#Admittedly medieval Christians rarely lived up to those values

[the-busy-ghost]

I will admit I’m only dabbling in English translations of ancient Greek works at the moment, so I’m not making a judgement about the whole culture, but honestly  I never expected to miss any aspect of mediaeval Christianity until now

#Hundreds of pages about what the best values are in a man and how one should order the body mind and state #and not one word about compassion or kindness or understanding others' failures #Or mercy #Admittedly medieval Christians rarely lived up to those values #But at least they were high on the list of Admired Virtues #Idk if the Greeks were any better at living up to the virtues of compassion kindness and mercy #But so far they don't seem to place a high value on them in the same way as say bravery or wisdom #One could make the argument that those two virtues usually encompass kindness but I would say that's only in our modern perspective #Anyway it's way too early to make that judgement it's just the one thing I'm feeling the lack of so far #Everything else is familiar territory because the ancient Greeks massively influenced both medieval Christian and modern western thinking #But I am definitely feeling like there's a lack of that central virtue of compassion #Which I would place very high on the list of modern virtues #And which seems to at least be valued by a lot of medieval Christian writers (even if they don't actually live up to it or they qualify it) #Anyway silly thoughts that are very uninformed but I will record on my own blog in case I need reminded in future #Probably some input required from Classicists who know the field much better than me #There's probably lots of sources out there about compassion in ancient Greece #Probably works that deal with it still survive #Just the few that I am familiar with so far don't seem to touch on it much at all