RITTEN IN HYPERTEXT 550 YEARS AGO in the monastery of St. Agnes. . . .
That is not quite how any introduction to previous editions of
The Imitation of Christ has begun. But those introductions do point out that the Imitation is a marvellous mosaic that arranges more than 1100 references to nearly every book of the Bible into the “best loved and most widely read book of Christianity” after the Bible itself. ( “Best loved” because, as Blaise Pascal, the inventor of the calculator, put it, “One expects only a book and finds a man. The deep, pious feeling expressed, the earnestness, the modesty, the unartificial piety of the author, come out in every sentence like the silvery sound of inward genuineness.”)
Despite the inner unity of the Imitation, the reader is usually advised in the introductions to “open the book to any page at random where he will find much instruction and inspiration,” or to read the book “slowly, reflectively, in brief portions at a time,” or to repeatedly turn to it as a
“source of devotional thoughts and aphorisms.” Thus, these introductions to the Imitation advise readers that this is a book that need not be read sequentially, and is, in a sense, the weaving of an intricate pathway
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