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Our Lady's Fool

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2024

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His story reminds one of the finest pages of the Golden Legend; and like the lives of so many saints, is hardly credible. Modern man, used to psychological and other methods, may find it offensive: might we call it a challenge to human reason? Where shall we draw the line between the marvellous and the absurd? Certainly we prefer stories that we can measure against our own limited standard. But, God is not logic. He is not (so St Teresa says) even reasonable. And the saint, every saint, always remains unfathomed—a sort of walking scandal, a challenge hurled at reason, a wager. The Creator's imagination infinitely surpasses the cleverest of those who ape him, romancers and poets, and the improbable is the natural habitat of his masterpieces, the Saints. That is why they bewilder us and lay hold of us: does it not prove, in a tangible way, that man is made to surpass himself and that true sanctity scorns to be stereotyped?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1950 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

Footnotes

1

Translated from La Vie Spirituelle, October 1948, by S.M. Imelda, O.P. The article is now publisher separately as a booklet—Le Fou de Notre Dâme. (Cerf: Blackfriars; 1s.)