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.
201–300
1 work
c. 240; survives in part, in Latin
Greek, surviving in Latin
Origen of Alexandria · c. 185 – c. 253
Ten books on the Song, prefaced by a warning that no one should read it who is not already past the stirrings of the flesh. The bride is both the church and the individual soul, and the wound she carries is the arrow of love.
301–400
1 work
c. 388–390
Latin
De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae
Augustine of Hippo · 354 – 430
Written soon after his baptism against the Manichaeans he had spent nine years among. It defines the four cardinal virtues as four forms of one love — temperance is love keeping itself whole, courage is love bearing everything — and then contrasts the ascetics he saw in Rome and Milan with the conduct of the Manichaean elect.
401–500
3 works
c. 407
Latin
In Epistulam Ioannis ad Parthos
Augustine of Hippo · 354 – 430
Ten sermons preached in Easter week on a letter about love, to a congregation split by the Donatist schism. The seventh contains the sentence everything else in Augustine has to be read against: love, and do what you will.
c. 406–420
Latin
Augustine of Hippo · 354–430
A hundred and twenty-four sermons through the fourth gospel, including the great treatment of the woman taken in adultery and the repeated call to love and do what you will.
c. 421
Latin
Augustine of Hippo · 354–430
A short summary of Christian doctrine for a layman who asked for one, organised around the creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the command to love.
601–700
2 works
c. 626
Greek
Maximus the Confessor · c. 580–662
Four hundred short sentences on the passions, self-love, and the love that reaches through the neighbour to God, in the tradition of Evagrius but corrected on the body.
c. 626–658
Greek
Maximus the Confessor · c. 580 – 662
Forty-five letters to officials, monks, and bishops across the Mediterranean, written while Maximus moved from Constantinople to Africa to Rome ahead of the armies. The second, on love, argues that charity is what makes one nature out of many persons, as God is one nature in three.
1101–1200
8 works
c. 1121–1124
Latin
William of Saint-Thierry · c. 1085–1148
A short prayer-treatise on the desire to see God, insisting that love itself is the faculty of knowing him and that the Spirit is the love between Father and Son given to us.
c. 1126–1141
Latin
De Diligendo Deo
Bernard of Clairvaux · 1090–1153
Why God should be loved, and how much: through four degrees, from loving oneself for one's own sake to loving oneself only for God's sake.
c. 1132–1135
Latin
Heloise · c. 1100–1164
An abbess writes to the man she loved: that she would rather be his mistress than an empress, that she obeys him and not God, and then asks him for a rule for her nuns.
c. 1133–1137
Latin
Peter Abelard · 1079–1142
A commentary containing his account of the atonement: that Christ's death works by kindling love in us rather than by paying a price to God or to the devil.
c. 1142
Latin
Aelred of Rievaulx · 1110–1167
Written at Bernard's insistence, on charity as the sabbath of the soul, and including a grief-stricken passage on the death of a friend.
1135–1153
Latin
Sermones super Cantica Canticorum
Bernard of Clairvaux · 1090–1153
Eighty-six sermons that never get past the second chapter, reading the Song as the soul's courtship by the Word and building from it a full account of humility, desire, and the degrees of love.
c. 1160–1165
Latin
De Spiritali Amicitia
Aelred of Rievaulx · 1110–1167
A dialogue rewriting Cicero on friendship for the cloister, arguing that a friend is the guardian of love, and that God is friendship.
c. 1162–1173
Latin
Richard of Saint Victor · d. 1173
An argument for the Trinity from the nature of love itself: perfect charity cannot be solitary, and requires not only a beloved but a third with whom love is shared.
1201–1300
1 work
c. 1230–1250
Middle Dutch
Beatrice of Nazareth · c. 1200–1268
Seven ways in which love seizes the soul, from a desire to serve purely, through a love that wounds and maddens, to a longing that cannot rest short of eternity.
1301–1400
1 work
c. 1395; visions 1373
Middle English
Julian of Norwich · 1343–after 1416
Sixteen visions received during a near-fatal illness and then turned over for two decades: the hazelnut held in the palm, Christ's motherhood, and the long refusal to let the problem of sin overturn the certainty that all shall be well.
1401–1500
2 works
1402–1408
Latin
Jean Gerson · 1363–1429
An attempt to give mystical experience a place inside academic theology, defining contemplation as knowledge reached through love rather than through argument.
c. 1490–1510; recorded by disciples
Italian
Catherine of Genoa · 1447–1510
Purgatory described not as punishment but as the soul's own joyful burning away of what keeps it from a love it can already see.
1601–1700
1 work
1616
French
Francis de Sales · 1567–1622
A full theology of charity from its natural roots to the highest union, written for people already committed and full of images drawn from beekeeping and gardening.
20 of 1774 works