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Palamas' writings, particularly the Triads, relate to a further elaboration that became necessary for the same reasons, so that his theology is closely involved with the struggle against the rationalist thought which since then has led to massive changes in the Western churches. A confusion arises when we attempt to rationalise a teaching about a God inaccessible to the senses or reason and 'fit' this teaching to sensory experience, Properly understood, Palamas' writings show that until the conquest of the Roman empire, Christianity had been successful by the standards that it taught, but that the complete teaching of the successful form never reached the West except to very small groups of people. Even today that successful form still survives, partially hidden, within the Eastern churches. And now, improved communications have made it accessible to the West, but most people in the Western world can no longer recognise the need for it. The truth is that Christianity has been repeatedly tried and has repeatedly succeeded on a regional scale, but that it has failed to spread from those small beginnings without becoming distorted by political influences, so that it becomes meaningless and ineffective. Hesychast monks like Saint Gregory Palamas were shaped by the fact that their whole lives were driven by the search for God, which became a personal striving for repentance. Their philosophical language distinguished theological ideas from psychological states - each of these taken to a fine point which, when we first hear of them, seem to show the different concepts as very little different from one another and thus of little importance. Yet if we study these ideas for the time they deserve, their fine distinctions of meaning can begin to grow on us, their importance become apparent. In the first of the three volumes of Palamas' Triads, for long famous in the Eastern church and now translated by Praxis, this happens not just in one subject that is now - in our era of specialisation - become a separate discipline, but in many different fields. In many of those fields this work is important, and it is the one book, more than any other, which has shaped the thinking of the Orthodox church to this day.
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