EDITORS' NOTICE
Under the name of Gennadius Scholarius, Patriarch of Constantinople, there was published in Rome, in the year 1577, together with the Greek acts of the Council of Florence, a *Defense of the Five Chapters which are contained in the holy and ecumenical Council of Florence*, namely: On the procession of the Holy Spirit, On the sacrifice in unleavened and leavened bread, On Purgatory, On the enjoyment of the saints, and On the primacy of the Pope.
But because this excellent little book was written in defense of the Catholic doctrine defined at the Council of Florence; and while it is evident from other sources that Gennadius Scholarius, immediately after the return of the Greeks to their homeland, fell back from the union and joined the schismatics, it is sufficiently clear that although Gennadius Scholarius was a supporter of the union of the two Churches before and during the Council of Florence, he is nevertheless not the author of this work, since at the time the book was written, he had become hostile to the doctrine of the Council of Florence.
The matter remained in doubt until the most astute Bollandist, the Reverend Father Cuperus, in his *History of the Patriarchs of Constantinople*—which is prefixed to the *Acta Sanctorum* of August, Volume I, and was published in Antwerp in 1733, on page 193*—asserted that the *Defense of the Five Chapters of the Council of Florence* should be ascribed to Joseph of Methone; and on page 197 in the same place, he cites the very words of Joseph of Methone, in which he testifies that he had purposefully defended the five chapters of the Council of Florence. The words of Joseph, which are read in Labbe, *Collectio Conciliorum*, Vol. XIII, col. 707, are these: Τὸ δὲ ἐκ τοῦ Υἱοῦ τὸ Πνεῦμα οὐ λέγομεν... ἐλύσαμεν ἐν τῷ πρώτῳ κεφαλαίῳ τοῦ ὅρου, ὑπεραπολογούμενοι τῶν πέντε κεφαλαίων. That is: “But as for ‘We do not say that the Spirit is from the Son’... we have already resolved this in the first chapter of the definition, while we were writing an apology for the five chapters.” Since these things are so, there should now be no doubt for anyone that Joseph of Methone is the author of this book of ours.
The Greek text of the book has been printed nowhere, to my knowledge, except at Rome by Zanetti, among the Greek Acts of the Council of Florence, which appeared in the Holy City in the year 1577.
The Latin translation, which Fabius Benevolentius of Siena produced, appeared in Rome in 1579, in quarto, at the printing house of the Roman people. Then, so that the book might better benefit the Orientals, it was translated into the Greco-Barbaric or vernacular language by that most learned and pious man, D. Giovanni Matteo Caryophilus, Archbishop of Iconium, and published in Rome in the year 1628, in quarto, by the press of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide.
These, and no others, are the things that seemed necessary to note here. We present this work now as it is titled in the Roman edition.
17 January 1863. J.-B. M.