Tootfinder

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If lepers were socially excluded and removed from the community of the visible church, their existence still made God manifest, as they showed both his anger and his bounty: ‘Dearly beloved’, says a ritual from a church in Vienne in the south of France, ‘it has pleased God to afflict you with this disease, and the Lord is gracious for bringing punishment upon you for the evil that you have done in this world.’ The leper was then dragged out of the church by the priest and his acolytes gressu retrogrado but he was assured that he was God’s witness: ‘however removed from the church and the company of the saints, you are never separated from the grace of God’. Brueghel’s lepers watch from afar, but forever, as Christ climbs Mount Calvary accompanied by a whole people. Hieratic witnesses of evil, their salvation is assured by their exclusion: in a strange reversal quite opposed to merit and prayers, they are saved by the hand that is not offered. The sinner who abandons the leper to his fate thereby opens the door to his salvation. ‘Thus be patient in your sickness, for the Lord does not underestimate your ills, nor separate you from his company. If you have patience, so shall you be saved, like the leper who died outside the door of the rich man, and was carried straight up to Heaven.’ Abandonment is his salvation, and exclusion offers an unusual form of communion.
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(Michel Foucault, History of Madness, transl. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa)