liuudred Christian and pagan works together with "elegant extracts"; unfortunately a great part of this book has been lost. His Nomocanon is the basis of Green canon law, the first systematical arrangement of which known to us was drawn up by Johannes Scholasticus (John the Lawyer), a presbyter at Antioch, who afterwards became patriarch of Constantinople (a.d. 565).[1] About the year 1180, Photius's Nomocanon was commented on by Theodore Balsamon, a deacon of Constantinople, as the standard collection of canon law for the Eastern Church. Photius was a voluminous writer, narrow in view, bitter in tone. His works include controversial treatises against the Latins and against the Paulicians, and among other books the Amphilochia,[2] containing answers to more than three hundred questions put to him by Amphilochius of Cyzicus. With Photius we come to the end of the great Greek Church writers whose names are known to fame. But the period of the Comnenian dynasty was the Augustan age of the Byzantine Empire—in some respects comparable to our age of Queen Anne rather than to our glorious Elizabethan period. Then we have that fierce opponent and libeller of the Paulicians, Michael Psellus, a man of wide culture, and a writer on a variety of subjects, who earned a reputation as a teacher of philosophy.[3] He died in the year 1105, leaving, among other books, a work on demonology[4] which contains an invaluable store of information with respect to mediæval notions on a subject then deemed of vital importance, and a compendium of universal science
- ↑ This work by John the Lawyer was based on still earlier collections. It reduced the sixty heads of canon law in the older writers to fifty, and added to the canons of Nicæa, Ancyra, Neo-Cæsarea, Gangra, Antioch, Ephesus, and Constantinople, already collected and received in the Greek Church, the "Apostolical canons," the canons of Sardica, and those contained in the canonical letter of Basil. When at Constantinople John edited an abridgment of his earlier work with the addition of a comparison of the imperial rescripts and civil laws (especially the Novels of Justinian) under the title Nomocanon. See Smith's Dictionary of Chr. Biog. vol. iii. p. 366, col. 2.
- ↑ Ἀμφιλόχια.
- ↑ He was called φιλοσόφων ὕπτατος.
- ↑ περὶ ἐνεργειάς δαιμόνων.
