The Library
1693 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.
200–101 BC
1 work
c. 160–145 BC; survives in fragments
Greek
Aristobulus of Alexandria
Five fragments preserved by Eusebius, arguing that where scripture gives God hands and feet these are figures for power and standing, and that Plato and Pythagoras had both read Moses in an older Greek translation.
101–200
12 works
c. 108
Greek
Epictetus, recorded by Arrian · c. 50 – c. 135
A freed slave teaching Stoicism in Nicopolis, taken down by a student. Some things are up to us and some are not; the rest follows. In one passage he asks why, if madness and habit can make the Galilaeans fearless of tyrants, reason cannot do the same.
c. 155
Greek
Justin Martyr · c. 100–165
A philosopher's open letter to the emperor, answering the rumours that Christians were atheists and cannibals by simply describing what they believed and did — including the earliest detailed account of a Sunday gathering.
c. 155–160
Greek
Justin Martyr · c. 100–165
A short supplement provoked by the execution of three Christians in Rome, arguing that Christians are punished for the name alone and that whatever any philosopher said truly belongs to Christ.
c. 165–175
Greek
Oratio ad Graecos
Tatian · c. 120–c. 180
A convert's contemptuous farewell to Greek culture, arguing that its philosophy is derivative, its gods immoral, and that Moses is older than Homer.
c. 175–180; reconstructed from Origen
Greek
Alethes Logos
Celsus
The first sustained intellectual attack on Christianity, recoverable almost whole because Origen quoted it line by line to answer it. Jesus was a bastard fathered by a soldier and a magician trained in Egypt; God does not come down; the faith recruits wool-workers and cobblers who tell children to disobey their fathers.
c. 170–180
Greek
Ta eis heauton
Marcus Aurelius · 121–180
Private notes written on campaign by an emperor reminding himself to be patient with fools, to accept what the whole sends, and to be ready to leave. A single line rejects the soul that is ready to depart out of mere opposition, as the Christians do, rather than by judgement.
c. 175–192; survives in fragments, partly in Arabic
Greek, partly surviving in Arabic
Galen of Pergamum · 129 – c. 216
The greatest physician of antiquity mentions Christians four or five times in passing, twice comparing arguing with them to arguing with the school of Moses — they accept undemonstrated laws. But he grants that they hold to justice, restrain their appetites, and include some who philosophise as well as anyone.
c. 180; attribution debated
Greek
Athenagoras of Athens
A philosophical defence of bodily resurrection, arguing from the nature of the human being as a composite of soul and body that judgement of one without the other would be incoherent.
c. 195
Greek
Protrepticus
Clement of Alexandria · c. 150–c. 215
An invitation rather than a defence: the old myths are dismantled, and the new song of the Word is offered in their place to readers assumed to be cultivated and curious.
c. 197–250; date disputed
Latin
Minucius Felix
Three friends walking on the shore at Ostia fall into a debate on religion, conducted with Ciceronian courtesy and no appeal to scripture at all.
c. 200
Latin
De Praescriptione Haereticorum
Tertullian · c. 155–c. 220
A lawyer's move: Tertullian argues that heretics have no standing to appeal to Scripture at all, because the Scriptures belong to the churches the apostles founded — and asks what Athens has to do with Jerusalem.
c. 198–203
Greek
Stromateis
Clement of Alexandria · c. 150–c. 215
Deliberately unsystematic notebooks arguing that philosophy was God's covenant with the Greeks as the law was with the Jews, and sketching the true gnostic — the mature Christian whom knowledge makes loving rather than superior.
201–300
5 works
c. 217–222
Greek
Philostratus · c. 170 – c. 250
The life of a first-century wandering Pythagorean sage commissioned by the empress Julia Domna: miraculous birth, travels to India and Egypt, healings, an exorcism, a girl raised from her bier, a trial before Domitian, a disappearance, and an appearance afterwards to a doubting disciple.
c. 222–235
Greek
Philosophumena
Hippolytus of Rome · c. 170–c. 235
Ten books arguing that every heresy is a Greek philosophy in disguise, with long quotations from the systems described and a bitter account of the Roman church under Callistus.
c. 238
Greek
Gregory Thaumaturgus · c. 213–c. 270
A farewell speech by a departing student describing exactly how Origen taught: logic first, then physics and ethics, then philosophy read widely, and scripture last of all.
c. 248
Greek
Contra Celsum
Origen of Alexandria · c. 185–c. 253
A point-by-point reply, seventy years late, to the most intelligent pagan attack on Christianity ever written — quoting Celsus so fully that his lost book can be largely reconstructed from it.
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
3 works
c. 303–311
Latin
Divinae Institutiones
Lactantius · c. 250–c. 325
Seven books written during the Great Persecution, setting out Christianity as a complete philosophy — false religion, the origin of error, justice, true worship, and the life of blessedness — in the most polished Latin any Christian had yet written.
c. 313–320
Greek
Praeparatio Evangelica
Eusebius of Caesarea · c. 260–339
Fifteen books arguing that Christians were right to prefer Hebrew scripture to Greek philosophy, assembled from enormous quotations of pagan authors.
c. 390–400
Greek
Nemesius of Emesa
A Christian synthesis of Greek medicine and philosophy on body and soul, sensation, imagination, memory, and the will, drawing on Galen throughout.
401–500
2 works
c. 437
Greek
Theodoret of Cyrus · c. 393 – c. 460
Twelve books answering pagan objections a century after the temples closed, quoting some three hundred and forty pagan authors — many of them now lost apart from these pages — and asking why, if the philosophers were right, it is the fishermen's teaching that has filled the world.
c. 470
Latin
De Statu Animae
Claudianus Mamertus · d. c. 474
An argument that the soul is wholly incorporeal, against Faustus of Riez, who had held that only God is truly bodiless and that everything created must have some kind of body. Written by a priest of Vienne with more Neoplatonism than anyone else in Gaul.
501–600
7 works
c. 500–510
Latin
De Institutione Musica
Boethius · c. 477–524
Music treated as a branch of mathematics rather than an art, dividing it into the music of the cosmos, of the human person, and of instruments.
c. 512–513
Latin
Contra Eutychen et Nestorium
Boethius · c. 477–524
A short treatise applying strict logical definitions to the christological question, and defining a person as an individual substance of a rational nature.
c. 500–518
Greek
Aeneas of Gaza · d. c. 518
A Platonic dialogue arguing against the pre-existence of souls and the eternity of the world, and for the resurrection of the body.
c. 518–522
Latin
De Trinitate
Boethius · c. 477–524
A very short treatise applying the Aristotelian categories to God, and asking which of them can be predicated of a being who is wholly simple.
c. 524
Latin
De Consolatione Philosophiae
Boethius · c. 477–524
Written in prison awaiting execution on a false charge. Lady Philosophy visits the condemned man and works him through fortune, happiness, providence, and how human freedom survives divine foreknowledge.
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. 543
Greek
Leontius of Byzantium · c. 485–c. 543
A technical defence of Chalcedon arguing that Christ's humanity has no independent person of its own but subsists within the person of the Word.
701–800
1 work
c. 743
Greek
Pege Gnoseos
John of Damascus · c. 675–749
Three parts — philosophical definitions, a catalogue of a hundred heresies, and the exposition of the orthodox faith — assembled as one complete course of instruction.
801–900
4 works
c. 815–820
Greek
Theodore the Studite · 759–826
Three refutations arguing that an image is a likeness and not a sharing of essence, so a portrait of Christ affirms exactly the individual humanity he assumed.
851
Latin
John Scotus Eriugena · c. 815–c. 877
Commissioned to refute Gottschalk, he argues that since God is simple and outside time there can be no double anything in him, and that evil has no substance to be predestined.
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. 890–899
Old English
Alfred the Great and his circle · 849–899
The Consolation of Philosophy rendered into English with substantial additions, Christianising Lady Philosophy and adding discussions of fate, free will, and kingship.
901–1000
1 work
c. 960–974
Arabic
Tahdhib al-Akhlaq
Yahya ibn Adi · 893–974
A philosophical ethics of the soul's three faculties and the training of character, written without appeal to scripture so that Muslims, Jews, and Christians could all use it.
1001–1100
6 works
c. 1065–1067
Latin
Peter Damian · c. 1007–1072
Prompted by a dinner conversation: can God restore a woman's virginity, or undo the past? An argument that logical rules must not be allowed to bind God.
1076
Latin
Anselm of Canterbury · 1033–1109
An attempt, made at his monks' request, to establish the existence and nature of God by reason alone, without once quoting scripture.
1077–1078
Latin
Proslogion
Anselm of Canterbury · 1033–1109
A prayer that turns into an argument: seeking God, Anselm arrives at the thought of that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and concludes that such a being cannot exist in the mind alone.
c. 1080–1085
Latin
De Veritate
Anselm of Canterbury · 1033–1109
A search for what truth is in statements, in thought, in the will, and in things themselves, arriving at truth as rightness perceived by the mind.
1–40 of 67 matching · 1693 in the Library