, and it is that world — quiet, laborious, and inward — that his manuals and psalm collections were written to serve.
The Core Argument
Thomas à Kempis wrote for one kind of reader: the monk, the novice, the child, and the ordinary Christian trying to pray. His books assume that the religious life is learned by repetition rather than argument — by alphabets, disciplines, dialogues, and psalms. The Manual of the Christian, Containing the Psalms stands in that tradition. It offers the Psalms as the working vocabulary of devotion, a text to be recited, copied, and lived rather than analyzed. The case it makes is not stated in propositions but embodied in the shape of the book: doctrine for the young, discipline for the cloister, consolation for the sick and poor, and the Psalter at the center of it all.
Inside the Book
The World That Made the Writer
The notes begin not with the book but with the man. Thomas Hammerken — also recorded as Hammerchen, or Malleolus — was born in 1379 or 1380 at Kempen, some fifteen miles north-west of Düsseldorf, in territory between the Meuse and the Rhine belonging to the archiepiscopal principality of Cologne. His father was a poor, hard-working peasant. His mother kept a dame’s school for the town’s younger children, and the Latin description of her is worth pausing over: attentive to the care of the household, brisk in work, sober in food, abstinent in drink, sparing in words, modest in deeds. John and Gertrude Hammerken had two sons, John and Thomas, and both went to Deventer, then to Zwolle, and finally to the convent of Mount St Agnes.
Thomas arrived at Deventer when he was barely twelve. A dame taught him his first letters, and within a few months he entered the classes of Florentius Radewyn. Following the custom of the time he was called Thomas from Kempen, and the school title displaced the family name — so that Thomas Hammerken was forgotten while Thomas à Kempis became known to the whole Christian world. In his own chronicle of Mount St Agnes he calls himself simply “Ego Thomas Kempis,” a scholar of Deventer born in the diocese of Cologne.
Deventer, Groot, and the Shape of a Vocation
The school at Deventer was already famous before Thomas was admitted. It had been founded by Gerhard Groot, a wealthy burgher won to pious living chiefly through the influence of Ruysbroeck, the Flemish mystic. Here, amid mystical theology and hearty practical benevolence, Thomas was trained. Groot was his saintly ideal; Florentius Radewyn and Groot’s other early disciples were his heroes, their presence his atmosphere, the measure of their lives his horizon.
He was not one of them. He was no educational reformer like Radewyn, no man of affairs like Groot. He liked books and quiet corners all his days, he says of himself. When conviction of sin and visions of God’s grace came to him in the medieval fashion — a dream of the anger and forgiveness of the Virgin — Florentius told him a monk’s life would suit him best, advised the Augustinian order, and sent him to Zwolle, to the new convent of Mount St Agnes, where his brother John was prior. He was received there in 1399, professed his vows in 1407, took priest’s orders in 1413, became sub-prior in 1425, and died on the 8th of August 1471, ninety-one years old.
The Copyist’s Cell
Mount St Agnes was poor, so most of the monks earned money by copying manuscripts to support the household. Thomas was a most laborious copyist, producing missals, books of devotion, and a famous manuscript Bible. He also wrote a great deal of his own, almost all of it about convent life — the only life he knew. There was a chronicle of the monastery and a set of biographies: the life of Gerhard Groot, of Florentius Radewyn, of the Flemish lady St Louise, and of Groot’s original disciples. There were tracts on monastic life — The Monk’s Alphabet, The Discipline of Cloisters, A Dialogue of Novices, The Life of the Good Monk, The Monk’s Epitaph, Sermons to Novices, Sermons to Monks, The Solitary Life, On Silence, On Poverty, Humility and Patience. Two tracts were written for young people: A Manual of Doctrine for the Young and A Manual for Children. Then the books of edification — On True Compunction, The Garden of Roses, The Valley of Lilies, The Consolation of the Poor and the Sick, The Faithful Dispenser, The Soul’s Soliloquy, The Hospital of the Poor — along with three collections of sermons, letters, hymns, and the famous Imitatio Christi, whose authorship has been disputed.
The Man in the Records
Contemporary pious records make him more than a shadow. He appears as a real man, helpless anywhere except in the study or the convent: a little fresh-coloured man with soft brown eyes, who habitually stole away to his cubiculum when conversation became too lively. Somewhat bent — it is recorded that he stood upright when the psalms were chanted and even rose on his tiptoes with his face turned upwards. Genial though shy, occasionally punning, as when he said he preferred Psalmi to Salmones. He perhaps led the most placid, uneventful life of all men who ever wrote a book or scribbled letters — and this was not because his times were uneventful. It would be hard to select a stormier period of European history, or one when the stir of the times penetrated so well into the obscurest corners. Bohemia, with Huss leading, was ablaze in revolt at one end of Europe; France and England, then France and Burgundy, were at death-grips at the other; two popes anathematized each other.
Key Ideas
The manual form itself carries an idea: that Christian teaching is something handed over, the way a copyist hands over a manuscript. Thomas’s titles read like a curriculum of the interior life — alphabets, disciplines, dialogues, soliloquies, hospitals. The Psalms, gathered into a manual, become the daily bread of that curriculum. And behind the books stands a conviction the notes make plain in the details of his life: that the cloister, not the world, is where the soul is formed, and that the copying of a psalter can be as much an act of devotion as the singing of it.
Themes
The uneventful life as spiritual achievement. Thomas lived through one of the most turbulent centuries in European history and wrote almost exclusively about the convent. The notes present this not as obliviousness but as vocation — the quiet corner chosen deliberately, the cubiculum sought when talk grew lively.
The school title that swallowed the family name. Thomas Hammerken disappears; Thomas à Kempis remains. It is a small biographical fact with a large resonance for a writer whose whole work is about the surrender of the self.
Piety learned by imitation. Groot was his ideal, Florentius his guide, the early disciples his horizon. His books reproduce that structure: models to be copied, alphabets to be memorized, psalms to be prayed.
The Psalter as the center of devotion. In a life measured out by chanting, copying, and writing about the religious life, the Psalms are the constant. A manual containing them is the most natural book Thomas could have made.
Why It Matters
The Manual of the Christian, Containing the Psalms matters because of who wrote it and how. Here is a man who copied manuscripts to keep his convent fed, who produced missals and a famous Bible, who wrote sermons for novices and consolation for the sick, and who — by the testimony of the records — rose on his tiptoes when the psalms were chanted. The book is the residue of that life. It preserves the devotional world of the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer and Mount St Agnes, a world of mystical theology and practical benevolence that shaped the most widely read devotional writer of the later Middle Ages. To read the manual is to enter the cell of the copyist, where the Psalms were not literature but labor, and labor was prayer.
