INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE ORIGINS OF A CHANGING CHURCH

The picture shows the quayside at the monastery of Osiou Gregoriou, on the West-coast of Mount Athos - one of our main sources for recovering forgotten knowledge.

The work of Praxis Research Institute, outlined in this website, introduces English-language efforts to make available ancient studies which are still understood in certain remote Christian monasteries and dedicated smaller commmunities, but have been almost entirely forgotten elsewhere.

It shows how, when the Apostolic Church took root in Greece with Saint Paul, it quickly went beyond the brilliant intellectualism of classical Greece, including the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle - to develop a highly sophisticated and thoroughly practical Christian psychological science that is almost entirely forgotten today.

In the following pages we define study-areas that give glimpses of some of the remarkable insights of that seminal era, and attempt to show how they can be understood in relation to modern-thought. One of these reveals how Saint Paul's definition of how God can be known effectively transcends our modern Western theory of knowledge, and how this may wake man's latent capacity for self-knowledge. A later investigation touches on the problem of attention, and may form a basis for teaching control of attention to many people in need.

Among other things, restoring knowledge of these forgotten-aspects of the psyche can restore the psychology of those whose psyche has been damaged by an irrational overemphasis on teaching rational thought.

Robin Amis - Director, Praxis Research Institute