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| CONTENTS |
In the Roman and Byzantine Near
East, the holy fool emerged in Christianity as a way of describing individuals
whose apparent madness allowed them to achieve a higher level of spirituality.
Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium examines how the figure of the mad saint or
mystic was used as a means of individual and collective transformation in the
period between the birth of Christianity and the rise of Islam. It presents a
novel interpretation in revealing the central role that psychology plays in
social and historical development.
Early Christians looked to
figures who embodied extremes of behavior—like the holy fool, the ascetic, the
martyr—to redefine their social, cultural, and mental settings by reading new
values in abnormal behavior. Comparing such forms of extreme behavior in early
Christian, pagan, and Jewish societies, and drawing on theories of relational
psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology of religion, Youval Rotman explains
how the sanctification of figures of extreme behavior makes their abnormality
socially and psychologically functional. The sanctification of abnormal mad
behavior created a sphere of ambiguity in the ambit of religious experience for
early Christians, which brought about a deep psychological shift, necessary for
the transition from paganism to Christianity.
A developing society leaves
porous the border between what is normal and abnormal, between sanity and insanity,
in order to use this ambiguity as a means of change. Rotman emphasizes the role
of religion in maintaining this ambiguity to effect a social and psychological
transformation.
