Catholic and Protestant Translations of the Imitatio Christi, 1425–1650: From Late Medieval Classic to Early Modern Bestseller by Maximilian von Habsburg (review)

This is a historico-theological-bibliographic study of the reception by selected Protestants and Catholics of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ (composed 1420–27). It begins (chapter 2) by concisely laying out the main themes of the work (deep awareness of human sin and frailty, contrition, grace, dangers of vain intellectualism, the Mass, invocation of saints), avoiding the temptation to reduce the work to interiorized piety. The Imitation is then situated within the devotio moderna (chapter 3), which von Habsburg rightly portrays as both monastic and lay in character. A survey of the initial, largely monastic dissemination of the work from 1470 to 1530 (chapter 4) is complemented by a study of pre-Reformation Catholic translations into French and English (chapter 5). Here the author notes how translators modified technical monastic terminology to make the work more useful for lay readership while explaining and elaborating as necessary.

Chapters 6 through 8 study Protestant translators Caspar Schwenckfeld, Leo Jud, Sebastian Castellio, Edward Hake, and Thomas Rogers up to the 1580s, noting a number of others as late as 1650. The five mentioned here by name all eliminated book IV on the Mass, removed all references to purgatory or the intercession of saints, and turned even implicit references to merit into “attainment” or “virtue.” In von Habsburg’s view, these Protestantizing modifications were thorough but not “overt” (p. 144).

None of these translators came from mainstream Lutheran or Calvinist circles; rather, three of them represent the more spiritualist-irenic (Schwenckfeld, Castellio) or at least Zwinglian (Jud) circles. The two English translators were polemically anti-Catholic Anglicans. Thus, it would be incorrect, the author concludes, to think that Protestant interest in the Imitation arose from hope for Protestant-Catholic reconciliation.

Chapters 9 to 11 study the Jesuit reception of the work. St. Ignatius of Loyola recommended it in his Spiritual Exercises, as he had been influenced by it during his conversion. Jesuits contributed enormously to the diffusion of the work in its complete four books. They were very active in the debate over authorship. Those who see a contradiction between the work’s supposed interiority and the Jesuit active apostolate are mistaken—the most active-in-the-world apostolate needs to be grounded in a rich interior spirituality. The book concludes: “The translators of the Imitatio firmly believed that no reformation was of any value without spiritual renewal. Spirituality was not a peripheral, insignificant dimension of religion; it remained at the very centre of Protestant and Catholic self-perception and identity” (p. 248).

An appendix lists hundreds of Latin, German, Dutch, French, English, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Croatian, Greek, Czech, and Japanese editions.

This is a fine study that well repays careful reading. This reviewer would have liked to see at certain points an even stronger debunking of the deeply embedded assumption that the Imitation of Christ is an interiorizing work. “Externals” are part of its wallpaper, taken for granted, and its original readers knew that in a way that modern people fail to grasp. For instance, in chapter 2, von Habsburg notes that the Imitatio contains almost no mention of the sacrament of confession, focusing instead on contrition. Yet precisely contrition makes the external sacrament more fruitful in advancing holiness (as distinct from forgiving sin). See, as one example among hundreds, the manual on frequent confession for lay people by Alfred Wilson, Pardon and Peace (London, 1946).