TRUTHS REDISCOVERED

Registration gives access to Free and PPV video-talks and other material, to Foundation Courses and ongoing Membership programme as well as periodic open groups in certain locations in USA, UK and NL

Registration

Studies gatehouse

Free videos

Introductory studies
Members pages
LOGIN

LOGOUT
Manage my account
Admin

Somee practical conclusions from the Praxis retranslation

of Saint Gregory Palamas' Triads.

ANCIENT TRUTHS restored

For around a thousand years, while the gospel has continued to be proclaimed from the housetops, by Palamas' time certain important practical knowledge was already beginning to become lost or perhaps hidden from the Christian world, almost like buried treasure. As a result, the Christian faith, which was intended to lend force to love, perception to the eye, and capability to caring, became a faith of failure; designed, as professor-priest John Romanides says, to cure 'the disease that has crippled religion,' it has itself suffered from the tiredness-of-heart it was intended to heal.

On close inspection, it is clear that it was not hidden in pursuit of a sense of power or exclusivity, nor in the quaint belief that if it is given away it will be lost to those who first possessed it, for we can give away knowledge, and yet at the same time keep it for ourselves. In fact, when this kind of knowledge takes verbal form, it becomes our true possession only after we have 'made it our own' through direct experience. At that point it is no longer merely verbal. All knowledge is more than hypothesis or opinion, and it is the certainty gained by experience that turns Christian belief and doctrine into genuine knowledge of a kind shared by all Christian denominations, even when they say the same things in very different ways. The most important of the knowledge traditionally taught in the early church is knowledge of how to act for certain purposes essential to the teaching of the New Testament, and we can only gain the necessary experience by learning how to put that teaching into practice in our lives.

"But you should be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like a man seeing his natural face in a glass: for he sees himself and goes his way, and quickly forgets what kind of man he was. But whoever looks into the perfect law of liberty, and persists in this, not one who hears and forgets, but one who carries out the work, this man will be blessed in his action." (James 1:22-25.)

In fact, if this knowledge was hidden in the past, it was hidden only because of the danger that it might be misinterpreted, and this policy has failed. In our times, with the decline of the teaching of Greek in the schools and the explosion of information in the media, the attempt to hide these teachings has been the cause of their becoming almost totally lost. This in its turn has led to a flourishing of imitators with their half-truths. Some elements that have been rediscovered are frequently discussed today, but in isolation from related aspects of the same teaching they cannot easily be understood, so that they survive like isolated plants in a desert, losing their resilience in the face of the hostile winds of an obsessively commercial world. With some of these, not even their value continues to be understood in our times.

Lost Truths

Truths Page 1

Truths Page 2

Truths Page 3

PRAXIS PAST

praxis web 4 ARCHIVES

including most of the text articles from praxis Web 4. Main texts are listed with simple descriptions under CONTENTS and more fully under ABSTRACTS

* CONTENTS

* ABSTRACTS

A New Vision

The Ark

A Different Christianity

Philosophers of God

St. Gregory Palamas

Cross-fertilisation

Abstraction & attention

Lost Doctrines

Lost Christian truths

The Royal Road