Thomas a' Kempis

In 1471 Edward IV became king of England ending the War of the Roses—for a time. In 1471 Thomas a’ Kempis died in the monastery of St Agnes aged 92. Thomas a who? 

Thomas a’ Kempis belonged to the school of mystics scattered along the Rhine from Switzerland to the Netherlands. He wrote many devotional works, copied the Bible by hand four times, but his great claim to fame is a small book ‘The Imitation of Christ’ referred to as ‘the pearl of all the writings of the mystical German-Dutch school of the fourteenth and fifteenth Centuries.’ Along with St Augustine’s Confessions, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress it is one of the great devotional works. General Gordon even took a copy of it with him on the battlefield—though it proved of little use at Khartoum. 

I inherited the book, a memento from a force of nature who recently died.

I was reading the Imitation of Christ during Advent and got a lot from it. It was, to the modern mind, inspiring and chilling in equal measure, an authentic window into the late medieval mind.  What struck me most powerfully was how wonderful it was to  hear the voice of someone who had died in 1471. Some written records by their nature are impersonal, and even the personal can be masked by self-censoring and buffing. Thomas a’ Kempis, however speaks from the heart, one that stopped beating five-hundred and fifty years ago—possibly in his coffin—for it seems likely that poor old Thomas was buried alive.

 From that moment on, he has become a bit of an anomaly in the Catholic Church. Two hundred years after his death, moves were afoot to make him a saint. Part of that process involved exhuming the body to see whether corruption had set in. When they opened the coffin, they found scratch marks on the lid and wood under his fingernails.

A cynic might laugh at the idea of a man who’d spent his entire life looking forward to union with God should have fought so desperately to delay things a little longer even though he was by this time 92. The Church though was not amused. Precisely because he’d fought for those few extra breaths instead of being reconciled to God, sainthood was denied the poor man.

 I’ve read some interesting counter-theories, such as for example the devil entered the coffin and was responsible for the scratchings and the incriminating wood under the fingernails just to deny Thomas sanctification. Another theory I read was that Thomas did it deliberately in order to deny himself sainthood because he was such a humble man—though that theory is basically illogical for only pride would have suggested he might be made a saint in the first place. 

The whole business illuminates the dross that can adhere to organised religion – rather like barnacles on the most glorious of ships. There is no doubt though that Thomas a’ Kempis was a deeply holy man and his voice rings clear today. He is also an anomaly: Though not a saint, he has his own feast day, and nuns scattered across the world  have assumed the name Sister Thomas a’ Kempis, and as we have seen, Gordon of Khartoum rode to battle with his book tucked under his chest.