ATHERTON. No one does know who really wrote the books which passed under that name. It is generally admitted that the forgery could not have been committed earlier than the middle of the fifth century, probably somewhat later. So all I can tell you is, that somewhere or other (it is not unlikely at Constantinople, but there is no certainty), about the time when Theodoric was master of Italy—when the Vandal swarms had not yet been expelled from northern Africa—while Constantinople was in uproar between the greens and the blues, and rival ecclesiastics headed city riots with a rabble of monks, artizans, and bandit soldiery at their heels—while orthodoxy was grappling with the Monophysite and Eutychian heresies on either hand, and the religious world was rocking still with the groundswell that followed those stormy synods in which Palestine and Alexandria, Asia and Constantinople, from opposite quarters, gathered their strength against each other—a monk or priest was busy, in his quiet solitude, with the fabrication of sundry treatises and letters which were to find their way into the Church under the all-but apostolic auspices of that convert made by the Apostle of the Gentiles when he spoke on Mars Hill. The writings would seem to have been first appealed to as genuine in the year 533. As heretics cited them, their authority was disputed at the outset; but being found favourable to the growing claims of the hierarchy, and likely to be useful, they were soon recognised and employed accordingly.[33] WILLOUGHBY. Proclus could not have been long dead, and his reputation must have been still at its height, when this anonymous—let us call him Dionysius at once—was writing his Platonized theology. ATHERTON. With the divines of Byzantium Proclus represented the grand old world of Greek thought. Even those who wrote against him as a heathen betray the influence he exercised on their doctrines. The object of Dionysius evidently was to accommodate the theosophy of Proclus to Christianity. Another aim, not less conspicuous, was to strengthen all the pretensions of the priesthood, and to invest with a new traditionary sanction the ascetic virtues of the cloister. Footnote 30: All these orders gaze admiring upward, and exert an influence downward (each on that immediately beneath it), so that they all together reciprocally draw and are drawn toward God. Dionysius gave himself with such zeal to the contemplation of them that he named and distinguished them as I have done. Footnote 31: _Athanasii Opp. Vita S. Antonii._ The vision alluded to is related p. 498. Footnote 32: