Humanism, Hesychasm, and the Fate of Byzantium and Eastern Europe

It is common to speak of a ‘renaissance’ in relation to different moments of the Byzantine millennium, including the Macedonian age, the Comnenian, and the Palaeologan. The last of these has been heavily investigated, not least because it has attracted the attention of scholars of Humanism and the Renaissance in Western Europe and of the South-Slavic Renaissance of the 14th century. Scholars have also investigated the nature and fate of Byzantine Humanism/the Byzantine Renaissance on the eve of the catastrophe of 1453, asking whether it is really possible to speak of a creative and fruitful renaissance, or whether we are only dealing with fleeting and fruitless episodes and individual trajectories between East and West. In the cultural and spiritual world of the Palaeologan age, particularly in the 14th century, two tendencies are usually distinguished: on the one hand, the world of the literati, intellectuals, and «humanists»; on the other, the «monastic party», which had a reserved, if not hostile, attitude towards the secular culture of the literati. This second tendency is represented by Gre gory Palamas and is known as Palamism (or Hesychasm). It is believed that the outcomes of this confrontation crucially shaped the destiny of Byzan tium and the subsequent age. The dichotomy between «Humanism» and «Hesychasm» has been accepted by art historians, historians of philosophy, Byzantinists, palaeographers, and theologians, at the risk of becoming a cli ché. The article illustrates the history of this interpretation from the end of the 19th century to the present day, analysing in particular the key studies of John Meyendorff and Gelian M. Prokhorov.