Last week I joined a group of YWAM leaders from  across Europe to visit a leafy glade just outside the city of Zwolle on what the Dutch optimistically call a mountain. 

Mount St Agnes (Sint Agnietenberg) would not even qualify as a hill in Switzerland, but here on this ‘mountain’ was written one of the most widely read devotional books of all time.

Zwolle has never rivalled Rome or Athens, Jerusalem or Constantinople, Paris or London, as a spiritual or cultural centre. Yet for over five centuries, millions have been spiritually nourished from this book’s five thousand editions and translations in over fifty languages.

Among its avid readers were Ignatius Loyola (founder of the Jesuits) and John Wesley (of the Methodist movement), former UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammerskjold and ex-President Bill Clinton, who reportedly read it as ‘spiritual therapy’ in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Vincent van Gogh wrote his brother that ‘this book is sublime’. A copy lay at the bedside of Pope John Paul I when he was found dead a mere month after his inauguration in 1978.

Standing together before a large stone monument in the centre of this glade, we read the inscription: ‘Here lived Thomas à Kempis in the service of the Lord and wrote The Imitation of Christ, 1406-1471.’

Skilful copyist

Thomas was born around 1380 in Kempen, between Krefeld and Venlo close to the German-Dutch border. Like many other boys from the Rhineland, he was sent to the Latin School in Deventer, just up the IJssel River from Zwolle. The school building still stands today where he, and later Erasmus and the Dutch Pope Adrian VI, also studied.

While in Deventer Thomas proved himself a skilful copyist. Later he entered the newly-formed monastery at Sint Agnietenberg, where he was to spend almost all the rest of his life. There he also copied the Bible at least four times, one five-volume copy being preserved at Darmstadt.

Catholics, Protestants and Liberals alike claim Thomas and the renewal movement to which he belonged, the Brothers of the Common Life. The Brothers (who included Sisters too) were key players in a broader Catholic devotional and mystic movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Netherlands and the Rhineland) called Devotio Moderna (the New Devotion).

It was the last major renewal movement tolerated within the Mother Church herself before the Reformation. The Brothers aimed to return to New Testament Christianity and a lifestyle based on simply imitating Christ. A medieval version of WWJD, if you like.

The movement’s teaching spread through trade routes from the northern Rhine down into France and Switzerland and as far across as Poland. Its emphasis on lay involvement and personal relationship with Christ helped seed Europe for the Reformation. Luther also attended a school run by this movement in Magdeburg. All twenty monasteries established in pre-Reformation Amsterdam embraced the spirituality of the Brethren and would have regularly used Thomas’ book in their devotional liturgies.

Bricks and tiles

Today there is not much to see of the former monastery except a pile of bricks and tiles. A small shrine where Thomas’ original grave lay has now been expanded into a large cemetery sprawling across the ‘mountainside’.

We read together random passages from a copy of The imitation of Christ, now widely recognised as a compilation of teachings, conversations, advice and sayings within the Devotio Moderna, not necessarily originally his own.

We read, for example: Without the Way, there is no going; Without the Truth, there is no knowing; Without the Life, there is no living.

And: At the Day of Judgement we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done.

A short drive back into Zwolle brought us into the old quarter of the former Hanseatic city where the Brethren ran their schools. Here in a 600-year-old cluster of school buildings nestled behind the modern city hall, the Brothers taught up to a thousand pupils from near and far – in a town with a population of only 5000. Their stress on the value of learning and the importance of reading was reason enough for Liberals to stake a claim to their heritage. In the late Middle Ages, the influence of the Brothers elevated Zwolle and Deventer to become the intellectual axis of Northern Europe.

For here in this quarter of Zwolle the pioneer educationalist Johannes Cele developed the school model known as the ‘gymnasium’ or ‘college’, with radical innovations such as setting pupils in classes according to age, holding examinations, and older pupils mentoring the younger ones. Education, Cele held, was primarily about norms and values, not facts and figures.

After posing for a group photo before a freshly-painted wall mural of Thomas, we drove away from the city challenged by a movement now dormant for over five centuries to live our lives radically in the imitation of Christ.

Jeff Fountain, Director of the Schuman Centre for European Studies. This article was first published on the author's blog, Weekly Word.