2008-09 Public Lecture Series: III - McGinn and Mysticism

Bernard McGinn
"The Imitation of Christ and the
Catholic Mystical Tradition"

Minor Hall Auditorium / University of Virginia
Thursday, February 12, 2009, 5:30PM

The St. Anselm Institute welcomed Bernard McGinn, Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Professor McGinn, a leading and still active scholar on the history of Christianity, Christian mysticism, the Doctors of the Church, and apocalyptic thought, did not disappoint his audience.
Bernard McGinn continues to research and write for the next addition to his multi-volume work on the history of mysticism. His latest focus is on the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471). This thin, thought-filled book--an exemplar of the medieval devotional and among the most popular works of Christianity spirituality ever--arose out of the devotio moderna reform movement at the end of the fourteenth century. This devotional and orthodox reform movement of the Catholic Church--led by clerics but with lay members--

was the first middle or third way of life between the clerical and the merely mundane.
De Imitatione Christi was first circulated as a series of instructional pamphlets for members of these local Catholic communities; but by 1427 they had been compiled into a single work, with printed versions appearing as early as 1472. As McGinn lucidly explained, the content of the imitation advanced by Thomas a Kempis--who published the work anonymously--was not a literal ascetism, but the interior and practical reformation of oneself to the life of Christ.
Prof. McGinn's disintinguished career has yielded numerous scholarly works, including The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century; The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century; The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200-1350; The Doctors of the Church; Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages; The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought, and numerous coauthored works like Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue; The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart; and Henry Suso: The Exemplar.