Vita Christi

[1] The book is not just a biography of Jesus, but also a history, a commentary borrowed from the Church Fathers, and a series of dogmatic and moral dissertations, spiritual instructions, meditations, and prayers.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola used these techniques in his Spiritual Exercises, e.g. self-projection into a Biblical scene to start a conversation with Christ in Calvary.

[10] Ludolph proposes a method of prayer which asks the reader to visualise the events of Christ's life (known as simple contemplation).

This simple method of contemplation outlined by Ludolph and set out in Vita Christi, in many of his commentaries on the gospel stories that he chooses it can be argued influenced the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola.

This closeness between the Carthusians and Jesuits is arguably due to the great influence of Ludolph of Saxony's De Vita Christi on the future founder of the Society of Jesus.

"[13] Father Henry James Coleridge, SJ, a grand-nephew of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his article of 1872, in the "Review of Famous Books" section of The Month, urges future translators of the Vita Christi to be cautious with the Folio edition published by Palme in 1865 since it is marred by poor punctuation, and based on a poor manuscript.

[14] The work has recently been translated into English from the Bodenstedt edition by Milton Walsh, and the final of four volumes appeared from Cistercian Publications in 2022.