The Imitation is the most widely read Christian devotional book after the Bible. Its register is humility, self-distrust, and the long discipline of detachment, which puts it some distance from the nondual texts around it. It is in this library because it stayed on the desks of Eckhart’s and Tauler’s readers for five centuries. The Devotio Moderna movement it came from drew directly on the German mystics, and its stripping away of self-will is what the apophatic teaching asks of an ordinary day. Whoever finishes the Theologia Germanica and wants to know what its teaching looks like in practice ends up here.
Thomas à Kempis's four-book manual on the inward turn, the most-read Christian devotional text after the Bible. Composed in the Devotio Moderna communities of the Low Countries, it teaches a contemplative life rooted in self-knowledge and the imitation of Christ's poverty of spirit.