The Triads (In Defence of the Holy Hesychasts)

St Gregory Palamas wrote these nine treatises, in three sets of three, between 1338 and 1341, to answer Barlaam the Calabrian, who had mocked the Athonite monks as navel-gazers and denied that anyone could see the light of God. The argument runs on two legs. The body is not a prison and prayer is not disembodied, so a bodily method is not absurd. And God is genuinely unknowable in His essence and genuinely participable in His energies, which are not a creature and not a part of Him, so what the saints see on Tabor and in the cell is God Himself. Every formula the councils of 1341, 1347 and 1351 used is already here.