Book One
25 chapters
Counsels on the spiritual life: self-knowledge, silence, reading, obedience, temptation, the judgement of others.
Volume One of Five
The Imitation of Christ
A short book from a Dutch monastery that has outlived the world it was written for. Apart from the Bible, no Christian writing has been read as widely or as continuously.
Thomas à Kempis, c. 1380–1471 · translated by William Benham · The Harvard Classics, 1909
114Chapters
58,900Words by the author
329Explanatory panels
358Typeset pages
Choose this volume when you want the most approachable of the five, in chapters of two or three pages that can be read one a day.
What it asks of you: Nothing. No prior reading, no background in theology. · Difficulty: Gentlest
Where readers get stuck
The Imitation of Christ, and what it asks of you
The sentences are plain. What defeats readers is that the book keeps making judgements whose grounds lie outside it: that learning is worth little, that a man should be content to be unknown, that the world deserves contempt. Each of those assumes something the text never stops to state.
What this edition adds
- ▪The medieval vocabulary of detachment, obedience and contempt of the world put back in its setting, so the counsels read as they were meant rather than as an attack on ordinary life.
- ▪The dialogue of Book Three marked where it matters: Christ speaks in the first person, and that is a literary convention of monastic writing, not a claim of private revelation.
- ▪Benham’s scripture references kept at the foot of each chapter, and the allusions he left unmarked identified in their own panels.
- ▪A word of caution wherever a passage of severe warning could wound a reader in a fragile state.
The shape of the work
Four books · 114 chapters
Book Two
12 chapters
Counsels on the inner life: intention, conscience, the love of Jesus, the royal road of the Cross.
Book Three
59 chapters
On inward consolation. A dialogue on grace, surrender, dryness, consolation and desolation.
Book Four
18 chapters
On the Sacrament of the Altar. Preparation for communion, largely in dialogue.
The whole work, with a guide at your side
All 114 chapters, unabridged, in 358 typeset pages. Read it straight through or study it a chapter at a time.
Volume One of Five
The Imitation of Christ
Thomas à Kempis · Four books · 114 chapters
$27USD
One payment. Yours to keep.
- The complete work in the William Benham translation — all 114 chapters, nothing abridged, nothing rewritten.
- 329 explanatory panels, placed only where the text is genuinely difficult. Whole chapters go by without one.
- Opening apparatus: a note on the edition, a guide to reading it, an introduction to the author and the work, and a map of the argument.
- Summaries and study questions at the close of every part, each question pointing back to a named chapter.
- A glossary defining terms in the sense the author gives them, not the dictionary’s.
- A thematic index whose every reference was opened and checked before it was printed.
- 358 typeset pages at 170 × 240 mm, with clickable contents and internal links.
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The historical translation is in the public domain. What you are paying for is the edition built around it: the explanations, the apparatus and the typesetting.
Reading more than one? The complete collection of five volumes is $97 — a saving of $38.