“Anti-Palamism in Hans-Georg Beck’s Earlier Works: The Russian Origins and Some Catholic Parallels. Part I.”
https://doi.org/10.31802/2658-4476-2020-2-6-81-104
Abstract
Hans-Georg Beck (1910–1999), the most outstanding 20 th-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.
About the Author
D. I. Makarov
Yekaterinburg Orthodox Theological Seminary; Urals Mussorgsky State Conservatoire
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Dmitry I. Makarov - Doctor of Philosophy, Professor at the Department of Bible and Theology; head of the Department of General Humanities
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Review
For citations:
Makarov D.I. “Anti-Palamism in Hans-Georg Beck’s Earlier Works: The Russian Origins and Some Catholic Parallels. Part I.”. Bible and Christian Antiquity. 2020;(2):81-104. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.31802/2658-4476-2020-2-6-81-104
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