Notes on Religious and Moral Education in Three (Modern) Principles of the Divine Pedagogy of Saint John Chrysostom

Abstract

The evolution of any society directly depends on the quality of its educational system, and it must include two essential components. The first considers education itself, that is, the gradual process of learning and accumulating general and special knowledge, aimed at discovering and exploiting the abilities of every individual. The second refers to the religious moral education based on the same principles, but which has a more noble goal, namely, to cultivate and develop a person’s spiritual qualities in view of their social integration and the establishment of normal interpersonal relationships. In this essay, I set out to show that within the general framework of the elementary education process, which takes into account the age and training of every individual, religious-moral education has always had a predominant role in society because it makes the junction between material, natural aspirations and the spiritual that are as important as the former. A human being is a microcosm in which two worlds, apparently contradictory but fully compatible, meet, namely, the human and the divine, body and soul, earth and heaven. My analysis considers the experience of Saint John Chrysostom, whose pedagogical principles, although based on strategies specific to the religious domain, are not in disagreement with the methods of modern pedagogy, because both pursue the finality of the educational act. In other words, I intend to show that, despite the passage of time, the principles of Chrysostom’s pedagogy retain their relevance and effectiveness.