The Case for Copying 'The Imitation of Christ' by Hand

In Christian higher education, we practice something often called “faith integration.” The goal is for faculty to bring faith into their classes, connecting faith with their discipline. Some people prefer other terms, like “faith-infused,” or something else, but the idea is always about connecting faith with the classroom and education. It is part of what distinguishes Christian universities from other universities.

In my university’s honors program, faith integration is often relatively straightforward. After all, we assign faith-related reading every semester. We have a chronological Great Books sequence and we pride ourselves on our broad coverage of “The Great Conversation.” In their first semester, students read Plato and Aristotle and Homer and Sophocles and Thucydides alongside portions of the Old Testament. The core of our honors sequence extends across six semesters and by the time our students finish, they’ve been assigned more reading than most undergraduates. This includes authors like Augustine and Aquinas and Hildegard and Benedict, as well as Marx and Freud and Nietzsche.

The downside to the breadth of our reading list is that we have to move at a pretty fast clip to get through all the assigned reading in any given semester. In the “World of Humanism and Reform” class, which covers the Renaissance and Reformation, we read Utopia, The Praise of Folly, Hamlet, The Spiritual Exercises, Imitation of Christ, Petrarch’s Secret Dialogue, sermons by Luther, and Paradise Lost, as well as a few other texts. Students sometimes remark that they wish they had more time with some of the books, especially the books about religious devotion.

Even at a relatively quick pace, Humanism and Reform achieves many aspects of faith integration. We are assigning explicitly religious texts and trying to really understand them. Any student who does not reflect at all on their faith in that semester is practicing some resistance. We are an interdenominational school, so group discussions that cover the events of the Reformation and Counter Reformation are an opportunity to learn more about church history and to learn to have mature conversations about theological differences within the church. People in the room do not all agree on the correctness of Calvin or the Council of Trent, but we learn to have productive conversations together about them anyway.

Still, the faith integration we normally achieve in the class does not typically reflect the depth of spiritual formation we see in some of the books. Our reading of Petrarch’s Secret Dialogue does not compare to Petrarch’s self-examination, even if it prompts from self-examination from us. We read Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises in a couple of weeks, but we do not experience an Ignatian retreat. I’ve taught the class for several years now and I have long pondered the gap between what we are reading about and what we are doing. A couple years ago, I came up with an idea to give students an opportunity to close that gap a bit.

To give students the opportunity to truly engage and internalize a devotional book from the semester, I created an alternative assignment that allowed interested students to hand copy the entirety of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. This was optional. Students who chose the transcription option would be exempted from two of the three papers we did as a class and they would not have to take the final (they still had weekly assignments). If they completed the transcription, they would earn a minimum of 93% on the final. If they did not complete the transcription, they would earn grades for the papers and final exam corresponding to the percentage of the book they completed, not to exceed 85%. It was a high risk, high reward option.

Imitation of Christ was the perfect text for this alternative assignment. Historians believe that Thomas à Kempis transcribed the Bible by hand four times. Transcribing his work by hand is the best way to enter into his world. Hand copying the book honors his work. Imitation of Christ is also an ideal length. It is challenging to transcribe in a semester but not at all impossible. And students have nearly the whole semester. Of course, Imitation of Christ is also a devotional classic which has been read for centuries and remains relevant. St. Ignatius read from it every day.

Transcription gave students the chance to turn a reading assignment into a spiritual practice for a semester. Like Ignatius, they would be reading the book consistently, even if not daily. When you can only move at the speed of your handwriting, you go word by word, page by page, day by day. The speed and the focus let the words sink in. When you transcribe a book, you begin to internalize the author’s rhythm and ideas. This is why so many famous writers have developed their craft by retyping the works of other writers. And more of those rhythms and phrases will be remembered because people have a better memory of what they write by hand than what they type.

In the two years I have offered this assignment, I have observed students assimilating Imitation of Christ across a semester. Weeks after we all read the book together, people doing the transcription were much more likely to bring it up in later class discussions. In honors classes, we encourage students to connect books and authors, within a semester or from across the honors sequence. With this assignment, some students were always prepared with what Thomas à Kempis might have thought about a book or an idea and their comments reflected understanding and familiarity. Even a year later, I have observed students who transcribed Imitation of Christ bringing it up in class conversation. Ideally, they will be thinking about it for more years to come.

Transcription offered students the opportunity to go deep with a single text and to really internalize Imitation of Christ. But it was high stakes. It takes an entire semester and sometimes more than one notebook to transcribe Imitation of Christ by hand (and it hurts your hand). It cannot be done last minute. It requires discipline and time management skills. I advise students to “know thyself” when they decide whether or not to choose this option. The consequences for misjudgment can be extreme. By the time you skip the second and third papers, you are all in. If you don’t finish, you can end up with a low final grade in the class. I’ve offered this option twice and each time I have had at least one student take it and fail to complete the transcription.

Arguably, the high stakes were part of the lesson. Over half the authors we read in Humanism & Reform emphasize self-examination. The Spiritual Exercises asks people to reflect on their sin, Petrarch’s Secret Dialogue suggests you should imagine your own death, Luther’s life and work encourage self-examination, etc. Imitation of Christ emphasizes a realistic understanding of one’s own weaknesses and an awareness of one’s own sin. Meditating on the words of Imitation of Christ and doing the slow work of transcription should lead to a more accurate self-assessment. And the stakes make failing the assignment a meaningful opportunity for learning.

This is an imperfect assignment, but it brought something new and exciting into the class. This was faith integration that was more than talking or a single assignment. This was faith integration that was doing, and that doing was sustained across an entire semester. Students who chose this assignment could turn something we were otherwise treating as primarily academic into something much more personal. And it helped them make more sense of a book which was written for the purpose of religious devotion. Many students found the practice of transcription meaningful.

Pedagogically, the assignment has some additional advantages. This assignment is AI-proof. It’s not a substitute for the analysis done in writing a research paper, but there is also no short-term substitute for the work done in hand copying a book. This assignment also helps connect the mind and body in a way that very little academic work does. Even the opportunity to accept or decline the challenge added an element of self-direction that is often lacking in school. The existence of choice was a helpful addition to class. Obviously, this assignment is not possible or helpful in every class, but for our class it made a positive difference.

The best part of teaching in a Great Books program is when you can help students understand all of the new thoughts and experiences they can get from old books. This assignment did that. It was also an experiment with a new way of doing faith integration. For the students who did this assignment, faith wasn’t just referenced or integrated in class, a space in their weekly routines was created and made hospitable for faith formation. This assignment readied the ground for spiritual growth, hopefully helping students to better understand the links between learning and study and growing in their faith. Whatever else comes of it, students will go forward with their own, very personal, copy of Imitation of Christ.