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.
1700–1601 BC
1 work
c. 1700 BC
Akkadian
Anonymous
The lesser gods strike over the work of digging the canals, so humanity is made from clay mixed with the blood of a slain god to take the labour. Then people multiply and their noise keeps Enlil awake, and he sends plague, drought, and finally the flood — from which one man is warned to build a boat.
1400–1301 BC
1 work
c. 1350 BC
Egyptian
Attributed to Akhenaten
Carved in a courtier's tomb at Amarna. When the sun sets the land is in darkness as though dead, lions come out and every snake bites; when it rises the Two Lands are in festival, people wash and dress and lift their arms, the cattle browse, the birds fly up with wings adoring.
1100–1001 BC
1 work
c. 1200–1100 BC
Akkadian
Anonymous
Before anything was named, there were only Apsu the fresh water and Tiamat the salt sea mingled together. Marduk kills Tiamat, splits her body like a shellfish to make sky and earth, sets the constellations and the calendar, and makes humanity from the blood of the rebel god to free the gods from labour.
200–101 BC
1 work
c. 150–100 BC
Greek
Anonymous
Inserted into the third chapter of Daniel: a confession from inside the furnace that there is no prince or prophet or place to offer sacrifice any more, followed by a litany calling on frost and dew, whales, fowls, and all the works of the Lord to bless him.
1–100
1 work
c. AD 20–40
Greek
De Opificio Mundi
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
A reading of the six days of Genesis in which God first frames an intelligible world of ideas and only then the visible one modelled on it, and in which the numbers of the days carry as much meaning as the things made on them.
101–200
1 work
c. 180
Greek
Ad Autolycum
Theophilus of Antioch · d. c. 183
Three books to a sceptical friend: on why God is seen only by the pure in heart, on the folly of the poets, and on the greater antiquity of Moses, with a chronology from creation.
201–300
2 works
c. 207–212
Latin
Adversus Marcionem
Tertullian · c. 155–c. 220
Five books dismantling Marcion's two gods, his edited gospel, and his shortened Paul, arguing that the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus are one and that the creation he made is good.
c. 280–300
Latin
De Fabrica Mundi
Victorinus of Pettau · d. c. 304
A short reading of the six days built entirely on the number seven — seven heavens, seven spirits, seven days, seven weeks to Pentecost — and defending the Friday fast and the Sunday assembly from the pattern.
301–400
5 works
c. 318
Greek
Contra Gentes
Athanasius of Alexandria · c. 296–373
The first half of a two-part work, arguing that idolatry is a fall from the knowledge of God available through the soul and the order of creation.
c. 378
Greek
Basil the Great · c. 330–379
Nine sermons on the six days of creation, preached morning and evening to a working congregation, refusing allegory and dwelling instead on the natural world as it actually is.
379
Greek
De Hominis Opificio
Gregory of Nyssa · c. 335–c. 395
Written to complete his brother Basil's work on the six days, on what it means that humanity is made in the image of God, and on the relation of body, soul, and sexual difference.
c. 386–390
Latin
Ambrose of Milan · c. 339 – 397
Nine sermons on the six days, preached in Holy Week and following Basil closely while filling the natural history with Ambrose's own enthusiasms — the habits of bees, the cunning of the crab that drops a pebble into the oyster's shell, the pelican, and the phoenix as a figure of the resurrection.
c. 400
Latin
Augustine of Hippo · 354–430
Thirty-three books answering the Manichaean bishop whose arguments had once impressed him, defending the Old Testament and the goodness of the created order.
401–500
1 work
401–415
Latin
De Genesi ad Litteram
Augustine of Hippo · 354 – 430
Fourteen years on the first three chapters of Genesis, and still unfinished at the end. God made everything at once, Augustine argues, planting causes that unfold in time. It also warns believers not to talk nonsense about the natural world in front of people who know better, since they will conclude the scriptures are nonsense too.
501–600
5 works
c. 500–510
Latin
De Spiritalis Historiae Gestis
Avitus of Vienne · c. 470–c. 519
Five books of hexameters on creation, the fall, the sentence, the flood, and the crossing of the Red Sea, with a serpent given real rhetorical craft.
c. 515
Greek
Zacharias Scholasticus · c. 465 – after 536
A dialogue set in the Alexandrian lecture rooms, in which a Christian student argues against his own professor that the world had a beginning, and that a craftsman who needs eternal matter is not a maker but an arranger.
529
Greek
John Philoponus · c. 490–c. 570
A Christian grammarian dismantles the Aristotelian arguments for an eternal universe, and in doing so attacks Aristotle's physics of motion and the fifth element.
c. 557–560
Greek
De Opificio Mundi
John Philoponus · c. 490 – c. 570
A hexaemeron by a working physicist, arguing that Moses wrote for ordinary people rather than to teach astronomy, and that God set the world running with its own powers rather than pushing each thing along — the heavens and the earth being made of the same kind of matter.
c. 570–600; attribution traditional
Latin
Attributed to Columba · 521–597
An abecedarian hymn running from the Trinity before creation through the fall of the angels to the last judgement, in dense and deliberately difficult Latin.
601–700
3 works
c. 622–630
Greek
George of Pisidia · 7th century
Verse accounts of Heraclius's Persian campaigns and the siege of Constantinople, alongside a poem on the six days of creation.
c. 658–680
Old English
Caedmon · 7th century
Nine lines in praise of the creator, said by Bede to have been given in a dream to an illiterate cowherd at Whitby who then became a poet.
c. 700–708; unfinished
Syriac
Jacob of Edessa · c. 640–708
A commentary on the six days of creation gathering the natural science of the age — geography, zoology, astronomy — from Greek sources into Syriac.
701–800
1 work
c. 790; manuscript c. 814
Old High German
Wessobrunner Gebet
Anonymous
Nine alliterative lines and a prose prayer. Before there was earth or sky, before mountain or tree or sun or moon or sea, when there was nothing, there was one almighty God — and then a plain request for the strength to resist the devil.
801–900
2 works
c. 862–867
Latin
Periphyseon
John Scotus Eriugena · c. 815–c. 877
A dialogue dividing all reality into four kinds of nature and following creation out from God and back into him, drawing on Greek fathers almost nobody in the West could read.
c. 865–870
Latin
Vox Spiritualis Aquilae
John Scotus Eriugena · c. 815 – c. 877
The voice of the spiritual eagle sounds in the ears of the church. Eriugena reads the prologue as the whole of theology in fourteen verses, with creation as God's self-utterance and the incarnation as the same Word said again in flesh.
901–1000
2 works
c. 900–920
Old Church Slavonic
John the Exarch · 9th–10th century
A commentary on the six days of creation compiled from Basil and Severian for the Bulgarian court, incorporating Greek natural science into Slavonic prose.
933
Judeo-Arabic
Kitab al-Amanat wa-l-I'tiqadat
Saadia Gaon · 882 – 942
The first systematic Jewish theology, arguing that reason and revelation cannot conflict because both come from God, that the world was created from nothing, and that scripture must be read figuratively wherever the plain sense contradicts reason or another verse.
1101–1200
3 works
c. 1130–1137
Latin
Hugh of Saint Victor · c. 1096–1141
The whole of doctrine arranged as the work of creation and the work of restoration, with the sacraments as the medicines applied in the second.
c. 1150–1165
Greek
Nicholas of Methone · d. c. 1165
A point-by-point answer to the Elements of Theology, defending creation from nothing against a Neoplatonist system of eternal emanation.
1163–1174
Latin
Liber Divinorum Operum
Hildegard of Bingen · 1098–1179
Ten visions on the cosmos and the human body as mirrors of each other, opening with a figure of Love holding the wheel of the world.
1201–1300
2 works
1225
Italian
Cantico delle Creature
Francis of Assisi · 1181/82–1226
Praise offered through Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, and finally Sister Bodily Death — composed while nearly blind and in constant pain.
c. 1232–1235
Latin
Robert Grosseteste · c. 1168–1253
A commentary on the six days combining patristic exegesis with optics, astronomy, and the author's own observations of the natural world.
1601–1700
3 works
1650–1654
Latin
James Ussher · 1581–1656
A chronology of the world from creation, dated by astronomy and by the reigns of kings, placing the first day in the evening preceding 23 October 4004 BC.
c. 1670; published 1908
English
Thomas Traherne · c. 1636–1674
Meditations on the goodness of creation and the recovery of a child's vision, in which the corn is orient and immortal wheat that never should be reaped.
1679
English
Lucy Hutchinson · 1620–1681
A verse meditation on Genesis from creation to the patriarchs, published anonymously and offering a markedly different account of Eve from Milton's.
35 of 1774 works