3 1822024587099 LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO Social Sciences & Humanities Library University of California, San Diego Please Note: This item is subject to recall. Date Due DEC 18 Cl 39 (5/97) UCSD Lib. THOMAS A KEMPIS HIS AGE AND BOOK BY THE SAME AUTHOR STATE INTERVENTION IN ENGLISH EDUCATION NATIONAL EDUCATION AND NATIONAL LIFE THE PROGRESS OF EDUCATION IN ENGLAND MUSICA ECCLESIASTICA "CAUSE THE MUSICIANS PLAY ME THAT SAD NOTE i NAM'D MV KNELL, WHILST i SIT MEDITATING ON THAT CELESTIAL HARMONY I GO TO" (King Henry I' I II, Act iv, Sc. ii) ILLUMINATED FRONTISPIECE OF THE TREATISE CALLED "MUSICA ECCLESIASTICA" FROM THE ROYAL MANUSCRIPT ^ B VIII IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM. THIS MS. CONSISTS OF THE FIRST THREE BOOKS OF THE TREATISE " DE IMITATIONE CHRISTI," AND BELONGS TO THE THIRD QUARTER OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. THOMAS X KEMPIS HIS AGE AND BOOK BY J. E. G. Jffi MONTMORENCY, B.A., LL.B. OF ST PETER'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, AND OF THE MIDDLE TEMPLE BARRISTER-AT-LAW WITH TWENTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON First Published in 1906 TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER JAMES LODGE DE MONTMORENCY TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION ..... ix LIST OF MANUSCRIPTS OF THE TREATISE " DE IMITATIONS CHRISTI" IN ENGLISH LIBRARIES xix LIST OF OTHER MANUSCRIPTS CITED . . xxi LIST OF PRINTED EDITIONS OF THE TREATISE " DE IMITATIONS CHRISTI" CITED . . . xxii I. THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS . . . i II. SOME FIFTEENTH CENTURY MANUSCRIPTS AND EDITIONS OF THE IMITATION . . .106 III. MASTER WALTER HILTON AND THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE IMITATION . . . .139 IV. THE STRUCTURE OF THE IMITATION . .170 V. THE CONTENT OF THE IMITATION . . . 223 APPENDIX I " DE MEDITATIONS CORDIS," BY JEAN LE CHARLIER DE GERSON, CHANCELLOR OF PARIS . . .29? APPENDIX II EXTRACT FROM THE " GARDEN OF ROSES," BY THOMAS A KEMPIS ...... 305 INDEX ....... 309 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (These illustrations are all reproductions from fifteenth century manuscripts or printed books.) Description The Four Latin Fathers producing the Music of the Church of Christ .... Lib. i. Cap. i. of the treatise Imitatione Christi . (See p. 162 within.) The same .... (See p. 114 within.) Richard Rolle of Hampole . (See p. 68 et seq. within.) Facing Page Frontis. de 22 4 8 70 Lib. II. part of Cap. xi. and Lib. III. part of Cap. xxi. of the treatise de Imitatione Christi . . 96 (See p. 94 et seq. within.) Lib. I. Cap. i. of the treatise de Imitatione Christi . . .107 (See p. 1 06 et seq. within.) The same 1 1 1 (See p. 1 10 et seq. within.) The same 117 (See p. 116 within.) The same 119 (See p. 1 1 8 et seq. within.) Source British Museum. Royal MSS. 7 B. viii. (circa 1460). Lambeth Palace Library. Codex 536 (circa 1440). British Museum. Harleian MSS. 3216. (21 De- cember 1454). British Museum. Cotton MS. Faustina, B. II. Part II. fol. 114 b. (circa 1400). Royal Library, Brussels. (1441. Autograph of Thomas a Kempis.) British Museum. Royal MSS. 8 C. vii. (circa 1420). British Museum. Burney MSS. 314 (circa 1419). British Museum. Harleian MSS. 3223 (1478). First page of Editio Prin- ceps printed at Augsburg about 1471. vii Vlll LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Description The Device of Les Freres Marnef (See p. 130 within.) Lib. I. Cap. i. of the treatise de Imitatione Christi . (See p. 160 et seg. within.) The same (See pp. 162-3 within.) Facing Page Source 130 Paris edition of 1491. 141 161 Lambeth Palace Library. Codex 475 (circa 1450.) The same (in English) (See p. 163 within.) Emmanuel College Library, Cambridge. Codex 83 (circa 1450). 163 Cambridge University Library. G.g. i, 16 (circa 1450). From a photograph by Messrs Mason &* Basevi The same 166 Magdalen College Library, (See p. 164 et seq. within.) Oxford. Codex xciii. (November 29th, 1438). From a photograph by Mr Horace Hart Woodcut a Pieta with Jerusalem in the distance (See p. 137 within.) Woodcut of the Adoration of the Magi ..... (See pp. 132-3 within.) Woodcut of the Crucifixion . (See pp. 132-3 within.) Lib. I. Cap. 5. and ii. and part of Cap. iii. of the treatise de Imitatione Christi . (See p. 114 within.) Woodcut of the Descent from the Cross (a Pieta) ' . . . (See p. 127 within.) Woodcut of Christ and the Sup- pliant . ... (See pp. 129-130 within.) Lib. III. Cap. i. of the treatise de Imitatione Christi (in English) (See p. 163 within.) Woodcut of the Crucifixion . (See p. 133 within.) 195 London edition of 1 503. Paris edition of 1496. 217 Paris edition of 1496. 225 230 240 247 British Museum. Addi- tional MSS. 1 1437 (circa 1465). Venice edition of 1488 of the treatise de Imitatione Christi. Argentine edition of 1489. Trinity College Library Dublin (circa 1450). 288 Paris edition of 1498. INTRODUCTION T^VESPITE the vast literature that has gathered ^^^ round the treatise de Imitatione Christi, no apology should be needed for the appearance at the present time of a volume dealing with that work, and with the age in which it was written. The perpetual fascination of the former theme is undeniable, while the wave of mysticism that is now moving across Europe, England, and America, makes the study of the not dissimilar phenomenon that troubled the minds and consciences of men in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries both monitory and profitable. We hear much to-day concerning the weakening of faith in God, Freedom, and Immortality, and there can be no doubt that the outlook of the western world upon the fundamental dogmas of religion has greatly changed in the last thirty years. The outlook tends to become an inlook, and the movement from one position of spiritual equilibrium to another necessarily involves the dislocation that accompanies any radical change. It is with a sense of despair and a certainty of loss, that many who have grown up in the older school see this tendency in religious thought. To some it seems almost irreligious to b ix x INTRODUCTION seek, with the mystic, the Kingdom of Heaven in the soul rather than in the firmament and to find the voice of God not in the earthquake or the fiery universe, but in the whispers of conscience. Yet there is nothing surprising in such a tendency. The mediaeval mystics deliberately adopted it in answer to the spiritual discontents and social miseries, to the faithlessness and unhappiness, of their day. The Imitation of Christ was, and~-is, the apology for this position of introspection an apology that has appealed to men with a force otherwise unknown in profane literature. An attempt has been made in the following pages first of all to place before the reader the group of European movements and events that was respon- sible for the school of spiritual thought of which Thomas a Kempis is the most notable represen- tative ; secondly, to trace in outline the various forces religious, philosophical, and literary that came to a focus in a Kempis, and so brought to life the treatise de Imitatione Christi', lastly, to analyse that treatise in considerable detail so as to exhibit the body of doctrine that its author drew from the material that he had gathered together a body of doctrine that repels completely the charges brought against the mysticism of Haemmerlein by Dean Milman and Thackeray. These writers ap- pear entirely to have missed the author's point INTRODUCTION xi of view, and to have confounded the Outer with the Inner life, despite the very clear and sensible distinction that a Kempis makes between these two broad aspects of man's complex personality. It has been a laborious task to describe even briefly the historical environment, the structure and the content of the Imitation. Many volumes would be required for anything like an exhaustive dis- cussion of the Age and Book of Thomas a Kempis. It seems, however, not possible to explain the ex- traordinary literary history of the Imitation, or to estimate its influence in the future, without some such discussion, though it is impracticable in any limited space to clear up the innumerable questions that arise as soon as a student attempts to deal with the complex age in which a Kempis lived, with the literary texture of his deathless work, and the mystical doctrines with which that work abounds. It has been assumed, in writing these words, that Thomas Haemmerlein of Kempen is the author of the treatise de Imitatione Christi. That is my definite opinion after a very careful consideration of this literary problem, and in the following pages there are set out some of the reasons that have enabled me to make up my mind on that ancient question. The doubt as to the authorship of the Imitation has probably aroused more acute contro- versy than any other problem in pure literature. xii INTRODUCTION The bitterness of the controversialists has been in inverse proportion to the sweetness of the book. Nor has this intensity of feeling altogether passed away. This is more particularly the case with respect to what is known as the Gersen claim. I have never seen any evidence that, on examination, presented even B.prima facie case for the authorship of a person named John Gersen, Abbot of Vercelli, who is supposed to have flourished in the first half of the thirteenth century. If a thirteenth century manuscript of the Imitation can be produced, the cases for John le Charlier de Gerson and Thomas a Kempis would disappear. But this fact would not enthrone the mysterious Abbot. The quotation from St Bona ventura in the fiftieth chapter of the third book would tell as heavily against Gersen as against St Bernard. This fact has to be met, and never has been met, by the Benedictine Order in their curious support of the Abbot discovered for them by Constantine Cajetan in the seventeenth century. But there is no thirteenth century manu- script of the Imitation. Manuscripts of this treatise abound throughout Europe, but not a single one that has been examined by competent authorities has been placed earlier than the early fifteenth century, and it must be remembered that the margin of error in dating a mediaeval manuscript does not exceed forty years. The "Codex Aronensis" INTRODUCTION xiii printed by the Benedictine Constantine Cajetan at Rome, in the year 1616, attributes the work to the Abbot John Gersen. Cajetan fruitlessly en- deavoured to identify this name as an Abbot of Vercelli. There is no evidence that there was ever an Abbot of Vercelli bearing that name. The Aronensis manuscript is undoubtedly a fifteenth century document. The difficulties of establishing the Gersen authorship are indeed overwhelming. We have first to establish the fact that there was an Abbot of Vercelli bearing that name ; then we have to show that the existing fifteenth century manuscripts are transcripts from a lost thirteenth century original ; then we have to expunge from the manuscripts all later references, such as the quota- tion from Bonaventura ; finally, having proved the existence of the Abbot of Vercelli and the thirteenth century origin of the work, we have the hopeless task of connecting the abbot and the work. This series of improbabilities destroys the Gersen theory. Gersen, or Gersem, or Gerseem can be nothing but variants of Gerson. The British Museum manu- scripts are very strong evidence of this. The claims of Gerson and Walter Hilton to the authorship are discussed at length in the follow- ing pages. The work was certainly attributed to each of them in the first half of the fifteenth cen- tury, and in the absence of Thomas Kempis, the xiv INTRODUCTION claims of either of them would be strong enough to secure the prize. Certainly the claim in Hilton's case is remarkable enough, for there is nothing in his prose style to exclude him from consideration. This cannot be said with respect to Gerson. I have certainly not cleared up finally the problem that I set out to solve the explanation of the fact that the treatise, Musica Ecclesiastica (consisting of the first three books of the Imitation) was for centuries attributed to Walter Hilton, a canon of the same Order as that to which a Kempis belonged. The flaw in Hilton's case and, for the matter of that, in Gerson's case also, is that the student is compelled to lay undue stress on the value of the fact that Gerson's or Hilton's name is in quite early times attached to the work. There was neither copy- right nor conscience in these matters during the Middle Ages, and the giving of an author's name is no guarantee at all of authorship. The exact problem that troubles us in the case of the Imitation occurs in the case of innumerable treatises of the four- teenth and fifteenth centuries. These are dead, and it does not much matter who wrote them, but we are necessarily concerned with the authorship of the one work that has survived. Mr Samuel Kettlewell's writings on the Author- ship of the Imitation and the Brothers of Common Life have, of course, been of great assistance to me, INTRODUCTION xv and it has been with much diffidence that I have ventured here and there to question his statements or extend his material. His confiding style, real learning, and admirable earnestness disarm all criticism, and I shall be gratified if this volume may be considered in some small measure to supplement his patient labours. Especial attention may be drawn to one feature of this book. I have reprinted in the first appendix Gerson's little treatise de Meditatione Cordis. This work was as popular in the Middle Ages as the Imitation itself. It has never been printed as a single work, but probably appeared in print before the Imitation, as it was issued under Gerson's name with other tracts of his from Cologne by Ulrich Zel between 1467 and 1472. Manuscripts of the treatise are very rare. I doubt if there is one in England. It was apparently one of a series of tracts of the same type, such as Gerson's de Simplification Cordis, de Perfectione Cordis, and others. Internal evidence indicates that it was a late work, written probably after the Council of Constance, and proves beyond doubt that it was from Gerson's pen. The editio princeps differs very considerably from the series of editions between 1485 and 1526, and the series between 1570 and 1575, when it appeared as a supplement to successive editions of the Imitation. The text here presented is to some extent composite, the intention being to secure a xvi INTRODUCTION text as free as possible from the errors and obscuri- ties of early copyists and printers. The Cologne edition of 1467-72 has been in one or two places used to clear up difficulties, but the text is chiefly founded upon that of Milan (1488); another of 1492 without printed place of origin (possibly Ulm) ; that of Nuremberg (1494); and another of about 1496, issued either at Leipsic or Magde- burg (British Museum, I. A. 10,955). The work is, of course, of real interest as showing the funda- mental difference between the style of Gerson and that of the author of the Imitation, but it also possesses much intrinsic value. It is from the pen of the last, and certainly not the least of the great Schoolmen ; it was written when the classical Renaissance was actually in sight ; it may be called the last literary work of the Old Age, and it has all the learning and all the humour that distinguished the work of Walter Map two centuries before. The work proves conclusively that Gerson was not, as some critics have thought, the dry remainder biscuit of a dead age, but was in fact the living link between the learning of the Middle Ages and the learning of the Renaissance. The greatest figure of his age, he was, of necessity, associated with its greatest book, and perhaps no finer tribute has been offered to the genius of the humble monk who penned the work than this inevitable association. It has been a matter of anxious care to secure INTRODUCTION xvii contemporary illustrations for the book. The early printed editions have supplied the curious woodcuts here reproduced. The frontispiece is a peculiarly interesting illumination, for it is not only an admirable example of a lost art, but it shows the meaning that the term Musica Ecclesiastica con- veyed to the mediaeval mind. The pages reproduced from manuscripts in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, and Brussels will, I think, be of particular interest to Colonial, American, and Continental students who are unable to visit the libraries from which these pages are drawn. A definite purpose is served by these reproductions. If we had but an exact reproduction of one page of the unique manuscript of Asser's Life of King Alfred, burnt in the great Cottonian fire of October 23rd, 1731, a literary problem of the first magnitude would not have arisen. I have reproduced here eleven pages from various English and Irish manuscripts of the Imitation, and the fact that these are brought together from scattered sources will enable scholars to test for themselves with some degree of accuracy the views that I have ventured to express on the authorship question. A book of this type necessarily owes a great deal to others beside the author. I have to thank various members of the ever-courteous and learned staff at the British Museum Library, and especially of Mr J. A. Herbert of the Department of Manu- xviii INTRODUCTION scripts, for assistance and advice in the ceaseless difficulties that arise in any discussion of problems dealing with manuscripts and early printed books. My acknowledgments are due to His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury for kindly allowing the reproduction of pages from the Lambeth manu- scripts, and I have especially to thank Mr Kershaw, the librarian, for enabling me to identify beyond much doubt the handwriting of Archbishop Bancroft in the attribution, written on MS. 475, of the Imitation to Walter Hilton. I have to thank Mr Falconer Madan for valuable information as to the Bodleian manuscripts, and, in particular, for drawing my attention to the interesting Dutch MS. (Marshall, 124). My acknowledgments are also due to the authorities of the various libraries men- tioned in the text for their readiness in permitting the reproduction of pages of manuscripts in their possession. The late Dr Shuckburgh and Mr F. W. Head, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge ; and Mr de Burgh, of Trinity College, Dublin, were good enough to give me the most useful information as to the manuscripts in their charge. I have also particularly to thank my publishers for their ready help in the difficult task of securing contemporary illustrations. J. E. G. DE M. ii NEW SQUARE, LINCOLN'S INN August zgth, 1906. LIST OF MANUSCRIPTS OF THE IMITATION IN ENGLISH LIBRARIES (The MSS. marked with an asterisk are entitled Musica Ecclesiastica and have only the first three books.) P]ace Reference and reputed Date Author 1. British Museum. Royal MSS. C. vii. Circa 1420 (none; part of First (or earlier). Book only). 2. British Museum. Burney MSS. 314 Circa 1419 (Gerson). (or earlier). 3. British Museum. Harley MSS. 3216. 2ist Dec. 1454- 4. British Museum. Additional MSS. 11,437 Circa 1465. (Gerson; first two books only}. *5- British Museum. Royal MSS. 7, B. viii. Circa 1470. (none). 6. British Museum. Harley MSS. 3223 1478. (Gerson). *7. Lambeth Palace Codex 475 (Hilton). Circa 1450 Library. (or later). *8. Lambeth Palace Codex 536 (none). Circa 1440 Library. (or earlier). 9. Bodleian Library. K. D. 37(5) (none; First Circa 1450. Book only). 10. Bodleian Library. Laud Misc. 167(1) Sixteenth (Gerson or John d Century. Kentpis). xix xx LIST OF ENGLISH MANUSCRIPTS Place ii. Bodleian Library. *i2. Bodleian Library. *I3- Bodleian Library. *I4. Bodleian Library. *I5. Magdalen College, Oxford. *(?)i6. Emmanuel College, Cambridge. *ij. Emmanuel College, Cambridge. *i8. Cambridge University Library. *ig. Library of Trinity College, Dublin. *2O. Coventry Grammar School MSS. 21. Formerly in Sir Thomas Phillipp's Collection. Reference and reputed Author Date Circa 1450. Marshall 124(6) (none; lib. ii. cap. 12 in Dutch). Laud Misc. 215(1) Circa 1450. (none; Tractatus im- perfectus). Bodley 632 (none). Circa 1450. Arch. Seld. Bodley 93 1469. (none). Codex xciii. (none). Codex 77 (none ; Third Book only). Codex 83 (none). Nov. 29th, 1438. Circa 1450. Circa 1450. G.g. i, 16 (none ; in Circa 1450. English). (None; in English.) Circa 1450. (None.) Circa 1460. (In Greek. Noted by Mr Seventeenth Kettleivell as among Century. the Guildford MSS.) {Note. Four manuscripts entitled Musica Ecclesiastica were in the Syon Library in the Fifteenth Century, and in the Sixteenth Century William Bonham and Reiner Wolfius each possessed a manuscript (noted by John Bale) with the same title. These may or may not be identical with some of the MSS. mentioned above. The above list contains five manuscripts not noted by Mr Kettlewell, namely, 8, 9, ii, 16, and 19. Four of the manuscripts are dated, namely, 1438(15), 1454(3), 1469(14), and 1478(6).] LIST OF SOME OF THE OTHER MANUSCRIPTS CITED Title and Page where Cited 1. Gerson's Sermon, Vivat l?ex(pp. 24-6). 2. Gerson's De Laude Scriptorum (p. 49). 3. De Imitatione Christi (P- 93)- 4. De Imitatione Christi (pp. 94-5). 5. Treatises of Thomas a Kempis (p. 95). 6. Sertnones ad Novitios (P- 95)- 7. Musica Ecclesiastica (p. 97)- 8. De Contemplarione (p. 107). 9. The Passion of our Lord (p. 108). 10. Terence (p. in). n. De Conjugio (p. 151). 12. Stimulus Amoris (p. 13. Scala Perfectionis (p. 151). 14. Speculum de Utilitate Religionis Regularis (p. 151). Place Paris. New College, Oxford. Royal Library, Brussels. Royal Library, Brussels. Royal Library, Brussels. University Library, Louvain. Royal Library, Brussels. British Museum, Royal MSS. C. vii. Bodleian Library, Bodley, 75- Bernard's List, 9259, 73, 2. Cambridge University Lib- rary, H. h. 1-12. Cambridge University Lib- rary, Ee. iv. 30. British Museum, Harl. 3852. Date 1406. Fifteenth Century. 1425. 1441. 1456. Circa 1450. Circa 1450. Circa 1420. 1405. 1419. Fifteenth Century. Fifteenth Century. Fifteenth Century. xxi XX11 LIST OF OTHER MANUSCRIPTS Title and Page where Cited 15. Scala Perfections (p. 152). 1 6. De Sacramento Altaris (p. 156). 17. De Sacramento Altaris (P- 157)- 1 8. Liber Commonitorius de Mundi Contemptu (p. 157). 19. De Utilitate Tribula- tionis (pp. 160-1). 20. Augustini Soliloquia (p. 162). 21. De Utilitate et prae- rogati-vis Religionis et praecipue ordinis Car- thusiensis (p. 165). 22. The same treatise (pp. 165-6). Place Date British Museum, Harl. 330. 1495. Once in Syon Library. Fifteenth Century. British Museum, Arundel Fifteenth 214. Century. Once in the Library of Duke Circa 1440. Humphrey. Now possibly the MS. at Lincoln Col- lege, Oxford, xviii. 21. Lambeth Palace Library, Fifteenth Codex 475. Century. Emmanuel College, Cam- Fifteenth bridge, Codex 83. Century. Magdalen College, Oxford, Circa Codex 93. 1438. Merton College, Oxford, Fifteenth Codex 514. Century. LIST OF PRINTED EDITIONS OF THE IMITATION CITED Reputed Author Place 1. Thomas k Kempis (Editio Princeps) .... Augsburg. 2. None (First Book only) . . Metz. 3. Gerson (entitled de Contemptu Mundi) . . . . Venice. 4. Gerson Venice. 5. Gerson or St Bernard . . Brescia. Date 1471? 1481. 1483. 1485. 1485. LIST OF PRINTED EDITIONS xxin Reputed Author 6. Gerson 7. None (First Book only) . 8. Gerson 9. Thomas a Kempis . 10. None 11. None . 12. None (in German) . 13. Gerson 14. Gerson 15. Gerson . . ... 16. Gerson 17. Thomas a Kempis . 1 8. Thomas a Kempis . 19. Gerson 20. None 21. Thomas a Kempis . 22. Thomas a Kempis (his col- lected works) . 23. Thomas a Kempis . 24. Gerson . . . . 25. Gerson 26. Gerson 27. Gerson 28. Thomas a Kempis . 29. Gerson (in English) . Place Date Lou vain. I 4 8 S ? Cologne. 1486? Venice. 1486. Argentine. 1487. Ulm. 1487. Ulm. 1487. Ulm. 1487. Venice. 1488. Milan. 1488. Augsburg. 1488. Paris. 1489. Louvain. 1489. Argentine. 1489. Paris. 1491. Ulm (?). 1492. Luneborch. 1493- Nuremberg. I494- Leipsic or Magde- 1496? burg. Venice. 1496. Paris. 1496. Florence. 1497. Paris. 1498. Cologne. 1501. London. 1503-4. ERRATA p. 5, line i : for Baarlam read Barlaam. p. 136, line 4 : delete the words and to Gerard Groote, THOMAS A KEMPIS HIS AGE AND BOOK THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS late fourteenth and early fifteenth century in Europe is a period difficult to realise, for it is a period both of preparation and dissolution. Change and decay are visible on every side. Internal forces of disruption challenge observation. External forces, ominous and destructive, compel attention. But change and reconstruction can also be observed. The New Learning is beginning to move almost unnoticed from East to West a fitful dawn, the precursor of a new day destined to reveal vast continents of knowledge and belief. The New Mysticism too is come, the Religion of the Inner Soul that fain would shuffle off the mortal coil of corrupt and unholy formalism. It is everywhere on a sudden. It is in Sweden, England, France, Germany, Italy. No one is free from its influence. The Pope at Avignon trembles and is afraid. The New Mysticism moves even faster than the New Learning, and thoughtful men begin to find one or other or both of these movements more im- portant than even the Great Schism of the West. 2 THOMAS A KEMPIS Both are beginning to influence the Universities and even the Great Councils of the Church. Jean le Charlier de Gerson, the most Christian Doctor, last and not the least of the great theologians, carried from Paris to Pisa, from Pisa to Constance, mystical forces of reform sufficient to abash the monstrous triarchy that filled the vicariate of Christ. Nor did the New Learning and the New Mysticism exhaust the reconstructive and recreative forces of Christendom. Pressure from the East was answered by expansion West and South, and the revelation of new continents. Yet all these forces must have seemed vague and unreal enough to the pessimists and worldlings of that generation. Central Europe was distraught with private war and unchecked lawlessness. The German Emperors received no divine gift of government with the be- stowal of their crown at Rome itself the scene of every vice, the home of every negation of goodness. There was no peace, no sense of rest in any part of Europe, from Ireland to the confines of Asia. England was rent by internal wars and discontent, following on the desolation of the Black Death. That Oriental plague moving West, in the mid- fourteenth century, prepared the way for the hun- dred years of disaster, desolation, shame, and destruction the veritable reign of anti-Christ which preceded, necessitated, but obscured the advent of the new worlds of religion, thought, and explora- tion. On all sides was the darkness of night. In THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 3 Spain were many kingdoms, but the Moor and the Crescent still dominated this part of the extreme West. From the middle of the thirteenth century when the great Subutai with his marvellously handled Mongol armies conquered Poland and Hungary, all Eastern Europe, and even Central Europe, had stood in dread of some new portent in the East. A century later it came. The Ottoman tide of humanity at last overflowed from Asia Minor into Europe, heedless of raging Constantinople and the Byzantine call to the careless West. The Ottoman Turks under Orchan first ob- tained a permanent position in Europe by the cap- ture of Gallipoli in 1358 some twenty years before Thomas a Kempis was born. During his childhood they isolated Constantinople from the Christian West, and the fall of that city accompanied by the extinction of the Eastern Empire on May 29th, 1453, was the completion of a long and disastrous struggle. Some reference to the position of the Eastern Empire must be made, for it throws light on the general con- ception of Christianity that pervaded Europe in the age immediately preceding the Renaissance. The needs of Constantinople, in face of the age-long threat of the Ottoman, were ever being placed before the secure monarchies of Europe. The Emperors pleaded that they ruled a buffer kingdom which alone stood between Europe and the hordes of Asia. Such ground for assistance for the most part fell away in the thirteenth century, when it was seen 4 THOMAS A KEMPIS that Europe was open to the East elsewhere and that the Mongol was even a worse foe than the Ottoman. But if the Emperors could no longer play upon the needs of Europe, her superstition (as Gibbon would say), or her sense of Christian solidarity was open to conviction. The Greek had faz. filioque clause with which to barter in times of need. The dream of the re-union of Christendom, the healing of the schism of the Greek and Latin Churches was ever evoked when the strong arm of the schismatic West was needed to prevent the rising of the Eastern Crescent. Never perhaps before in all the doubtful and unhappy Erastian preoccupations of the Orthodox Church had the precious tenets of Christianity been employed in so scandalous a fashion. At no time did the Greek Church intend re-union, and yet the farce of reconciliation was maintained by servile and ignoble ecclesiastical politicians for more than a whole century in face of the Ottoman peril. So degraded had Christianity become in its Eastern centre that when St Sophia was dedicated to the uses of the Crescent, it certainly suffered no spiritual diminution. There was scarcely a degree of degra- dation that the Orthodox Church was not prepared to suffer. Its embassies to Rome and Avignon, made in bad faith and happily crowned with discredit and unsuccess, are among the more lamentable incidents of history. Yet they answered an uncon- scious and glorious purpose. When the learned THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 5 Calabrian Baarlam in 1339 was despatched as an ambassador by the younger Andronicus to Benedict XII. with a plea for the union of the Churches, he met Petrarch and set in motion that revival of letters which resulted in the Classical renaissance. But the heedless Pope of Avignon and the careless monarchs of Europe rejected all political advances. Nine years later, Clement VI., magnificent and infamous, received the envoys of Cantacuzene in Avignon, that cheerful Babylon of the West, and after much entertainment sent Bishops with them on their return to Con- stantinople to discuss meaningless propositions for the re-union of what both parties were pleased to regard as Christendom. John Palaeologus, a Western both by descent and inclination for his mother was Anne of Savoy was alone perhaps in his desire for the union of the Churches. In 1355 he placed the Eastern Church under the control of Innocent VI. ; and fourteen years later, when the whole of the Empire, with the exception of Constantinople, was in the hands of the Ottomans, he himself, journeying by sea, visited Urban V., who had just returned from Avignon to Rome, and admitted the doctrines of the Catholic Church and the double procession of the Holy Ghost. In the same year the German Emperor of the West was also entertained. Urban, says Gibbon, " enjoyed the glory of receiving in the Vatican the two imperial shadows who represented the majesty of Constantine and Charlemagne." Help, however, was not forth- coming, and the Emperor of the East returned to Constantinople by sea after a brief arrest for debt at Venice. Thirty years later, at the end of the fourteenth century, Constantinople was still isolated from Europe by land when Manuel, the son of John Palaeologus, renewed the attempt to secure the help of the Western princes. It was useless for him to solicit the aid of Rome or Avignon. The Western Church had its own schism to heal. Manuel was magnifi- cently entertained in Paris and not less magnificently in London, but seething Europe had no interest in the affairs of the East, and Manuel returned to find that the danger had passed. The mighty Timour had broken the Ottoman power, and a generation was to die before the attack on Constantinople could be resumed in earnest. During this period there was no talk of re-union. Indeed, until after the Council of Constance, the possibility of re-union would have been remote even had the Greeks been earnest in their Christian professions. Rome for a century and a half before the conclusion of the Great Schism of the West had ceased to be the residential see of the Vicar of Christ. Before the opening of the fourteenth century the Popes had ceased permanently to reside amid the broils and dangers of the ruinous city. Boniface VIII., in I 3O3> was settled at Anagni in the French dominions. A breach between the Pope and Philip the Fair resulted in the excommunication of the King and THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 7 the expulsion of the Pontiff. His successor, Benedict XI., hurled the harmless bolts of the Church from Rome, but Clement V., a nominee of the French Court, abandoned the city and led his Court across the Alps in search of a new Rome. In 1308 the wanderers finally settled at Avignon and acquired its sovereignty. The seventy years of captivity had begun and eight Popes in succession ruled Western Christendom in not unpleasant exile. Clement V. was succeeded by John XXII., Benedict XII., Clement VI., Innocent VI., Urban V., Gregory XI., and Clement VII. Widowed Rome rejoiced to receive Urban V. in 1367, but three years' sojourn was enough, and he returned to die in his beloved Avignon in 1370. His successor, Gregory XL, after seven years by the Rhone, removed the Papal Court once more to Rome, where he died in 1378, and he was succeeded by a Roman Pope, Urban VI. For the moment it seemed as if the widowed and mystic Jerusalem had regained her spouse, but the Cardinals during the summer fled across the Alps and there elected an Anti-Pope, Clement VII. The Great Schism had begun. The seventy years of captivity had been a fitting prelude to the scenes that were to follow. Petrarch had hardly exaggerated the position when he had declared of Avignon, "veritas ibi dementia est, peccandi licentia magnanimitas et libertas eximia. Stupra, in- cestus, adulteria, pontificalis lasciviae ludi sunt." In 8 THOMAS A KEMPIS the struggle that followed between the Babylon of the West and the Jerusalem of Italy we see the forces of iniquity struggling with the nerveless efforts of political expediency. The forces of righteousness in the main stood aside from the struggle, if we except the noble figure of Jean Gerson wrestling in the darkness for the preservation of a Church that had ceased to preserve or even demand the respect of Christendom. It is desirable to realise in some measure these various forces, for without so doing it is not possible fully to appreciate the most singular position in which the Christian world to use a comprehensive phrase has ever found itself. We must endeavour to realise an invisible Church recognising Christ and Christ alone as its Founder and Head, and working without conscious unity of effort for the regeneration of Christendom like yeast in a measure of meal. We must at the same time realise a formal, visible, and official Church, highly organised, immensely rich, claiming, and in an extraordinary measure exercising, control over the persons, the purses, and the spiritual personalities of men ; a Church with incomparable traditions and pos- sessing unlimited power ; a Church that had emerged weakened but triumphant from three centuries of conflict with the temporal power of Europe. We have to watch this Church, sated with worldliness and honeycombed with corruption, THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 9 rapidly losing its spiritual and its temporal power and becoming a private corporation of enormous wealth under the patronage of its eldest daughter the Kingdom of France. We see its managers abandon the great capital that created its organisation and settle in a city of Southern France which forthwith becomes the open cloaca of Europe and the Magna Meretrix of the Middle Ages. We see the Catholic Church watching in vain for a spiritual awakening. We see Rome sick almost to death of Roman fever and raving with Rienzi as its voice. Further West we see Constantinople in its death throes, false to the last and faithless even to the painted rags that symbolised its Christianity. The Orthodox Church was beyond recovery. At the most it could hand on an insane tradition of corruption and superstition to the most savage tribes of Eastern and Northern Europe. But the Catholic Church even in the depths of its degradation was great both in its political instincts and its power of recuperation. It had, it had always had, the power of producing both saints and statesmen, and in the hour of its need, while the Church Invisible was slowly permeating Europe with what a writer of the late fourteenth century called the New Faith, 1 it made effort after effort to leave its Slough of Despond. Slothfully, unwilling, it returned to Roma Aeterna, and this was the signal for the huge forces of degradation to join issue with the political 1 Adam of Usk 10 THOMAS A KEMPIS party which saw that the only hope for Catholicity lay on the banks of the Tiber. Nor were the forces only political that under- took this notable effort. The invisible Church turned from its silent labours to precipitate the result. Reluctant Popes saw visions and dreamt dreams. Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden disturbed with relentless minds the peace of Avignon and the sloth of death. St Bridget was not least among the remarkable revivalists of the fourteenth century and was cer- tainly the sanest of them all. She was born in the year 1304, one of the Royal House of Sweden. At the age of sixteen she married Ulpho, Prince of Nericia, in Sweden. She bore him eight children, and after his death in 1344 she retired from the world and devoted herself to good works and a life of austere contemplation. She founded the great double monastery of Wastein in the Diocese of Lincopen in Sweden, and imposed the Rule of St Augustine. Her writings are full of interest, and in the be- ginning of the sixteenth century had some vogue in England. The most practical minded of women, she endeavoured to combine the life of Mary, who represented in her phraseology the life contempla- tive, with the life of Martha, who represented the life active. Some of her sayings are of value as repre- senting the singularly sane outlook of a prominent mystic of the fourteenth century. "He that fasteth muste take hede that he be not THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 11 overmoch enfebled and made weyke by his un- resonable fastyng " 1 "The contemplatyve man maye nat be ydel." " If he be wery and temptation rise in his prayers he may labour with his handes some honest and profitable werke either for him selfe if he have nede or for other." "If the contemplatyve man have nat sufficient to lyve withal but through his labour than may he make the shorter prayers for his necessary laboure and that labour shalbe the perfection and encreasyng of his prayer." " Also the contemplatyve man must hate his owne wyl, ofte remembre his dethe, fly curiosytie, al mur- muringe ane grudgynge, alway remembre. the right- wysenesse of God and take hede of his owne affec- tions." The following passage may be taken to heart to- day as deeply as when it was written : "The sonne of God speketh to saynt Bryget and sayth, he that desyreth to visyte the londes of the infydels ought to have v thinges. The first is that he discharge his conscience with trewe confessyon and contrition as though he should forthwith dye. Seconde that he put awaye al lyghtnesse of maners and of apparyl nat takynge hede to newe customes or vanytyes but to such laudable customes as his 1 Certayne revelacyons of Saint Birgette (London, 1535?, Godfray). Printed with the translation of The Imitation and The Golden Epistle of St Bernard. The Revelations were first printed at Lubec in 1492. 12 THOMAS A KEMPIS auncesters have used before tyme. Thyrdly that he have no temporall thynge but for necessyte and to the honoure of God and yf he knowe any thynge un- ryghtwysely gotten eyther by hym selfe or by his auncesters that he restore it whether it be lytel or great. Fourthly that he labour to the intent that the unfaythful men may come to the trewe catholy- cal faythe not desyrynge theyr goodes ne catel or any other thynge but to the onely necessitie of the body. Fifthly that he have full wyll gladly to dye for the honour of God and so to dyspose hym- selfe in laudable conversation that he maye deserve to come to a good and a blessed endyng. Amen." It may be imagined that a lady possessed with such ideas filled the Courts of Rome and Avignon with fear and aversion. She strove with all her might to secure the abandonment of Avignon. The return of Urban V. in 1367 must have filled her with joy, while his flight to die in Avignon in 1370 was certainly calculated to point a moral. Bridget is said to have foretold the speedy death of the fugitive Pope. His successor, Gregory XI., re- mained at 5 Avignon the prey of superstitious fears, and when at last he was drawn to Rome by Saint Catherine of Siena he died within a year, warning men on his death-bed against visionaries of either sex. It would seem legitimate to think that the experiences of these saints in Avignon and Rome, would have taught them that it was not the seat of the Church but its mind its universal and corrupt- THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 13 ing influence that mattered. Saint Bridget's faith in the Church, however, won for her a posthumous reward. She died in 1373 at the age of seventy in Rome, after a prayerful pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and within a few years an unreformed Church with its centre at Rome sanctioned, at Basle, her Revelations and enrolled her, at the Council of Constance, among the Saints. Saint Catherine, the daughter of James Benincasa, a dyer, was born at Siena in 1 347. From childhood she sought the contemplative life. On her refusal to marry at the age of twelve she was deprived of the means of solitary contemplation, and henceforth, we are told, 1 the Holy Ghost " taught her to make herself another solitude in her heart; where amidst all her occupations she considered herself always as alone with God ; to whose presence she kept herself no less attentive, than if she had no exterior employment to distract her." With regard to this period of her life, she wrote (in her treatise, Concerning God's Providence] " that our Lord had taught her to build in her soul a private closet, strongly vaulted with the divine providence, and to keep herself always close and retired there ; he assured her that by this means she should find peace, and per- petual repose in her soul, which no storm or tribula- tion could disturb or interrupt." In 1 365 she received the habit of the third Order of St Dominic and, enter- ing a nunnery, for three years never spoke to any one but God and her Confessor. "Her days and nights 1 Lives of the Saints, vol. iv. p. 330. 14 THOMAS A KEMPIS were employed in the delightful exercises of con- templation : the fruits whereof were supernatural lights, a most ardent love of God, and zeal for the conversion of sinners." This saint, famous for her life, her visions, and her mystic treatises (such as that on Consummate Perfection], ventured in June 1376 into the tainted atmosphere of Avignon and interceded with Gregory XI. on behalf of the city of Florence. That superstitious Pope turned to Catherine of Siena for a solution of his doubts. He had vowed to return to Rome : what was his duty ? She replied without knowledge of the vow, " Fulfil what you have promised to God." It is a curious spectacle, the vision of these holy women moving amidst the corruption of Avignon and Rome. They represented the invisible Church of Christ, and they were moved to intervene in the affairs of the visible Church of Anti-Christ. A sense of wonder fills the mind as we see the Cardinals of Avignon questioning the Saint of Siena on the meaning of the Interior Life, and listening to her revelations as to the sufferings of the Founder of Christianity and as to the revolutions of earthly kingdoms. Little good, one must think, could come of such trafficking between the forces of good and evil. Yet she touched the superstitious heart of corruption, and one cannot forget that Christ Himself argued with the doctors in the Temple. After she left Avignon in September 1376 she wrote more than once to the wavering Pope, urging his return THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 15 to Rome. He appears to have followed her as far as Genoa for further advice, and at last, in January 1377, in fear of forces visible and invisible, carried his Court to Rome, to die there anathe- matising all visionaries. Catherine threw herself into the Papal election of 1378 with all the energy of a politician, and until her death, in April 1380, worked actively for Urban VI. and against Clement VII. and the revived Court of Avignon. These women, and other less notable visionaries who took sides in the Great Schism that followed the death of Gregory XL, served no adequate purpose in the regeneration of Christendom by their efforts to bring down from Heaven that pattern of Rome which was evidently laid up in their celestial visions. The visions of a Jeanne d'Arc might bring victory to the temporal arm, but they did nothing to make new the heart of Christendom. More worldly forces were needed to cleanse the sinks of Europe. Womanhood was accounted little in the days of the Great Schism. Yet it is not altogether just to speak of the famous man who rendered the revival of Roman Catholicism possible as a worldly force. Jean le Charlier de Gerson was without any doubt the most remarkable personality of the age in which the De Imitatione Christi was written and the tragedy of the Great Schism enacted. He was born of obscure parentage in the hamlet of Gerson, near the village of Barby, on December i4th, 1363. His mother was a woman 16 THOMAS A KEMPIS of notable holiness, and Gerson compared her to Monica, the mother of Augustine. The cur6 of the village saw in his devout little choir boy the seeds of great things and sent him to school at Rethel. Hence he passed to the College of Rheims at the age of fourteen, and some years later, pro- vided with what we should call a scholarship, he set out, cheered by many blessings, on the long walk to Paris. He entered the Royal College of Navarre, where the famous Pierre d'Ailly became his friend. He immediately made his mark both in University affairs and as a student of the Trivium and Quad- rivium. So popular did he become, that he was elected as the representative of the "Nation" of France in the College for the purposes of the election of the Rector. In 1381 he took his degree in Arts and passed to the study of Theology. About this date he adopted the name of Gerson as a result of punishment undergone through the confusion of his personality with that of a man of a similar birth name. There was perhaps a certain foreshadowing of the future in the new name for Gerson may be compared with the Hebrew word meaning exile. In 1387 an apparently fortuitous opportunity gave Gerson his great chance in life. One of the startling theological controversies of the Middle Ages suddenly arose. A monk named Jean de^Montesson propounded the not unreasonable theory that the mother of Our Lord was conceived in sin, and that the contrary doctrine was opposed to Holy Writ. THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 17 The Theological Faculty of Paris condemned the proposition and directed the monk to retract. He maintained his position, and was denounced to the University who confirmed the judgment of the Faculty, and referred the offender to the Bishop of Paris. The bishop passed sentence forbidding Montesson to continue the offence of promulgating his doctrine. The monk appealed to the Anti-Pope at Avignon. Clement VII. nominated a Com- mission headed by three Cardinals to consider the question. The University was represented at the hearing by two religious and two secular doctors (including Pierre d'Ailly, Grand-master of Navarre). DAilly took Gerson with him to Avignon. In 1387 the Great Schism of the West had been in progress nine years, and Christendom was divided beyond repair in its allegiance. Gibbon has briefly summed up this question of allegiance during the Schism. "The vanity rather than the interest of the nation determined the Court and Clergy of France. The states of Savoy, Sicily, Cyprus, Arragon, Castille, Navarre and Scotland were inclined by their example and authority to the obedience of Clement VII., and, after his decease, of Benedict XIII. Rome, and the principal states of Italy, Germany, Portugal, England, the Low Countries, and the kingdoms of the North, adhered to the prior election of Urban VI., who was succeeded by Boniface IX., Innocent VII., and Gregory XII." The schism literally rent the most intimate countries 18 THOMAS A KEMPIS asunder : England and Scotland differed in their obedience, the Spanish kingdoms and Portugal owned a different spiritual head. This was scarcely the season at which to raise for discussion and decision a question of such curious moment as that of the Immaculate Conception, nor was Avignon at this period exactly the place that could with decency be chosen for the discussion of such a question. More- over, a discussion before Clement and a decision by Clement could not possibly be accepted by Rome. It was perhaps this fact that delayed for something like five centuries the official enunciation of the doctrine that the Anti-Pope was now called upon to examine. DAilly spoke first, addressing Clement VII. and his College of Cardinals. He was followed by Gerson, whose keen eloquence and transparent piety drew forth the personal approval of the schismatic Pope. Three days later Clement pronounced in favour of the University, and Montesson forthwith fled from Avignon to Arragon, and two years later was declared contumacious and excommunicated. It is noticeable that he based his doctrine upon the words of Holy Writ, and refused to be answered by any other evidence. It was a sign of the times. The Invisible Church with one accord was turning back from formalism and tradition to Scripture. The authority of Scripture was not to be over-ridden by any other authority. In Montesson's opinion not only was the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 19 not found in, but it was absolutely denied by, Holy Scripture. That being the case, it was im- possible for him to yield, though like many others he preserved his loyalty to the Pope of his nation, and fled to one of the few countries that admitted his spiritual sway, and where the penalty of ex- communication could run. The decision of Clement was never binding on the faithful. This Apol- linarian doctrine was supported by Gerson at the Council of Constance, and was perhaps implied as a doctrine of the Church at the Council of Trent, but it was not until 1854 that it was officially imposed upon the Roman Church by Pius IX. The University of Paris, however, had no doubt on the subject, and expelled the Dominicans from their midst on the ground that Montesson was one of them. In 1403 Gerson secured their return. In 1387, on his return from Avignon, Gerson took orders, and became, in the words of a con- temporary, "a seraph at the altar." His piety now, as always, and his fervent faith, were undeniable. At this time he wrote a famous panegyric on Saint Louis, applying to him the phrase, servire autem Deo, regnare est. The style of the tract is noticeable. It is full of recondite allusions to history and ancient authors. It has nothing in common with the style of the Imitation. In 1392 he became a Doctor in Theology. At this date d'Ailly was Chancellor of the University and Confessor to Charles VI., the mad king. 20 THOMAS A KEMPIS Gerson's progress thenceforward was very rapid, and it is worthy of record that he drew into the religious life of the time many of his numerous brothers and sisters. His intense affection for them and his parents are notable facts in a life that for the most part was absorbed in the mad whirl of a bad age. His active mind saw the evils of the time, and was not overwhelmed by them. He saw the Schism ruining the Catholic Church, he saw the corruption of the great cities, the intolerable con- ditions of life even in France, that most habitable part of the West, and the general signs of dissolution in the society of Europe. On the other hand he knew well that there was reason for hope. In the way of scholarship what he did not know was not knowledge, and he must have been conscious of the slow revival of classical scholarship, of the wealth of learning introduced from the East by Barlaam the Calabrian in 1339, and by the successive embassies from the Bosphorus. He, too, knew of the hidden but ceaseless religious revival that was moving throughout Europe. He was himself at heart, though not by education, a mystic, a profound contemplative, who looked earnestly for the Kingdom of God. In education and religion he saw the twofold force that would regenerate Christendom. They were the forces that had made his own career possible, that had raised him from obscurity into the doubtful daylight of kings. The education of children seemed to him the primary secret of re- THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 21 generation, and he spent the years after his fall in the teaching of little children. His power as an orator was great. He was the founder of the great line of French preachers. His speech was free and merciless, but this did not exclude him from the delivery of sermons to the Court, where by the year 1396 he had secured great influence. It says a good deal for Gerson that when on the elevation of Pierre d'Ailly to the episcopate in 1398, he himself was offered the Chancellorship of the University of Paris, he was able to refuse the posts of Almoner and Confessor to the King which dAilly had held with the Chancellorship. This great office should not, he felt, be hampered by personal service to the King. As Chancellor of Notre Dame he was in a position that had been occupied by one hundred and sixty bishops, thirty-nine cardinals, and six popes Gregory IX., Adrian V., Boniface VI 1 1., Innocent VI., Gregory XL, and Clement VII. 1 From the year 1227 when Gregory IX., the nephew of Innocent, became Pope the Chancellorship had been a step to the Papal throne. Adrian V. became Pope in 1276; in 1294 Benedict Cajetan ascended the throne as Boniface VII. Inno- cent VI. (1352), Gregory XI. (1370), and Clement VII. (1378), were in Gerson's own age, and the latter was the reigning Pope of his obedience. Gerson was in a position that might quite possibly lead to the 1 See Jean Gerson, so, Vie, son temps, ses ceuvres, by A. L. Masson (Lyons, 1894). 22 THOMAS A KEMPIS throne of Avignon. He threw himself into the work of the Chancellorship with characteristic energy. He himself taught in the Cloister School the children of the poor, declaring that they were the children of God and the inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven, and that it was therefore as great an honour to teach them as to teach the Dauphin. He went as the representative of Charles VI. in a deputation of the University to Benedict XIII., the successor of Clement VII. In the year 1400 he accepted, in his desire to see practical clerical work, a cure at Bruges, which he managed to combine with his work as Chancellor. It was during this period that he com- posed several works in French, including Le TraiM de Mendicit^ Spirituelle. He did all he could, by writing in the vulgar tongue, and by means of education, to bring the best thought into the lives of the people. It was in recognition of this fact that he was called "le Docteur du peuple et le Docteur des petits enfants." This use of the vernacular was perhaps Gerson's most important educational work. His treatise de scavoir bien mourir was largely used in the parish churches. His " L'A B C des simples gens " was also much in vogue. The introduction is a short statement of the undenominationalism which seemed to him sufficient as a working religion for the people. " Entendez-vous," it runs, " petits enfants, fils et filles, et aultres gens simples, je vous escripray en francois cet ABC, qui contient la Patre nostre, laquelle Dieu fist de sa propre bouche ; i K- >- tr- , t e q uocfitnnnfira coinftimoilK lutwe nuttatumc fpi * fjmnptu mm vammtii muftM. :O clmlH Cut fuupuuCicO rtottnna ummc, . in 19 ;O cmiw? {bhttiMiJ f filcn)ieo f ropiutoc ottbUJ,. u --< . i t '^' *<--. -(\-i 4 .'r.. M.S. IN THK BRITISH MUSEUM (HAKL. 3JHI) OK THE TREATISE " I)E IMITAT1ONK CHRISTI." THE M.S. IS DATED '"21 DEC., 1I5I." PART OK CAP. 1. (I.IH. I.) IS HERE REPRODUCED. THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 49 doubt, to fit these names, had it not been for the fact that the word " Chancellor " in each follows. The omission of the word " Chancellor " in the Aronensis manuscript has led to one of the most inane controversies, perhaps the most inane of mediaeval or modern times. There can be no reasonable doubt that every manuscript that bears a variant of the name Gerson was intended by the scribe to be attri- buted to the great Chancellor of Paris. That Gerson was familiar with the work might possibly be adduced from the fact that in his De Laude Scriptorum he refers to the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine as good copyists, if we couple it with the fact alleged by M. Masson that one of the most ancient manu- scripts of the Imitation was transcribed by, or by the direction of, Thomas de Gerson, a nephew of the Chancellor and a canon of Sainte Chapelle. In any event it is certain that if the work did come Gerson's way he would have read it with profound admiration, for its attitude of humility accorded with the mental and spiritual resignation of the broken statesman of Constance. It may well have been at this time that he wrote his De Meditatione Cordis repeatedly in after- times treated as an integral part of the Imitation and the fact that this work was known to be his may have associated his name with the Imitation. In any event Gerson, a voluminous author who did not love anonymity, and whose works written during the ten years of meditation and obscurity were for the most part, at any rate, signed, never claimed the 50 THOMAS A KEMPIS authorship. The apparently very early date of the Burney manuscript in the British Museum which bears his name no doubt offers some difficulty if it was in fact written before his death. But the difficulty, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is not a very serious one, unless of course the origin of the manuscript can be traced to Lyons. There is no vestige of a claim by Gerson to have written the work. Indeed his time seems to have been filled with other labours, and continual introspection. In 1423 he left the Celestine monastery and took up educational work in connection with the little church of St Paul at Lyons and still wrote on. He taught the children in the cloister beside the college of St Paul, and there they learnt also to pray for him in the pathetic words, " Mon Dieu, mon Createur, faites misericordes a votre pauvre serviteur Jean Gerson." Here Gerson wrote his mystic commen- tary on the Song of Songs. He finished it on July Qth, 1429, and immediately fell into an ecstatic trance from which he never came back to common day. His poor children were with him each day, re- peating for him the prayer he had taught them. On July 1 2th, 1429, he passed away from the world in which he had played so great a part. " Notre pere Jean Gerson" had ended his strange career a mystic after all and not a politician. The spiritua aspirations and ideals that had inspired his earlies labours crowned his latest efforts. To instil into th( education of youth the rapture of true religion was th( THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 51 solution that he offered first and offered last for the woes of the world. Such a conception is perhaps a better title to fame than the fruitless victories of the Most Christian Doctor in the Council of Constance. Education is the only factor of progress, the future is in the hands of the little children, and it is in our power to make these children what we will. We may make them princes in all lands and give them power to change the very aspect of society. This Gerson fully recognised and ceaselessly preached. The poorest child was a child of God and an inheritor of the kingdom of Heaven, and therefore it was as great an honour to teach him as to teach the Dauphin. Gerson absolutely realised the relationship of education to the social problems of his day and of all days. He was in fact the first educationalist in our modern sense of the term. It is not possible fully to realise the age of Thomas a Kempis unless we obtain some conception of what education meant and whither it was drifting in that period of blood and iron, and also some appreciation of the mysticism or quietism which at this time lay beneath much, if not all, of the religious revivals in various parts of Europe. One particular combina- tion of education and mysticism produced d'Ailly and Gerson, another Gerard Groote, Florentius, and a Kempis, and another the English mystics, and yet another visionaries such as Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden. Education, on the other hand, uncombined with mysticism or any other form of 52 THOMAS A KEMPIS earnest religion, was responsible for the cold and not very striking intellectuality of the average Paris doctor, the men who followed Jean Petit and justified the Burgundian reign of terror. Education, moreover the mediaeval education of the mind alone in no way checked the unrestrained lawless- ness and debauchery of the Papal Courts at Avignon and Rome. True education, then as now, comprised the training of the spiritual and moral as well as the purely intellectual faculties. If either of these faculties were left untrained, there was a form of education that produced some abnormality of nature varying from the calculated degradation of Cossa to the ignorant but noble mysticism of Jeanne dArc. It will be convenient to glance somewhat rapidly at the educational system in force about the year 1390. In education, as in everything else, the decline had begun and mediaevalism was fighting in strange, strenuous fashion against forces that it could neither understand nor adequately resist. In the same way that mediaeval armour in the fifteenth century as illustrated in the sepulchral brasses both of England and the Continent steadily in- creased in weight and complexity with the addition of grotesque devices for resisting the new mysterious gun, did the intellectual armour endeavour to meet new explosive ideas. A desperate effort was made to carry the old educational ideals, the old strict training in the Trivium and the Quadrivium, into battle against the THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 53 intellectual moral and spiritual unrest of the world. The Doctors of Europe, gathered together at Constance and elsewhere to do battle for old ideals, were cumbered by an intellectual armour that robbed them of all real strength. For a time it was possible by a continual increase of the outward strength of this armour to resist the new mysterious forces that were awakening in Europe. But the great century that saw the armour of the knight attain its most monstrous proportions, saw also its disappearance. The same is true of the armour of the Doctor. Knight and Doctor indeed vanished together. The gunpowder of the Reformation swept both away as the symbols of material and spiritual brigandage. It must never be forgotten that the Roman Church performed a great work for education and culture during the Early and Middle Ages. Learning must inevitably have died after the decay and end of the Western Empire, had it not been for the efforts, first of the monasteries, and then of the popes and provincial councils. The names of the councils and popes who strove to keep alight the flickering torch of learning are forgotten to-day. Who re- members the Capitulare Aquisgranense^- of the year 789 A.D., when the first Adrian was pope ; the Theodulfi Capitulare (caps. 19 and 20) of the year 797, and the third canon of the Second Council of Chalons-sur-Soane of the year 813, both in the days 1 Cap. 72 de schola. 54 THOMAS A KEMPIS of Leo III.? Who recalls the thirty- fourth canon De scholis reparandis pro studio literarum, promulgated at the Concilium Romanum of the year 826, when Eugenius II. was pope, and who ever heard of the Schola Cantorum of Pope Sergius II. ? The seven- teenth canon of the Council of Turin, held in the year 858, when the first Nicholas was pope, possibly only interests the antiquarian mind, while the refer- ence to education in the same year at the Synodus Carisiaca (cap. 12) is probably too obscure for any notice, and the tenth canon (de scholis sacraescripturae, et humanae literaturaeinstituendis] of the year 859 at the Council of Tullens is perhaps as dead as the rest. These and other instances of the scholastic activity of the Holy See and the bishops of the Church when all the world of thought and light seemed dead are, however, important as proving that in the dark eighth and ninth centuries there was a force in the world drawing men on to some far dawn. Indeed the scholastic legislation of the Church in the ninth century is directly responsible for the educational organisation of the twelfth century. It is customary to attribute to the combined effects of the decrees of Third and Fourth Councils of Lateran * the establishment throughout Christendom of a diocesan system of schools. The Concilium Romanum of 826, however, in its thirty-fourth canon, really created this system. The canon runs : " We are 1 Third Council of Lateran (cap. 18), 1179 A.D. ; Fourth Council of Lateran, 1215 A.D. THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 55 informed that in certain places there are to be found neither teachers nor provision for the study of letters. Therefore in all bishoprics and among subject peoples and other places wherein the necessity arises, let all care and diligence be exercised in the appointment of such masters and teachers as shall have at heart and diligently teach the study of letters and of the liberal arts and the sacred doctrines. For in these things are the divine commands most clearly mani- fested and declared," The Fourth Council of Lateran was but carrying this express provision into effect when it declared, in 1215, that "in every cathedral or other church of sufficient power the Dean or Chapter must appoint a schoolmaster to whom the revenue of a prebend should be given. In a metropolitan church a theologian must also be appointed. And if the church cannot support both a grammarian and a theologian, it must provide for a theologian out of its own revenues and see that provision is made for the grammarian in one of the churches of its state or diocese." These provisions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were but a re-statement of a recognised position made with the view of encouraging and indeed of enforcing the higher clergy to carry out their educational duties. In the larger cities throughout Europe, however, the diocesan system of education was and had long been in force. It is more than probable that one of the earliest permanent officials of a cathedral was the Magister Scolarum, and that this official eventu- 56 THOMAS A KEMPIS ally became through the importance of his position the chancellor of the diocese. Mr A. F. Leach, dealing with the fact that the chancellorship of Southwell Minster was annexed to one of the first and most ancient prebends Normanton tells us that this is a " fact which suggests that here, as at York and Waltham, the Magister Scolarum was the earliest dignitary. All collegiate churches and cathedrals were bound to keep schools ; and the teaching of the grammar school was regarded in early days as an even more important part of the duties of the official, who afterwards was known as the chancellor, than his legal and clerkly business. It is indeed only through his scholastic functions that, at Southwell, we learn there was a chancellor at all, though when he appears in written evidence he no longer teaches school himself, but only sees that others do so. This he does not only in Southwell Grammar School itself, but throughout the county of which Southwell was the mother church. So the schools of the University of Oxford were, at first, under the superintendence of the Chancellor of Lin- coln, as chancellor of the mother church of the dio- cese." 1 The diocese of Worcester gives us evidence as to the Magister Scolarum in that county, 2 while we get a particularly valuable instance of the powers of this official in the case of the diocese of London. 1 Visitations and Memorials of Southwell Minster ; Camden Society, 1891, p. xli. 2 Register of Worcester Priory, pp. ex., 130 b, Camden Society, 1865. THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 57 As this is apparent in the very period with which I am dealing, it is desirable to refer to it somewhat fully. Dugdale, in his History of St Paul's Cathedral? tells us that a charter of Richard, Bishop of London, in the time of King Henry I., "granted to one Hugh, the schoolmaster, and his successors in that employ- ment, the habitation of Durandus at the corner of the turret (id est the Clochier or Bell Tower), where William the Dean of Paul's had placed him by his the said Bishop's command. To which Hugh succeeded in that place Henry, a canon of the same Bishop's, that had been educated under the said Hugh . . . which Henry had such great respect in those days that Henry de Bloys, that famous Bishop of Winchester (who was nephew to the King), com- manded that none should presume to teach school within the whole city of London, without his licence, excepting the schoolmasters of Saint Mary Bow, and St Martin's le Grand." Newcourt, in his History of the Diocese of London? adds a little to this informa- tion. He tells us that Henry the Chancellor of Paul's " was that Henry for whom Henry de Blois (who was Bishop of Winchester from 1129 to 1171 and nephew to the King) had such great respect, that by virtue of his legatine power he commanded the chapter of St Paul's and William the Archdeacon, and their ministers, by virtue of their obedience, that after three times calling, they should pronounce the 1 Edition 1658, pp. 8-9. 2 Edition 1708-9, p. 109 ; see Round : Commune^ p. 117. 58 THOMAS A KEMPIS sentence of anathema against all those who without licence of Henry, the Master of the Schools, should presume to teach within the whole city of London, except those who were masters of the schools of St Mary le Bow and St Martin le Grand." The school was further endowed by Richard Nigel in the time of Richard I. I think, however, we must date the origin of the school earlier than the beginning of the twelfth century, for the educational canons of 826 A.D. promulgated by Pope Eugenius II. must have applied to an important cathedral church such as St Paul's, especially when we consider the fact that King Alfred is known to have initiated an educational revival on a large scale and must have been familiar with the specific educational provision of the English Provincial Council of Cloves-hoo and the Council of Rome in 826. 1 The school of Paul's, however, became a national factor under the patronage of Henry of Blois soon after the Norman occupation of England. During his occupation of the see of Winchester, Henry of Blois was an important social force in England. A contemporary writer, 2 under the date 1171, tells us: "Henry, Bishop of Winchester, than whom never was man more chaste or prudent, more compassionate, or more earnest in transacting ecclesiastical matters, or in beautifying 1 Concilium Cloveshoviense, Canon vii., A.D. 747 (Wilkin's Concilia, vol. i. pp. 95-6, London, 1737). 2 See Annals of the Church of Winchester from the year 633 A.D. to the year 1277, by a monk of Winchester, translated by Rev. J. Stevenson (Church Historians of England, vol. iv. part i., 1870). THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 59 churches, departed to the Lord, whom with his whole heart he had loved, and whose ministers, the monks and all other religious, he had honoured as the Lord Himself. May his soul repose in the bosom of Abraham." To the noble prelate, Alexander III., a great educational pope, wrote sometime after 1 159 : " In future be more careful to see that nothing be demanded or even promised for the licence to teach anyone. If hereafter anything is either paid or promised, take care that the promise is remitted and payment restored, such charge being null and void knowing what is written ' freely thou hast received, freely give.' Indeed if anyone by reason of such a prohibition delay the institution of masters in fit places, you may, by our permission, disregarding all gainsaying or appeals, appoint in such places for the instruction of the people, prudent, honest, and discreet men." l We may be sure that the bishop who had done so much for education in London did all that was possible to carry out this truly national policy. We know that even the reign of Stephen did not altogether check educational work, 2 and thirty years after the death of Henry of Blois the Council of Westminster ordained, "let nothing be exacted for licences to priests to perform divine offices, or for licences to schoolmasters. If it have been paid, let it be restored." 3 Alexander III. did not 1 Corpus Juris Canonici, par. 2, col. 768 (Editio Lipsiensis secunda post A. L. Richteri, 1879-81). 2 See Sarum Charters and Documents, Rolls Edition, p. 8. 3 Johnson's Laws and Canons, vol. ii. p. 89. 60 THOMAS A KEMPIS restrict his educational efforts to England. In 1 1 70 it was especially provided with respect to the Gallican Church: "prolicentiadocendi pecuniaexiginondebet, etiam si hoc habeat consuetude " ; l and this provision was confirmed for the whole of Europe by the Third Lateran Council in 1179. From the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth century, Rome indeed was doing all that was possible to secure the spread of education throughout Europe, and her efforts were admirably seconded in many cases, despite the disorders of the times, by great ecclesiastics like the Bishop of Winchester, and by a devoted clergy. The corruption of Rome in the fourteenth century did not undo her noble earlier work. We find that the great London school for which Henry of Blois had done so much had for the year 1 1 90 become an educa- tional centre of the greatest importance, and as in the two succeeding centuries the supremacy was maintained and the curriculum practically unchanged save for the increasing application of Aristotelian scholasticism I may quote William Fitzstephen's description of the curriculum, 2 as rendered by Stow. " Upon the Holydayes, assemblies flocke together about the Church, where the Master hath his abode. There the Schollers dispute ; some use demonstra- tions, others topicall and probable arguments, some practise Enthimems, others are better at perfect 1 Corpus Juris Canonici, par. ii. col. 769. 2 See State Intervention in English Education, by the present writer (Cambridge University Press, 1902), p. 43. THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 61 Syllogismes : some for a shew dispute, and for exercising themselves, and strive like adversaries : Others for truth, which is the grace of perfection. The dissembling Sophisters turne Verbalists, and are magnified when they overflow in speech ; some also are intrapt with deceitfull arguments. Sometime certaine Oratours, with Rhetoricall Orations, speake handsomly to perswade, being carefull to obscure the precepts of Art, who omit no matters contingent. The Boyes of divers Schooles wrangle together in versifying, and canvase the principles of Grammar, as the rules of the Preterperfect and Future Tenses. Some after an old custome of prating, use Rimes and Epigrams : these can freely quip their fellowes, suppressing their names with a festinine and railing liberty : these cast out most abusive jests, and with Socraticall witnesses either they give a touch at the vices of Superiours, or fall upon them with a Satyricall bitternesse. The hearers prepare for laughter, and make themselves merry in the meane time." London at the end of the twelfth century was in the way to become, as Paris was becoming, one of the great Universities of Europe. The sudden development of Oxford and Cambridge checked the expansion of the ancient London school into a university, but the school itself remained famous and efficient, and was a type of the cathedral schools scattered all over Europe, some of which became universities in answer to some peculiar 62 THOMAS A KEMPIS geographical or social demand, but all of which for two centuries, from the end of the twelfth century, remained centres of learning, sending forth travelling teachers possessing the licence to teach and actually teaching in the parochial schools of Europe the ABC schools, the reading schools, the reading and writing schools and in the im- portant song and grammar schools that led directly to the universities, and possessing the curriculum the very advanced curriculum indicated by Fitzstephen. The Church, despite the terrible growth of ecclesiastical corruption in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, kept a firm hold upon the schools. We see this in all parts of Europe. At Beverley, at the opening of the fourteenth century, the independent schoolmaster is crushed out of existence. 1 At Dundee at the beginning, and at Glasgow at the end, of the fifteenth century, the same thing happens. 2 In 1364 we have at Geneva an appeal to the Pope at Avignon, informing his Holiness that the titular canon of the chantry of St Peter, who was the Magister Scolarum of the city, had put up for sale the right to control the city and diocesan schools, and as no purchaser had been found, " quod scole ipse quasi ad nichilum sunt redacte." 3 The Pope ordered the canonical provisions on the subject 1 Memorials of Beverley Minster, edited by A. F. Leach (Surtees Society, 1897), pp. lix.-lxv. 8 State Intervention in English Education, p. 113. 3 LAcadtmie de Calvin, par Charles Borgeaud, Geneve, 1900, p. 6. THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 63 to be enforced. The dispute between educational authorities had, however, temporarily destroyed a flourishing- local system. The schools in this case, as in many other cases from about this time for- ward, were taken over by the municipal authorities. In London in 1393-4 we find the Magister Scolarum and the ecclesiastical authorities which controlled schools situated in Peculiars engaged in a desperate controversy. London was then so important, and the ecclesiastical courts so power- less, that the Church could not retain its control without the aid of the secular arm, and in conse- quence we have a petition to the Crown from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dean of the Free Chapel of St Martin le Grand, and the Chancellor of the church of St Paul's, relating a strange tale. The petitioners declared l that by the laws spiritual, and immemorial custom, the ordinance, the dis- position, and examination of the masters of certain schools of the faculty of Grammar within the city of London, and the suburbs of the same, belonged to them, but that nevertheless strange unqualified masters of grammar held general schools in grammar in the said city, to the deceit and illusion of the children, and to the great prejudice of the King's lieges, and of the jurisdiction of Holy Church. The masters of the official schools of St Paul's, the Arches, and St Martin's had pursued their right against the intruders in the 1 State Intervention in English Education, p. 41. 64 THOMAS A KEMP1S Court Christian, and the intruders in reply began proceedings in the secular court to secure a declaration of their right to teach grammar without ecclesiastical licence. The breath of the Refor- mation was in the bold demand. It was a de- liberate attack in one of the greatest centres of Christendom on the immemorial claim of a Church now notoriously corrupt to control all and every form of education. The significant fact is that the attack was successful. The petition remained un- answered, and seventeen years later the English courts declared in the Gloucester Grammar School Case 1 that there was by the common law of the land, apart from prescriptive rights in particular cases, a perfect right to teach : " It is a virtuous and charitable thing to do, helpful to the people, for which he cannot be punished by our law." This was in the year 1410, a date when new educational ideas were in the air, when the Brothers of Common Life had given their new conceptions of teaching to the world, when Gerson was pro- claiming to Europe that education and the inner life alone could save society, when a Kempis was penning his immortal claim for the free intercourse of man with God, and the spiritual necessity for the following of Christ. The decay, the failure of the great mediaeval educational system had begun, but the whole of its vast machinery was open to the new ideas, and they flowed in. The 1 Year Book, anno n, Henry IV., p. 47, Case 21. THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 65 University corporations of masters and scholars associated for this or that scholastic discipline, for the study of the liberal arts, of theology, medicine, or law, was gradually permeated with the new unrest that ran before the new learning. In Paris, with its faculties of arts, theology, and canon law the very home of that study of Aristotle which from the end of the twelfth century had substituted dialectic and philosophy for the ancient Quadrivium Gerson thundered forth the needs of the inner and the outer life. The life of Oxford was Wiclivism at this date, and the revival of Church authority as shown in Archbishop Arundel's Con- stitutions of 1408 was short-lived. In so far as the University was under the control of the Church, it slowly died during the fifteenth century, and the University of Paris about the middle of the century refused even to recognise Oxford as a seat of learning. Lollardism alone kept the flame of culture alive and made Oxford fit to receive the new learning at the end of the century. The mediaeval system of education was in process of dissolution at the date when the Imitation first appeared, and the question for the world was whether the old machinery could be adapted to new needs, new methods of thought, new spheres of learning, new manners of life. The revolu- tion in religion that accompanied the revolution in thought alone rendered this possible. The machinery of society was rapidly fitted to the new 66 THOMAS A KEMPIS ideas, and for this we have in some large measure to thank the practical work of mystical thinkers who did all that was possible to soften the rudeness of revolution, and to make the hearts of men move with their minds. The Imitation was, indeed, un- consciously enough, a representative of a force that rendered possible the transition from mediaeval to modern manners without a disastrous loss of power, and without a revolution that could only recreate by virtue of destruction. That force was the Christian mysticism which then as now lay beneath the varying living forms of Christian profession. In England the influence of mysticism was peculiarly apparent. England gave to the world extraordinary developments both of scholasticism and mysticism. It was Anselm who first definitely enunciated the principal of scholasticism in its application to the interpretation of scripture. Had it not been for his work, Petrus Lombardus could never have created that logical structure which comprised the whole dogma of the mediaeval Church. These men were realists and believed in the reality of general ideas, and therefore in a sense made logically possible the later extreme mystical position. Their great descendants Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were for this reason no opponents of the mystic position. If general conceptions represented real facts in nature, the general conceptions of the mystic were real. The two Victorines Hugo of St Victor, a Saxon, and Richard of St Victor, a THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 67 Scotsman had already realised this and evolved their mystic doctrine by the means of scholastic logic. Richard definitely built up a philosophical theory of contemplation as an intuitive fact dis- tinguishable from cogitation (the ordinary power of reason) and meditation (the power of reflection upon a single subject). Another man closely connected with England, Bonaventura, carried the mystic doctrine into daily life and showed its practical ap- plication. At this stage, the mid-thirteenth century, the theory of religion was partly controlled by the Aristotelian logic and partly by the new trans- cendental logic of the mystics. One force or other was, however, certain sooner or later to dominate the religious world. The decision came in the fourteenth century. Another Englishman, Duns Scotus, gave the final development to scholasticism. He carried it beyond the bounds marked out by Albert and Aquinas. He forced it to its ultimate and logical conclusions, and justified Roger Bacon's appreciation of its essential unreality. When Duns Scotus died in 1307, the final stage of mediaeval scholasticism was in its prime. It was an intellectual triumph of the highest order, but it had ceased to have any relationship to life or religion. Throughout and beyond the fourteenth century, it was magnified as an intellectual weapon, but it had ceased to have any meaning in the life of the people. Realism vanished from the scholastic philosophy, and with realism the relation- 68 THOMAS A KEMP1S ship of mysticism and scholasticism. Paris became the school of the nominalists, and formal theology was controlled by nominalism. Universals, she taught, were mere words, mere figments of the imagination. From that time the official faith of the Church became hard and materialistic, and the mystics alone represented the Invisible Church and alone carried on the Platonic conceptions of Saint Augustine. It was in England that the mystic movement was carried to its height. From early Norman times England had exhibited a vigorous Christianity that depended but little on the dictates of Rome. Even when Rome, in the reign of Henry III., possessed her maximun of power in England, the spiritual movements of the time seem to have developed quite freely. The monastic life from the time of Stephen appeared to offer singular attractions to English men and women, and in the twelfth century we get a curious mystic development, not so much among the thinkers, as among the people. The monastic discipline was not enough. An extra- ordinary desire for the eremitical life arose. The hermit was regarded as a person of peculiar and enviable sanctity. A desire to experience the fullest sweetness of religious contemplation became wide- spread. Men and women of all classes wished to live the mystic life. Mr Horstman tells us that " the chief conquests of the English mystics lay on the side of practical, moral, and popular theology, and gradually they even more than Bonaventura THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 69 absorbed the whole sphere of religion. They taught the way Godward, the way of perfection, the ruling of life ; and at the same time they undertook the edification and instruction of the people, of the poor and illiterate, taught them the elements of the faith, the commandments, the sacraments, etc., and took hold of the pulpit ; or they instructed the parish priests how and in what to teach the people, how to use the sacraments, etc., and made model sermons, festivals, legendaries, for their use. The sermon, the homily, the epistle, the religious tract became the mouthpiece of the mystics." 1 It is in this mystical movement of which a vast unprinted literature survives that we find the origin of Lollardism and of the Reformation in England. It is in this movement that we find the leaders in their efforts to reach the people turn- ing from Latin to the vernacular in England, Germany, and (later) France. Gerson, as we have seen, at the end of the fourteenth century wrote for the people in the vernacular ; a Kempis in at least one tract did the same ; but a century earlier, David of Augsberg (who died in 1272) and Meister Eckhart wrote in German, and in the first half of the fourteenth century Richard Rolle of Hampole, the great English mystic, wrote many of his tracts in the English tongue. Some mention must be made of Richard Rolle de Ampulla, for it would be difficult to over-estimate the indirect influence that he 1 Richard Rolle of Hampole^ by C. Horstman, vol. i. p. xii. 70 THOMAS A KEMPIS exercised over the development of religion in Europe. He was born about the year 1300 at Thornton, near Pickering, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. He died on September 29th, 1349, at Hampole. His life was an extraordinary exhibition of what appears to the ordinary mind as perverted holiness. He was sent to Oxford, and there he met scholasticism in its latest, its most brilliant, and its most arid stage of development. It rilled him with horror, and after a brief sojourn at the University he fled at the age of nineteen. He returned home and, at an age when the pleasures of life seem most vivid, he de- cided to become a hermit. He found a patron who supplied him with a cell and the necessaries of life. He set to work to realise in his own person the mystic ideal. He passed through the stage of Purification, or Purgation, and was able to declare that he had reached that point of purification when even remorse is washed away. From that stage he passed to the second, the stage of Illumination, where the mind is kindled to the perfect love of God. Two years and eight months were spent in the ex- hausting exercises that could produce this subjective state. Then the hermit passed into his final stage, that of Contemplation, where man " sees into heaven, with his ghostly eye." In this extraordinary state he lay absorbed for a year, until he attained to the final goal of this type of mystic. He acquired the Calor the inward spiritual warmth, almost indis- tinguishable, he tells us,Trom physical warmth and RICHARD R01.I.K OF H A.Ml'OI.K (i:jco-l:U!i) FROM COT- TON MS. FAUSTINA I!. II., PART II., KOI.. lUii- HRITISH MUSEUM). I>K. C. HOKSTMAN CONSIOKKS THIS A CONTKMI'UKAKV I1)M1'KAIT, HfT IT IS IJIKKICt'T TO DATK THK MS. EAKI.IKK 'I MAN 1400. IT MAV WKI.I. UK A COI'V OK A CONTKMI'OKAKV KCKIOIKS THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 71 nine months later this was followed by the Canor an all-pervading melody of uncloyable sweetness. These experiences were accompanied by the Dulcor a sense of spiritual happiness ineffable and divine. A period of four years and three months had given to Rolle these results. Henceforth, he declared, they remained with him in various forms of intensity. He laid claim to saintship as a being wholly absorbed in the love of God, and he asserted that the gift of Canor that spiritual music, that invisible melody, celestial sound, the greatest gift of God to men brought him within the select class of the one or two " privilegiati." J What is one to think of all this? It is cer- tainly repellent, it is still more certainly danger- ous. It shows us the road to that most horrible of all heresies Perfectionism and it estab- lishes, I think, the reactionary character of all ex- cessive religious emotion. But nevertheless it is a fact that has to be considered, very seriously to be considered, in an age that promises to become as mystical as the fourteenth century. It must be remembered that Richard Rolle did not stand alone. Some mystics went even further. It was claimed that Saint Bernard actually saw God face to face. We have to realise that there is in human nature this extraordinary quality : the desire to become unclothed of human characteristics while still in the flesh, and to take part in a life which is in 1 See Richard Rolle of Hampole, vol. ii. (Introduction/ajttw). 72 THOMAS A KEMPIS truth pure mentality. Rolle deliberately en- deavoured to realise in his own person the transcen- dentalism of Richard of St Victor, and he claimed success. But the important point about this extra- ordinary mystic, for my present purpose, is his career after he attained the summit of subjective holiness. He returned to the world and became a wandering preacher, and at last took up his pen. Here the practical North Country Englishman came to light. His treatises were treatises for the people ; treatises of the practical mystic life ; treatises of well-living and well-doing, not untouched with the spirit of social revolt that was to become a political factor in his spiritual descendants the preaching friars in russet grey who filled the countrysides with Lollardism. It is a curious story. This man was not a monk. He was a layman who determined to live the mystic life and inculcate it by word and example. Having done his work, he settled down, at the age of forty, at Hampole, as the spiritual adviser of a community of nuns, and there nearly ten years later he died, probably of the plague, which was then raging in England. Wiclif was then twenty- five years of age. Even a cursory examination of Rolle's Latin writings show a remarkable unity of ideas between him and the author of the Imitation. His description of love and the true lover is almost identical with the wonderful fifth chapter of the book of Internal Consolations. Walter Hilton, of whom I have written in another chapter, was a THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 73 follower of Rolle, and certainly those who are tempted to think that Hilton wrote the Imitation will find a measure of support in the influence that Rolle undoubtedly exercised over Hilton. It might well be contended that only one intimately acquainted with Rolle's writing could have written certain parts of the Imitation. The answer to such a contention is that the English and Flemish mystics had a common ground of thought and faith. When we turn from England to Germany and the Low Countries, we find that mysticism had there, as in England, become a great though intangible force. Mechthild of Magdeburg, "prophetess, poetess, Church reformer, quietist," l had stated the mystical case and its relation to social problems before the birth of Meister Eckhardt in 1260. This famous Dominican became Vicar-General for Bohemia in 1 307, and from that date was engaged in preaching his transcendental doctrine of the God- head, " the universal and eternal Unity comprehend- ing and transcending all diversity." A Neo-platonist, he gave a new currency to Plotinian conceptions, and though his doctrines were officially condemned in 1329, and he himself forgotten, his realistic con- ception of God had become part of the mystic creed. As Mr Inge points out, his philosophy "does not keep clear of the fallacy that an ascent through the unreal can lead to reality." But nevertheless he brought home to innumerable congregations the 1 Light ', Life and Love, by W. R. Inge, p. xi. 74 THOMAS A KEMPIS reality of God as an object of mystic contemplation. His successor was John Tauler, born about the same year, 1300, as Richard Rolle. He died in 1361, after a life of parochial work. To mystics of this type "everything, every event, every person, is a vision from the U nseen, a voice from the I naudible. H e lives in a world of parables, full of spiritual significance ; and while for him there is a Real Presence every- where, he finds it also most truly and effectively where it is most clearly discerned by faith. . . . In God's dealings with man from first to last he perceives a harmony that implies a foreshadowing of the last in the first, of the whole in the part ; and in this way he can find an interpretation of spiritual value even in the thoughts of good men, who have pictured to themselves, inaccurately, it may be, as to matters of fact, God's earlier work in the creation of the world and of man." x Tauler dwells continu- ally on the oneness of man and God. " The soul is so nobly united to God, and, at first, in such a supernatural way, that man might justly shun, like death, every thought that could interfere with this union. The thought, which is to receive God into itself, can endure nothing strange. There- fore desire only invisible and inexpressible things " (Sermon on St Paul). The Plotinianism of Eck- hardt is made into a practical mysticism by Tauler. 1 See The Inner Way, being thirty-six sermons for festivals by John Tauler, with an invaluable introduction by the Rev. A. W. Hutton (p. xxxiii.). THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 75 God is not the only reality. Man is also a reality, but one that desires to merge into God. With Tauler we ascend through reality to reality. When we pass from John Tauler to Henry Suso (1295- 1365), we meet a mystic more of the type of Richard Rolle but possibly less spiritual and more sensuous and even more neurotic than was Rolle. He had something of the same influence over a Kempis that Rolle had over Hilton. John of Ruysbroek {Doctor Ecstaticus) is even of more importance in con- sidering the spiritual heritage of Thomas a Kempis. He was a Fleming, born in 1293 at Ruysbroek, near Brussels. He founded the Abbey of Groenendael in the forest of Soignies, where he died in 1381, shortly after the birth of Thomas a Kempis. At Groenendael he was visited both by Henry Suso and Gerard Groote. These visits may be said definitely to connect a Kempis with the schools of the German and Flemish mystics. Ruysbroek's work has been carefully analysed by Mr W. R. Inge in his learned and brilliant Bampton Lectures for I899. 1 In his abbey "he wrote most of his mystical treatises, under the direct guidance, he believed, of the Holy Spirit." He " was not a learned man or a clear thinker. He knew Dionysius, St Augustine, and Eckhardt, and was no doubt acquainted with some of the other mystical writers ; but he does not write like a scholar or a man of letters. He resembles Suso in being more emotional and less 1 Christian Mysticism, p. 167. 76 THOMAS A KEMPIS speculative than most of the German school." He elaborated the order of mystical evolution. He con- ceived a " Ladder of Love," the rungs of which were " (i) good will ; (2) voluntary poverty ; (3) chastity ; (4) humility ; (5) desire for the glory of God ; (6) Divine contemplation, which has three properties intuition, purity of spirit, and nudity of mind ; (7) the ineffable, unnameable transcendence of all know- ledge and thought." Still more elaborate is his analysis in his Ordo Spiritualium Nuptiarum. "The three stages are here the active life (vita actuosa], the internal, elevated, or affective life, to which all are not called, and the contemplative life, to which only a few can attain." He held with Rolle that there were privilegiati, and his analysis of life is not unlike that which Rolle endeavoured to realise. But his final position is more philosophic : " What we are, that we intently contemplate ; and what we contemplate, that we are ; for our mind, our life, and our essence are simply lifted up and united to the very truth, which is God. Wherefore in this simple and intent contemplation we are one life and one spirit with God. And this I call the contemplative life. In this highest stage the soul is united to God without means ; it sinks into the vast darkness of the God- head." Here we have Eckhardt and Tauler mingled into one : but Rolle and Suso add some softening touches to this cold philosophic ending to the soul's spiritual journey. " We must be conscious of our- selves in God, and conscious of ourselves in ourselves. THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 77 For eternal life consists in the knowledge of God, and there can be no knowledge without self-conscious- ness." It was, we must believe, some such thought that drove Richard Rolle back to the world ere he reached the Ruysbroekian consummation of con- templation. From John of Ruysbroek we pass to a figure who was destined to give a new and practical impulse to mysticism, and to create the means whereby the Imitation was given to the world. Gerard Groote was a contemporary of Wiclif, but unlike Wiclif and unlike Hus, he originated no political changes. An itinerant preacher, as Wiclif was, he nevertheless made no appeal, direct or indirect, to the spirit of social reform that then was stirring in the hearts of men. A spiritual descendant of the German and Flemish mystics, he went about preaching the doctrine of the inner life. The life story of Gerard Groote is a strange one, and it throws a vivid light on an import- ant aspect of society in the days when the tide of time was turning from its ebb in the direction of the Reformation. Groote was born at Deventer in the year 1 340. Educated at the grammar school of that town and later at Aix-la-Chapelle and Cologne, he passed with a sound reputation to the University of Paris, where he drank deep of the well of scholastic learning and became a profound theologian and a nominalist of the recognised type. He left Paris perhaps twenty years before Gerson came to give the University 78 THOMAS A KEMPIS new light and leading. Groote was a man of wealth, position, and learning, and was able to select his own career. He chose, after some experience of teaching and lecturing at the University of Cologne, that ecclesiastical career which was open to laymen. The choice appears to have been the result of a visit paid to the papal court at Avignon in the year 1 366. That city must in many ways have impressed the mind of a man whose great gifts enabled him to see below the surface of things. St Bridget of Sweden in that very year was urging Urban V. to return to Rome. Rumours of the new mysticism, fear of all that it might mean, filled the papal court. There can be no doubt that at the very time when Groote was in Rome the mystic shadow lay on the soul of Urban the shadow that was to drive him to Rome in the succeeding year, and was to brood over and haunt his death-bed. Gerard Groote had his first acquaintance with mysticism in the strange palaces of a dead faith. His immediate reward was scarcely spiritual. On his return to Deventer he found various benefices to his hand, as well as the canonries of Utrecht and Aix-la-Chapelle. In his new career he led a life of cultured and learned leisure, enjoying the present hour as his wealth and inclination dictated, and waiting for the further preferment that his gifts and his position were certain to secure. The turmoil of Europe, the struggle for temporal and spiritual power, meant as little to him as it meant to the average church dignitary of the eighteenth century. THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 79 He was a man who had great possessions material, intellectual, and, as the sequel proved, spiritual. To him in due time, as to his prototype in the Scriptures, the call came, and, unlike that friend of Christ, he was not found wanting. From time to time he had been stirred by vague calls to life. He had heard them in the cathedral services and in the daily life of the church. But they came from other sources also. An unknown hermit came to him one day in the public street did it recall the mystic rumours of Avignon and cried, " Another man thou oughtest to become." Later in sore sickness he abjured his Parisian studies in astrology and magic. At last in 1 374 the final call came, bringing inherited traditions of piety to light. A university friend, now a Carthusian prior, called upon him at Utrecht and eloquently bade him take up the following of Christ. There was little hesitation. The seed of mysticism suddenly germinated. Without hesitation or regret he re- nounced his benefices, his canonries, his ecclesiastical ambitions, and took holy orders as a deacon. Such were the contrasts of the fourteenth century : to take orders was to end the ambition of the Churchman. For five years he trained his heart. He visited the monastery of the Augustinian Canons at Viridis Vallis ; he communed deeply with John of Ruysbroek ; he entered the Carthusian House at Monichuysen. Under the influence of the ascetic life and of the mind of Saint Augustine he returned to the world in 1379, intent on its conversion. He 80 THOMAS A KEMPIS became an itinerant preacher, and travelling on foot from place to place, might have been taken in his coarse grey robe for one of Wiclifs friars, who at this very date were tramping the roads of England and haranguing the multitude in churchyards and market-places. But it was a very different though a not less wonderful work that he performed. He had three aims : one was to bring a sense of repentance home to the many ; another was to introduce a new life into the work of the parochial clergy ; and the third was to make the education of the people a vital fact in the economy of the land. He devoted his wealth to this third aim, and not only intimately associated himself with the teachers in the chief schools, but also founded schools where they were needed. His itinerant preaching, which attracted multitudes, arousedecclesiasticaljealousy andsuspicion. He, how- ever, held the episcopal licence, and for five years con- tinued his itinerant work. At last in 1383 his licence to preach was withdrawn on the ground that he was not a priest, but only held deacon's orders. His appeal to Urban VI. failed, and his labours hence- forth were limited to educational work. But he was no longer alone. He had awakened spiritual life throughout the diocese of Utrecht and the work of preaching had in fact achieved its object. Centres of spiritual life, tiny congregations of humble Christians, had been formed in many places, and these congregations supplied him with a band of THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 81 followers who could aid him in the great educational work that he had designed. His educational and religious aims were well known, and young men seeking instruction came to him from all parts. We are told that as far as possible he educated them free of charge, and gave them copying work to do, for which he paid them. The result of his efforts was the formation of little bands of young men who lived together a life of simplicity, purity, and strenuous work. These were the Brothers of Common Life, and even in Gerard Groote's life there were several definite communities. He also founded a House of Sisters of Common Life at Deventer. Two of these communities are of particular interest to us, though they only formed part of a movement that spread throughout Germany and was vigorous until it was absorbed into the larger issues of the Reformation. It appears to have been Groote's first disciple, Florentius Radewin, who suggested the formation of com- munities entirely supported by the joint-earnings of the copyists, who in the days before the introduction of printing received good payment. Groote con- sented, and advised the drawing up of rules regulat- ing the common life. The first community was that formed at Deventer under Florentius. It was immediately followed by the House of Sisters in the same town, while the community at Zwolle was probably formed about the same time. With this community Groote stayed, and made it an effective 82 THOMAS A KEMPIS mission centre. Groote felt that if the organisation that had suddenly come to life was to grow and prosper it must have a centre ; so, after consulting with John of Ruysbroek, he decided to found a central monastery to which all the scattered com- munities could look. The members of these communities were bound by no vow. Membership was from first to last voluntary. To pray, to preach, to teach, and to live by labour were the sole duties of the members. Gerard Groote did not live to see his work reach its prime. His desire to found a central monastery, a community of Canons Regular of the Order of Saint Augustine, to watch over the praying and teaching Order that he had founded, was, however, brought nearly to accomplishment. He could not himself found the monastery, for his great fortune had already been exhausted ; but at this very time a friend dying of the plague bequeathed the necessary money to carry out what he knew to be Groote's desire. Unfortunately Groote himself, waiting upon and consoling his dying friend, con- tracted the horrible disease and died. That was in the year 1384. His ministry had lasted, from the date of his call, some ten years. The results of that ministry are still felt throughout civilisation to-day. Gerard Groote on his deathbed had exhorted his followers to found the monastery which he saw to be necessary as a rallying-point of the Brothers of Common Life. He had even indicated the place " a waste and uncultivated spot lying between Deventer THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 83 and Zwolle . . . afterwards called Windesem or Windesheim." l The monastery, after the lapse of some years, was founded, and among the first six brethren was John, the elder brother of Thomas a Kempis. The foundation of the central monastery of Windesheim led to the establishment of various other houses, including that of Mount St Agnes, which was founded in 1398, on a site which had been chosen by Groote many years before, as a Brother House for the Brothers who had originally settled in the neighbouring town of Zwolle. After Easter 1398 Brother John a Kempis was elected Prior of the small band of Augustinian Canons now gathered on Mount St Agnes. This was the spot where Thomas a Kempis was destined to spend his long and holy life, and to become the spiritual light of a great movement which was quietly spreading through Central Europe. It is almost startling to turn from the restless lives of men like Rolle, Groote, and Gerson to the serene placidity of the life of Thomas Haemmerlein, the only one of the innumerable writers of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries besides Chaucer, who has survived to our day. Other writers of that period are read out of curiosity or for the somewhat idle purposes of book-making ; but these two are read of necessity. Their works 1 See Thomas a Kempis and the Brothers of Common Life, by the Rev. S. Kettlewell. It is a laborious and invaluable work. 84 are part of the spiritual heritage of the race. "Thomas a Kempis was born in the year 1379 or 1380 at Kempen, a small but pleasant town in the diocese of Cologne, and situated about forty miles northward of this city, in the flat and fertile country bordering the Rhine." 1 His parents were of the laborious yeoman or citizen class, persons of some education and much godliness, who apparently had come under the influence of either Tauler or Gerard Groote. There seems to be some evidence to prove that the mother taught in a little school, but at any- rate we are told that she was " sedulous in the education of her children, attentive to the concerns of her household, active in her habits, very abstemious, not given to much talk, and extremely modest in her behaviour." She is "especially mentioned for her distinguished piety and for the influence that she exercised over her son Thomas in early implanting in his mind the love of holy things." 2 Her sons certainly followed closely in her footsteps, as she followed in those of her husband. All that we are told of this simple household recalls the house- hold at Nazareth. We only know of two children, John and Thomas. John was born about the year 1364, and was probably one of Groote's earliest scholars. He had been sent to the school at Deventer probably before the birth of Thomas, and had been helped by the community of Brothers of 1 Thomas a Kempis and the Brothers of Common Life, p. 27. 2 Ibid. pp. 30, 31. THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 85 Common Life there. He must have been a witness of the foundation of Groote's first community, and have been intimate with Groote himself. Long before Thomas set out from home for Deventer, John had joined the Brotherhood ; and when, after the death of Gerard Groote, the monastery was founded at Windesheim, he had been chosen as one of the first six Canons Regular. In due time, when Thomas was about thirteen years of age, in the year 1392, he was sent to Deventer to join his brother. His parents did not know that John was already settled at Windesheim. This has always seemed to me a curious fact, and it is still more curious that Thomas with all his gift of penmanship, makes scarcely any, if any, definite reference to his parents. There seems a certain want of human lovingness, an absence of the love of kind, in the apparent seclusion of these two men from the dearest ties in life. Yet it is probable that the absence of any reference is due to the loss of documents, for we know from his biographical writings that Thomas was peculiarly susceptible to human friend- ship, and when Lubert Berner was called away from the House to visit his sick father, Thomas records the incident with pleasure. Moreover, the brothers were certainly devotedly attached to each other ; so that we may perhaps assume that in this instance quietism was not guilty of the ingratitude with which it is so often degraded and stained. It was a long tramp from Kempen in the diocese of 86 THOMAS A KEMPIS Cologne to Deventer in that of Utrecht, but the farther march on to Zwolle in the same diocese was a smaller matter. There the brothers met, perhaps for the first time, and there was sealed one of those deathless friendships that give such a human aspect to the character of Thomas Haemmerlein. The elder brother determined that the boy should follow the course of education that had been so great a source of spiritual strength to himself and so many of his friends. He therefore gave him a letter addressed to the saintly Florentius, the Rector of the Brothers of Common Life at Deventer. Florentius, the chief disciple of Groote, and himself a contempo- rary of Ruysbroek and Suso, received the lad with many welcomes. " When I came," Thomas tells us, " therefore into the presence of this reverend Father, he, being at once moved with pity towards me, kept me for some little time with him in his own house, and there he prepared and instructed me for the schools, giving me, moreover, such books as he thought I might stand in need of. Afterwards he obtained a hospitable reception for me into the house of a certain honourable and devout matron, who showed much kindness both to me and to several other clerks." Between Florentius and Boheme, the rector of the town school, the boy fared well. It was a notable age in this respect. Education was ever free to those who could show an intellectual or a moral title to it. In this dark and troubled age THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 87 man's intellectual birthright was respected more fully than in later times. Thomas Haemmerlein remained at Deventer about seven years. The public school was in fact, if not in name, a song- school, with such local modifications as had been produced by the influence of Groote. The rector was one of the vicars in the parish church, and he in part drew his choir from the school. The song- school in the fourteenth century gave what we should now call a sound secondary education of the classi- cal type, with special attention to the spiritual needs of the children. The part that they played in the cathedral or church services as choristers rendered a special training in matters of ritual essential. But the education given was also preparatory to the prolonged university course, and a Kempis had as his master a distinguished university scholar, while he had in Florentius an adviser who was acquainted with all Groote's educational views, and was more- over a scholar and a saint. These seven years were, therefore, spent in an environment of the most help- ful kind. The House of the Brothers was in intimate touch with the school, and after perhaps five years a Kempis entered the House and became acquainted with the daily life of the Brotherhood a life laborious and simple, modelled on the methods of the early Christian Church. Their life became the pattern of his life. Almost unconsciously he became a member of the community, joining in their labours, and learning to take a share of the copying work 88 THOMAS A KEMPIS which then formed a main source of income. There he found his first personal friend if we except his brother a boy of his own age, Arnold of Schoon- hoven, a youth of admirable piety, whose sweet and amiable nature played no mean part in determining the direction of the mind of a Kempis. By the year 1400, when Thomas Haemmerlein was about twenty years of age, his future seemed clearly marked out. He had attained to a degree of scholarship that would have enabled him to have taken up the specialised work of a university ; he had become a copyist of no mean ability ; he had absorbed the spirit of the Brotherhood in which he had lived. The serenity of his environment had become a necessity of his life. In any other air he would have pined and died ; in these high altitudes he could live and could rejoice. Florentius in daily intercourse had woven round him the subtle spell of the simple life, and when manhood came it seemed a matter of necessity, both to the disciple and his master, that the youth should pass into a monastery of the Community. At this date John a Kempis was at Mount St Agnes, and thither Thomas was sent with letters recommendatory. Florentius had com- pleted his work. He had moulded this young son of a Flemish peasant on the very pattern of Christ, and had made it possible for him to write a handbook for the followers of Christ. The two were never to meet again. " The good Father and sweet Master Florentius," as a Kempis calls him, THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 89 " died on the Feast of the Annunciation in the same year." His life was written by his disciple, who describes the end in touching words : " The power of intense love compelled them to weep for so dear a father, when the light and mirror of all the devout, the solace of all the sufferers, was taken away from this temporal light. But the pious faith of those who loved him, reflecting on the sobriety and modesty of this most excellent priest, was consoled by the hope of celestial glory that would not be denied to him through Jesus Christ, Whom he loved with all his heart, to Whom he perseveringly clung unto death, by serving Him in the full devotion of faith. . . . For whose praiseworthy life praise and glory be to Christ for ever, Who adorned our times with a star of so bright a lustre." 1 Mount St Agnes is a solitary hill near Zwolle. It is now known as Agnietenberg. In the monastery here of the Canons Regular of St Augustine, Thomas a Kempis lived, with one brief interval, for seventy years. Out of the world it lay, out even of the ecclesiastical world, to which it nominally belonged. It knew nothing of Avignon, nothing of Rome. " Raving Paris, roaring London " were not within the sphere of its contemplation. It knew nothing of ambition, nothing of controversy, nothing even of the great spiritual movement of which it was the heart. It was the silent, motionless centre of a whirling and incomprehensible world. It was like 1 Thomas a Kempis and the Brothers of Common Life, pp. 112-13. 90 THOMAS A KEMPIS a cathedral shrine in a great city, shut in from all the noise and strife of progress, but typifying the goal of progress all the while. The poor little monastery was composed of a tiny group of men who thought only of Christ and strove to imitate Him ; whose sins were minute fallings away from their ideal of the Man of Nazareth sins wept over and watched ; whose hope lay on the other side of the grave that offered them no terrors ; whose faith came so near to the faith of the first Christians that the days of Christ seemed to have returned. Mount St Agnes was the Little Gidding of the fifteenth century. It represented the noblest form of Christianity that that or perhaps any age could produce. The Rule of the Community inculcated the fundamental law of love towards God and man ; the lessons of humility as taught by Christ; the preparation of body and soul for orderly prayer, by proper and simple attention to both body and mind. Nothing in excess was the ideal of the community. The body was to be made absolutely efficient for the purposes of the soul, and the duty of man to his neighbour was to shadow forth the duty of man to his God. Perfect simplicity in dress and manners, food and drink, work and play, was the ideal for the body ; perfect charity to all men, to the young, to the sick, to the sinful, was the ideal for the mind ; and the love of God which passeth all understanding was the ideal for the soul. No selfish faith dominated the members of this little community. They did not THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 91 seek Calor, Canor, and Dulcor : but they walked with Christ. But nevertheless their life had many pleasures it had all the pleasures of simplicity. John a Kempis, who ruled it from its foundation in 1398 till 1407, in addition to superintending the erection of the buildings, planted an orchard of fruit trees, and an arbour, as well as laying out a herb and vegetable garden. There were guest cells, and there were many opportunities for converse, especially at meal times. The work of copying and illuminat- ing manuscripts was ever at hand, while the many services were a continual refreshment from labour. During the rule of John a Kempis, seven clerical and three lay brothers were invested. On June loth 1406, Thomas Haemmerlein and Octbert Wild of Zwolle were invested as Canons Regular, also a lay brother, Arnold Droem of Utrecht, who brought many gifts and was appointed Refectorarius. In the year 1408 the brothers were parted. John was directed by the Chapter of Windesheim to form a new community at Bommel on the Rhine. The movement was slowly moving south and east. Brother William Vorniken from Windesheim suc- ceeded him. "A lover of poverty and discipline," he ruled the little house until 1425. He subsequently became Father-General of the Order. "He en- larged the boundaries of the monastery ; he built a new house for the husbandmen, and folds near at hand for the flocks; he planted divers sorts of 92 THOMAS A KEMPIS trees, and among them those bearing fruit, in many places in the grounds belonging to the community ; the rougher portions moreover of the mountain, which for the most part had been as yet untouched, he planted, and reduced the sandy tracts to service. He decorated the sacrarium with pictures, wrote books for the choir, and good copies for practising ; he also illuminated many books." 1 Such a life, with its simple pleasures and unassum- ing godliness, offered many attractions to the pious, and we find that in 1408 the first convent for Sisters of Common Life was established at Dieppenheim near Deventer. On April 8th 1412 the church on the Mount, dedicated to St Agnes, was consecrated. It had been many years a-building and the brothers had done much of the work themselves. In the year 1414, Thomas a Kempis was or- dained priest. Mr Kettlewell thinks that it was about this time that the Imitation was begun. There is some evidence that before this Thomas had written certain tracts. But certainly up to this date his time was full enough, and it is difficult to think that the four tracts of the Imitation, or any of them, were written by a man under thirty years of age. On the other hand, as is pointed out in another chapter, the manuscript evidence, for what it is worth, seems to point to an earlier date than 1414. This evidence requires consideration. It is at any rate certain that a complete copy of 1 Thomas a Kempis and the Brothers of Common Life, p. 239. THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 93 the first three books was available by the year 1425. We know that a Kempis visited the mother House at Windesheim in 1425, and Mr Kettlewell suggests that he did so for the purpose of depositing there the first three tracts of the Imitation. It is certainly remarkable that a manuscript formerly at Kircheim, and now in the Royal Library at Brussels, should have the following important attestation clause attached to it : " Notandum quod iste tractatus editus est a probo et egregio viro, Thoma Magistro de Monte Sanctae Agnetis et Canonico Regulari in Trajecto, Thomas de Kempis dictus, descriptus ex manu auctoris in Trajecto, anno 1425, in sociatu provincialatus." Mr Kettlewell translates this passage as follows : " Let it be observed that this treatise has been composed by a pious and learned man, Master Thomas of Mount St Agnes, and Canon Regular of Utrecht, called Thomas a Kempis. It has been copied from the manuscript of the author in (the diocese of) Utrecht, in the year 1425, and in the Society's House of the Provincialate." It is in truth a very striking coincidence that a Kempis should have visited the house of the Provincialate Windesheim at this very date, and certainly the fact appears directly to connect this, the earliest dated copy, with 4 Kempis. The copy itself is not in the hand- writing of Thomas, but it may well have been copied out at Windesheim from a copy deposited there by a Kempis. What has become of this copy ? 94 THOMAS A KEMPIS In 1425 he began a lengthy work the copying of the whole Bible in Latin. This laborious under- taking occupied him until 1440. About that year he began the final copy from his pen of the four books of the Imitation, and of others of his writings. This work was finished in the following year. " The venerable codex is now preserved among the manuscript treasures of the Royal Library at Brussels, where it is numbered 5855-5861. It is a small volume, composed of 192 leaves of paper, intermixed at irregular intervals with leaves of vellum, and written entirely by the hand of Thomas a Kempis, as is attested by the following inscription which ends the manuscript : ' Finitus et com- pletus anno domini MCCCCXLI. per manus fratris thome Kempis in monte sancte Agnetis prope Zwollis.' The writer has placed at the beginning of the volume a table of the treatises therein con- tained, all of which are of his own composition. It is as follows : ' In hoc volumine hi libelli continentur. Qui sequitur me non ambulat in tenebris. 1 Regnum Dei intra vos est dicit Dominus. 2 De Sacramento. Venite ad me omnes qui laboratis. 3 Audiam quid loquatur in me Dominus Deus. 4 De disciplina claustralium. Apprehendite dis- ciplinam. Epistola devota ad quemdam regularem. 1 First Book of the Imitation. 2 Second Book. 3 Fourth Book. 4 Third Book. THE AGE OF THOMAS A KEMPIS 95 Renovamini autem spiritum mentis vestre. Cognovi Domine quia equitas judicia tua. Recommendatio humilitatis. Discite a me. De mortificata vita. Gloriosus apostolus Paulus. De bona pacifica vita. Si vis Deo dignus. De elevatione mentis. Vacate et videte cum ceteris. Brevis ammonicio. Ab exterioribus.' " Although the different treatises are written on separate sheets of paper, and divided by one or two blank leaves, the manuscript is quite homo- geneous. The whole is transcribed by the same hand, and no doubts have ever existed as to its authenticity and integrity. The date affixed to the last page is therefore applicable to the entire volume : it was finished and completed in the year 1441." 1 The only other manuscripts that we have now extant from the pen of Thomas are (i) another collection of treatises composed by him and written out in 1456, "and removed from Mount St Agnes to the House of the Jesuits at Courtrai, and after- wards to that of the same society at Antwerp. It is now in the Royal Library at Brussels." (2) "A volume containing the " Sermones ad Novitios " and "Vita sancte Ledewegis," now preserved in the University Library at Louvain." 1 The Imitation of Christ, being the autograph manuscript of Thomas a Kempis . . . reproduced in facsimile . . . with an introduction, by Charles Ruelins, Keeper of the Department of Manuscripts, Royal Library, Brussels. 96 THOMAS A KEMPIS The Autograph manuscript has had a curious history. It lay at St Agnes' until after the de- struction of the House in 1559. It was found there in 1577 by Johannes Latomus, the Visitor- General of the congregation of Windesheim, and taken by him to Antwerp. It passed from him to Jean Bellere, a famous printer of Antwerp, who died in 1595. In 1590 Bellere gave the volume to the House of the Society of Jesus in Antwerp. On the suppression of the Society it was transferred to the Burgundian Library at Brussels. These two manuscripts, the Kirchheim manuscript of 1425, and the Autograph manuscript of 1441, form what I may call the fundamental evidence for the authorship of Thomas a Kempis ; but, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, this evidence by no means stands alone. There is one piece of evidence inherent in the text of the autograph manuscript which is of great importance. It was first noticed by Dr Carl Hirsche of Hamburg. This is the use of a peculiar system of punctuation for the purpose of indicating a peculiar rhythm or musical cadence running through the entire work. This elaborate system is described by M. Ruelins as follows. We have " the full stop followed by a small capital, the full stop followed by a large capital, the colon followed by a small letter, the usual sign of interrogation, and, lastly, an unusual sign, the dims or flexa, used in the musical notation of the period." This system , ityuA u>mwtijfc4tuV*