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The decline of the West

Western civilisation is one of humanity's great experiments - over the past few millennia - in the formation of a true civilisation.  Our civilisation began to grow towards its fulfilment during the first Christian millennium. It began to decline during the eleventh century, with the conquest of Rome and the division into two halves of the Greek oikumene which had been extended by Alexander, conquered by Rome, consolidated by Christianity, and was then destroyed by conquest by Charlemagne as the leader of communities formed from outside the original Christian community, and never properly assimilated into the Christian consolidation. Due to these historical accidents, the Christian corrective training declined and became lost or distorted.  The distortions in the initial teaching and the ascetic training it supported have since led to a loss of credibility of the Christian religion.  This in turn permitted the virtual elimination of spirituality and monasticism in Western Europe.

Common results of this situation are a breakdown of the ‘attitude of stewardship’ which characterised Christian society and the care of Christians for one another in certain times and places in the past:

• In relation of the individual to his or herself, alienation and the breakdown of mental health and happiness.

• In relation to human society, a reduction in educational standards, leading not only to illiteracy and incompetence, but to increasing dishonesty, social inequity, economic instability and violence.

• In relation to all species including our own, destruction of species beginning with the most vulnerable or those most in competition with our own.

• In relation to the planet itself, progressive destruction of the environment.

This website is the result of ongoing efforts over almost two centuries to recover for the Western world the original methods by which Western civilisation was formed, and to discover how to adapt these to serve as an essential source of healing in our own times.