A major spiritual and intellectual figure of Orthodox Byzantium, Gregory Palamas—monk, archbishop and eminent theologian—dedicated most of his active life to theological argument, centered on one basic truth: The living God is accessible to personal experience, because He shared His own life with humanity. Both his contemporaries and the later generations considered that the nine treatises composed by Palamas between 1338 and 1341 and entitled For the Defence of Those Who Practice Sacred