Nicholas of Methone

[2] He was bishop of Methone by 1147–1151, for he took an active role in the controversy that followed the deposition of Patriarch Cosmas II for Bogomilism in 1147 and continued until the resignation of his successor, Nicholas IV.

He wrote an account of the affair, in which he presents himself as one of the few supporters of Nicholas IV, who had previously resigned from the archbishopric of Cyprus.

[7] Nicholas's earliest work is perhaps the hagiography of Meletios the Younger that he wrote to demonstrate that true godliness was still possible in his own day.

[13] Nicholas's next earliest work is a treatise on the eucharist, Pros tous distazontas kai legontas, probably written in the mid-1140s during the Bogomil controversy and the Nephon affair.

[15][13] Nicholas wrote another work on the eucharist, Logos peri azumon (On the Azymes),[16] in which he defends the use of leavened bread against the "azymite" practice of the Latins.

[17] Nicholas's next work chronologically is a response to a question posed by the Grand Domestic John Axouch, Pros ton megan Domestikon erotesanta peri tou hagiou Pneumatos.

[18][7] Sometime before 1155, Nicholas wrote a series of responses to another questioner of high rank: These three treatises survive in a single manuscript and can be dated by a reference to his unfinished Anaptyxis.

[20][21] Pros tous skandalizomenous (To the Scandalized), an exegetical treatise on 1 Corinthians 15:28, was written shortly before the meeting of the endemic synod on 26 January 1156.

Nicholas condemns two errors: reading the scriptures only out of intellectual curiosity and ignoring context, which leads to Arianism and Origenism.

[27] Nicholas's major theologico-philosophical work is the Refutation (Anaptyxis) of Proclus' Elements of Theology, which survives in thirteen manuscripts and in a sixteenth-century Latin translation.