When Thomas à Kempis finished writing his masterpiece ‘The Imitation of Christ’ in the early 1400’s it became an immediate hit, spreading across the Christian world, being translated and retranslated; printed, and reprinted. It influenced rulers and soldiers, nonconformists, and Saints; and still inspires people to this day. That’s how it came to my attention. When you have a conversation about Old Christian Books, ‘The Imitation of Christ’ is bound to come up at some point.

It was added to my (ever-growing) wishlist of books, and I got it for Christmas. I’d been warned that it was going to be a hard read, and so I was incredibly surprised when I found myself just blasting through the book at an incredible speed. One night, I finally realised why…

Stylistically, ‘The Imitation of Christ’ is a Twitter thread.

Bear with me here, because this is not an insult. Kempis wrote in short, clearly defined, chunks. The Imitation of Christ is actually made up of four short books. The books are divided into chapters that are only a few hundred words long, at most. The short chapters are divided into numbered sections. And even within the sections, most of the sentences make sense alone. It’s a medieval Twitter thread. So I went about making a Twitter bot (an automated account) that would post the book in chunks of 280 characters or less.

I don’t know anything about coding, so the first step was to rope in someone who does. I messaged my friend, Alex, asking if she’d be up for being involved in such a scheme - she’s not Christian, but she does like ridiculous schemes. My proposition was simple: “I’ll do the content, if you do the code.” Thankfully, she agreed.

Next up, I needed to “do the content”. Because of the age of the book, there are a number of translations of it that are now public domain, so I headed over to the fabulous Project Gutenburg and picked one, then settled down to do what I had flippantly described as “doing the content”. Over the course of a week's worth of evenings I divided Kempis’ masterpiece into just over 2170 individual tweets, almost all of which are completely coherent in isolation.

In short: I turned a 15th century theological masterpiece into a Twitter thread.

I’d already set up an account for this scheme to run from, so I sent the document over to Alex who, by the power of tech magic (there was code, the code runs on a virtual computer, it’s a whole lot of complicated stuff I don’t understand but which I am told is relatively simple), set up the KempisBot. For approximately a year, every four hours, the bot will tweet a chunk of ‘The Imitation of Christ’, in order. Because here’s the thing - unlike a lot of twitter bots, which tweet chunks of text at random, I have a vision for the KempisBot…

Hopefully it will become like the world’s weirdest, slowest, book club.

I am fascinated to see how the bot plays out - the form brings a lightness, levity, and accessibility to a medieval text. It’s already opened the book up to audiences who would never have picked it up in a bookstore. But, it also allows for a deeper connection and more consideration of the ideas. By tweeting the book out so slowly, and in such small chunks, people are forced to consider each part of it. In consuming the book like this, we have to properly evaluate and think through each and every aspect of Kempis’ ideas. You cannot speed-read it, like I did. You have to sit with it. There are no spoilers. No skipping ahead. The next bit will come in four hours. And it will be 280 characters, or less.

I’m sure a lot of people will write this off as some silly experiment - and to be fair to them, it definitely is a silly experiment. But who said we shouldn’t ever have fun with faith.

I think this whole thing is just a cool new way to experience an old book. People are already engaging with the bot in fairly high numbers, spreading medieval theology across corners of twitter it normally would never appear in - but hopefully they’ll also begin talking about it - even if they don’t like what Kempis is saying - maybe even especially if they don’t like what Kempis is saying. Personally, I don’t even agree with all of his ideas, after all - and what is a book club without a bit of disagreement?

So yes, I turned the masterpiece of a medieval theologian into a twitter thread. But I also made a book club, of sorts. It’s just long, and slow, and open to literally anyone who wants to join in. Hopefully, something interesting comes of it.

Come join the club, if you want.