St. Gregory Palamas wrote the Triads, the foremost of his many theological works, to refute Barlaam the Calabrian's attacks upon the spiritual practices of the Athonite monks. The Triads constitute the apex of late Byzantine theology, serving to tie together many strands of thought from earlier Church Fathers into a remarkable synthesis of what it means for man to know God and how this knowledge is obtained. Above all, Palamas is at pains to prove to the reader that salvation is not a human reality but rather one that takes man beyond himself and the limits human nature imposes upon him. At the core of the Triads lies St. Gregory's insistence that man can truly participate in the life of God even during the course of this earthly life and that this participation is a transfiguration of the whole man—body, soul, and mind.
This translation by Alexander Titus is published alongside the original Greek text of Palamas as the first volume of the new Popular Patristics Series: Longer Works. An extension of the Popular Patristics Series, this new series is meant to bring to readers major texts from the patristic tradition that are too long to fit in the original Popular Patristics format. The Longer Works are indispensable reading for anyone interested in the history and development of Orthodox theology or the Christian patristic tradition.
About the translator: Alexander R. Titus is an independent scholar and educator living in western Oregon. He received his doctorate in Church History from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he wrote his dissertation on Palamas’ reception of the Dionysian corpus in the Triads.
