This work, the third panel of a triptych dedicated by the author to
the notion of illness derived from the patristic and hagiographic
texts of the Christian East from the first to the fourteenth
centuries, makes an essential contribution to the history of mental
illnesses and their therapies in a domain very little studied until
now. Confronted by the numerous problems still posed today in
understanding these illnesses, their treatment, and their
relationship to those who are sick, he shows the importance offered
for reflection and current practice by early Christian thought and
experience. After indicating how the Fathers understood the psyche
and its relationship with body and spirit, the author gives a
detailed analysis of the different causes they attribute to mental
illness and the various treatments recommended. At the same time he
shows how, relying on fundamental Christian values, they manifest a
constant solicitude and respect for the sick, and how they are at
pains to integrate them into community life and have them
participate in their own healing, foreshadowing in this way the
needs and aspirations of our own time. The last part discloses the
deep significance of one of the strangest and most fascinating
forms of asceticism the Christian East has known: 'folly for the
sake of Christ', a madness feigned with the goal of attaining a
high degree of humility, but also a way well-suited, through a
close experience of their condition, to help those who are often
among, today as in the past, the most destitute. Jean-Claude
Larchet is docteur des lettres et sciences humaines, docteur en
theologie, and docteur d'Etat en philosophie. The author of
Therapeutique des maladies spirituelles (Paris: Editions de
l'Ancre, 1991) and The Theology of Illness (Crestwood, New York: St
Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2002), he is a specialist in questions
of health, sickness, and healing. He is today one of the foremost
St Maximus the Confessor specialists.
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