With the collapse of the Byzantine influence from the East, the Western Empire, centred on Rome but long fallen into a true dark age that had until then passed Byzantium by, generated certain different types of character in which by the end of the first Christian Millennium formal intellect had begun to become dominant. It was this that led to rationalism and from that to the narrow sensory form of Western science, with its power over the world, and its lack of power over human character.

It was in the other, the Eastern Empire, that Christianity had gone inward with the Apostolic churches, the desert fathers, and the monasticism that arose from them, combining to produce a vast number of ascetic saints. We know the boundaries of that Eastern Empire. Combining the intellectualism of classical Greece, the religious fervour of the Middle East, and the splendour that was Rome, it was once a powerful, multi-national state containing Greece, the Balkans, and present-day Turkey, Syria, the Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Egypt. In Palamas’ time, the early 14th century, the Byzantine Empire had as yet managed to hold on to its capital, Constantinople, and still held some scraps of territory in Greece and the Greek islands. But by then much of it had already died, and the once glorious empire fell into a half-millennium of subjection. 

In that empire, one of the great influential groups distinguished itself by distancing itself from the everyday life of the average citizens although, as they do to this day, some of its leaders play at least a marginal role in political life. This group was that of Christians dedicated to a spiritual life; in monastic communities, in ordinary villages and families dominated by the spiritual ideal, in movements such as what is known to this day as ‘hesychasm’; the pursuit of hesychia, the ‘peace of God.’

It is with the events of that specialised community within the final remnant of the once great empire, and with their relation to our own history, that my present  interpretation of Palamas’ greatest work is concerned. I shall seek to show, so clearly that it becomes inarguable, that the forgotten civilisation of the Eastern Empire, for all its political confusions, contained on the religious side a civilising power which the Western Empire never knew in full, and whose strength, transfused now into a Western world fallen into division, a corrupt and aimless moral emptiness, and rampant inequity, might yet restore not only an ailing Christian church, but civilisation itself.