Humble Thyself Before the Lord: The Wisdom of Thomas a Kempis, Brother Lawrence, St. Antony of Egypt, and St. Catherine of Siena
It is not easy to write about the importance of Christian humility. How does one exhort others to be humble without sounding boastful oneself? The writings in Humble Thyself Before the Lord avoid that problem. They are classics of the genre, penned by four of the true experts on the Christian spiritual life.
"When the soul is lifted by a great, yearning desire for the honor of God and the salvation of souls, it practices the ordinary virtues and remains in the cell of self-knowledge, so that it may know better God's goodness toward it. It does this because knowledge must come before love, and only when it has attained love can it strive to follow and to clothe itself with the truth. But humble and continuous prayer, founded on knowledge of oneself and of God, is the best way for the creature to receive such a taste of the truth. Following the footprints of Christ crucified, and through humble and unceasing prayer, the soul is united with God."
St. Antony of Egypt, Humble Thyself Before the Lord
Each of these great Christian mystics writes with clarity and from a great depth of personal experience, and yet what they describe is something that is ultimately beyond description. In that respect, this book is deceptively simple: you cannot obtain what they describe by simply reading.
The writings of Thomas a Kempis, Brother Lawrence, St. Antony of Egypt, and St. Catherine of Siena are not presented chronologically, but rather, thematically, in a way that is designed to move the reader from one topic to the next in an order of spiritual progression. Humble Thyself Before the Lord, a truly wonderful collection of wisdom, also includes brief biographies of all four writers.
