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EDUCATION FOR THE YOUNG IN EUROPE. THE DILEMMA BETWEEN SECULAR ETHOS AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION

Ion Croitoru

Abstract

The perspective of the young person on the horizontal and vertical of his existence is given by the education taking into account the perennial values of Europe, based, most of them, on the Christian past and tradition of the European peoples. The denial of this spiritual and cultural heritage leads to the relativization of the perennial values and to confusion, because of the attempt to disconnect a whole sphere of the moral problems from the meanings related to guilt, shame and transcendence. The supporters of the secular ethos ask that the public opinion should be restructured based on an atheistic or, at least, gnostic methodological principle, and that the public discourse should be formulated as if there were nothing beyond the visible world, as if everything came from nowhere and as if there were no ultimate aim. Yet, if we do not refer them to God, as the point of unity and the overseer of morality, the moral choices are devoid of meaning, because the young person no longer has any perspective of a universal canon by which to judge his personal choices as being good or bad, correct or wrong, virtuous or vicious. Actually, by faith in God, the young person can move on from psychological to spiritual states, from sin to virtue, from a simple moral life to a spiritual life, by experiencing the states of purification, illumination and deification. In this way, he becomes free in Christ, namely he is called to live another freedom, totally different from the one promoted in Europe’s secular liberalism. Consequently, in the absence of an objective spiritual counseling, the educational system does not manage to protect the young against the habits making them vulnerable to the sinful passions and perversions promoted via different materials that they can come across on the media and advertising market.

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