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Lice in the Iron Cap: Holy Foolishness in Perspective
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Lice in the Iron Cap: Holy Foolishness in Perspective Svitlana Kobets Iurodstvo (iurodstvo Khrista radi), or holy foolishness for Christ's sake, is a peculiar form of Eastern Orthodox asceticism whose practitioners, iurodivye Khrista radi (later referred to as iurodivye, holy fools, fools for Christ's sake, fools in Christ),1 feign madness in order to provide the public with spiritual guidance yet shun praise for their saintliness and attract abuse in imitation of the suffering Christ. Geographically, the origins of holy foolishness can be traced back to the early Christian ascetic and monastic communities in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the Middle East in general, whereas its textual prototypes2 reside in the New Testament. The term and concept of holy folly stem from the Apostle Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, where he dwells on the foolishness of the cross in the eyes of the profane, spiritually blind world and deems the apostles, followers of Christ, to be fools for Christ's sake. A number of ascetic accounts embracing this ideal can be found in early Christian monastic corpora. While holy foolishness as a behavioral paradigm and hagiographic ideal evolved in Byzantium, it was in medieval and modern Russia that the holy fool's cult and impact on culture reached unprecedented scope and intensity. The hagiographic image of the holy fool arrived in Kievan Rus' as part and parcel of the Byzantine Christian legacy, yet it took root in Rus' and Muscovy only several centuries later. In the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, when the holy fools came to be among Russia's most popular canonized saints, the 1 For a more detailed discussion of the terms iurodstvo and iurodivyi, see n. 1 in A. M. Panchenko, "Laughter as Spectacle," trans. P. Hunt, S. Kobets, and B. Braley, in this volume, 41-147. [English translation of A. Panchenko, "Smekh kak zrelishche," in D. S. Likhachev, A. M. Panchenko, and N. V. Ponyrko, Smekh v Orevnei Rusi (Leningrad: Nauka, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1984), 72-154.] 2 Svitlana Kobets, "The Paradigm of the Hebrew Prophet and the Russian Tradition of Iurodstvo," in "Canadian Contributions to the XIV International Congress of Slavists: Ohrid, Macedonia, 2008," ed. Oleh !l'nytsky, special issue, Canadian Slavonic Papers 50: 1-2 (2008): 1-16; Kobets, "The Prophetic Paradigms: The Fool in Christ and the Hebrew Prophet" (thesis for License in Mediaeval Studies, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, University of Toronto, 2006); Kallistos [Timotl1Y Ware], "The Fool in Christ as Prophet and Apostle," Sobornost, no. 2 (1984): 6-28. Holy Foolishness in Russia: New Perspectives. Priscilla Hunt and Svitlana Kobets, eds. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publi shers, 2011 , 15-40. 16 SVITLANA KOBETS term iurodivyi became a byword designating a type of secular behavior, which derived its traits (e.g., presumed hidden holiness, grotesque self-humiliation, play-acting) from the behavioral paradigm of holy foolish asceticism and the model of saintliness. The secular and ascetic designa tion of the term have existed side by side. Such famous public figures as Tsar Ivan IV Groznyi (sixteenth c.), Archpriest Avvakum (seventeenth c.), and Grigorii Rasputin (twentieth c.), contemporary politicians such as Eduard Limonov and Vladimir Zhirinovskii as well as authors such as Fedor Dostoevsky, Vasilii Rozanov, Venedikt Erofeev, Viktor Erofeev, and Konstantin Kuz'minskii,3 to mention just a few, employed this playful cum subversive model in their behaviors, lifestyles, rhetoric, and works. So did dozens of characters from Russian belle letters who were modeled on the hagiographic holy fool or featured different aspects of the holy fool's diverse phenomenology. Among examples we find the drunken humility of Venedikt Erofeev's Venichka, the grotesque foolery of Ivan Groznyi, and the sublime stance of Vasilenko's Durochka.4 Because of the holy fool's intrinsic ambiguity (as the saint feigns madness and sinfulness, he cannot be distinguished from real madmen or sinners), practitioners of iurodstvo were rejected and mistreated on a par with real madmen and hooligans. In fact, from the very inception of the phenomenon of iurodstvo holy foolish ascetics existed side by side with their numerous epigones , and both were continuously persecuted and even executed as fraudulent fools for Christ. In this respect the holy fool resembles one of his models and prototypes, the Hebrew prophet,S whose identity as God's mouthpiece has been traditionally questioned and challenged by people. Christianity epitomizes this typological kinship in the holy fool's imitation of Christ's Passion6 The iurodivyi has been viewed as a religious type, as a historical reality, as a...