Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/42

 32 K E M P I S told him that a monk s life would suit him best, advised him to join the Augustinian order, and sent him to Zwolle to the new convent of Mount St Agnes, where his brother John was prior. Thomas was received there in 1399, he professed the vows in 1407, received priest s orders in 1413, became sub-prior in 1425, and died on the 8th of August 1471, being ninety-one years old. The convent of Mount St Agnes was poor, and most of the monks had to eirn money to support their household by copying MSS. Thomas was a most laborious copyist : missals, books of devotion, and a famous MS. Bible were written by him ; and the weightiest argument of those who deny that he is the author of the Imitatio Christi is that he was a copyist. He also wrote a large number of original writings, most of them relating to the convent life, which was the only life he knew. He wrote a chronicle of the monastery and several biographies the life of Gerhard Groot, of Florentius Radewyn, of a Flemish lady St Louise, j of Groot s original disciples ; a number of tracts on the monastic life The Monk s Alphabet, The Discipline of Cloisters, A Dialogue of Novices, The Life of the Good Monk, The Monk s Epitaph, Sermons to Novices, Sermons to Monks, The Solitary Life, On Silence, On Poverty, Humility, and Patience ; two tracts for young people A Manual of Doctrine for the Young, and A Manual for Children; and books for edification On True Com punction, The Garden of Roses, The. Valley of Lilies, The Consolation of the Poor and the Sick, The Faithful Dispenser, The Soul s Soliloquy, The Hospital of the Poor. He has also left behind him three collections of sermons, a number of letters, some hymns, and the Imitatio Christi, if that be his. These writings help us to see the man and his surroundings, and contemporary pious records make him something more than a shadow. We see a real man, but a man helpless anywhere save in the study or in the convent, a little fresh-coloured man, with soft brown eyes, who hid a habit of stealing away to his cubiculum whenever the conversation became too lively; somewhat bent, for it is on record that he stood upright when the psalms were chanted, and even rose on his tiptoes with his face turned upwards; genial, if shy, and occasionally given to punning, as when he said that he preferred Psalmi to Salmones ; a man who perhaps led the most placid uneventful life of all men who ever wrote a book or scribbled letters. It was not that he lived in uneventful times : it is impossible to select a stormier period of European history, or a period when the stir of the times made its way so well into the obscurest corners. Bohemia, Huss leading, was ablaze in revolt at one end of Europe ; France and England, then France and Burgundy, were at death-grips at the other. Two popes anathematized each other from Avignon and from Rome, and zealous churchmen were at their wit s end to concoct ways and means, by general councils of Constance and Basel and otherwise, to restore peace to a distracted church, and to discipline the clergy into decent living. But Thomas knew nothing about all this. He was intent on his copying, on his little books, and on his quiet conversations. His very biographies are colourless. He had not even the common interest in the little world coming up to the convent gate which most monks may be supposed to have. His brethren made him ceconomias prefectus, but he was too &quot; simple in worldly affairs &quot; and too absent-minded for the post, and so they deposed him and made him sub-prior once more. And yet it is this placid kindly fresh-coloured old man who is commonly said to be the author of that book the Imitation of Christ, which has been translated into more languages than any other book save the Bible, and which has moved the hearts of so many men of all nations, characters, and conditions of life. Did Thomas a Kempis write the Imitation of Christ ? Had it not been for his connexion with this famous little book, Thomas would have been no better known than Gerhard Groot, Florentius Radewyn, or Jan van Ruysbroeck. The problem of authorship has given rise to the most interminable controversy the history of litera ture has ever seen, and one which seems to be still as fresh as it was in the 17th century. It arose in this way. The author of the Imitatio sent it forth anonymously. If Thomas was the author he must have written it when he was about forty-five years of age, and it must have found its way into England and France within a very short space of time. Then Thomas was a copyist, a man who spent his life in copying for sale books which he had not composed. These are the only presumptions which make it likely that the Imitatio Christi had another author. But down till the beginning of tlie 17th century Thomas was almost universally esteemed the author of the Imitatio. Some MSS. undoubtedly bore the name of St Bernard, and others that of John Gerson ; but the great majority of MSS. testified to the authorship of Thomas. In 1604, however, a Spanish student of the Imitatio found a sentence from it quoted in what was believed to be a sermon of Bonaventura, who died in 1273, long before either Gerson or Thomas was born. It was after wards proved that the sermon was not by Bonaventura, but belonged to the end of the 15th century ; still for the time it was supposed that Thomas could not have written the Imitatio, and learned men looked anxiously for a clue to an earlier author. Just then, in 1605, Bernardin Rossignoli, superior of the Jesuit college at Arona, discovered in the college library a MS. of the Imitatio without date, and bearing the title Incipiunt capitula primi libri Abbatis Johannis Gersen, De Imitatione Christi. The college had formerly belonged to the Benedictines, and it was supposed, wrongly as it turned out, that the MS. had been in the old Benedictine library, and was therefore ancient. Here then was an author, Gersen, and a MS. of the date required. The facts were, however, that the MS. was of the beginning of the 16th century, and had been brought to Arona from Genoa in 1579. Constantiue Cajetan, famous for his insane devotion to the order of St Benedict, got the Arona MS. printed at Rome, declaring that the author was John Gersen, an abbot of the order of St Benedict. Cajetan next discovered in a copy of the printed Venice edition of the Imitatio of 1501 a note in an unknown hand: &quot;This book was not written by John Gerson, but by John, abbot of Vercelli.&quot; He also found an MS. bearing the name of John of Canabaco. Weaving these unconnected details together, Cajetan declared that the author of the Imitation of Christ w;is John Gerson of Canabaco, Benedictine abbot of Vercelli. Thus began the famous controversy. It has been a controversy really between the supporters of Thomas a Kempis and the Benedictines, who advocate the claims of John Gersen, a mythical personage whose very existence has been taken for granted and never proved. But, while this is the crux of the dispute, the authorship has been claimed for a great variety of writers: John Scotus Erigena, Bernard of Clairvaux, Giovanni Gerso (an Italian monk and philan thropist of the close of the 12th century), Pope Innocent III., Scoto Giovanni and Thomas Gallus, both abbots of Vercelli, David of Augsbiirg, Bonaventura, Ubertin of Cassalis, Peter do Corbario, Ludolf of Saxony, Kalkar, Humbert, Martinus Carthus, Giovanni Michele, Joannes Paumerii (the last four probably transcribers their names are appended to single MSS. in an early printed edi tion), John Gerson a brother of the famous chancellor of Paris, John Gerson the famous chancellor himself, John Gersen the supposed Benedictine abbot, Walter Hilton an English monk, Thomas a Kempis, John a Kempis the elder brother of Thomas, and John of Canabaco, probably John of Tambacho, a professor in the university of Prague. It will be sufficient to examine the claims of four of these candidates. Walter Hilton, a monk of Schene (Sheen) in Surrey, who wrote several devotional books, notably Scala Perfectionis Christia-nse,, is said by Bale (Illustri. Maj. Brit. Summarium, published in 1559) to have written a treatise called DC Musica Ecclcsiastica, and this is confirmed by Pits, who wrote much later. The earlier MSS. of the De Imitatione are called De Musica Ecclcsiastica, and the earliest English MS., now in Magdalen College, Oxford, and dated 1438, bears that title. The inference has been drawn that Hilton wrote the first three books of the Imitation in England, and that Thomas copied them and added the fourth book (see Notes and Queries, March 1881). W e have no contemporary evidence, however, that Hilton did write a treatise called De Musica Ecclcsiastica, and this work may have been attributed to him because the MS. copies have been found in volumes also containing some of his devotional writings. John Gerson, chancellor of Paris (1363-1429, see GERSON), is called the author of the Imitation in several undated MSS., and more especially in two MSS. dated 1441 and 1460. His claims have been supported on the ground of MS. evidence, the presence of Gallicanisms in the Latin of the treatise, and the common tradi tion in France. The evidence to the contrary is so strong, how ever, that his cause has been given up by all save by Frenchmen who, like Vert, consider it patriotic to declare themselves &quot; pour Gerson, Gerson, et pour la France.&quot;