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1.    A Different Christianity

In what has sometimes been called His 'hard teaching,' Jesus describes the problem of the humanity of his time, the problem He perhaps came to overcome. Briefly and succinctly He describes the action that must be taken. We must change what is within us. To find the Kingdom of Heaven, we must search within ourselves, 'for the kingdom is within you.' To live in that Kingdom of Heaven, or to live according to the divine teaching of love, we must cleanse ourselves within. This chapter also describes a book called A Different Christianity, written by Robin Amis, published by State University of New York Press (SUNY).

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2. The Church of the First Millennium and the Philosophers of God

It has been said that there was no new philosophy throughout many centuries of the Middle Ages (REF). This statement is a direct result of the fact that the early fathers of the church were progressively ignored after the great closing-in of the Western mind that occurred with the Reformation. It is not now generally understood that many of the early saints were significant philosophers in their own right, and that in fact in their own world philosophical thought had actually transcended that of Periclean Athens.

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3.     Saint Gregory Palamas ... and the time of saints

Trained as a philosopher, then a monk, a Hesychast abbot, an archbishop who helped his society survive in troubled times, and finally a Saint, who helped to shape the thinking of his church from the C14th. until the present .... Gregory Palamas can give us a clearer understanding of what might be called the time of saints in the early church. The three volumes of his Triads throw new light onto the First Millennium of the Church, particularly onto novel conclusions about early Christian forms of:

• History  

• Philosophy of knowledge 

• Spirituality.

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4.     Cross-fertilisation between different streams of thought

Because of this, Palamas' writings, once separated from the polemic style dictated by the times, a style which often obscured their deeper content, can now make a specific contribution to the ‘meta-relationship’ between different disciplines that exist in our present time, a contribution extending to the relationship between physics and theology, science and religion.

Palamas gives a view of contemplative abstraction that is both psychological and experiential, and well as imparting clear knowledge of its spiritual implications. Despite having trained as an Aristotelian philosopher, he wrote in his Triads about abstraction not in the intellectual Aristotelian sense, but as a change of state, as a result of which the nous sees itself as separate from the thoughts and feelings etc.