Tendentiousness in Patristic Collections

The problem of judging the dogmatic tendency of mixed patristic corpora is often a delicate one. As I have pointed out elsewhere such collections appear often to have been made up for general theological or devotional reading and were probably valued more for the variety of their contents than for any consistent principle of selection. This point is strikingly confirmed by an anecdote in John Moschus's Pratum spirituale c. 46 (P. G. 87, 3, col. 2900):We once approached Father Kyriakos, a priest of the Laura of Kalamon on the holy Jordan. And he related to us,“Once I saw in my sleep a woman of honorable appearance and dressed in purple and with her two venerable and worthy men, standing outside my cell. And I assumed that the woman was Our Lady the Mother of God and that the two men with her were John the Divine and John the Baptist. Therefore, leaving my cell I invited them to enter and pray in my cell. But she did not consent. I stayed therefore a while beseeching her and saying, ‘Let not the humble man be turned away and put to confusion’ (Ps. 74:21) etc. And when she saw me pressing my request, she answered me severely saying, ‘You have my enemy in your cell and how do you expect me to enter?’ And saying this, she departed.