http://www.interfax-religion.ru/print.php?act=news&id=22392

A French theologian’s study of modern psychiatry proposes studying the Orthodox
view of madness

Moscow. January 17. INTERFAX – A Russian-language translation of “Healing
Mental Illness: the experience of the first centuries in the Christian East”,
the work of the French theologian and doctor of philosophy, Jean-Claude Larche
(sp?) was published in Moscow.
The book is dedicated to understanding madness from the Orthodox point of view,
drawing on patristic and hagiographic literature of the I-XIV centuries; it
recounts the experience of healing mental illness by holy fathers, who, unlike
psychiatrists, examined the person, took into account the totality of the human
being (spirit, soul and body).
The author hopes that the experience of the Orthodox will be useful to modern
psychiatry, which, being “established on the model of medical science, a priori
excludes any relationship to religion and morality, and, therefore, arrives at a
dead end notes the review of the study which was published on Thursday in the
newspaper, Nezavisimaya Gazeta – Ex Libris”.
J.-C. Larche pays special attention to craziness [“fools for Christ’s sake” –
yurodstvo], defining it as a voluntary choice of one who attains a certain
degree of spiritual perfection; attempting to define the specifics of a fool for
Christ’s sake, as compared with other feats of Christian piety; trying to
understand and explain the reasons the “holy fools” to behave “foolishly”.



________________________________________________________________________________\
____
Be a better friend, newshound, and
know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.
http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]