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WEB 4 - ARCHIVE
Commentary 19 - Page 8 |
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Historical postscript: Elements of emotional teachingTo sum up my conclusions, it has become clear that the loss of practical training - of emotional education - has been crucial to our civilization. It is now clear that this ancient form
of education was present in both the main streams that formed our
civilization.
It was endemic to the Greek and is certainly present in the
Hebraic tradition prior to the time of Christ.
It formed a major element in the merging of those two
traditions orchestrated by the early fathers whose words form the
substance of the Philokalia.
It underlay the strengths of Christian civilization, and its loss
was a sign of the decay of civilization that followed the slow
disintegration of the Roman Empire under the onslaught of repeated
barbarian invasions, including the Crusades.
To
stem the tide of today's moral collapse requires the restoration of
moral strength in individuals which, in its turn, demands the
restoration of civilized emotions within them.
If emotional education was the civilizing element that gave Western civilization its strength, as I believe, then the restoration of the necessary elements of this lost emotional education would depend on restoring to active use the main elements of the long-lost Christian paedia, with the addition of corrective elements appropriate to our times. To do so would require teachers who were themselves emotionally educated, something that would require inner knowledge, and when we think what kind of esoteric knowledge this might require, we should remember that Evagrius wrote, "The ascetic life is the spiritual method for cleansing the feeling part of the soul.”
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