Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ's Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality
John Saward
Abstract
This book tells the story of those who have taken Jesus and his apostles at their word and have received from God the rare and terrible charism of holy folly. The book encounters a wide variety of fools for Christ's sake: the wild men of Byzantium, Russia, and Ireland, whose apparently outrageous and provocative behaviour masks a deeper sanctity; the ‘merry men’ of the Middle Ages, God's jongleurs, who proclaim the ‘Gospel of Good Humour’; and finally, those who have gone the darker and more perilous way of being written off by the world as mad and contemptible but who ‘rejoice and are glad’. ... More
Keywords: Jesus, holy folly, Byzantium, Russia, Ireland, Middle Ages, madness, saints, Catholic, Orthodox
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 1980 | Print ISBN-13: 9780192132307 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 | DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780192132307.001.0001 |
