 Some historians restrict Byzantine philosophy to this tradition, based on the ancient texts of Aristotle and, occasionally, Plato and his  followers.[9]  But there were two other strands to philosophy in Byzantium. One is that of those thinkers after 1200 who looked to Latin thought  (§1.3.5).  The other goes back to the philosophically-inclined Greek Christian Fathers, and above all to the (probably) Syrian monk who, late in the fifth century, issued a set of writings under the name of Dionysius, the Athenian Areopagite (learned judge) converted by St Paul. The author had read the near contemporary pagan Platonist Proclus, who envisaged a many-tiered universe, deriving ultimately from a One, beyond even being.  Pseudo-Dionysius  substituted the Christian God for the One, and where Proclus accommodated the pagan pantheon on the elaborately triadic rungs of his pantheon, he placed the angels and the Church hierarchy. Maximus the Confessor, schooled in ancient philosophy though hostile to it, developed pseudo-Dionysius’s thinking, especially his negative theology. This line of Byzantine thinking has its most powerful later expression in the work of a monk of Mount Athos, Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), who combined the theme of God’s unknowability with the idea that he does make himself manifest even in this life to some people who are helped by a special sort of “hesychastic” (still, silent) prayer.