Thomas a Kempis
German-Dutch Augustinian canon regular (c. 1380–1471), born Thomas Hemerken in Kempen, near Cologne, trained from the age of thirteen at the school of Deventer under the influence of the Devotio Moderna ('Modern Devotion') movement, a spiritual current of religious renewal that arose in the Low Countries in the fourteenth century emphasising practical, interior and personal piety in opposition to prevailing scholastic and ecclesiastical formalism, and who later entered the Augustinian monastery of Mount St Agnes, near Zwolle, where he lived for nearly seventy years devoted to copying manuscripts, teaching and contemplative life, holding the office of sub-prior during several periods. He is traditionally credited — though with some residual scholarly debate over exact authorship given the compilatory nature typical of the devotional genre of the period — with writing The Imitation of Christ, a brief spiritual treatise in four books that, after the Bible, is considered the most translated and widely read Christian text in history, with hundreds of editions in virtually every language in the world. The work, written in simple Latin of immediate spiritual efficacy, deliberately removed from erudite theological speculation, proposes a model of Christian life centred on radical humility, self-knowledge, contempt for worldly vanities and, above all, the personal and intimate imitation of Christ as a direct path to spiritual perfection, summed up in its most famous maxim: 'it is better to feel contrition than to know how to define it'. Its influence has extended well beyond confessional boundaries, praised alike by Catholic saints such as Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas More and by Protestant reformers such as John Calvin and John Wesley, and it remains today one of the fundamental reference works of practical Christian spirituality.