John CyparissiôtA

John Cyparissiôta (Κυπαρισσιώτης), surnamed the Wise, an ecclesiastical writer, lived in the latter half of the 14th century, not in the middle of the 12th, as erroneously stated by Labbe in his Chronologia Brevis Ecclesiasticorum Scriptorum. Cyparissiota was an opponent of Gregory Palamas (q.v.) and his followers (the believers in the light of Mount Tabor), and most of his works (of which some were written after 1359) had reference to that controversy. They compose a series of five treatises, but only the first and fourth books of the first treatise of the series, Palamiticarum Transgressionum Libri 4, have been published. They appeared, with a Latin version, in the Auctarium Nocissimum of Combefis, 2, 68-105, and the Latin version was given in the Bibliotheca Patrumn, 21, 476, etc. (ed. Lyons, 1677). Cyparissiota wrote also ῎Εκθεσις στοιχειώδης ῥήσεων θεολογικῶν (Expositio Materiarum eorum que de Deo a Theologis dicuntur). The work is divided into one hundred chapters, which are subdivided in ten decades or portions of ten chapters each, from which arrangement the work is sometimes referred to by the simple title of Decades. A Latin version of it by Franciscus Turrianus was published at Rome in 1581, 4to, and was reprinted in the Bibliotheca Patrum, 21, 377, etc. — Combefis, Auctar. Novissim. 2, 105; Fabricius, Bibl. Gr. 11, 507; Cave, Hist. Litt. vol. 2, Appendix by Gery and Wharton, p. 65; Oudin, De Scriptor. et Scriptis Ecclesiasticis, 3, 1062; Smith, Dict. Gr. and Rom. Biog. 2, 594.