John of Scythopolis

No attempt is here made to intervene in the apparently interminable debate as to who the ps.-Dionysius was and when he lived, though this must have been later than the Cappadocians, some of whose notions he developed, and before 528, the latest possible date for the first historical reference to his writings. Obviously he had both Christian and Platonist sympathies, though it is difficult to assess their relative weight. It is probably safe to say that he was a Christian philosopher who presented his beliefs in terms of the contemporary Neoplatonism both because it had a strong appeal for him and because these beliefs could best be defended by turning the arguments of what he considered the most satisfactory of the rival philosophies against itself.

In this, his position was not unlike that of St Gregory of Nyssa: but the Neoplatonism of Gregory was that of Plotinus while the Neoplatonism of the ps.-Dionysius was that of Proclus. The trend from the one to the other was a deviation in the direction contrary to Christianism, and the ambiguities of the ps.-Dionysius are the symptoms of a tension between Christianism and Platonism that was nearing breaking point. This was felt at once. No sooner had the Corpus Dionysianum been made public than commentators leapt to the task of defending not only its genuineness, but also its orthodoxy. In the first half of the sixth century commentaries were written by John and George of Scythopolis, by St Maximus in the seventh, by Germanus I, Patriarch of Constantinople in the eighth, and by other anonymous commentators who belong to these three centuries.