The Following of Christ
The Following of Christ is the English title under which Thomas à Kempis’s Latin devotional handbook—best known in modern English as The Imitation of Christ—has circulated in Catholic translations, notably Richard Challoner’s. It is not a narrative, a biography, or an exposition of doctrine in the scholastic sense. It is a manual of practical, interior religion: a sequence of short, aphoristic chapters addressed to a soul trying to conform its life to Christ. The book’s distinctive voice is that of a spiritual director speaking with unusual directness—sometimes to “the disciple,” sometimes as the disciple praying, and in its longest section as Christ answering the disciple in a sustained dialogue.
The work is conventionally arranged in four books, and editions differ only slightly in chapter numbering and titles. The whole is characterized by brevity of paragraph, abundance of scriptural allusion (especially to the Gospels and the Psalms), and a marked distrust of learning, disputation, and public religious display when these are severed from humility and charity.
Book I: Counsels on the Spiritual Life
The first book is the most general and the most accessible. Its twenty-five or so chapters are, in effect, a series of maxims for beginners, beginning with a warning against the vanity of merely human knowledge and accomplishment: everything is vanity except to love God and serve him alone. From that starting point the book moves through a sequence of practical and moral topics—holding a low opinion of oneself; the difference between learned cleverness and the love of God; the doctrine of truth; prudence in one’s dealings; the reading of Scripture in a humble spirit rather than for the sake of argument; the restraint of inordinate affections and desires as the condition of peace; the flight from vain hope and pride; the avoidance of excessive familiarity and of talkativeness.
A large part of Book I concerns the common life. There are chapters on obedience and subjection, on bearing with the defects of others, on avoiding rash judgment, on doing works out of charity rather than mere inclination, on acquiring peace of heart and zeal for progress, on the usefulness of adversity, and on resisting temptation. Several chapters specifically address the religious life—the example of the holy fathers, the exercises of a good religious, the love of solitude and silence, compunction of heart. The book closes with a group of sober, almost severe chapters on the misery of human life, the thought of death, the judgment and punishment of sin, and the need for a fervent amendment of one’s whole life. The tone throughout is sober, unsentimental, and constantly turned back on the reader’s self-knowledge.
Book II: Counsels on the Interior Life
The second book, much shorter—twelve chapters—turns inward. It deals with humble submission, the peaceable man, purity of mind and simplicity of intention, the avoidance of self-esteem and of curiosity about others, the joy of a good conscience, and the love of Jesus above all things. Its most characteristic chapters concern the intimacy of the soul with Christ and the conditions for it; the value of inward conversation with God over outward consolation; gratitude for grace; the small number of those who are willing to bear the cross; and, at the climax of the book, the “royal road of the holy cross”—the argument that the cross is everywhere and inescapable, that it is the test of the true lover of Christ, and that only by bearing it patiently can one follow him. This book contains the work’s sharpest sayings about the difference between those who love Christ in words and those who love him in the bearing of adversity.
Book III: On Inward Consolation
The third book is by far the longest—fifty-nine chapters in the received numbering—and constitutes the heart of the work. It is framed as a dialogue: the disciple speaks, Christ answers. The disciple begins by asking to hear what the Lord speaks in his heart, and the book proceeds as a series of colloquies on the interior life—on truth speaking inwardly, on hearing the word of God with humility, on walking before God in truth and simplicity, on the wonderful effect of divine love, on proving oneself a true lover of Christ, on the grace of devotion and its fluctuations, on desolation and the withdrawal of consolation, on the dangers of self-love and of seeking one’s own comfort, on the offering of oneself wholly to God, on thanksgiving, on prayer and the dispositions for it, and repeatedly on the necessity of humility as the guardian of grace.
Throughout Book III the disciple voices the ordinary experience of a serious religious life: distraction in prayer, fluctuation between fervour and dryness, resentment of others’ faults, discouragement at his own failures, the temptation to seek human approval, the desire for sensible consolation. Christ’s answers consistently redirect him—toward self-knowledge, patience, conformity to the divine will, and the acceptance of suffering as the means by which love is purified. The book also contains extended passages on the interior life of Christ in the soul, on the reading of Scripture as a means of union with God, on the offering of the sacrifice of prayer, and on the difference between true and false liberty of spirit. It is in this book that the work’s mystical teaching is most fully set out, though always in a practical and moral, rather than speculative, key.
Book IV: On the Sacrament of the Altar
The fourth book, in eighteen chapters, is devoted wholly to the Eucharist and to the worthy and fruitful reception of Communion. It opens with an exhortation to approach the altar with reverence and humility, and it returns repeatedly to the dispositions proper to the communicant: faith in the real presence, humility, contrition, gratitude, and the desire for union with Christ. It treats of the dignity of the sacrament and the unworthiness of the recipient, of the many who communicate out of habit or custom rather than love, of the need to prepare carefully and to give thanks afterwards, of the value of frequent communion and of the excuses by which people avoid it, and of the offering of oneself together with Christ in the sacrifice of the Mass.
The book’s tone is that of a devotional address rather than a theological treatise; it presupposes Catholic sacramental doctrine without arguing for it, and its interest is entirely in the effect of the sacrament on the soul. It concludes with the disciple’s prayer of self-offering and with counsels on bearing the defects of others and on the pursuit of peace.
Character of the Whole
Considered as a single work, The Following of Christ is unified less by argument than by a small set of recurring convictions. The first is that the Christian life consists in the imitation of Christ’s life and especially of his humility, obedience, and suffering—hence the standard English title. The second is that self-knowledge is the foundation of all progress, and that the pursuit of knowledge, and even of religious knowledge, is worthless or harmful when it feeds self-importance. The third is that the interior life—prayer, silence, purity of intention, patience under trial—matters more than any external observance, though external observances are never simply dispensed with. The fourth is that the cross is inseparable from following Christ and that resistance to it is the chief obstacle to peace.
The style is deliberately unadorned: short chapters, brief paragraphs, frequent antitheses, direct address, and a vocabulary of humility, consolation, desolation, and love. It makes no claim to originality of doctrine and grounds its authority almost entirely in Scripture and in the common experience of souls. Its power lies in its refusal to flatter the reader: it names the ordinary evasions of the religious life plainly, and it consistently locates progress in the acceptance of one’s own weakness rather than in the achievement of spiritual heights.
Further Themes and Method
The book’s characteristic method is the examination of the heart. It repeatedly contrasts the outward appearance of devotion with the inward truth of the will, warning that religious practice, reputation, and even knowledge of holy things can coexist with self-love. Its remedy is not a technique but a repeated turning: humility, confession of weakness, and the renunciation of self-will.
It treats temptation as an ordinary condition of the spiritual life rather than an anomaly, and it presents resistance to temptation as a school of humility. It warns against curiosity, idle talk, and the desire to know matters that do not serve one’s own salvation. Peace is described less as a change of circumstances than as the ordering of the affections and the acceptance of one’s present condition.
The work sets grace and nature in opposition: nature seeks its own advantage, comfort, and esteem, while grace seeks God’s glory, self-denial, and the good of others. It also keeps an eschatological horizon—death, judgment, and the last things—as a motive for detachment from the world.
Its form is not a continuous argument but a series of colloquies, prayers, maxims, and direct exhortations. The reader is addressed as a disciple, and the voice shifts between teacher, penitent, and Christ. The book’s significance lies in this compression of ascetical teaching into portable, repeatable counsel: it dignifies hidden fidelity, patience, and humility above extraordinary spiritual experience, and it measures progress by charity and self-knowledge rather than by consolation or insight.
