Hans-Georg Beck (1910–1999), the most outstanding 20th-century German Byzantinist, has gone a long way from a Benedictine monk to professor in Munich, a creator of a comprehensive conception of Byzantine general and cultural history. The problems of ecclesiastical history and theology were in the center of his scientific activity from its first steps on. As a student of Martin Grabmann, a prominent historian of Western scholasticism, Beck appropriated the Thomist view of theology. That is why he denied the real distinction between essence and energies in God, which had been disclosed and analyzed by Gregory Palamas. If in his first 1935 article, The Struggle for the Thomist Concept of Theology in Byzantium, Beck criticized Palamism «from outside», i. e., from the neoscholastic viewpoint, it was later then, in his secular thesis of 1952, that the German scholar tried to censure the Palamite doctrine «from inside» by making the case of its incompatibility with the Chalcedonian Orthodoxy. Besides some general considerations about a putative barrenness of the Byzantine folk spirit (Volksgeist), in the question of Chalcedonian Orthodoxy and its survival in the Late Byzantium Beck leaned on Vladimir Solov’ev’s (1853–1900) idea of Byzantine monasticism as being infected from the early stage on with the Monophysitism. Making no clear-cut distinction between Hesychasm in general and Palamism as its most elaborated form, Beck saw in this Monophysite infection the very reason of the Palamite hesychasm being tolerated, accepted and officially stated by the Byzantine Orthodoxy, although it had been a very ‘strange’ and ‘anthropomorphite’ teaching.