Thomas à Kempis

Thomas à Kempis, born Thomas Hemerken (also rendered Hämerken), was a native of Kempen in the Rhineland, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. Early biographical notices place his birth in 1379 or 1380; the exact year is not independently documented. His family name, meaning little hammer, is generally taken to reflect his father’s work as a blacksmith. In adolescence, around 1392, he was sent to Deventer in the Low Countries to the Latin school associated with the Brethren of the Common Life. That community, inspired by Geert Groote and organized by Florens Radewyns, formed the heart of the Devotio Moderna, a late-medieval movement of interior conversion, meditation on the Gospels, copying of spiritual texts, and humble practical charity that spread through the Netherlands and the Rhineland.

After some years of study among the Brothers, Thomas sought admission in 1399 to the monastery of Mount Saint Agnes (Agnietenberg) just outside Zwolle. The house belonged to the Congregation of Windesheim, a federation of canons regular of Saint Augustine that gave a more strictly monastic form to the same spiritual ideals. His brother John was already a member of the community and later served as prior. Thomas received the habit, made religious profession, and was ordained priest in 1413. Apart from a forced absence between 1429 and 1432, when an interdict arising from a disputed election to the see of Utrecht obliged the canons to take refuge at Lunekerken near Kampen, he remained at Mount Saint Agnes for the rest of his life, a span of more than seventy years. He held the offices of procurator, subprior, and master of novices, and was remembered as a quiet, devout, and industrious religious.

A large part of his labor consisted in the copying of manuscripts, a central occupation of the Windesheim houses. He is reported to have transcribed the Bible in its entirety four times and to have produced copies of numerous patristic and spiritual works. He also wrote original texts: sermons, meditations, letters, hymns, and biographical sketches of Geert Groote, Florens Radewyns, and other early figures of the Devotio Moderna. The work that secured his lasting fame is the Imitation of Christ (Imitatio Christi), a compact guide to the interior life in four books. Circulating first in manuscript, often anonymously, it was printed in the later fifteenth century and became, after the Bible, one of the most frequently published Christian books in Europe. Although other candidates for authorship were proposed in later centuries, the weight of manuscript evidence and the Windesheim tradition support attribution to Thomas, writing in the first half of the fifteenth century.

He died at Mount Saint Agnes on 25 July 1471 and was buried in the eastern cloister of the monastery. The house itself did not survive the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. His remains were later recovered; in modern times they have been placed in a shrine in the Basilica of Our Lady in Zwolle. No formal process of beatification or canonization was ever brought to completion, and he does not appear in the General Roman Calendar, though he has been popularly venerated, especially in the Low Countries, and 25 July is observed as his commemoration in some local calendars. His spiritual teaching, with its emphasis on self-knowledge, withdrawal from empty curiosity, and the patient following of Christ in humility, continued to nourish Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant readers for centuries after his death.