The Fool Tradition After Andrew

Andrew’s place in the long arc of holy folly: the hinge between the Byzantine salos and the Russian yurodivy. This file traces the vocation forward from Andrew’s Life — through the medieval Russian fools of Novgorod and Pskov to Basil the Blessed of Moscow and, at the far end, Xenia of Petersburg — and marks what Andrew contributed to the type and how the tradition changed as it moved north.

Tradition: Byzantine (Constantinopolitan); the later tradition Russian Orthodox

Andrew as Hinge

Holy folly has two great classical Lives — Symeon of Emesa and Andrew of Constantinople — and of the two it is Andrew who became the bridge to the later, and in the end larger, Russian tradition (Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, trans. Franklin, Oxford, 2006, on Andrew as the transmitting model; see The Holy Fool of Byzantium). The reason is diffusion: Andrew’s Life was translated into Slavonic and read intensely in Rus’, where it served as the founding literary model of the native vocation of foolishness for Christ (Ivanov, Holy Fools, 2006; see Andrew in Byzantium and Among the Slavs). What Symeon fixed as a Byzantine type, Andrew carried across the cultural frontier; the Russian yurodivy is, in a real sense, Andrew’s heir.

From Salos to Yurodivy

The vocation that reached Rus’ through Andrew’s Life took on, in its new soil, a character partly its own. The Byzantine salos, as Andrew and Symeon embody him, is above all an ascetic figure — the desert discipline carried into the city under the mask of madness, aimed at the destruction of vainglory. The Russian yurodivy keeps all of this but develops, more sharply than the Byzantine model, a prophetic and socially critical edge: the fool as the one who, precisely because he is “mad” and outside the order, can rebuke the powerful and speak truth to princes and tsars (Ivanov, Holy Fools, 2006, on the distinctive development of the Russian tradition). The type flourished in medieval Rus’ as it never quite had in Byzantium — the yurodivye became a recognized and beloved feature of Russian religious life, especially from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

The great exemplar of this development is St. Basil the Blessed of Moscow (d. 1552x1557), the naked fool of the Moscow streets who, in the tradition, dared to rebuke Ivan the Terrible himself, and over whose grave the great cathedral on Red Square came to bear his name (see St. Basil of Moscow). Basil is the Russian fool at his most public and most fearless — the fool as the conscience of the realm — and he stands squarely in the line that Andrew’s Life had opened. Other medieval Russian fools — the yurodivye of Novgorod and Pskov, Prokopy of Ustyug, and their like — fill out the tradition between Andrew’s model and Basil’s fame (Ivanov, Holy Fools, 2006, on the Russian fools).

The Tradition’s Long Reach: Xenia

The vocation proved remarkably durable, reaching down even into the modern age. St. Xenia of Petersburg (18th century) is the tradition’s late flowering: a widow who took up her dead husband’s name and clothes and wandered the streets and markets of the imperial capital as a fool for Christ, hidden, homeless, and secretly praying (see St. Xenia of Petersburg). Xenia shows the type still alive in a Petersburg that, as scholars note, had no established tradition of holy folly to slot her into — evidence of how deeply the vocation had taken root in Russian piety over the centuries since it arrived through Andrew’s Life (on Xenia and the tradition, see St. Xenia: Methodology). From Andrew at Blachernae to Xenia at the Smolensk cemetery is a span of many centuries and a great cultural distance, but it is one continuous tradition, and Andrew’s Life stands near its head.

The Irony of the Source Situations

There is an instructive irony in comparing Andrew with his Russian heirs across this repository’s source-critical files. Andrew, the model of the tradition, is the least historically secure of them all: his Life is of disputed date and his existence doubted, and he may be a literary figure (see Methodology). Xenia, at the far end of the tradition, is barely documented but certainly real — a saint of thin sources but firm cult (see St. Xenia: Methodology). Basil stands between, with his own source problems weighed in his collection (see St. Basil of Moscow). The tradition of holy folly is thus, from end to end, a tradition where the sources are hard — which is fitting, since its saints spent their lives making themselves invisible. The fool who hid from human notice is, almost by vocation, a fool the historian struggles to find; and Andrew, who may be a figure of fiction, is the extreme case of a saint whose whole ideal was to leave no trace. The tradition he heads is one that resists documentation by its very nature.

Andrew’s Contribution

What, then, did Andrew give the tradition? Three things stand out. He gave it a founding text — the Life that carried the type to the Slavs and modeled the vocation for a new world. He gave it a great image — the fool at Blachernae seeing the Virgin’s veil, which became, through the Pokrov, the tradition’s most public and beloved monument (see Andrew in Icon and Hymn). And he gave it a pattern of the double life — degradation without and vision within, folly before the crowd and wisdom before the disciple — that every later fool would reenact. Whether or not a historical Andrew ever walked the streets of Constantinople, the Life that bears his name shaped the way an entire Orthodox people would understand and honor the fools for Christ; and that shaping is among the largest and most secure facts of his afterlife.

See Also

References

  • Ivanov, Sergey A. Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond. Trans. Simon Franklin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (Andrew as the transmitting model; the salos-to-yurodivy development; the prophetic-critical edge of the Russian fools; Basil and the Russian tradition; Xenia and the persistence of the type.)
  • Krueger, Derek. Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. (Symeon as the other Byzantine classic against which Andrew’s transmitting role stands out.)
  • Nikephoros (attrib.). The Life of St Andrew the Fool. Ed. and trans. Lennart Rydén. 2 vols. Uppsala, 1995. (The founding text of the transmitted tradition.)