A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [315]
Association was voluntary, without the binding vow essential in the regular Orders, committing members to life apart from the world. Under the rules of Groote’s Devotia Moderna, members were to live in poverty and chastity but, instead of begging like the friars, were to earn their living by teaching children and by two occupations not controlled by the guilds, copying manuscripts and cooking. Work, Groote believed, “was wonderfully necessary to mankind in restoring the mind to purity,” although not so commerce: “Labor is holy, but business is dangerous.” By the time he died of an illness in 1384, his followers’ houses in Holland and the Rhineland numbered well over a hundred, with those for women being three times as many as those for men.
The communities’ emphasis on individual devotion and their very existence without a vow or an official rule were in themselves a criticism of the authorized Orders. Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels. Before he died, Groote was prohibited from preaching by the Bishop of Utrecht. When other churchmen afterward attempted to suppress the movement, his followers made vigorous and successful defense of their principles. At the Council of Constance in 1415, Gerson, though he disliked their doctrines, defended them against charges of heresy. Their communities survived because a climate of sympathy existed in their favor, and not only among the laity. Two years after Groote’s death, the Brethren established their first formal monastery in association with the Augustinian Order, though still without vows. Although the movement remained small and limited, it was soon to produce in The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, the most widely read religious book in Catholicism after the Bible.
In 1380, in the small town of Kempen, south of Deventer, a peasant’s son was born to an evidently literate mother who kept a dame’s school for the younger children of the town. At twelve, Thomas of Kempen—or a Kempis, as he came to be called—entered a school of the Common Life at Deventer, lived and studied with its disciples, and then joined an associated Augustinian monastery, where he remained for the rest of his 91 years. Loving books and quiet corners, he compiled the sayings and sermons of Groote and his disciples into a prolonged rhapsody on the theme that the world is delusion and the Kingdom of God is within; that the inner spiritual life is preparation for life everlasting. What he was saying over and over, through endless variations and admonitions, was that the life of the senses is without value, that the riches, pleasures, and powers of the world—the things most men want and rarely obtain—are no good to them anyway, but are only an obstacle on the way to eternal life; that the way to salvation lies in the abnegation of earthly desires and in the continual struggle against sin in order to make room for love of God; that man is born “with an inclination to evil,” which he must conquer to be saved; that good lies in doing, not knowing—“I would rather feel compunction than know how to define it”; that only the humble in spirit are at peace—“it is much safer to be in subjection than in authority”; that to desire anything is to be “straightway disquieted”; that man is but a pilgrim in life, the world is an exile, home is with God.
Nothing of this was new or remarkable. The Imitation of Christ was what it said it was, an imitation of Christ’s message, a consolation for the humble who are mankind’s majority, a reassurance of the promise that their reward is to come hereafter. For a long time after Thomas’ book appeared, so little was known about its author that Jean Gerson was supposed by some to be the Bacon behind this obscure northern Shakespeare.
In 1391 Gerson’s plea against the Way of Force held the attention of the court from prime to vespers. Remembering how prison had closed over his predecessors, he pursued his argument at some risk, but as a native of Burgundy he had acquired the Duke as a patron, which may have made the