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.

Our Father who art in heaven. . . . Two thousand years have elapsed since these words were first spoken from the Mount of the Beatitudes. Since that time countless sermons and commentaries have echoed these words, but never has the Lord's Prayer been likened to such an array of spiritual themes: the Commandments, the Divine Liturgy, the virtues, the Gospels, and then the Apocalypse and the Psalms are all taken in turn and formed into "verbal icons." This is an eminently practical book to be not so much quoted as lived, a modern quest for the heart of Scripture.

Jean Hani, professor emeritus at the University of Amiens - where he taught Greek civilization and literature - has long labored to recover and illuminate various aspects of Christianity. His findings have been presented in several works: Divine Craftsmanship, Symbolism of the Christian Temple, and The Black Virgin (all published by Sophia Perennis), as well as Apercus sur la Messe, La Royaute, Du Pharaon au Roi Tres Chretien, and a collection of articles entitled Mythes, Rites et Symboles. His aim has been to integrate the latest findings in the history of religions with the perennialist spiritual perspective of such writers as Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon. If in the first place our book is intended to be a personal homage to the Divine Liturgy, it also has another purpose. Without any doubt, the gravest symptom in the crisis the Western Church is currently undergoing - the effects of which on art we have already denounced in our book The Symbolism of the Christian Temple--is the calling in question of the very meaning and content of the Mass, given that it is the heart and vital center of the Church. And we have made our feeble contribution to its defence. But our intention is not to become involved in theological quarrels. In this study our point of view is that of the historian of religions. What we wish to show is that the Christian mass is illumined in the light of studies concerning the universal schemas of the sacred to which it conforms. Most assuredly, the Christian cult has its specificity, but that is for the theologian and liturgist to spell out. What we are proposing to do is to unravel the characteristics in the Christian cult linking it to the universality of the sacred. From the Introduction

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.