The Holy Fool

that no other shaykh from the Mamluk period has received such scholarly attention, and rightly so. In fact, writers contemporaneous to Khiḍr were no less intrigued than modern ones by his personality, his influence over such a potent ruler as Baybars, the edifying value of his story, and, as importantly, his alleged scandalous (and therefore entertaining) deeds. Khiḍr is mentioned in practically every chronology or biographical compendium of the Mamluk period. Most recensions of his story seem to be ultimately derived from two main "primary" sources. The first, attributed to the amir Qashtamur al-ʿAjamī (d. after 680/1281)-Baybarsʼ comrade in the Baḥrīyah regiment and a fellow devotee of the shaykh-was originally narrated by Ibn Shaddād al-Ḥalabī (d. 684/1285), Baybarsʼ court biographer. 4 The second version appears to have originated with the Damascene chronicler Ibn al-Jazarī (d. 739/1338), relying on an account narrated to him by his father, who personally met Khiḍr. Ibn al-Jazarīʼs version is later reproduced-and embellished-by the Cairene chroniclers Ibn al-Dawādārī (fl. 736/1335), al-Nuwayrī (d. 733/1333) and Ibn Abī al-Faḍāʾil (fl. 759/1358). 5 In other words, Khiḍrʼs story gained wide publicity very early on, was founded on well-known narrators who knew him first-hand, and received wide coverage from prominent chroniclers representing both Cairene and Syrian circles. Since Khiḍrʼs story is well known to modern scholarship, in what follows I will focus on the magnitude of his influence and the dynamics that made his downfall inevitable. Meanwhile, the parallels to Rasputin-whose story verges on a Related to the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem,"

Fools and children-particularly infants and young children-proliferate in the wisdom traditions of the world. Both are outsiders to and subversive of the positive, adult male knowledge tradition. King Lear's Fool, for example, turns out to be the only adult in whom (because he is a "child"), an old, failing king at the mercy of his enemies can find any wisdom. It is the fool who presides over the old king's rebirth and his reassumption of childhood. As they are presented in Western wisdom discourse, child and fool stand for a crisis in human understanding of self in its relation to whole, or cosmos. Historically, this crisis originated in the Greek and Hellenistic world, where both the Near Eastern wisdom-as-technical-knowledge tradition, which had one culmination in the sophists, and its close relative, the even older Egyptian wisdom-as-harmony-with-cosmos tradition which culminated in Stoicism, fell to the radical Socratic aporia. This paper seeks to identify the psychological and epistemological moment at which child and fool become powerful, if enigmatic, signs of the hidden wisdom for the Western tradition, and significant symbols for the mythic structure of Western self-understanding.

На основе сравнительного анализа сведений "Младшей Ливонской рифмованной хроники" (МЛРХ) и псковского летописания автор пытается доказать, что МЛРХ продолжает оставаться самостоятельным источником достоверных и уникальных сведений - по крайней мере, для событий истории русско-ливонских отношений в 40-х гг. XIV в.

Tolokonnikova, member of the anarcho-feminist punk group Pussy Riot, devoted her last trial statement to recalling famous hooligan role models: Jesus, Socrates, Dostoevsky. But she dwelled at length on one rather obscure example: Alexander Vvedensky, an absurdist poet who belonged to the late 1920s avant-garde group "OBERIU" and to its successor, the 1930s Lipavsky Circle. 1 Tolokonnikova was not the first to claim the Oberiuty for radical left art. Their many artistic inheritors today consider themselves leftist activists. The Oberiuty themselves had claimed to be "a new section of leftist revolutionary art" and, indeed, in criticizing them, their contemporaries levied familiar slurs against radicals-"hooligans," "Dadaists"-I thank the anonymous reviewers and Stephanie Sandler, Jonathan Bolton, Geoff Cebula, and Ainsley Morse for their comments on drafts of this article. 1 While scholars generally agree that there are at least two phases in the unpublished literary output of Vvedensky and the members of his circle, there is a difference of opinion on the question of what to call this circle in its various iterations from the early 1920s to the late 1930s.

In the first chapter, I engage in a close reading of several poems from Shvarts's longest poetic cycle The Works and Days of Lavinia, focusing specifically on Shvarts’s use of space and place in the text in order to explore questions of marginality and the divided self. In the second chapter, I identify two female writers who I argue served as direct models for Works and Days as well as for Shvarts’s construction of an authorial identity: the medieval devotional writer Mechthild of Magdeburg and the early modern Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Although the lives and works of these women definitely inspired Shvarts, I contend that she found them to be inadequate as models and explore the reasons why. In the third and final chapter, I turn to the figure of St. Ksenia of St. Petersburg, the sole canonized female holy fool, as an alternate model for the character of Lavinia and for Shvarts’s self-construction. In this chapter, I argue that Ksenia represents Shvarts’s ideal model, and thus the precursor whom she ultimately hopes to supplant.

The link between Moscow art-group “Voina” and the movement of Moscow Conceptualism was clear when, in 2007, it planned a performance with the artist Dmitrii Prigov, called “Voina/War does only unskilled jobs”.  Prigov died before he could take part in the performance but the group “Voina”  has since carried out an ever more spectacular series of  projects, bordering on pornography, as in the notorious performance "Fuck for the Heir Puppy Bear!", staged in February 2008, when five couples had public sex in Moscow’s Museum of Biology. This and other actions were filmed and posted on YouTube and other social networks, immediately going viral. The same M.O. was adopted in the actions of  the group “Pussy Riot”, and in Ukraine by “Femen”.While more traditional media such as TV and radio are government monopolies, access to internet and social media is still free and provides a powerful means for these dissident groups to publicize their performances against the restoration of n...

The paper examines Byzantine views on different types of social and religious outcasts – holy fools, imaginary Ethiopians (blacks), heretics, infidels (Jews and Muslims), women – and the attitudes of the Byzantines towards the others. Analysis is focused on the holy foolishness for the Christ’s sake as cultural, religious, social, and literary phenomenon. The study traces the changes in Byzantine hagiography and mindset, which were provoked by the shifting of imperial borders after the Arab conquests.

In this article Vasilenko’s novel The Little Fool is analysed in order to highlight the ways the author created the hybrid genre of the “novel-hagiography” by re-visioning a series of classical, biblical and folk myths. The novel has a frame-like structure and the main character of the novel has two hypostases in two different timelines: Nad’ka in the early Sixties and Ganna in the early Thirties, both in the Soviet Union. The core of the novel re-visions and recreates the figure of the ‘Fool in Christ’ by assigning this role to a female protagonist, the thirteen-year-old girl Ganna. Her double, Nad’ka, merges the figures of the archetypal Great Mother and the Mother of Christ. At the end of the novel Nad’ka gives birth to a new Sun thereby saving her people from the menace of a nuclear war. This novel is a fine example of the neo-mythological conscience which, in the late twentieth century, found expression in the works of many Russian women writers who reworked classical and folk ...

A Postgraduate in English literature and an activist, Anshula is zealous about literature, philosophy and envisages an egalitarian society by obliterating gender and social biases. Professionally, she is currently employed as a literary editor at a publishing house.

jurodivye - юродивые
Nessun altro paese come la Russia conta un numero tale di folli e reca loro venerazione. Le condizioni di povertà e di bisogno in cui versava la popolazione facevano dei folli di Cristo i protettori della gente e i predicatori del vero cristianesimo. Come si può vedere anche dalle figure comprese in questa raccolta si tratta di una strana popolazione, sporca e sudicia, numerosa, turpe e coperta con orripilanti cenci che non difendono per niente dal freddo, dai venti, dalle piogge e dal fango paludoso delle strade. Questa gente vagabondava per un immenso territorio da una città all’altra, da un villaggio all’altro, chiedendo l’elemosina e rilasciando in cambio profezie sorprendenti, ma nello stesso tempo sicure. I russi chiamano questi strani personaggi jurodivye. Di solito li disprezzano ma fino ad un certo punto. E’ un grande e imperdonabile peccato non riconoscerli come esseri umani e, persino di più, il loro audace atteggiamento e i coraggiosi detti creano, nella tradizione russa, intorno a loro una particolare aureola di santità. Essi infatti hanno avuto e continuano avere un dono per la maggior parte dei russi indiscutibile, non solo di sapere che cosa gli succederà nel futuro ma anche di penetrare nell’intimità di un uomo e di scoprire la sua intima e integrale natura.
Il modello maschile è prevalente. Fedotov ne elenca una trentina ma il loro numero è ben più grande per la diffusione locale che ebbe il fenomeno in Russia. È il caso di ricordare Procopij di Ustjug (inizi del sec. XIV), forse tedesco, ma si sa che l’«essere straniero», metafora dello sradicamento e della ricerca, è uno stato civile comune ai santi folli (si veda per esempio anche Isidoro di Rostov di origine latina o tedesca, a cui si attribuiva la volontaria esposizione ai rigori del gelo russo oltre che ai raggi del sole estivo per mortificare la carne); Michail Klopskij (+ 1453), che scelse il silenzio; Nicolas di Pskov (+1576), di cui è noto lo scambio di battute con Ivan il terribile accusato dal «folle» di bere il sangue dei cristiani.
La linea femminile delle sante stolte, pur essendo minoritaria per numero, presenta esempi molto significativi di «follia in Cristo». La vita di Isidora è compresa nelle agiografie russe e la santa è venerata nel calendario liturgico ortodosso il 10 maggio. A partire da questo riferimento si può ricostruire in base al tempo e allo spazio una mappa più dettagliata di sante stolte russe dove risulta evidente una caratteristica importante del fenomeno nel quale culto nazionale e venerazione locale appaiono strettamente intrecciati. In questa raccolta si presentano per la prima volta le vite di alcune di esse Iulitta di Ufa, Pelagia Bereziha di Ustyg, Matrona di Mosca, Xenia di San Pietroburgo, Anna Ivanovna,  Pelagia di Diveevo, Pascia di Sarov, Maria Ivanovna e diverse altre, ognuna con la sua particolare “follia”, ognuna col compito di indicare una strada d’accesso alla verità al di là delle ipocrisie e dei luoghi comuni che regolano e spesso alterano i rapporti tra le persone e di rivelare alla gente “normale”, proprio attraverso quel rovesciamento e ribaltamento che ogni stolta incarna con la propria sofferenza e la propria croce, una via più immediata e diretta per la sincerità e l’autenticità.

Writing about Katherine Tekakwitha, the seventeenth-century Mohawk girl who would become North America's first indigenous saint, Jesuit Claude Chauchetière notes that it was smallpox that "obtained for [Katherine] the blessing of virginity." Her face, he reports, "which was formerly pretty, became ugly; she almost lost her eyesight, and her eyes were so hurt by this disease that she could not bear a strong light," preferring to stay indoors and to veil herself to block out the sun. If Katherine's pock-marked face and impaired eyesight proved disabling within the context of a Mohawk culture that mandated a woman's marriage to a suitable partner and expected a certain degree of liberal social intercourse, it turned out to be, in a Christian hagiographic context paradoxically enabling. It was, after all, Katherine's marred visage and visual handicap that made possible her cultivation of the Christian virtues of modesty, humility, and chastity against the grain of (as the Jesuits would have it) Mohawk tendencies toward vanity, pride, and promiscuity. Katherine, writes Chauchetière, "often thanked Our Lord for [these] favor[s], calling her affliction a blessing, for if she had been pretty she would have been more sought by the young men, and so might have abandoned herself to sin as did the other girls in the country of the Iroquois." In a Christian hagiographic context, Katherine's scarred face, sensitive eyes, and assortment of other ailments functioned as prostheses that enabled her to preserve her virginity against all odds, to develop the habit of contemplation, and, indeed, to encounter the Christian gospel in the first place-for, as Chauchetière explains, it was on account of an illness

This dissertation will ask whether the Scottish natural fool had a vital relationship with Stewart rulers because of their neurodiversity and will prove they had a vital yet changing dynamic during the period. The unique nature of the Scottish fool will be revealed as each chapter reconstructs the lives of neurodiverse natural fools like Thomas Nornee and La Jardiniere in Scotland then Britain between 1488 and 1649. Following a methodology inspired by figures like Irina Metzler and C.F Goodey, it will acknowledge that disability is not transhistorical but instead defined by its specific time and place, using such work alongside thorough primary research to create a historically sensitive framework for revealing the Scottish fool. The first chapter will thus analyse the contemporary understandings of neurodiversity and folly that allowed these neurodiverse figures to occupy socially acknowledged roles as court fools.

Christian Münch bringt den Leser(inne)n die bewegten Lebensgeschichten "heiliger Narren" (jurodiwye) in Russland nahe. Er fokussiert auf ihr Freiheitsstreben, das sich u.a. in einer ihrem unkonventionellen Leben entsprechenden Frömmigkeit sowie politischer Kritik, vor allem an Leibeigenschaft, Unterdrückung und einengenden Normen, ausdrückt. Hier wird deutlich, dass wahrhaftige Spiritualität der Welt zugewandt ist.

A Chapter from 'Godseekers' (2019). A new discussion of the nature of holy foolishness, which goes beyond the stereotype of 'feigned madness'. Chapter V!! of 'Godseekers; Selected Essays on Literature and Spirituality, East and West'. Philip Gorski, The AlphaOmega Press, 2019

The study of folk religiosity turned out to be one of the topics demanded by the last decades in Russia. Modern researchers, especially field researchers, pay great attention to the conditions of existence of certain practices in a particular region. Until now, special places are recognized by the local community and (or) pilgrims as Saint ones. In the focus of this article is the analysis of the regional identity of the forms and manifestation of reverence for the socalled "Village shrines" in the Tambov region. Various forms of veneration of local Saints are
observed in the article, e.g.: visiting of holy wells, building of chapels on the graves of holy fools, making the museums of Saints, etc. The authors make an attempt to retrospectively analyze the functions and meanings that were endowed with village shrines in the region under consideration during the Soviet period and at present. By the example of veneration of
the blessed Nastya from Viryatino it is raised the question about the role of groups of true Orthodox Christians (IPH) in maintaining and reproducing “village shrines”. The authors point out the prevailing role of popular beliefs and directed efforts of local laity in formation and preservation of a number of "village shrines" in the Tambov region.

Doktor korkusu kavramı anlaşılmaya çalışılırken tıbbi prosedürlere odaklanmak yerine şifacı arketipinin tarihsel evrimine bakmak yararlı olabilir.
Avcı-toplayıcı toplulukların şifacısı olan şaman hastalığı bizzat yaşayarak iyileştirir. Şaman ayrıca diğerinin arzusunun nesnesi olmayı arzu
etmediğinden ötürü bir başarı öyküsü olarak inşa edilen modern doktor kimliğinden oldukça uzaktadır. Yunan mitolojisinin yaralı şifacısının
da yarası şifacılığını sağladığından ötürü yarasız modern doktor kimliğinden oldukça uzağa düşmektedir. Sonuç olarak çoğu zaman mutlak bir
teslimiyet ve güven gerektiren hasta-hekim ilişkisinde kusursuz modern doktor kimliği hasta rolünün tekinsizleşmesi ile doktor korkusunun
temellerini oluşturuyor olabilir.

Tanulj meg szenvedni, és nem fogsz többé szenvedni - állítja egy több évezredes bölcsesség. De megtanulható-e valaha is ez a lecke? Honnan a szenvedés, a gonosz sokszor arctalan tombolása egy olyan világban, melyet a hívő minden gyötrelem ellenére Isten teremtésének tart és amelyről a hitetlennek is végső soron jót kell gondolnia, ha egyáltalán élni akar? A könyv mélyreható teológiai, filozófiai és szépirodalmi megfontolásokat ajánl a kérdezőknek és útkeresőknek.

The article, based on the historical realia mentioned in the Life of Isidore of
Rostov, tries to date this source more precisely, as well as to find out more about
the time St. Isidore spent in Rostov. The data obtained allows for a more detailed
understanding of a social, political and cultural contexts of the appearance and
development of the worship tradition of Isidore, who was the first Russian saint
to be canonically accepted as a Fool-for-Christ (yurodivy). This tradition would
later strongly influence the development of Russian yurodstvo in Late Middle
Ages and Early Modern times.

›Yurodstvo‹ (holy foolishness) is widely regarded as a »Russian national phenomenon«. This Christian ascetic paradigm, though present in Eastern monastic literature since the fifth century, has gained wider cultural significance only in Russia.
Christian Münch chronicles the interpretations of ›yurodstvo‹ and the multiple religious, social and cultural significance the practice received in Tsarist Russia (1547–1917). Its main temporal focus is on the Imperial Period (18th–19th centuries), when ›yurodivye‹ (holy fools) were persecuted by church and state, before they were placed in modern literature and theology by poets and thinkers who took notice of them.
Based on an extensive corpus of texts ranging from medieval hagiography through legal decrees to modern religious literature and fiction, the study presents ›yurodstvo‹ comprehensively and in all its facets. -----

Puškin, Tolstoj und Dostoevskij haben es weltbekannt gemacht: das ›Narrentum in Christo‹ (jurodstvo) – ein Phänomen christlicher Askese, das seit dem 5. Jahrhundert in der Mönchsliteratur bezeugt ist und in Russland eine kulturelle Bedeutung erlangt hat, die weit über die religiöse Sphäre hinausreicht. Christian Münch untersucht das ›jurodstvo‹ im russischen Kulturkontext von den Ursprüngen bis 1917. Der Schwerpunkt seiner Darstellung liegt auf der Petersburger Periode (1703–1917), in der die ›Narren in Christo‹ (jurodivye) zeitweise von Kirche und Staat verfolgt wurden, ehe sie das Augenmerk von Dichtern und Denkern auf sich zogen und in die moderne Literatur eingingen.
Anhand eines umfangreichen Textkorpus, das von der mittelalterlichen Hagiographie über kirchliche und staatliche Erlasse bis zur neuzeitlichen Belletristik reicht, bietet Münch eine Deutungsgeschichte des Phänomens und präsentiert es in all seinen Facetten.

The " holy fools " are suffering from " cretinism " , it is not intended as a physiological disease but it is rather a state of mind that allows them to be included in a certain category of artist. Then cretinism in this special meaning it is said to derive from the same etymological root as " Christian " , as a follower of Christianity, or that is from the French " Chrétien ". In this specific sense is therefore also includes a person so pure and naive to adhere to holiness and spiritual promise of eternal salvation by the religious profession of Christianity. An artist who believes deeply in his search for truth through art is for this reason identified as " holy " , in the same way a person who professed Christianity could be identified in a Christian artist, stupid and insane. About this concept of cretinism has been talk of holy fools in the case of artists such as Jerzy Grotowski and Carmelo Bene. The figure of the simpleton like an artist suffering from cretinism, in the sense that we have given here, then, is the topic of this paper. In particular here the artistic legacy of Carmelo Bene is discussed about his female heirs. The performer Lady Gaga will be analyzed as the most representative of the heirs of Bene, by the way of the song and video titled Judas; and by the entire album titled Born this way. Can be found in it figures as the Christ and his apostles and the chorus sings: " I'm just a holy fool. " Apart from that the poetic imagination and artistic vision are undoubtedly close to those of Bene.

It is not an easy task to understand the nature of carnival as it is shown by the many failures of the last century after Mikhail Bakhtin’s work became generally known. My book is an attempt to define carnival in relation to another entity that is always and necessarily associated with the carnival, still, easier to identify. The “Clown or Fool par excellence” embodies the carnival’s topsy-turvy attitude and transgresses all borders of reason and social order. Moreover, her repeated jumps to recover bear ritual laughter mocking the figure of Death. This is how the phenomenology of the clown par excellence and the carnival are ontologically related to each other. But, parallel to the strange fate of the clown “on stage” the carnival can become problematic as well. This is clearly visible in the Early Modern theatre of Shakespeare. The resentful exit of Malvolio leaves us confused in Twelfth Night. When the Fool disappears, others have to take on in the stormy night of King Lear. While the gravedigger and his friend, in Hamlet, are mockingly clowning, the grounds spits back a skull that already whispers: “God is dead.” This is how in Shakespeare’s plays the “decarnivalization of the world” is present on the Early Modern stage. I discuss and develop the concept of decarnivalization in order to reinterpret Shakespeare’s dramatic art.

In every period in history the definition of insanity is pertinent, and its meaning is different. We owe this perception to a large movement in the scholarship of the nineteen-sixties and seventies that changed our concept of what constitutes sanity and insanity. This scholarship examined the ways in which such concepts were formed as part of the medical, mental, social, cultural, but above all political settings. A number of important studies on psychology and psychiatry, whether in the fields of social sciences, the humanities or medicine (by Michel Foucault, Roy Porter, William Bynum, Gladys Swain, Marcel Gauchet, Franco Basaglia, among others), has radically changed the way we look at insanity. These studies brought insanity out of the individual dimension, and made it a social, cultural and political phenomenon. In a way, the wave of study of psychiatry of the sixties and seventies was a reply to the development of psychoanalysis in the first half of the twentieth century, which concentrated on the psychological dimension in the individual. These new directions of thought shifted the understanding of what constitutes insanity from the individual to the social and political dimensions. Nevertheless, they still placed the individual in the center, affected by the social settings, mental constructs and politics. This perspective was conditioned by the link between psychology and medicine, according to which the insane person was perceived as sick.
The present study chooses a different line of investigation. In a way, it goes in the opposite direction in focusing on societies which sanctified what we consider today as insanity. These societies looked for spiritual values in abnormal, in-sane, behavior, and legitimized it by attributing a unique spiritual character to figures who portrayed it. In this they were changing the social and cultural norms related to abnormality and normality. A parallel process can also be detected in contemporary societies. Only few decades ago, people in Western societies who turned to healers, clairvoyants, and mediums were considered to be themselves not in their right mind. Today, not only is such behavior legitimized, but this is even becoming a norm. These so-called ‘new age’ phenomena express the invasion of the religious sphere into modern secular societies. We do not call them ‘religious,’ but ‘spiritual’ in order to reject the religious establishment and its historical framework. However, such expressions of spirituality have long been the realm of the religious sphere. The question is why secular societies today have become more and more inclined to adopt and legitimize these expressions of spirituality, and justify their functionality.

In the Roman and Byzantine Near East, the holy fool emerged in Christianity as a way of describing individuals whose apparent madness allowed them to achieve a higher level of spirituality. Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium examines how the figure of the mad saint or mystic was used as a means of individual and collective transformation in the period between the birth of Christianity and the rise of Islam. It presents a novel interpretation in revealing the central role that psychology plays in social and historical development.

Early Christians looked to figures who embodied extremes of behavior-like the holy fool, the ascetic, the martyr-to redefine their social, cultural, and mental settings by reading new values in abnormal behavior. Comparing such forms of extreme behavior in early Christian, pagan, and Jewish societies, and drawing on theories of relational psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology of religion, Youval Rotman explains how the sanctification of figures of extreme behavior makes their abnormality socially and psychologically functional. The sanctification of abnormal mad behavior created a sphere of ambiguity in the ambit of religious experience for early Christians, which brought about a deep psychological shift, necessary for the transition from paganism to Christianity.

A developing society leaves porous the border between what is normal and abnormal, between sanity and insanity, in order to use this ambiguity as a means of change. Rotman emphasizes the role of religion in maintaining this ambiguity to effect a social and psychological transformation.

This essay will primarily investigate the proposal for the redefinition of the artist’s role – that is, to act as shaman for society. It will analyze if and how Coates embodies this alternative archetype, as put forward by Suzi Gablik in her book The Re-Enchantment of Art (1999) who advocates the necessity of a new frontier of compassionate art with a spiritual dimension. Secondly, this essay will analyze Coates through the lens of a non-believer in the power of ritual, a con man; I will consider the implications of the artist posing as shaman, and the potential damage of Coates’ use of cultural appropriation. The aim is to investigate the possibility whether an artist can have a sincere civic duty whilst ultimately yielding career benefits from community interaction, as protected by the art world bubble the artist remains exempt from society.

Like the fool for the king, the young child  represents for the adult original human nature in all its ambiguity and ambivalence. The child's nature, like the fool's, is both fallen and innocent, amoral and beyond morality--and what is even more confusing, alternately one or the other.  The child's unsocialized presence reveals and exposes the imperfections of the socialized world of adult artifice and hypocrisy.  The child's very simplicity seems perverse by reason of the corruption of the adults who so judge him or her.The child is a question put to the adult world, a pretext for a radical re-evaluation of the question of what it means to be human.  Like the fool's babble, the child's very being is presented to us as a riddle, an enigma. In learning the language and the moves of philosophy, we render, if only through a sort of displacement, the inarticulate discourse of the fool and the child into adult speech.  Philosophy itself does not speak the "prelapsarian tongue," but it is propedeutic to it, in that it has a way of breaking the frames of the adult common sense world, of casting that world into doubt, on the assumption that in so doing, some deeper or better knowledge of the world will emerge. And that better, deeper knowledge is, at least in some part, the knowledge of the child and of the fool.

Pussy Riot’s surprise punk prayer at the altar of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ Our Savior instigated significant controversy in Russia and resulted in the conviction of three Pussy Riot members on the charge of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” While the Russian Orthodox Church swiftly condemned the performance as blasphemous, Pussy Riot has contended that its punk prayer is consistent with the message of the Gospels. This study investigates the punk prayer controversy in relation to the figure of the holy fool, a radical behavioral model canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church and secularized in Russia’s literary and artistic traditions.

Drama plays an essential role in the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar and the aesthetics of G. W. F. Hegel. Indeed, drama is the preeminent art for both and sits at the horizon where art touches religion, leading to the so-called “end of art.” However, Hegel and von Balthasar come to different conclusions on the continued relevance of drama for religion and theology. This paper will explore these differences by focusing on the dramatic character of the wise fool. I will argue that the dramatic fool provides a compelling theatrical metaphor for theology by focusing attention on embodiment and the performance of a particular kind of wisdom that the audience participates in. I will approach this first by discussing von Balthasar’s understanding of the literary fool and follow this with how the fool figures into Hegel’s understanding of drama, especially comedy. After drawing out points of contact and difference between the two thinkers I will return to the question of the end of art and suggest that rather than art ending it is transfigured within the unfolding work of the Trinity and it finds its most appropriate expression in the wise fool.