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WEB 4 - ARCHIVE
Commentary 26 - Page 6 |
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The Need for Christian teaching Physicist David Bohm’s novel psychological investigation - given in the book ‘Thought as a system’ - failed to achieve its objective because it met the same philosophical errors in conception as are met by all modern attempts to solve the problem of how man can awaken himself. To sum up my conclusions from researches I have described elsewhere, it has become clear that the lack of consistent and adequate emotional education has been crucial to the shaping our civilization, and is directly responsible in our society for the wide discrepancy between a high level of technical capability, and what can only be called a state of moral confusion . Let me put it this way: if it is true that a civilization is formed of civilized beings, to overcome decay within that civilization demands that we overcome the decay within a majority of its individual members. To stem the tide of moral collapse requires a new strength within individuals. In our present situation, this demands the restoration of civilized emotions within individuals, and this in turn depends on the restoration of a lost part of the original civilizing influence; of the element of emotional education within our whole civilization, a stream which intentionally became part of the structure of the church as a result of the action of Constantine in establishing the Christian religion as a means of stabilising the social order, and reached the West with the expansion of Christianity. Unfortunately, during the last century or two, this role, never fully established in the West, has been almost entirely abandoned by most Christian denominations, in the progressive breakdown that began with what I called (in the Preface to my book A Different Christianity) a 'balkanisation of the mind'. This was itself one of the decay-products stemming from the slow disintegration of the aging Roman Empire under the onslaught of repeated pagan invasions. If the classical Greek paedia was the pre-Christian form of the emotionally civilizing element, then the ethics of Western civilisation are a vestige of that civilising trend, and 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 established by Constantine, plus 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 psyche." It was said by Saint Paul that what we now call emotional education always requires some kind of practice. Indeed, without exercises to make it part of our nature, it remains ineffective. Both these statements link with what we have said earlier about the survival of esotericism. At the same time, it is clear that on an informal level, some survival of this emotional education exists in certain churches in the idea of ‘taking up one’s cross.’
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