Perfect Fools

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’. It is not argued that all the saints of God conform to one or other of these categories, nor is it claimed that folly for Christ's sake is itself a homogeneous phenomenon. The book is concerned with the fools for Christ's sake in the Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions only.