The Library
1774 works catalogued century by century, from the literature the Bible was written among to the present — each with a note on what it is, why it lasted, and where to read it.
1–100
1 work
c. AD 20–40
Greek
De Migratione Abrahami
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
Get thee out of thy country read as the soul's departure from the body, from sense, and from speech, in that order, toward a homeland it has never seen.
101–200
1 work
c. 150–200
Greek, surviving in Coptic
Anonymous
The Lord prepares James for his own martyrdom before and after the crucifixion, and teaches him the passwords for getting past the toll-collectors of the heavens: I am a son from the Father, and I go to what is mine.
201–300
4 works
c. 200–250
Greek, surviving in Coptic
Anonymous
The longest text in the Nag Hammadi library and among the most damaged: an ascent through successive baptisms and levels of being, each named and enumerated, told by a visionary who claims descent from Zoroaster.
c. 200–250
Greek, surviving in Coptic
Anonymous
The Foreigner records what the female revealer Youel taught him and what he saw after a hundred years of preparation: an ascent that ends not in a vision but in a knowing that has to be described by saying what it is not.
c. 200–250
Greek, surviving in Coptic
Anonymous
Three hymns of ascent and return, said to be copied from stone pillars Seth set up, with instructions on the order in which they are to be said going up and coming back down.
c. 240–244; survives in Latin
Greek, surviving in Latin
Origen of Alexandria · c. 185 – c. 253
Twenty-eight sermons on the wilderness, above all on the list of forty-two stopping places in chapter thirty-three, each read as a stage the soul passes through on its way out of Egypt.
301–400
1 work
c. 390
Greek
Gregory of Nyssa · c. 335–c. 395
Moses read twice — once as history, once as the soul's ascent — climbing from the burning bush into the dark cloud where God is known precisely as unknowable.
1101–1200
1 work
c. 1144
Latin
William of Saint-Thierry · c. 1085–1148
A letter to the Carthusians of Mont-Dieu tracing the ascent from the animal state through the rational to the spiritual, where the soul loves as it is loved.
1201–1300
1 work
1259
Latin
Itinerarium Mentis in Deum
Bonaventure · 1221–1274
Six stages of ascent — through the world, in the world, through the mind, in the mind, and beyond — written on the mountain where Francis received the stigmata.
9 of 1774 works