Holy Foolishness in Russia: New Perspectives

Isaakii of the Kiev Caves Monastery: An Ascetic Feigning Madness or a Madman-Turned-Saint?

Isaakii of the Kiev Caves Monastery: An Ascetic Feigning Madness or a Madman-Turned-Saint? Svitlana Kobets The ambiguity of Isaakii's h agiographic and canonical sta tus is reflected in the d eba tes over his ascetic identity. In a number of sch olarly and ecclesiastical discu ssions of iurodstvo, or h oly foolery, Isaakii figures as the firs t Russian holy foo1.1 In contrast to this 0finion, however, a number of sch olars view his holy foolery as problematic. Not only h as this ascetic been exclude d from the church canon of iurodstvo,3 his role in the developmental history of 1 This opinion is voiced in discussions and studies of foolery in Christ by Ioann Kovalevskii, Iurodstvo 0 Khriste i Khrista rodi iurodivye Vostochnoi i Russkoi tserkvi: Istoricheskii ocherk v zhitiia sikh podvizhnikov blagochestiia (Moscow: Pechatnia A. I. Snegireva, 1895), reprinted as Ioann Kovalevskii, Podvig iurodstva (Moscow: Lepta, 2000), 79, 16167 ; Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky and the Poetics of Cultuml Critique (Stanford , CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 3, 18; Ewa M. Thompson, Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture (Lanham, MO: University Press of America, 1987),7-8,76-77; G. P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 1: 147; Sergey A. Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, trans. Simon Franklin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 253. 2 See Natalie Challis and Horace W. Dewey, "Divine Folly in Old Kievan Literature: The Tale of Isaakii the Caves Dweller," Slavic and East European Joumal 22: 3 (1978): 259; G. P. Fedotov, Sviatye drevnei Rusi (X-XVII sl.) (New York: Izdanie russkogo pravoslavnogo Bogoslovskogo Fonda, 1959), 147; Marcia A. Morris, Saints and Revolutionaries : The Ascetic Hero in Russian Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 71; and S. B. Chernin, "Povestvovatel'naia struktura slova 0 chernoreztse Isaakii v sostave PVL," Vestnik Udmurtskogo llI1iversiteta, no. 7 (2005): 85. These scholars consider Isaakii as an ascetic and not a iurodivyi. 3 The matter of canonizations of Kiev Caves Monastery saints is complex and poorly documented. In the case of Isaakii, specific canonization documents and references are unavailable. Before Metropolitan Makarii's canonizations of 1547-49, Isaakii was venerated as a monk (Russ. chemorizets) of the Kiev Caves Monastery. As such he is mentioned in the fifteenth-century Kiev Caves Monastery sinodik along with nine other Kiev Caves Monastery saints; see Elena Vorontsova, Kievskie peshchery: Putevoditel ' (Kiev: Amadei, 2005), 30. His relics are in part located in the Near Caves of the monastery; see Evgenii E. Golubinskii, Istoriia kal1ol1izatsii sviatykh v russkoi tserkvi (Moscow, 1903; repr., Famborough, UK: Gregg International Publishers, 1969),205. In Makarii's Chet'i Minei Isaakii does not have a separate vita. His story appears together with other Kiev Caves Paterik texts under 13 Mayas an attachment to the vita of SI. Holy Foolishness in Russia: New Perspectives. Priscilla Hunt and Svitlana Kobets, eds. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2011 ,245- 68. 246 SVITLANA KOBETS the Russian paradigm of foolishness for Christ has been continuously denied4 Scholars voice the contention that in Russia the genre of the holy fool's vita fully evolved and came into its own only in the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries,S when the vitae of urban fools in Christ (e.g., 10ann Ustiuzhskii, 1sidor Rostovskii)6 were first created in the Novgorod and Moscow lands? Consequently, first Novgorodian and then Moscow hagiographers were acclaimed as the initiators of the Russian tradition of holy fools' hagiography. Meanwhile the vita of St. 1saakii of the Kiev Caves Monastery has been seen as an abortive attempt at creating an indigenous Russian vita of a iurodivyiB and proof of the discontinuity between the Novgorod-Moscow and Kievan Rus' periods in the history of Russian iurodstvo9 Feodosii. In 1624-27 the archimandrite of the Kiev Caves Monastery, Zakhariia Kopystenskii, included several Kievan monks (one of them 1saakii) who had been venerated in Ukraine in the service books (Vorontsova, Kievskie peshchery, 31). 1saakii, together with other monks from Kopystenskii's list, was formally canonized in 1643 by Metropolitan of Ukraine Petro Mohyla (Golubinskii, Istoriia kmlOnizatsii sviatykh, 210). In Dmitrii Rostovskii's Chet'i-Minci, Isaakii received a separate vita. Yet it was only in 1762 that the Holy Russian Synod ordered the inclusion of Kievan saints into the allRussian list of saints. See A. S. Khoroshev, Politicheskaia istoriia russkoi kmlOnizatsii (XIXVI vv.) (Moscow: Izd-vo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1986),55. 4 See, for exampIe, Morris's as well as...