The Library
1577 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
2 works
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.
written c. 253–270
Greek
Plotinus · c. 204 – 270
Fifty-four treatises arranged by Porphyry into six sets of nine, on the One beyond being, the Intellect that contemplates it, the Soul that orders the world, and the return of the soul by stripping away — including a treatise written specifically against the gnostics in his own lecture room.
301–400
2 works
c. 380; authorship disputed
Greek
Attributed to Macarius
Homilies on the experience of grace in the heart, insisting that the Christian should feel the Spirit's work and not merely believe in it.
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.
501–600
2 works
c. 500–520; first cited 533
Greek
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Four treatises and ten letters written under the name of Paul's Athenian convert: on the divine names, on mystical theology, and on the ranked hierarchies of angels and of the church.
c. 500–520
Greek
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Five very short chapters stripping away every name given to God, affirmative and negative alike, until the soul is united to the one beyond assertion and denial.
601–700
2 works
c. 628–634
Greek
Maximus the Confessor · c. 580–662
Solutions to difficult passages in Gregory of Nazianzus and Pseudo-Dionysius, which become an entire cosmology of the logoi — the divine intentions by which each created thing is what it is.
c. 680
Syriac
Shem'on d-Taybutheh · 7th century
A physician-monk describes the stages of contemplative prayer alongside an account of the brain, the nerves, and the humours, treating soul and body as one subject.
701–800
2 works
c. 760–780
Syriac
Joseph Hazzaya · 8th century
A map of the spiritual life in three stages — bodily, psychic, spiritual — with a precise phenomenology of the lights and stirrings that accompany each.
c. 760–780
Syriac
John of Dalyatha · 8th century
Writings of a solitary in the mountains of northern Iraq on the vision of the divine light and the wonder that overtakes the mind in prayer.
801–900
1 work
c. 860–862
Latin
John Scotus Eriugena · c. 815–c. 877
A Latin version of the whole Dionysian corpus, made from a Greek manuscript the Byzantine emperor had sent as a diplomatic gift.
901–1000
1 work
c. 980–998
Greek
Symeon the New Theologian · 949–1022
Talks to his monks insisting that a Christian must consciously experience the Holy Spirit — that grace received without awareness of it is no use — with accounts of his own visions of light.
1001–1100
2 works
c. 1000–1022
Greek
Symeon the New Theologian · 949–1022
Fifty-eight poems of startling intimacy on union with God, describing the divine light seen and the body itself made a member of Christ.
c. 1054
Greek
Niketas Stethatos · c. 1005–c. 1090
A disciple's account of his teacher's visions, his conflict with the church authorities, his exile, and the eventual rehabilitation of his memory.
1101–1200
4 works
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. 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.
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. 1153–1162
Latin
Benjamin Major
Richard of Saint Victor · d. 1173
The ark of the covenant read as a diagram of contemplation, with six kinds of contemplative seeing rising from the senses to what exceeds reason.
1201–1300
5 works
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.
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.
c. 1275–1285
Syriac
Bar Hebraeus · 1226–1286
A guide for solitaries without a spiritual director, ending with the author's own account of how he came to peace by ceasing to argue about doctrine.
c. 1283
Catalan
Ramon Llull · c. 1232–c. 1316
A young man rises from hermit to abbot to bishop to pope, reforms the whole church, and then resigns to become a contemplative — with the Book of the Lover and the Beloved embedded in it.
c. 1290–1300
Old French
Le Mirouer des simples ames
Marguerite Porete · d. 1310
A dialogue among Love, Reason, and the Soul describing a soul so annihilated in God that it no longer needs the virtues, having become what it loves.
1301–1400
10 works
c. 1300–1327
Middle High German
Meister Eckhart · c. 1260–1328
Sermons preached to nuns and laypeople on the birth of the Word in the soul, the ground where God and the soul are one, and the counsel to pray God to be rid of God.
c. 1330–1361
Middle High German
Johannes Tauler · c. 1300–1361
Preaching on the ground of the soul, on suffering as the shortest road, and on the ordinary work of a cook or a farmhand as no less a vocation than choir.
c. 1335–1340
Middle Dutch
Die geestelike brulocht
Jan van Ruusbroec · 1293–1381
Three lives — active, interior, and contemplative — built on the cry that the bridegroom comes and we must go out to meet him, ending in a union that does not abolish the distinction between God and the soul.
c. 1343
Latin
Incendium Amoris
Richard Rolle · c. 1300–1349
A hermit's account of the physical warmth, sweetness, and song he experienced in prayer, described with a confidence that irritated more cautious contemporaries.
c. 1340–1350
Middle Dutch
Jan van Ruusbroec · 1293–1381
On the difference between the faithful servant, the secret friend, and the hidden son of God, and on the common life in which contemplation and action are one act.
c. 1350–1400
Middle High German
Theologia Deutsch
Anonymous
An anonymous treatise on how self-will is the whole of sin, and how the soul must let God act in it rather than claiming anything as its own.
c. 1375
Middle English
Anonymous
Counsel from an unnamed director to a young contemplative: God cannot be reached by thinking, so put every thought — even good ones — under a cloud of forgetting, and press toward him with a naked intent of love.
c. 1380–1395
Middle English
Anonymous
A shorter, warmer sequel by the author of The Cloud, answering a disciple's questions and insisting the work is simply to offer God the naked fact that you are.
c. 1380–1396
Middle English
Walter Hilton · c. 1340–1396
Two books of measured guidance on reforming the image of God in the soul, written first for an anchoress and then extended to anyone living in the world.
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
4 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. 1430–1471
Latin
Denys the Carthusian · 1402–1471
Commentaries on the whole Bible, on Dionysius, on Peter Lombard, plus treatises on contemplation, on death, and on reform — filling forty-two printed volumes.
1453
Latin
De Visione Dei
Nicholas of Cusa · 1401–1464
Written for monks with a painting whose eyes follow every viewer: an exercise in which each brother sees the gaze fixed on him alone, and learns from it how God sees.
c. 1495–1510; recorded by disciples
Italian
Catherine of Genoa · 1447–1510
A dialogue among the Soul, the Body, and Self-Love on the long process of being stripped of self-interest, based on her own account of forty years.
1501–1600
6 works
1527
Spanish
Francisco de Osuna · c. 1497–c. 1541
A method of recollected prayer that gathers the scattered faculties inward and lets the mind rest without images or discursive thought.
1577
Spanish
El Castillo Interior
Teresa of Ávila · 1515–1582
The soul imagined as a castle of many rooms with God at the centre. Teresa maps the seven dwelling places a person passes through, describing prayer with the practicality of a woman who also had convents to run.
poem c. 1578; commentary 1584
Spanish
John of the Cross · 1542–1591
A poem in the voice of a bride searching the woods for her beloved, begun in a prison cell, with a long commentary written for the nuns who asked what it meant.
1–40 of 49 matching · 1577 in the Library