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.
401–500
1 work
c. 450–460
Greek
Diadochus of Photike · c. 400 – c. 486
A hundred chapters on how to tell the movements of grace from the movements of delusion, and the first text to prescribe the continuous repetition of the name of Jesus as the way to occupy a mind that will otherwise wander.
1301–1400
7 works
c. 1338–1341
Greek
Gregory Palamas · 1296–1359
A defence of monks who claimed to see the uncreated light, distinguishing God's unknowable essence from the energies by which he is genuinely shared.
c. 1338–1341; survives in fragments
Greek
Barlaam of Calabria · c. 1290–1348
An attack on monks who claimed to see divine light with bodily eyes, dismissing their breathing techniques and accusing them of an ancient heresy.
1340
Greek
Gregory Palamas and the monks of Athos
A declaration signed by the leading monks of Mount Athos affirming that the light of Tabor was uncreated and that the saints genuinely participate in God.
c. 1349–1350
Greek
Gregory Palamas · 1296–1359
A compressed summary of his whole theology — cosmology, the human person as image, the distinction of essence and energies — in short numbered chapters.
c. 1340–1359
Greek
Nikephoros Gregoras · c. 1295–1360
A history of the later empire that turns, in its second half, into a sustained polemic against Palamas by the leading opponent of hesychasm.
c. 1368
Greek
Philotheos Kokkinos · c. 1300–1379
The life of the hesychast theologian by the patriarch who canonised him nine years after his death, written to settle the controversy for good.
c. 1376–1406
Old Church Slavonic
Cyprian of Kyiv · c. 1336–1406
The correspondence and service-book revisions of a Bulgarian-born metropolitan who brought Byzantine hesychast practice and corrected texts into the Russian church.
1401–1500
1 work
c. 1490–1508
Old Church Slavonic
Ustav
Nil Sorsky · c. 1433–1508
A rule for small skete communities built on hesychast prayer of the heart, on the analysis of the passions, and on monasteries owning no villages or serfs.
9 of 1774 works