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Rh or aught: they are nothing. That which has no entity, is not. All creatures have no being, for their being depends on the presence of God.” Intensive mysticism signifies return to a pre-intellectual mental life. All that is culture is obliterated and annulled.

If, notwithstanding, mysticism has, at all times, borne abundant fruit for civilization, it is because it always rises by degrees, and because in its initial stages it is a powerful element of spiritual development. Contemplation demands a severe culture of moral perfection as a preparatory condition. The gentleness, the curbing of desires, the simplicity, the temperance, the laboriousness practised in mystical circles, create about them an atmosphere of peace and of pious fervour. All the great mystics have praised humble labour and charity. In the Netherlands these concomitant features of mysticism—moralism, pietism—became the essence of a very important spiritual movement. From the preparatory phases of intensive mysticism of the few issued the extensive mysticism of the “devotio moderna” of the many. Instead of the solitary ecstasy of the blessed moment comes a constant and collective habit of earnestness and fervour, cultivated by simple townspeople in the friendly intercourse of their Frater-houses and Windesheim convents. Theirs was mysticism by retail. They had “only received a spark.” But in their midst the spirit lived which gave the world the work in which the soul of the declining Middle Ages found its most fruitful expression for the times to come: The Imitation of Jesus Christ. Thomas à Kempis was no theologian and no humanist, no philosopher and no poet, and hardly even a true mystic. Yet he wrote the book which was to console the ages. Perhaps here the abundant imagination of the medieval mind conquered in the highest sense.

Thomas à Kempis leads us back to everyday life.