Never the Twain Shall Meet? ― Latins and Greeks Learning from Each Other in Byzantium

This volume explores the theme of Latin and Greek mutual learning, intellectual and cultural interchange in the final age of Byzantium (1261-1453), challenging received conceptions of East and West as clearly delineated ideological categories. The reception of Thomas Aquinas and Western scholasticism receives emphasis, but also other forms of philosophical and theological frames of reference that have had lasting repercussions.

Many readers of this volume will have been brought up on the notion that ‘East’ and ‘West’ are clearly delineated ideological and ecclesial categories. This book challenges the acceptance of that dichotomy as a drastic over-simplification. It aims to transcend the often polemically motivated scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by emphasizing shared frames of reference between the Greek East and Latin West.

The contributions in this book point not only to Greeks and Latins learning from each other but also to Greeks and Latins learning together. The divergences between late Byzantine and Latin philosophy and theology can be even more interesting than the similarities, since they manifest a commonality and synchronism between East and West that is richer and more complex than the phenomenon of mere borrowing or assimilation.

In addition to broader, diachronical surveys, the East-West dichotomy is examined through case-studies of the writings of key figures such as Palamas, Scholarios, Demetrios Kydones, Bessarion, Plethon and others. The results will be surprising for those accustomed to conceiving of the Greek East and Latin West as somehow radically opposite.