The Monks of S

The monks of S. Saba make use of G.’s works, as is demonstrated by the writings of Theodore Abū Kurrah, who never cites him but makes use of the Orationes de sacris imaginibus, the treatises against the Jacobites, and the De fide orthodoxa. The continuation of the struggle against images, together with the poor reputation of the Manṣūr family (G.’s grandfather opened the gates of Damascus to the Arabs), caused the Byzantines to continue to ignore him.

Photius, for example, does not even mention him in his Biblioteca, nor does he make any direct reference to him in any of his books. The first Byzantine citations of G. are found in the time of Alexios Komnenos, in the Panoplia dogmatica of Euthymios Zigabenos, who transcribes almost 30 chapters of the De fide orthodoxa. In the 10th century, John, exarch of Bulgaria, translated the De fide orthodoxa into the Slavonic language. This was followed by the Georgian version, probably produced by John of Petritzos in the 12th century, and the Armenian version, made by the monk Simeon of the Georgian monastery of Pṛḍadashanq. Toward the middle of the 12th century, the first Latin versions appeared: that of the Pisan Burgundio, another completed in the Hungarian monastery of S. Maria di Paszto, and a third, the work of Robert Grosseteste, archbishop of Lincoln, which in reality is a reworking of Burgundio’s version. Thanks to the latter, G. took his place in Peter Lombard’s Summa and gained the attention of the great scholastics of the Middle Ages. G.’s influence on Latin theology has been assessed in different ways; according to Harnack, he «was one of the foundations of medieval theology»; others do not venture to say so much, but acknowledge that G. supplied our scholastics with many doctrinal points concerning the angels, man, and Christology.