The Imitation of Christ

Kempis opens the book with a simple provocation: what good is it to discuss a complicated theological topic in depth if you live without humility? For him, a simple life that serves your neighbor is worth more than someone full of degrees and without a drop of charity. The central idea of the whole work is here: imitating is not admiring from a distance, it is copying a way of living, not just repeating doctrine by heart.

You can take this out of religion and apply it to any area: reading about personal finance does not pay your bills by itself, and knowing the theory of healthy eating by heart does not make anyone lose weight. Knowledge that does not become habit is decoration. Kempis argues that knowing only has value when it pushes someone to act differently the next day.

This is not an invitation to despise study. It is a specific warning against the pride of people who study and become arrogant, looking down on others because they know more names and dates. The target of the book is not knowledge, it is knowledge that inflates the ego without improving the conduct of the person carrying it.

One of the most repeated pieces of advice in the book is to spend your energy examining your own life, not commenting on someone else's. Kempis describes people who can point out a neighbor's flaw with surgical precision but never turn that eye on themselves. For him, this is the way of someone who wants to look fair without doing the work of being fair.

It applies to the family group chat, the building's group chat, the bar talk after work: it is always easier to comment on a coworker's life than to review your own week. The book suggests a direct exercise: every night, ask what you yourself did wrong before judging someone who acted differently from you.

This does not mean swallowing everything in silence. Kempis also criticizes those who stay quiet out of cowardice and calls that a false peace. The difference he draws is between observing yourself with humility and watching others with the pleasure of finding fault in them.

Book 1 devotes an entire chapter to arguing that accepting guidance from someone with more experience usually costs less than insisting on your own way. Kempis was thinking of this within the monastery, following the house rule, but the underlying reasoning is simpler: people who never accept correction spend their whole lives reinventing mistakes that already had a known solution.

Think of the boss with no charisma at all who is nevertheless right about the deadline you were about to blow, or the older colleague in your profession who warns you about a badly drafted contract before you sign it. Listening is not weakness, it is saving time and headaches.

The weak point of the advice appears when the authority in question is wrong or abusive. The book writes for a context of strict religious hierarchy and does not deal well with the possibility of a corrupt hierarchy, which is left for the critique section later on.