Introduction

The Christian Platonism of the Greeks, shaped by the Alexandrians, the Cappadocians, the ps.-Dionysius and St Maximus the Confessor from material that continued to the end to be drawn from the pagan schools, had grown apart from that of the Latin West, which, except for Alexandrian influence reaching it through Boethius, was largely unaffected by any pagan thought later than Porphyry. But the defeat of iconoclasm in the East at the Second Council of Nicaea caused a flow of iconoclastic refugees to the West, bringing their books with them. The works of the ps.-Dionysius became available even if they were not read. In 758 Pope Paul I sent a copy to Pepin the Short, and Hadrian I may later have sent another to Abbot Fulrad of S. Denis. But there is no evidence of any use being made of these books. It was the gift of a third codex from the Emperor Michael the Stammerer presented to Louis the Debonair at Compiègne in September 827 that initiated the study of the ps.-Dionysius in the West and led to the transplantation of Greek Christian Platonism into Europe.

After an abortive translation by Hilduin, the abbot of S. Denis where the codex was deposited, a new version was requisitioned in or about 860 by Charles the Bald from Johannes Scottus, an Irishman who some time in the first half of the century had been driven from his country by the depredations of the Danes, and who like so many of his compatriots had brought with him the reputation for a knowledge of Greek exceeding what could be found on the European continent at that time.