HIDDEN THEMES IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY BYZANTINE AND LATIN THEOLOGICAL DEBATES: MONARCHIANISM AND CRYPTO-DYOPHYSITISM 1 György GERÉBY Theology was an important area of articulation of fourteenth-century culture, as Aristeides Papadakis’ paper in this volume emphasizes. Awareness of the ‘other side’, however, was often defective, and even historians of Latin and Byzantine Greek Christianity have suffered from a curious short-sightedness in not noticing that two of the supremely important debates of the period actually proceeded in par- allel, although they resulted in very different solutions to basically similar problems. Sten Ebbesen’s paper shows how little and jumbled was the knowledge that the scholastics had about matters Greek, and Martin Hinterberger writes about mysterious elements in the theo- logical controversies (for the modern mind, to wit). All three issues played a role in the case I address here. The dogmatic differences became so abstract and rarified that the resulting differences hardly made it to the ‘lists of errors’, and the precise nature of and the rea- sons for the differences have remained largely an arcane subject until today. Palamas’ theology is generally dismissed, or played down as obscure ‘mysticism’, a kind of excessive irrationalism nicely befitting the last period of declining Byzantium. 2 The mechanics of the gradual separation and growing alienation of the two great Christian Churches remains therefore a difficult issue for the investigation of medieval “Greek” and “Latin” interactions. 3 1. If not otherwise indicated, the translations are mine. I thank István Perczel for the innumerable discussions we have had on these issues and for a fundamental insight on the interpretation of transcendence in Augustine. I would like to commemorate here Katalin Vidrányi (1945-1993), our teacher, who hinted at some of the fundamental issues dis- cussed in this paper. 2. A telling example is the recent book of H. CHADWICK, East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church, Oxford-New York 2003. The book completely leaves aside the Hesychast debate. It is mentioned only on a single instance, and even there cursorily (the only occurrence is on p. 270). The name of Gregory Palamas is missing altogether. 3. Leading to an alienation epitomized by the famous passage of Nicetas Choniates on the “deep chasm” and contradictory opinions between the Latins and themselves: oÀtw