Divine madness

For the Renaissance, Foucault argues, the line between madness and reason was thin and easily crossed. The madman, in fact, frequently gained insight that the sane did not; think Lear howling on the heath. Over time, madness and truth had been clearly distinguished, and madness ceased to be instructive. Foucault goes off on a digression about the madness of the cross, which, he says “belonged so intimately to the Christian experience of the Renaissance” was disappearing in the seventeenth century “despite Jansenism and Pascal.” More precisely, the theme “changed and somehow inverted its meaning”:

“It was no longer a matter of requiring human reason to abandon its pride and its certainties in order to lose itself in the great unreason of sacrifice. When classical [ie, 17th century] Christianity speaks of the madness of the Cross, it is merely to humiliate false reason and add luster to the eternal light of truth; the madness of God-in-man’s-image is simply a wisdom not recognized by the men of unreason who live in this world: ‘Jesus crucified . . . was the scandal of the world and appeared as nothing but ignorance and madness to the eyes of his time.’ But the fact that the world had become Christian, and that the order of God is revealed through the meanderings of history and the madness of men, now sufficies to show that ‘Christ has become the highest point of our wisdom” [these quotations from Bossuet]. The scandal of Christian faith and Christian abasement, whose strength and value as revelation Pascal still preserved, would soon have no more meaning for Christian thought except perhaps to reveal in these scandalized consciences so many blind souls: ‘Do not permit your Cross, which has subdued the universe for you, to be still the madness and scandal of proud minds.’ Christian unreason was relegated by Christians themselves into the margins of a reason that would become identical with the wisdom of God incarnate. After Port-Royal, men would have to wait two centuries – until Dostoievsky and Nietzsche – for Christ to regain the glory of his madness, for scandal to recover its power as revelation, for unreason to cease being merely the public shame of reason.”