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.
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.
201–300
6 works
c. 200–250
Greek, surviving in Coptic
Anonymous
The longest text in the Nag Hammadi library and among the most damaged: an ascent through successive baptisms and levels of being, each named and enumerated, told by a visionary who claims descent from Zoroaster.
c. 200–250
Greek, surviving in Coptic
Anonymous
The Foreigner records what the female revealer Youel taught him and what he saw after a hundred years of preparation: an ascent that ends not in a vision but in a knowing that has to be described by saying what it is not.
c. 260–270; survives in fragments
Greek
Porphyry · c. 234 – c. 305
A collection of oracles presented as evidence for theology, including one in which Hecate declares that Christ was a most pious man whose soul is immortal, and that the Christians err by worshipping him.
c. AD 100–300
Greek
Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus
Seventeen Greek treatises from Roman Egypt on God, mind, and the ascent of the soul. The first, the Poimandres, describes a Word coming out of light, a Man made in the image of God who falls in love with his own reflection in nature, and a rebirth into mind.
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.
c. 290
Greek
Symposion
Methodius of Olympus · d. c. 311
Ten virgins at a banquet deliver speeches in praise of chastity, in deliberate imitation of Plato's dialogue on love, closing with a hymn sung by the winner.
301–400
3 works
c. 300–305
Greek
De Mysteriis
Iamblichus of Chalcis · c. 245 – c. 325
An answer to Porphyry, who had asked why gods should need rites at all. Iamblichus replies that the soul cannot think its way up: it is joined to the divine by acts whose power lies in the acts themselves, not in the understanding of whoever performs them — names, stones, incense, and prayer.
c. 357–363
Latin
Adversus Arium
Marius Victorinus · c. 290 – c. 364
A famous Roman rhetorician who converted late and publicly, writing Trinitarian theology in the language of Neoplatonic metaphysics: being, life, and understanding as one movement out and back, with the Son as the act by which what is at rest becomes what moves.
c. 380
Greek
Gregory of Nyssa · c. 335–c. 395
A dialogue at his sister Macrina's deathbed, in which she takes the role Socrates played for Plato and argues him through grief to the resurrection and the final restoration of all things.
401–500
1 work
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
2 works
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.
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.
1401–1500
2 works
1474
Latin
Marsilio Ficino · 1433–1499
An argument that religion is natural to humanity and that Christianity perfects what the Platonists and the ancient sages half-saw.
1469–1482
Latin
Marsilio Ficino · 1433–1499
Eighteen books arguing the immortality of the soul from Platonic principles, placing the human soul at the centre of a hierarchy binding matter to God.
1601–1700
3 works
1660
English
Henry More · 1614–1687
A defence of Christianity against both atheism and enthusiasm, arguing that reason and a purified imagination together lead to a rational and moderate faith.
1678
English
Ralph Cudworth · 1617–1688
A vast refutation of materialism and fatalism, arguing for plastic natures in the created world and quoting so much ancient atheism that some accused him of spreading it.
preached c. 1636–1683; published 1698
English
Benjamin Whichcote · 1609–1683
Sayings and sermons on the reasonableness of religion, the folly of narrow zeal, and the conviction that to go against reason is to go against God.
18 of 1774 works