Faith & Spirit Quote by Thomas Kempis

Thomas a Kempis is running a quiet counter-revolution against the medieval prestige economy of intellect. In an age when universities were consolidating status and scholastic theology could feel like a competitive sport, he flips the scoreboard: the “deep search after learning” isn’t condemned as useless, just demoted as spiritually unreliable. The line works because it’s less anti-knowledge than anti-ego. “Deep” carries a faint taunt; depth can be a costume, a performance of seriousness that still leaves the self untouched.

The key move is “humble knowledge of thyself.” Kempis doesn’t mean modern self-actualization or therapy-speak introspection. He means the bracing inventory demanded by the Devotio Moderna tradition he’s often associated with: attention to one’s motives, vanity, appetites, and distractions, with the goal of surrender rather than self-expression. It’s a spiritual technology of deflation. If learning can inflate the mind, self-knowledge punctures it.

The subtext is practical and political: you don’t need institutional gatekeepers to approach God. A “surer way” implies risk management. Study can become a maze where the seeker confuses complexity for holiness, argument for transformation. Self-knowledge, in Kempis’s formulation, is harder to counterfeit. You can cite authorities and still be unkind; you can win debates and still be ruled by pride. He offers a test that bypasses the library and targets the one place doctrine can’t easily hide: the interior life.