Dia Xristou Salotita (The Christ-like peace)
For Dia Xristou Salotita {(The Christ-like peace(madness), Greek : Δια Χριστόν σαλότητα} refers to the way of functioning of a special order of saints in the body of the church, who, acting in a paradoxical way and far from the usual formal moral patterns, managed to achieve holiness and at the same time bring back a multitude of people within their bosoms of the church. This example has many times been scandalous for believers and non-believers in the history of the church, but the church through these saints saw the expression and manifestation of a special gift of the Holy Spirit, one of the sharpest forms of prophetic preaching.
The lunatics are usually monks who leave the quiet of their monasteries and go down to the cities operating with actions that are absurd and stupid, but which have a deeper meaning and purpose to demonstrate the truth that lies behind the pretenses and formulas of world. They have no problem entering, for example, taverns, brothels, and mingling with disreputable associations, seeming to group themselves with the example of the disreputable of society. But it is at this moment that the troubled monk reveals the truth of salvation, always in a way that is appropriate to the level of the people he associates with. Hence he jests, reproaches sinners, works miracles, reads men's secrets, publicly mocks their secret offenses in a way that only the guilty can perceive, while he himself in their eyes appears to them to be very sinful, being apparently in the same level of sinfulness. That is why he initiates defiant fasts, visits brothels, talks with corrupt people, finally absorbing the pretenses of this world, just before he returns at night with the true mask of holiness, to prayer and exercise. Hence, the holy saint for the church is the Saint in the most extreme form of exercise, the ultimate self-denial, the complete disappearance of the ego[2].
Salos generally come in times of intense secularization of the Christian life. They appear at a time when the conventional criteria of society measure the morality of Christ with the measures of social decency and not with the evangelical ethos. They come to remind us how irreconcilable the salvation of man is when it wants to satisfy social prestige and denounce the hypocrisy of conventional life. He therefore rejects the mantle of holiness, knowing that individual morality creates self-satisfaction, deciding to lift the cross of the Church on his shoulders, in order to save sinners and tortured people. And he knows that this can be done by revealing the false facades of conventional decency that annihilates personal alterity and freedom, pulverizing the hypocritical established style and illusory evaluations. However, they do not choose this form of exercise themselves, but are chosen by God himself to do it. They themselves decide to accept without protest this call and the sins they are accused of, common and hidden sins in society, so as to expose society to its false face.
Finally, these saints, sharers in the kingdom of God, overcome the division of the human entity that comes from sin and make it an event of communion and love. They decide to demonstrate the evangelical ethos, which does not desire the abolition of the law, but the transcendence of the law within the framework of the kingdom of God. This is how they gain the trust of sinners, the unfortunate and the dishonorable, leading them to salvation.
The most characteristic examples of hall of saints are:
Symeon Directly
Andreas, for Christ's sake, Salos
Thomas, for Christ's sake
Luke of Ephesus
John the Shalos
Vasilios the Shalos
Ioannis Moscow
Procopius the Russian
Xenia of Saint Petersburg
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