The Library
1780 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.
601–700
89 works
c. 605–615
Syriac
Babai the Great · c. 551–628
A systematic christology of two natures and two hypostases in one person of union, worked out for a church living under Persian rule with no emperor to appeal to.
c. 598–615
Latin
De Ecclesiasticis Officiis
Isidore of Seville · c. 560–636
An account of the origin of each order of ministry and each part of the liturgy, written to explain to Spanish clergy why they do what they do.
c. 611
Greek
Andrew of Caesarea
Revelation read on three levels at once — literal, moral, and spiritual — with the millennium taken as the present age of the church rather than a coming one, and Gog and Magog as nations still to appear.
c. 613
Latin
De Natura Rerum
Isidore of Seville · c. 560–636
A short handbook on the heavens, the seasons, thunder, tides, and pestilence, written for a Visigothic king who had asked about eclipses.
c. 612–615
Latin
Sententiae
Isidore of Seville · c. 560–636
Three books of doctrine and moral instruction assembled almost entirely from Augustine and Gregory the Great, arranged by topic.
c. 615
Syriac
Gabriel of Qatar
A working explanation of the daily office as celebrated in the Gulf: why the psalms fall in that order, what each procession and each veil means, and what a monk should be thinking during the parts where nothing is said.
c. 615–619
Greek
Pratum Spirituale
John Moschus · c. 550–619
Over two hundred short anecdotes collected on a lifetime of travel between the monasteries of Palestine, Sinai, and Egypt, gathered as the Persian invasion destroyed them.
615–617
Syriac
Paul of Tella
A word-for-word Syriac rendering of the fifth column of Origen's Hexapla, made at Alexandria and keeping the asterisks and obeli that marked where the Greek differed from the Hebrew.
616
Syriac
Thomas of Harkel
A Syriac New Testament revised against Greek manuscripts so literally that the Syriac breaks under it — particles, word order, and even Greek constructions with no Syriac equivalent are reproduced, with variant readings noted in the margin.
c. 615–618
Latin
De Viris Illustribus
Isidore of Seville · c. 560 – 636
Thirty-three short notices continuing the catalogue Jerome began and Gennadius extended, weighted heavily toward Spain and Africa — Leander, Fulgentius, Martin of Braga — with a verdict on each.
c. 600–650
Greek
Klimax
John Climacus · c. 579–c. 649
Thirty steps from renunciation to love, each a chapter on one virtue or vice, written by an abbot of Sinai in a compressed and aphoristic Greek.
c. 620
Greek
Antiochus of Palestine · 7th century
A hundred and thirty short chapters on the virtues and vices, compiled at the monastery of Mar Saba for monks scattered by the Persian sack of Jerusalem.
c. 624–626
Latin
Isidore of Seville · c. 560 – 636
A history of the barbarian kingdoms of Spain by a Roman bishop who has stopped thinking of them as barbarians, opening with a hymn in praise of Spain herself as the fairest of all lands, and treating the Goths as its rightful and legitimate rulers.
c. 620–636; unfinished at his death
Latin
Etymologiae
Isidore of Seville · c. 560–636
Twenty books explaining the whole of knowledge by way of the origins of words — grammar, medicine, law, God, animals, ships, farming, furniture.
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. 622–630
Greek
George of Pisidia · 7th century
Verse accounts of Heraclius's Persian campaigns and the siege of Constantinople, alongside a poem on the six days of creation.
c. 630
Greek
Chronicon Paschale
Anonymous
A world chronicle from Adam to 628, organised around the Easter cycle, with a detailed eyewitness account of the Avar siege of Constantinople.
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. 628–638
Greek
Theophylact Simocatta
The reign of Maurice and the Balkan and Persian wars, written in prose so mannered that later Byzantines used it as a style exercise. It opens with a dialogue in which Philosophy introduces History, and contains the earliest Western notice of the Turks and of China.
c. 628–630
Greek
Maximus the Confessor · c. 580–662
A reading of the eucharistic liturgy in which the church building, the entrances, and the readings each figure the movement of the whole cosmos toward God.
c. 630; attribution debated
Greek
Attributed to Sophronius of Jerusalem · c. 560 – 638
A monk crossing the Jordan finds a naked, sun-blackened woman who levitates at prayer and knows scripture she has never read. She tells him she spent seventeen years in Alexandria taking men for pleasure rather than money, was turned back by an invisible force at the church door in Jerusalem, and has been in the desert forty-seven years.
c. 630
Hebrew
Anonymous
Written as Persians and Byzantines fought over Jerusalem. Zerubbabel is shown the end: a Messiah son of Joseph who dies in battle, a Messiah son of David who does not, Hephzibah the mother of the Messiah fighting with a staff, and Armilus, a monster begotten on a stone statue, whom the nations worship.
c. 630
Greek
Thalassius the Libyan · 7th century
Four hundred brief sentences on the ascetic life addressed to a fellow monk, closely related to the work of his friend Maximus.
c. 630–634
Greek
Maximus the Confessor · c. 580–662
Sixty-five answers to difficulties in scripture, each opening into an argument about the passions, the fall, and how the incarnation heals the will.
recited c. 610–632; standard text c. 650
Arabic
Recited by Muhammad; collected under Uthman · Muhammad, c. 570 – 632
The scripture of Islam, and unavoidably a book about Christians. Jesus is born of a virgin, works miracles, is the Messiah and a word from God, and is not the son of God; Mary has a sura to herself and is named more often than in the New Testament; the Trinity is rejected, and the crucifixion is denied with the words it only appeared so to them.
c. 632–633
Latin
Cummian · 7th century
An Irish abbot explains why, after a year shut in with the computistical texts, he has abandoned the Irish Easter reckoning for the Roman one.
633
Latin
The Fourth Council of Toledo
Seventy-five canons standardising the Spanish liturgy and clerical education, and regulating the status of Jews and of forcibly baptised converts.
633–634
Greek
Sergius I of Constantinople · d. 638
A patriarch's attempt to reunite an empire split by Chalcedon: stop arguing about one energy or two, he rules, and simply confess one will in Christ. The letter to Rome presents this as a settled peace and asks for agreement.
634
Greek
Sophronius of Jerusalem · c. 560–638
A newly elected patriarch's statement of faith, insisting against the imperial compromise that Christ has two natural activities, not one.
25 December 634
Greek
Sophronius of Jerusalem · c. 560 – 638
The patriarch of Jerusalem explains to his congregation why they cannot go the five miles to Bethlehem this year: the Saracens are on the road, and the sword of the godless is at the throat of the city. He tells them their sins are the cause and that repentance is the defence.
634
Latin
Honorius I · d. 638
Rome's reply to Sergius, agreeing that the question should be dropped and adding the sentence that would cost him: we confess one will of our Lord Jesus Christ. He appears to have meant that Christ had no divided will, not that he had only one.
c. 634–640
Greek
Doctrina Jacobi Nuper Baptizati
Anonymous
A dialogue among Jews forcibly baptised at Carthage, arguing about the messiah, and reporting in passing a prophet arisen among the Saracens.
638
Greek
Heraclius, drafted by Sergius · Heraclius, c. 575 – 641
Posted in the narthex of Hagia Sophia. It forbids anyone to speak of one energy or two in Christ, and requires the confession of a single will — imperial law settling a question the councils had left open, in the year Jerusalem fell.
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.
c. 635–650
Syriac
Sahdona · 7th century
A long treatise on the monastic life whose second part turns to prayer, the reading of scripture, and the fear of God with unusual warmth.
c. 640; survives in fragments
Greek
Leontius of Neapolis · c. 590 – c. 650
An answer to the charge of idolatry, arguing that Christians do not worship wood but honour what it depicts, as a man kisses a letter from an absent son and honours the son rather than the paper — and pointing to the cherubim God himself commanded for the ark.
c. 641–642
Greek
Leontius of Neapolis · 7th century
The life of a patriarch of Alexandria who kept a register of the city's poor, called them his lords and masters, and ran hospitals and hostels from church funds.
c. 635–641
Chinese
Alopen and the Church of the East mission
The gospel explained to a Tang audience in Buddhist and Daoist vocabulary: God is the Emperor of Heaven, the Messiah is born of the Cool Breeze upon a chosen woman, and the duties owed are to God, to the emperor, and to one's parents, in that order.
c. 630–651
Latin
Braulio of Zaragoza · c. 590 – 651
Forty-four letters, including the exchange in which Braulio spends years nagging Isidore for the finished Etymologies and finally receives it unrevised, with a note asking him to correct it. The life of Aemilian describes a hermit of the Rioja hills.
c. 639–643
Latin
Jonas of Bobbio · 7th century
The life of the Irish founder of Luxeuil and Bobbio, written a generation later by a monk of his own house, including his quarrel with the Frankish court.
1–40 of 89 matching · 1780 in the Library