Despising the World (midweek message)

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

“Despising the World” and the “Vanity of Affections”

July 24, 2019

Today is the feast day of Thomas à Kempis. (died July 25, 1471; his feast was moved forward to avoid competition with the Feast of the Apostle James son of Zebedee).  Kempis was a priest and monk in the Order of the Brethren of the Common Life.  He wrote or compiled the great classic of late medieval spirituality, The Imitation of Christ, the second most widely translated and published book after the Bible.

The Imitation is somewhat less popular as a devotional classic today than it was a generation ago.  Much of this stems from its apparent pessimism:  cultivate penitence, love Christ and no one else, despise the world and its vanities (including works of devotion and charity done to please the ego). 

But what we often miss as moderns looking at the Imitation is this:  its pessimism is a jaded reaction to all the systems of devotion, courtesies, and disciplines of the late Medieval Church and Monastery.  Following the “New Devotion” (devotio moderna) of the Brethren of the Common Life, the Imitation is a foretaste of the Renaissance Humanism of Erasmus of Rotterdam and the focus on grace and surrender of the Protestant Reformation.    When Kempis says “love Jesus, and no one else,” he means love Jesus above all, because whatever love you put before Jesus will be taken from you.  Again and again in the Imitation, you hear hints of the joys and loves in everyday life that will be consecrated and enriched if our love of Jesus comes first.   For Kempis, “despising the world” was a dramatic way of saying “get your priorities straight.”  “The world” here means that which separates us from God, not the creation of God around us that God declared “Good, very good!” (Gen. 1:31). 

The beginning of book three of the Imitation expresses the idea clearly, all the while keeping the “despise the world” language: 

“Blessed is the soul who hears the Lord speaking within her, who receives the word of consolation from [God’s] lips. Blessed are the ears that catch the accents of divine whispering, and pay no heed to the murmurings of this world. Blessed indeed are the ears that listen, not to the voice which sounds without, but to the truth which teaches within. Blessed are the eyes which are closed to exterior things and are fixed upon those which are interior. Blessed are they who penetrate inwardly, who try daily to prepare themselves more and more to understand mystery. Blessed are they who long to give their time to God, and who cut themselves off from the hindrances of the world.”

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+