An alternative

Now our only hope is to find ways of analysing what is happening that do not stem  from the kind of thinking that creates the problem. The way I have chosen in years of study, and have begun to outline in this book, is based on the conclusion that every great civilization is the product of its great religion, and that the sicknesses of each reveal the failures of the capacity once, I believe, possessed by every true religion to heal the community around it (a belief counter to the immediate evidence of the Christian world today, but still evidenced in its most forgotten corners.)

It is also my thesis that the place where one can best investigate these weaknesses is where Christ turned his searching gaze; in the human heart. Just as a forest can be restored to health by ensuring the health of the trees, said that voice of the East the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, so the health of a society can be assured by assuring the health of individual members of that society. This is logically inescapable, and if so, then the investigation must begin with the individual: with oneself; with me, and now with you, the reader, if you will take these thoughts to heart.

Of course, the formation of the individual does depend to a large extent on the society in which he lives. In our society the provision of knowledge depends on the educational system; the transmission of skills on industry and the professions. In ancient Greece the formation of the heart depended on the family and on paedia, on special forms of education that trained the heart as well as head and hand, forms whose still-contentious nature was made visible in the trial and death of Socrates. In the early church this paedia was rooted in the inner realities sought by Socrates, then transformed and modified in the light of the gospel of love, both tasks fulfilled by those now known as the Fathers of the Church. Christian societies grew around this institution of what might be called emotional education that was for far more than a thousand years the civilizing task of the Church. This role still survives in a few inner-oriented monasteries, mostly on those fringes of Christendom near where it was originally formulated, but teaching requires teachers, and the churches no longer have such teachers as a function separate from the priesthood, although Saint Paul wrote, about what he called the Gifts of the Spirit: "And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers," ( 1 Corinthians 12:28.)