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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
The title of this paper is neither provocative nor immediately arresting but it is at least descriptively accurate. These are remarks. They are only remarks. Their aim is to notice certain elements and direct (or perhaps I should say re-direct) attention to a classic in Christian literature. Part of what is meant in calling something ‘classic’ is that it addresses what used to be called without embarrassment ‘the universally human’. In these fragmented times of the sociological-political-economic-psychological-and-what-have-you person that expression has all but lost meaning. We find it difficult to recognise anything as classic and thus all but impossible to learn anything of lasting importance. What follows is an attempt to indicate at least a few of the ways in which The Imitation of Christ applies to us. In order to do this I must also indicate certain confused and misleading tendencies in the way we take our faith, tendencies which Thomas à Kempis was well aware of and for which he provides a corrective. My presentation may cause offense, however, and that offense may cause one not to take the book seriously. That would be a shame. The last thing I want is to get in the way of the book. There are many reasons for not taking the book seriously—all of them bad. There is one reason to take it seriously, and that reason is as deep and as rich and as painful as human existence.
page 421 note 1 The biographical information is taken from Abbot Justin McCann's Preface to the Mentor-Omega edition and the Introduction to the Image Books edition edited by Harold C. Gardiner, S.J. The page references are to the latter, i.e., The Imitation of Christ, Kempis, Thomas à, edited with an introduction by Gardiner, Harold C., S.J., (Image Books, a Division of Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1955)Google Scholar.
page 422 note 1 A book that arises from a movement that stands against confusion and self-indulgence would seem to be particularly apposite for the second half of the twentieth century. But in a larger sense, it may ‘fit’ what is human at any time.
page 423 note 1 And approaching a text in this manner can wither an oasis and make arid an ocean.
page 424 note 1 Edman, Irwin in the Introduction to The Modern Library edition contained in The Consolation of Philosophy (Random House, New York, 1943)Google Scholar. The language of this edition is almost entirely that of Richard Whitford's classic ‘King James’ translation of the sixteenth century.
page 424 note 2 The last section of the book is titled ‘Which Treats Especially of the Sacrament of the Altar’. The foot-noted sentence, that is, should be taken in two senses, just as the book.
page 425 note 1 Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, translated from the Danish, by Swenson, David F. and Lowrie, Walter (Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 145.Google Scholar
page 426 note 1 This ‘argument’ seems to assume that all temporal change is Progress, and that ‘not really like us’ comes to mean ‘we are better’. Even if that assumption were granted, it is simply wrong that one cannot learn from one's inferiors. But in any event, the Homeric conception of deterioration and corruption through time is just as plausible as the notion of Progress.
page 433 note 1 Kierkegaard, Søren, The Gospel of Suffering, translated by Swenson, David F. and Swenson, Lillian Marvin (Augsburg Publishing House, Minneapolis, 1948), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar
page 436 note 1 That is, the latter, what is said, is both heretical (over against any standard of doctrine and theology) and blasphemous (regarding the person and passion of Christ); the former, how it is said—the very saying of it—is prideful of the speaker and pointless for the hearer (as if he were to be called, re-created, wafted to a better life and ultimately to streets of gold by a commercial). Scripturally, spiritually, and, one might say, linguistically, things do not work that way.