Modern thought generally concludes that the world ‘happens’ according to certain laws which it regards in an authoritarian way, laws whose origin is often regarded as unknown. But the early Christians believed that the world was created, and that it therefore had a cause and a purpose. More important in practical terms are the moral implications of all this. Modern thought, after several decades of progress in localisation largely of sensory functions in the brain, continues to believe the main assumption from the ideas made fashionable so long ago by Freud, currently claiming that consciousness is a mere ‘epiphenomenon’, that the human psyche is the product of a brain which contains no central form of control. In practice, this view is easily made to support the contemporary fashionable belief that claims that a human being is essentially fallible: that we are fated by our nature to be imperfect. Observation of those who support this current dogma shows their states of mind when they argue in this way to be little different from the Christians who imprisoned Galileo and burned Giordano Bruno. Fortunately, they do not have power of life and death over us today! Prolonged study of this book by Palamas has convinced myself and a number of friends that this modern belief is contrary to the inner doctrine of Christianity. It is even beginning to appear probable that it is a major element in the decay of our modern society.

But even today Christian thought sometimes still believes that it this is not necessarily true. Many Christians still believe, and some of them demonstrate that, a form of self-control can be established in the human psyche through Christian belief and practice .... although it is still difficult to be sure in what sense whether or not this process actually occurs in the brain itself. But although this still quite frequently happens among Christians, the underlying view of reality on which it is based was long-ago supplanted by the human-centred view of the 13th-14th Century rationalists who, even more than the Renaissance, shaped our modern world.

Either way, the moral implications of this difference between the two points of view is enormous, and this difference is the primary reason why the inner interpretation of Christianity is so very .important in a general sense, and not only for those who follow the demanding way of the Hesychasts. In this sense, the way we think of life determines how we live, and the whole of our world rests on our resolution of the choice between these two views of reality, the religious and the scientific.

With a belief in the absolute reality of science comes all the ‘baggage’ of that view; belief in the emptiness, the aimlessness of things, in the paramount nature of our pettiest wishes, in the primacy of ambition over compassion and of productivity over beauty.

The alternative, to rediscover the inner understanding of Christianity that was the civilising force that formed our modern world, is to restore meaning, purpose and compassion to the place in our world they have long been losing, for it was the gradual departure from that view of Christianity which was responsible for the decay of our civilisation.