 John Italos (c. 1025–after 1082) was a pupil of Michael Psellos, and his successor in the Imperial School as “Consul of the Philosophers”, where he also taught all branches of philosophy. Anna Komnene refers to him in the Alexiad, the history she wrote of the events during the reign of her father Alexios I (1081–1118), as an exceptional thinker and an excellent logician who interpreted Aristotle better than anyone else in his time. Indeed, Italos occupies a special place in the history of Byzantine thought for having been put on trial and condemned by the Church in 1082, on the charge of having advocated the systematic use of philosophical analysis and logical reasoning in clarifying theological issues. Regardless of the positions he defended on such issues, positions some of which, after all, were not at all different from those of other philosophers, notably from Psellos’, what seems to have been really unacceptable for the religious and the political establishment at the time was his rationalist approach towards doctrines which the Orthodox Church considered beyond comprehension, as something Christians should simply accept on faith and as something only the Church had the authority to judge. It is telling that to this day, during the mass of the first Sunday in Lent, the so-called Synodikon of the Greek Orthodox Church is read, in which Italos is anathematized in eleven articles. What mainly survives from his writings are the commentary on the second, third and fourth book of the Topics; two small treatises on dialectic and on the Aristotelian syllogisms together with a very brief synopsis of rhetoric; and finally, the Quaestiones quodlibetales, a collection of ninety-three answers to philosophical questions posed to him by his students, among which were the emperor Michael VII (ruled 1071–1078) and his brother Andronikos Doukas. In these texts Italos seems to question the supremacy of theology over philosophy and even to overturn the established hierarchy. That is to say, Italos obviously follows the ancient conception of philosophy, well known from both the Platonic and the Aristotelian traditions, according to which theology is part of philosophy, since philosophy culminates in the attempt to understand the first principle of everything. It probably was this supposedly arrogant attempt on his part to develop a natural or philosophical theology that led to his trial and condemnation.