Reading room

The Imitation of Christ

Thomas à Kempis

Four booklets written for the spiritual formation of religious which circulated anonymously from the 1420s and which Thomas copied in his own hand, signed and dated, in 1441. The first counsels detachment from vanity and from knowledge that does not make one better; the second invites to the inner life and culminates in 'the royal way of the holy cross'; the third, the longest, is a dialogue between Christ and the disciple on inner consolation and love; the fourth prepares for communion. With more than seven hundred manuscripts and thousands of editions, it is the most widely circulated Christian book after the Bible. For centuries it was also attributed to Jean Gerson and to a supposed abbot Johannes Gersen; the Brussels autograph and Johannes Busch's testimony support Thomas's authorship.