Download PDF | Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond (Oxford Studies in Byzantium), By Sergey A. Ivanov, Oxford University Press ( 2006).
492 Pages
Preface to the English Edition
The first version of this book, Vizantiiskoe iurodstvo, was published in Russia in 1994. The intervening years have seen the publication of at least three monographs and dozens of articles relevant to the theme of Byzantine holy foolery. In places this has made it necessary to rewrite or edit my original text for the English edition. The greater challenge, however, lies in how to adapt the book for readers whose very language lacks any proper equivalent term for its central concept. The word iurodstvo in the original is instantly accessible to anybody in Russia, evoking a mass of cultural associations.
Only Russian-speakers need no quotation marks or additional clarifications when they talk about this ancient and bizarre phenomenon. The conventional English phrase for the phenomenon is ‘holy folly’, or sometimes ‘holy foolishness’. Neither term is satisfactory. ‘Folly’ nowadays implies something done rashly and often in error, while ‘foolishness’ is merely silly. Not so iurodstvo. Here, therefore, we have preferred the unfamiliar but more apt locution ‘holy foolery’. Though still not ideal, this nevertheless conveys some of the essential features: in particular, it implies behaviour which is caused neither by mistake nor by feeble-mindedness, but is deliberate, irritating, even provocative.
Other Russian words could also be used to convey the same meaning: pokhab, blazhennyi, bui, for example. All these words still exist in my native language today, but they have undergone semantic shifts. Buinyi now means ‘crazed’, ‘violent and a danger to others’. Blazhennyi has two distinct meanings: in the first place it designates one of the degrees of sanctity; but in its other sense it implies a kind of gentle imbecility, a feeble-minded person with a silly smile on his face (a ‘beatific’ smile, as one might say), utterly unable to engage with the world. Pokhabnyi, in contrast, might now refer to a salacious joke, or scabrous behaviour, indecent, but with no implication of insanity. In the modern language, therefore, all these words have different meanings, yet the point at which their semantic paths intersect is in the multivalent concept of the iurodivyi, whose very essence is in his volatility: now he is insane, now he is not; now quiet, now wild; now manifestly pious, now obscene—or several or all of these things at once.
As for the word iurodivyi itself (cognate with urod—a person with a birth defect): in modern Russian it is used too frequently (there are more than 85,000 occurences of words with this root in the Russian internet) and has too many meanings. For example, in Dostoevskii’s The Brothers Karamazov eight characters in different contexts are referred to as iurodivye. The English translator of the novel had to render them in very different ways, depending on the context: ‘idiot’, ‘religious idiot’, ‘pious ecstatic’, ‘saintly fool’, ‘crazy, ‘fanatic’ (F. Dostoevskii, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, 1949), 72-7, 145, 57, 58, 256, 150, 258) while the quality of iurodstvo is translated as ‘buffoonery’ ‘foolery,, or “crazy streak’ (Dostoevskii, Karamazov, 51, 259, 29).
The secular meaning evolved as late as the nineteenth century and is derived from the religious meaning. The common ground for both is their reference to another reality. In the context of Orthodox culture this reality is divine; secular culture reinterpreted this concept— iurodstvo—in different, psychological terms. In both cases such foolery sends the same message: that the obvious is in fact deceptive. While a ‘religious’ holy fool alludes to the inscrutability of divine judgement, the ‘secular’ holy fool hints at his own hidden merits.
Typically, a iurodivyi today is a person who is aware that he looks pathetic in other people’s eyes and pre-empts their contempt by exaggerated self-humiliation, as if saying to himself: they are incapable of understanding what I am really like anyway. The next step in this psychological display is for the performer to let it be known that his behaviour is staged and that its function is to disguise his superiority over his audience. Finally, the performer, who may suspect that the pathetic impression he makes is not entirely undeserved, attempts to forestall the act of judgement by making a public scene. Such a person plays the buffoon not for enjoyment but in resentment; he insults by pretending to instruct; employs ostentatious cheerfulness to conceal his constant readiness for a scene; he expresses public remorse for his sins while refusing to accept any reproach.
In Russian there is a saying: ‘Self-abasement is higher than pride.’ The original meaning appears to have been a banal Christian admonition that humility is superior to pride (cf. Prov. 29:23; 1 Peter 5:5), but eventually it came to imply something very different: that self-abasement is in fact the highest form of pride.
Introduction
‘Holy fool’ is a term for a person who feigns insanity, pretends to be silly, or who provokes shock or outrage by his deliberate unruliness. However, the term does not apply to all such behaviour. Extravagant conduct may qualify as holy foolery only if those who watch it assume that what lies beneath is sanity and high morality, even pious intent. The Orthodox Church holds that the holy fool voluntarily takes upon himself the mask of insanity in order that he may thereby conceal his own perfection from the world and hence avoid the vanity of worldly praise. A further stimulus to such behaviour, in the Orthodox view, may be as a comical, paradoxical form of spiritual instruction.
However, the holy fool’s indecorous behaviour can be edifying only if he abandons his disguise (for otherwise how would one tell him apart from a real, non-pretend fool or delinquent?); yet if he does reveal himself, the holy fool subverts his own vocation. If he has no intention of edifying anybody, then he could far more easily avoid worldly renown if he were to retreat to a place of solitude; yet he is drawn to company, to the very crowd whose devotion he ostensibly abhors. This is a basic paradox in the Orthodox conception of the holy fool.
Associated originally with the Church, holy fools have been studied mainly in a religious perspective.! For most Orthodox believers the holy fool has been among the most revered types of saint, but not all Orthodox writers have approved. The distinguished church historian E. Golubinskii took the view that ‘strictly speaking, holy foolery is anticanonical’? I have nothing whatever to contribute to such debates, and they do not figure in the present study. I take no position on the question of the holy fool’s sanctity, nor on how to distinguish ‘true’ and ‘false’ holy fools. It is wholly irrelevant whether any given Byzantine tale of holy foolery deals with an ‘actual’ saint or with a sinner.?
Any cultural phenomenon can be approached in a number of ways, and it would be as well to state at the outset which approaches I do not pursue. It would be legitimate, for example, to study holy foolery in the context of a history of psychiatry (that is, to look at medieval descriptions of holy foolery and consider which currently known mental disorders they may fit); or one could explore a typological comparison between the holy fool and the Finnic shaman,* or with the Suibne Geilt cycle of early Irish legend.5 Some scholars detect a link between holy foolery and carnival, others see it as an ecclesiastical conspiracy against the masses,” or, vice versa, as a form of social protest. The phenomenon of holy foolery could fruitfully be investigated in the context of the mythology of sacrifice or self-sacrifice, or as an aspect of the ways in which various cultures have regarded outcasts and especially clowns.
The clown is a well known figure in many traditional cultures, from Samoa to the Masai to the Indian subcontinent. Among the American Indians in the northwestern USA the clown has some attributes of the ritual madman: ‘he is privileged to ridicule, burlesque and defile the most sacred and important ceremonies...licensed to behave as no ordinary mortals would dream of behaving’? In some respects the Native American clown is remarkably like the holy fool: among the Moyo-Yaqui, for example, clowns are noted for their indecent and profane behaviour during the Great Fast.!° In the Anachkina ritual, clowns of the Pueblo catch a dog (see below, p. 113)—a ritually impure animal—tear it to pieces, and sprinkle onlookers with its blood. Almost all the clowns wallow in filth, eat excrement and drink urine. The Zuni describe ‘Kiyemishis’—a kind of “doleful clown.
who behave oddly and speak in their own ‘prophetic’ language while the entire tribe mocks them; during the Shalako festival, however, they suddenly change from pathetic outcasts into all-powerful priests able to summon rain. Thus the clown evokes ambivalent responses.!!
The jester, by contrast, bears only a superficial resemblance to the holy fool. Although both inhabit a topsyturvy world and neither can survive without spectators, nevertheless the jester is part of the crowd whereas the holy fool is entirely alone even in the midst of the urban bustle; the jester thrives on dialogue, while the holy fool is monologic; the jester is immersed in ‘festival time’, or “carnival time’ whereas the holy fool is outside time; the behaviour of the jester is akin to an art form, whereas art is quite alien to the holy fool. “The holy fool’s laughter is a reflection: the holy fool becomes a mirror for those who mock poverty and impotence, and as such he mocks poverty and impotence. The laughter of the holy fool is the laughter of a world which is horrified by its own reflection in the mirror. }2
Yet however tempting these and numerous other possibilities might be, they will not be addressed in the present book, for our subject is holy foolery and its genetic rather than generic connections.
Genetic links can also, of course, be traced to greater or lesser degrees of remoteness. Thus one could choose to trace the holy fool’s provocative behaviour right back to God’s instruction to Abraham that he sacrifice his son, or the licence given by God to Satan to torment Job. Or one could go still further, and assert that there is an element of such provocation in the very act of Creation which permits evil to exist in the world. The holy fool’s simulated insanity can be compared to the kenosis of Christ, who, according to the New Testament, ‘made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men’ (Phil. 2:7). That there is an element of concealed provocation here is suggested by the semantic development of the word skandalon, which in scriptural usage may even allude to Christ himself. Originally a physical obstacle, ‘that which causes someone to stumble’ already in New Testament usage skandalon has taken on a moral sense, ‘that which causes someone to sin’ ‘a temptation’, ‘a provocation.!> The holy fool is a ‘scandalous’ figure both in the modern sense (shocking, causing outrage) and in this very specific moral sense.
In the present work I do not attempt to trace the hypothetical deep roots of holy foolery. The aim is to explore the immediate origins, the emergence, and the life-span, of a specific cultural phenomenon which could only arise in particular historical circumstances.
The main source for our survey is the complete (as far as possible) corpus of Byzantine and Old Russian hagiographic literature (lives of saints) and the associated genre of ‘beneficial tales. Supplementary—though still very import-ant—sources include theological and historical works; here I cannot claim that the coverage is comprehensive, and significant material has doubtless been overlooked. The texts under consideration are mostly in Greek and Old Russian. As regards texts in other languages, only those in Latin (and its derivatives) and Slavonic have been perused in the original. Sadly, my familiarity with Coptic, Syriac, Amharic, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, Hebrew, and Sanskrit texts extends no further than those which have been translated into European languages. This has consequences for Chapter 13, which is bound to be somewhat amateurish and where I cannot claim that the issues have been fully addressed. The Russian variant of holy foolery will be surveyed down to the end of the seventeenth century. The more recent, mostly ‘secular’ evolution of this institution is touched upon briefly, in a somewhat impressionistic manner.
A holy fool is someone whose behaviouris no different from that of any madman (or, more broadly, than any other trouble-maker or delinquent) yet who is accorded notably high status in society. He is seen—accurately or otherwise— as a righteous man who assumes a guise of irrationality for ascetic and educational purposes. However, not every pretence at insanity can be deemed holy foolery. Instances of feigned stupidity for non-religious purposes are beyond the scope of our study. Moreover, a Christian context in itself is not sufficient grounds for inclusion. One Byzantine text, for example, tells of how a certain man decided to expose a thief’s crimes: “He went into the church, took off his clothes and began to make as if he was possessed by demons (zrovetv €avtov daovrCouevov), shouting incoherently. Horror-struck, the thief confessed his transgressions, and the fake demoniac ‘began to stifle him, saying “St Andrew commands you to give this person fifty coins”. As soon as the stolen property was returned, the impersonator ‘took his clothes and dressed himself decently’.14
Although this pretence takes place in a church, and even in the name of a saint, it cannot be called holy foolery, since its aim is practical rather than metaphysical. The same can be said of cases of insanity feigned for the sake of modesty. For example, when Ephrem Syrus was threatened with being consecrated a bishop, he decided to simulate insanity so as to avoid this honour. He ‘rushed into the square and began to act the imbecile (7aparaiwv). He wandered aimlessly, tore his clothing, ate in public’. And he kept up his pretence until somone else was consecrated bishop.!5
Obviously one cannot count as holy fools the hirelings whom exorcists sometimes paid to ‘act as if possessed’ (Satovav broxpivecbat) so that they could seem to demonstrate a miraculous healing. The vita of St Auxentios (BHG, 199-203) tells of such pseudo-exorcists in Byzantium,!® while the vita of Lazaros Galesiotes has evidence for the existence of the pseudo-insane.!7 Nor should the label of holy foolery be applied to those who may feign insanity in order to protect themselves. When St Domna ‘began to dissemble, rolling her eyes and dribbling... uttering incoherent sounds, by turns weeping and laughing,!® her intention was to save herself from her pagan accusers. Nor can one define as holy foolery—in the sense in which the phenomenon is conceived in this book—‘divine simplicity’. St Philaretos the Merciful, for example (BHG, 1511-12), complies with the most absurd requests, and his love of poverty knows no bounds, but he is not faking anything at all: on the contrary, he is simple-mindedness personified.!9 A holy fool can be many things, but he is never simply simple.
Nor, quite emphatically, is the Orthodox holy fool either a heretic or a religious reformer. He does not recruit imitators and followers; indeed, he actively repels them. Nor is the holy fool a mystic, for he makes no attempt (though he would be capable of it) to share with others his unique experience of communion with God.
Holy foolery always, in our view, involves aggression and provocation. By ‘provocation’ I mean the deliberate manipulation of a situation such that somebody is forced into an otherwise undesirable action which the provocateur can foresee. By ‘agression’ I mean an activity whose purpose is to disrupt the status quo in personal relations and which is perceived as hostile by the person at whom it is directed.
Why do holy fools engage in their foolery? This is perhaps the central question which the present study ought to address. However, since our concern is with cultural history, we can reformulate the question thus: What prompts a given community or society to perceive signs of holiness where the only thing visible, at an empirical level, is insanity?
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