Studying certain of these old teachings provides practical solutions to spiritual questions. It can also give us a new awareness and in time a new understanding of gospel texts that we have read a hundred times and never seen. It can show us how to put them into practice in their lives. For example, the gospel says that those who have purity of heart can see God. The psychological methods of the early fathers taught how to achieve that purity. They taught how to accumulate that inner stillness in which we can distinguish what is truly yourself from what is borrowed: how to join ourselves to God in love and to 'love your neighbour as ourselves'. They taught ways of changing the mind that allowed change of being itself: an ontological psychology that turns life itself golden even to mortal eyes. They spoke of illumination as in the realm of the possible, of the death of saints that is not death at-all ... and which was -- and is -- accompanied by the miraculous. Saint Paul first shaped its interpretations of the Gospel. Later it grew in the great School of Alexandria, and took root in the cave-churches of Cappadocia, surviving there forgotten by the world until Ataturk drove out the Christians in the 1920s.