Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius's Life and the Late Antique City (review)

While earlier hagiographical scholarship has largely evaluated the figure of Symeon of Emesa in the light of posterior traditions of “holy folly” in Roman Catholic and Orthodox piety, Krueger’s monograph examines the “construction” of this sainted fool from the ground up by probing into the sources and purview of Leontius of Neapolis’s seventh-century Life of Symeon. According to Krueger, Leontius’s work presupposes a predominantly urban audience in Cyprus, one clinging to its (christianized) Greco-Roman cultural legacies and its relative economic prosperity on the eve of the Arab invasions of the Byzantine Empire; but an audience morally and religiously compromised by city life and by the presence of heterodoxy (Monophysites, Jews, etc). Leontius’s Symeon is an accomplished ascetic and prophet of the desert whose invasion of Emesa (ostensibly in the sixth century) is crafted literarily as a contemporary invasion of the bishop’s own city in order to save souls and help usher in the New Jerusalem. The Life, for which Krueger provides a fine translation as an appendix to his book, is at bottom a serious piece of societal criticism and a commentary on the character of true holiness.

Without doubt the key to the Life is Leontius’s ability to modulate and rework traditions of Symeon’s godly madness. Structurally, Krueger believes, the second, anecdotal section of the Life, detailing Symeon’s shameless acts (dragging a dead dog through the streets, defecating and farting in public, playing the glutton and sexual deviant, etc.) was published first; the opening apologetic section of the work, probably written in response to readers’ blanching at the anecdotal material, and aimed at vindicating Symeon’s underlying sanctity and apatheia, actually came last in the sequence of composition. Throughout the Life, however, Leontius is editorializing and obviating disgust at the superficial foolishness of Symeon, striving to unveil (albeit not too overtly) the genuine meaning of the holy man’s shamelessness along the lines of traditional hagiographical standards. Symeon is able to perform his public spectacles precisely because he has already transcended the body, because his outrages lead miraculously to the salvation of others, and because the humiliating acts ironically betray the saint’s own authentic humility.

Remarkably, as Krueger definitively demonstrates, Leontius integrates two mutually alien models of “holy folly” in constructing his Symeon: the Diogenes of Cynic fame, and the Jesus of the gospels. Thoroughly aware of the chreiai of Symeon bequeathed by the grammatical and rhetorical schools, and building on earlier patristic whitewashing of Diogenes as a paragon of ascetic simplicity and poverty, Leontius conscientiously exploits parallels between Diogenes and Symeon. Whereas Diogenes’s shameless acts—he too defecates in public, eats enormous quantities of beans, and generally disrupts life in the marketplace—aim at questioning social conventions and redefining what truly is behavior respectful of the body and “according to nature” (kata physin), Symeon’s own cynicism (literally “doglike” acts) not only attacks the superficiality of public perceptions of moral behavior but also parodies the Cynics’ ill-placed attempt to represent public profanity as “natural” (moral) action. What saves Symeon’s folly, for those who find themselves in on the joke, as it were, is that his actions are not kata physin but uniquely graced, virtuous (kata aretên), and godly (kata theon). Indeed, the parallels with the “folly” of biblical saints, and most notably with Jesus himself, further vindicate Symeon’s indecency. Krueger brilliantly conveys the christological “inversion” at work in Leontius’s presentation of Symeon, who, like Jesus, climactically invades the city, many of his actions directly paralleling those of Jesus in Jerusalem. While Symeon seems to get it all wrong, his actions nonetheless lead to the redemption of souls, and, at a deeper level, represent a commentary on the ministry of the Christ who was himself treated as a fool by the majority of the city populace. Symeon ironically incarnates the gospel...