Various historical circumstances leading to a different understanding of imitation

During Church History, different social, ecclesiastical, and personal circumstances lead to new understandings of this practice of following and imitating Christ.

In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the Church experienced martyrdom and persecution. This served the early Christians an opportunity to imitate the passion of Christ.  Indeed, Eusebius of Caesarea (c 263 – 339?), identify martyrs as “imitators of Christ.”

However, Martyrdom was not considered the only way of how Christ was imitated. Polycarp(ca. 69 – ca. 155), for example, exhorts the Christians to practise virtue and to persevere in hope and patience through imitation.

With the conversion of Constantine in the year 313, Christianity was no longer persecuted and became the religion of the Empire.  In this era, new teachings emerged about the imitation. Christ was considered the holistic model of the Christian.

In the Middle Ages, new types of spirituality emerged, namely, the monastic movement, the regular canons, and the mendicants. These broughta revival of the devotion towards the humanity of Christ, especially devotion to his birth, passion, and death on the Cross.

In the Reformed Era, the practice of imitation plays a prominent role in the main spirituality writings. Prominent authors are:

• Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) dedicates the second, third, and fourth week of his spiritual exercises to the meditation of the life of Christ.
• Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), puts forth the humanity of Christ: “I could only think of Christ as He was a man,” she states in The Book of her life (9,6).
• John of the Cross (1542 -1591) states that “This life is not good if it is not an imitation of His life,”(Letter to Madre Ana de Jesús, in Segovia, Madrid, 6 July 1591) and places the practice of imitation as the “manner and method of entering the night of sense” (Ascent 1,13).

Finally, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which are another prolific centuries for the writings on imitation, even though with fewer outstanding spiritual writers, we have witnesses like Alphonsus de Liguori (1696 – 1787) especially with his book ‘The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ,’ and Charles Eugène de Foucauld (1858 –1916), who states that “Perfection does not consist of insisting on this or that virtue up to one or another extreme. No, perfection is to resemble as closely as possible the infinitely perfect Jesus: The disciple is perfect if he or she is similar to the teacher”(Meditazione su Luca 6:40, n. 176, in Piccolo fratello Gesù, Rome 1975, p. 70).