Folly, Foolishness, Foolery

Abstract

In Eastern Orthodox Christianity the fool for Christ (Russ. iurodivyi, Greek salos) is both a canonical saint and a social pariah. While he is an ascetic, he prefers the city's commotion to the serenity of seclusion, constantly engaging his audiences in interactive shows, which shock them into the realization of vital truths about themselves, worldly existence and higher reality. It was this role of the iurodivyi that elevated him to the position of Russia's spiritual mentor and traditional commentator on social, political and spiritual matters. The prominence of the holy fool in Russian literature, history and culture puts him firmly on the agenda of Slavic studies scholarship.Holy fools are not unique to Russia and have been observed, recorded and studied within Byzantine, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu and other world traditions. Therefore, the subject of holy foolery falls within the broader domain of Anthropology, History, Religious and Cultural Studies. Yet Russia, which has long made the iurodivyi one of its most recognizable national types, claims priority in exploring the holy fool's phenomenology in religion, culture and art. The ratio of Russian to Western studies of the history and phenomenology of iurodstvo is indeed rather revealing: while the latter amount to just a few monographs and articles, the former yield dozens of book-length studies and many more articles. In the last decade several books on Russian holy foolishness as well as several dissertations have appeared. There have also come out important reprints of nineteenth-century ethnographic1 and theological2 studies of the subject.3Despite the number of works dedicated to holy foolery and especially to its cultural and literary applications, this subject has long remained understudied. Some works are flawed by ideological (I. G. Pryzhov), political (I. U. Budovnitz),4 or religious (I. Kovalevskii) bias. Other studies offer superficial, uninformed5 readings of holy foolery and even misinterpret this phenomenon. For example, Ewa M. Thompson's monograph, Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture (1987),6 is based on the premise that holy foolishness is not an innately Christian phenomenon but a Russian transformation of Finish shamanism. Examination of pagan aspects and folk versions of Russian holy foolery is certainly a productive field of research, yet Thompson ventures to discard the Christian significance of the phenomenon altogether. However, her study fails to substantiate her argument: Thompson's claim is based solely on circumstantial evidence and is not convincing.For a long time Aleksandr Panchenko's 1 978 Smekh kak zrelishche (Laughter as Spectacle)7 remained the most comprehensive study of the phenomenology and cultural meanings of Russian foolery for Christ. In 1994 the primacy of Panchenko's work was challenged by Sergei Ivanov's monograph, Vizantiiskoe iurodstvo, which for the first time presented the developmental history of holy foolery as a phenomenon, concept and hagiographie tradition. This work dramatically re-evaluated the field of study of holy foolery. Yet, it remained largely unknown in the West, where scholars often relied on non-Russian-language studies. In 2006, Ivanov's monograph finally became available to Western readership, albeit in a new, revised and expanded form, deservedly claiming the status of the most comprehensive study of Eastern Orthodox foolery in Christ to date.The 2006 monograph, titled Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, builds on its 1994 forerunner, but is a new study altogether. It has doubled in scope and size, with five new chapters and a new introduction, as well as an expanded bibliography. A year earlier, the Russian version of this study, titled Blazhennye Pokhaby: Kul'turnaia istorila iurodstva (Blessed Fools: cultural history of foolery for Christ)8 was published. The divergence between the Russian and English titles is indicative of occasional dissimilarities between the Russian and English versions of the book, yet they largely overlap. …