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Starvard University · Christian devotion
Read three of the most loved devotional books ever written: Augustine's honest Confessions, the Imitation of Christ, and Brother Lawrence practising God's presence among his pots and pans.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Some books are famous. These three are loved, and there is a difference. For more than sixteen hundred years, ordinary people have kept them by their beds, copied them by hand, carried them into prisons and kitchens, and read one short piece at a time. An African bishop tells the honest story of his messy young life. A quiet Dutch monk teaches humility in pages you can read in five minutes. A French monastery cook explains how he prayed while scrubbing pots. None of them wrote for scholars. They wrote for people like you, and in this course you will meet each of them in their own words. All you need is a few quiet minutes at a time.
Devotional classics survive because they are useful, not just admired. Augustine gives you honesty: he hides nothing about himself, not even a boyhood theft of pears. Thomas à Kempis gives you direction: short chapters on humility, patience, and the inner life that you can act on the same day. Brother Lawrence gives you company: proof, from a cheerful cook, that a busy and noisy day is no barrier to prayer.
This course presents what each writer believed, in their own terms and their own words where we can. You do not need to share their faith to learn from them, and readers of many backgrounds have treasured these books for centuries. Read one lesson at a sitting, slowly. That is exactly how these books were designed to be read, and it is still the best way.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The seven lessons
Lesson 1
Three writers, three centuries far apart, three very different lives. Augustine of Hippo wrote his Confessions in North Africa around the year 397, looking back over his own conversion. Thomas à Kempis, a Dutch canon, completed The Imitation of Christ in the fifteenth century, a handbook of the interior life in four books. Brother Lawrence, a French Carmelite lay brother, never wrote a book at all: his short Conversations and Letters about practising the presence of God were gathered and published after his death in 1691.
What unites them is not style but usefulness. Each book is built for rereading in small pieces: a confession, a short chapter, a letter. Each is strikingly honest about ordinary failings, restlessness, pride, distraction, and each offers a practice rather than a theory, something a reader can actually do today. The Imitation became one of the most widely read devotional books in Christian history, copied and translated again and again, and the other two have never been out of circulation for long.
They have also lasted because they speak to people in every station. Augustine was a brilliant public speaker, à Kempis an obscure monk who copied manuscripts, and Brother Lawrence a cook and sandal mender. Scholar, monk, and kitchen worker all describe the same journey from restlessness toward peace, which is why beginners and lifelong believers alike still reach for them.
Lesson 2
Augustine of Hippo (354 to 430) opens the Confessions with a prayer that became one of the most quoted sentences in Christian writing. In E. B. Pusey's translation it reads: "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it repose in Thee." That single line is the map of the whole book. Augustine tells the story of a man who searched for rest in pleasure, in ambition, in philosophy, and in other people's approval, and found that none of it quieted him for long.
He is unsparing about small sins as well as large ones. His most famous episode of this kind is almost comic: as a boy, he and his friends stole pears from a neighbour's tree, not from hunger, since they threw most of the fruit to the pigs, but, as he puts it looking back, for the pure joy of stealing. Augustine examines that small theft for pages. Why did doing wrong feel sweet? His honesty about motives most of us would rather skip is a large part of why readers trust him.
Behind the story stands his mother, Monica, who prayed for her son for years while he moved in directions she grieved over. Augustine never forgot it, and the Confessions honours her patience as one of the threads that held his life together. His restlessness, as he tells it, was never only his problem to solve. It was met, slowly, by love that refused to give up on him.
Lesson 3
The turning point came in Milan in 386, when Augustine was thirty one and teaching rhetoric. He believed the Christian faith was true, yet felt bound by his old habits and could not will himself free. In the garden of the house where he was staying, overwhelmed, he threw himself down under a fig tree in tears, asking how long his struggle would go on: why not now, why not this very hour, an end to it?
Then, as he tells it, he heard from a neighbouring house a voice, as of a boy or girl, chanting over and over: "Take up and read; Take up and read." Augustine took it as a command meant for him. He hurried back to where his friend Alypius was sitting, seized the volume of Paul's letters he had left there, opened it, and read in silence the first passage his eyes fell on, from Romans 13: not in rioting and drunkenness, but "put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh."
"No further would I read; nor need I," he writes, "for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away." They went in and told Monica, and Augustine records her joy: she leapt and triumphed. Whatever a reader makes of the scene, Augustine presents it as the moment his divided will became whole.
Lesson 4
Thomas à Kempis (about 1380 to 1471) spent most of his long life at Mount St. Agnes in the Netherlands, a canon in the tradition of the Brethren of the Common Life, copying manuscripts and guiding younger brothers. The Imitation of Christ, written in Latin and arranged in four books on the interior life, is the fruit of that quiet setting. It does not argue. It instructs, in short chapters meant to be read slowly and often.
The very first chapter sets the tone. It opens with Christ's words, "He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness," and then turns on learning itself: "What doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility, and be thus displeasing to the Trinity?" À Kempis says plainly that he would rather feel sorrow for his faults than be skilled at defining it, and that knowing the whole Bible and all the philosophers profits nothing without the love and grace of God. Knowledge, for him, is good only when it makes a person humble and kind.
This is the doorway into his inner life teaching. Turn inward, he urges. Notice your motives. Prefer being unknown and thought little of to being praised. The chapters return again and again to self knowledge, patience under criticism, and quiet trust, because à Kempis believed the real battleground of a life is interior, long before it shows in anything the world can see.
Lesson 5
The title of à Kempis's book is a programme: imitation. To follow Christ, in his teaching, is not mainly to admire from a distance but to copy, in small daily acts, a pattern of humility, patience, self denial, and love. The four books move from profitable advice for the spiritual life, through the interior life and inward comfort, to a final book on the Sacrament of the Altar, the centre of his own community's worship.
Daily is the key word. À Kempis expects failure and plans for it. His chapters tell the reader to examine conscience regularly, to begin again after faults without despair, to bear injuries and slights patiently, and to cast cares upon God rather than carrying every burden alone. He is realistic about temptation, warning that there is no complete security against it in this life, and equally realistic about people: do not place your peace in the opinions of others, he counsels, because they change with the weather.
What readers across centuries have valued is this practicality. The Imitation asks for no heroics. It asks for today's duties done honestly, today's irritations borne gently, today's faults confessed and left behind, and the same again tomorrow. It is devotion as a craft, learned the way his community learned manuscript copying: one careful page at a time, for a lifetime.
Lesson 6
Brother Lawrence, born Nicholas Herman (about 1614 to 1691), was a French Carmelite lay brother who worked for years in the monastery kitchen, cooking for a community of over a hundred, and later mended sandals. He admitted he was clumsy, and at first he disliked kitchen work. Yet it was there, among the pots, that he developed the teaching his Conversations and Letters preserve: a continual, simple awareness of the presence of God, carried into every task.
His method was deliberately plain. Beginning a task, he prayed: "O my God, since Thou art with me, and I must now, in obedience to Thy commands, apply my mind to these outward things, I beseech Thee to grant me the grace to continue in Thy Presence." As he worked he kept up what the account calls familiar conversation with God, offering each action to him. Afterwards he examined himself: if he had done well, he gave thanks; if not, he asked pardon and carried on without discouragement.
His most famous remark describes the result. "The time of business," said he, "does not with me differ from the time of prayer. In the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Supper." Observers noticed: in the greatest hurry he was never hasty. For Brother Lawrence, no work was too ordinary to be done with God in mind.
Lesson 7
These three writers were never a team, but together they suggest a daily practice simple enough to keep. From Augustine, take honesty: begin by telling the truth about your own restlessness, as he did, without decoration. From à Kempis, take the small portion: one short chapter, read slowly, with one sentence carried into the day. From Brother Lawrence, take the setting: not a retreat from your work, but God remembered in the middle of it, at the sink, the desk, and the steering wheel.
A shape many readers have found workable looks like this:
Keep it small. All three writers distrust grand resolutions and trust steady ones. Augustine's conversion came after years of his mother's patient prayer; à Kempis copied and taught for seventy years; Brother Lawrence said his first ten years in the practice were full of difficulty before it became, as he put it, almost as hard not to think of God as it once was to begin. A practice that survives ordinary Tuesdays is worth more than a heroic one that lasts a week.
Sources
This course is taught from classic texts that are free for anyone to read. Every method in the lessons traces back to one of these books.
Graduation
You have heard Augustine's restless heart find rest, taken à Kempis's small daily instructions seriously, and stood with Brother Lawrence in a noisy kitchen at peace. Their shared invitation is modest: be honest, go slowly, and practise daily. Congratulations on finishing Classics of Christian Devotion.
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