Greece has scarcely given us a man more learned than blessed Cyril of Alexandria. Liberatus the African testifies that Cyril borrowed certain things from the books of blessed Dionysius the Areopagite; I shall give his words in chapter 28. I did not take care to seek the passages in Saint Cyril, because I lack Greek exemplars and do not sufficiently trust the Latin ones, since I know that heretical translators behaved in their usual manner in the translation of blessed Cyril. A great part of Cyril’s works has also perished, and the things Liberatus says could have been contained in them.
Blessed Maximus, monk, philosopher, and martyr, in the fifty-seventh discourse of his Theological Chapters, adduces a passage from our Areopagite: “That which is deprived of the good in every respect never was anywhere, nor is, nor will be, nor can be.” You have it in On the Divine Names, chapter 4, page 320: “But that which has been wholly deprived of the good in every way neither was, nor is, nor will be, nor can be.”
The same Maximus wrote scholia on all the books of Dionysius the Areopagite, which exist printed in Greek. The same author, in the disputation against Pyrrhus the Monothelite, Patriarch of Constantinople, by which he converted him from heresy to the Catholic faith, praised the letter of our Dionysius to Gaius. The same, in the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, adjudges these books to the Areopagite.
This Maximus was a very great man, whose sanctity, deeds, and knowledge of divine and human wisdom all the writers of that time deservedly celebrated, and whose very many books testify to the same. Photius reported many of them, and Baronius more in the Annals, volume 8, at the year of Christ 657. To him, reader, I refer you, so that you may see Joseph Scaliger’s unbridled license in insulting the orthodox Fathers, and indeed martyrs. Many little works of the same Maximus against the Monothelites have recently appeared in the translation of our Francisco Torres; I have not yet read them. See below, chapter 21.