The Library
1277 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.
501–600
1 work
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.
1301–1400
2 works
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. 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.
1501–1600
1 work
c. 1578–1585
Spanish
La Noche Oscura del Alma
John of the Cross · 1542–1591
A poem and its commentary on the two nights the soul passes through — of the senses and then of the spirit — in which God withdraws every consolation precisely in order to purify love of its self-interest.
1601–1700
1 work
c. 1645–1676
German
Paul Gerhardt · 1607–1676
Hymns of trust written through the Thirty Years' War and the deaths of four of his five children, including the passion hymn O Sacred Head Now Wounded.
1801–1900
1 work
1880
Russian
Bratya Karamazovy
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1821–1881
A patricide and its aftermath in a provincial Russian town, carrying inside it the century's fiercest indictment of God over the suffering of children and, set against it, a monk who answers with love rather than argument.
1901–2000
1 work
published 1951
German
Widerstand und Ergebung
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1906–1945
Letters smuggled out of Tegel prison to family and to his friend Eberhard Bethge, mixing ordinary requests with the fragmentary late thinking about a world come of age and what Christ actually is for us today.
7 of 1277 works