Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/69

Rh fearlessness equally foreign to its spirit. Another Greek writer, the monothelete monk Maximus, supplemented the Scot's knowledge of the ultimate forms of Neo-Platonism, and from him too he translated a commentary on Saint Gregory which was likewise destined for the royal study. It should be remarked in passing that John, unlike the men to whom our attention has hitherto been given, addressed himself to a very select company; it might be to the king, whose intellectual sympathies were inherited from his father and grandfather, or it might be to his own hearers in the palace school. Twice only did he emerge into public view, and the estrangement, the public condemnation, which his utterances then on the subject of predestination and of the nature of the Eucharist provoked may have naturally confirmed his previous reserve. Of his further life little certain is recorded. He appears to have been in France in the year of the emperor's death. The following year saw peace reestablished in England, and it is