Fools for Christ's Sake

Abstract

The article examines the origin of the term "foolishness for Christ's sake", and also examines how the church tradition interprets foolishness and how this state is refracted in the interpretations of researchers of this phenomenon. The author comes to the conclusion that foolishness for Christ's sake is a special form of asceticism associated with personal humiliation and asocial behavior, which cannot become an image for imitation for most Christians. The external behavioral order of a holy fool cannot be acceptable for many people. However, the inner content of the feat of a holy fool is important, i.e. the meaning of this feat, its spiritual filling, which must be imitated. That is, foolishness for Christ's sake is a form of ascetic feat, the renunciation of one's own mind for the purpose of humility, self-abasement, imitation of Christ. The attitude to foolishness for Christ's sake has always been ambiguous both in the Church and among the people. The history of foolishness for Christ's sake begins in the Byzantine Empire, but the Christian blessed ones can be found predecessors in the Old Testament - these are the prophets. Foolishness for Christ as a fact "arises in the environment of Eastern monasticism around the 5th century. At the beginning of the 6th century, many monks, engaged in wandering, end up in cities, and together with them, city dwellers become acquainted with such a form of behavior as foolishness for Christ. However, the monks accepted only some forms of foolishness (beggary, antisocial behavior, begging, etc.), and in the 6th century the first, so to speak, "classical" fool for Christ appears - Simeon of Emesa. And now the figure of the compiler of the life of the fool for Christ also becomes important, because in fact it is he who interprets this image, explaining the meaning of certain actions of the saint. In Rus', the first information about fools for Christ dates back to the 11th century. Comparing Byzantine foolishness, which provided hagiographic examples for compiling the lives of Russian blessed ones, the author comes to the conclusion that, in cultural terms, it did not acquire such a powerful distribution as it did in Rus'.