The Holy Fool

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.

Shakespeare's fools have a long history: while some (like Hamlet) use madness as a cloak to hide their designs, other 'true fools' could speak often brutal truths with impunity. The fool may be foolish or possess natural wisdom and truth.
    Death in the Danse Macabre has much in common with the fool. He can caper about like a madman and yet hold out a mirror to everyone as he confronts them with their true nature, without showing any respect for wealth or status. Death is sometimes presented as the fool's alter ego: Hans Holbein the Younger juxtaposed the two in one of his 'Images of Death' woodcut designs.
    The fool was not included in the mural that was created in Paris in 1424-25, but he was to become a regular character, perhaps through the influence of the German carnival tradition and such works as Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) of 1494. Perhaps Shakespeare's melancholic Jaques had in mind both this satire and the Danse Macabre in his final farewell to the fool Touchstone and assembled company in As You Like It:
    And you to wrangling; for thy loving voyage
    is but for two months victualled. So to your pleasures;
    I am for other than for dancing measures.

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.

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.

›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.

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.

Religion is one of the most powerful devices in the visual arts. It attempts to explain what cannot be seen, as the arts so often attempt to do as well. But religious art attempts to codify belief; no easy task, and certainly one open to unceasing disputation. The fact that so much is open to interpretation, coupled with the notion of theological disputes, leads me to constantly ponder and doubt if the path I have chosen as a painter of religiously discordant imagery is spiritually sound. I have discovered over time, however, that perfect depiction is not truly possible, only the wisdom through experience of new ideas. I wish to depict the concepts of doubt and dispute, as well as faith and forgiveness, in my paintings. I am fascinated by the power of one Biblical verse in altering the spiritual life of a person, community or society. The differences between a Catholic and a Protestant, for example, are wide and varied. The only thing that would ultimately separate their intentions, however, lies in interpretation and context.

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.

In her novel-vita Little Fool (1998), Svetlana Vasilenko unfolds an epic story of a female holy fool’s redemptive journey through the tribulations of twentieth-century Russia. This essay explores the Orthodox Christian and folk aspects of Vasilenko’s female savior, as a holy fool, as a mother and as a Mother of God figure, in order to provide a key to the overall textual meaning. I argue that Vasilenko implements the salvation of Russia and the salvation of the world in a traditionally Christian way. It is one who is meek and powerless—the holy fool Ganna/Nad’ka—who saves the world. Humility is the foremost characteristic of the holy fool. Yet Vasilenko makes a conspicuously idiosyncratic use of this archetypal redemptive figure by making her holy fool a woman, thereby enhancing her humility and liminality, and enhancing her significance with the hypostasis of motherhood. The latter is discussed within the Orthodox Christian and folk frames of reference, which reflect a traditional Russian veneration of motherhood. The protagonist’s folly, however, is explored within the hagiographic and phenomenological paradigms of holy foolishness and is treated as the protagonist’s paramount meaning.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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