Greco-Christian stream·The Imitation of Christ·Book III — On Inward Consolation·Chapter XLIV. Of Not Troubling Ourselves About Outward Things
XLIV. Not troubling ourselves about outward things
The inward freedom from preoccupation with outward affairs. The disciple's heart kept free for God; not in the sense of avoiding duty but in the sense of not letting external things colonize the inward attention.
Source context
- Theme
- detachment from outward concerns as condition for interior recollection
- Soul-faculty
- Consciousness Soul
Steiner
not engaged in the GA corpus
Cross-tradition
- Stoic apatheia (Epictetus, Enchiridion)Stoic discipline distinguishes what is 'up to us' from what is not, counseling withdrawal of anxious attention from externals as prerequisite for inner freedom — a structural parallel to the Imitation's instruction to leave outward things untroubled.
- Vedanta — pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses)In Patanjali's eight-limbed path, pratyahara denotes the deliberate retraction of sense-attention from external objects, exhibiting cross-tradition congruence with this chapter's counsel against dispersal into outward affairs.
- Sufi maqam of zuhd (world-renunciation)Classical Sufi station-literature (e.g., al-Kalabadhi, Kitab al-Ta'arruf) identifies zuhd — the inner turning away from worldly preoccupation — as a necessary stage on the path toward divine proximity, structurally parallel to Kempis's injunction here.
Chapter XLIV. Of Not Troubling Ourselves About Outward Things
OF NOT TROUBLING OURSELVES ABOUT OUTWARD THINGS
"My Son, in many things it behoveth thee to be ignorant, and to esteem thyself as one dead upon the earth, and as one to whom the whole world is crucified. Many things also thou must pass by with deaf ear, and must rather think upon those things which belong unto thy peace. It is more profitable to turn away thine eyes from those things that displease, and to leave each man to his own opinion, than to give thyself to discourses of strife. If thou stand well with God and hast His judgment in thy mind, thou wilt verily easily bear to be as one conquered."
2O Lord, to what have we come? Behold a temporal loss is mourned over; for a trifling gain we labour and hurry; and spiritual loss passeth away into forgetfulness, and we rarely recover it. That which profiteth little or nothing is looked after, and that which is altogether necessary is negligently passed by; because the whole man slideth away to outward things, and unless he quickly recovereth himself in outward things he willingly lieth down.