Tonsure as Gabriel

In a dense cluster of days at the end of February 1955, the young Goderdzi Urgebadze was ordained deacon, tonsured a monk under the name Gabriel at Motsameta Monastery, and ordained hieromonk — taking his new name in honor of St. Gabriel the Athonite, the Georgian monk who drew the Iveron icon of the Theotokos from the sea. After years of ordinary priestly service at Sioni, Betania, and the Holy Trinity Church of Tbilisi, and after the rupture of his 1965 protest and psychiatric confinement, the monk Gabriel took on yurodstvo — feigned foolishness-for-Christ — as both a shield against an atheist regime that already treated faith as madness and a license to preach Christ aloud in the street. This file follows the making of the monk and the reasons the sources give for his folly; the tradition that frames it is treated in the sibling file, and the protest that precipitated it in Section 03.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox (canonized 2012)

The Cluster of Days in 1955

The decisive turn in the life of Goderdzi Urgebadze — born 26 August 1929 in Tbilisi, of the family called Vasiko, the fatherless boy whose turn to God against the atheist world is treated in Tbilisi and the Fatherless Boy — came in a remarkably compressed span at the end of February 1955. The sources place the events close together: he was ordained deacon in January 1955; tonsured a monk on 23 February 1955 at Motsameta Monastery in Imereti, near Kutaisi, taking the name Gabriel; and ordained hieromonk (priest-monk) on 26 February 1955 by Bishop Gabriel (Chachanidze) (Larisa Khrustalyeva, Elder Gabriel [Urgebadze]: His Life, Miracles, and Service after his Death, OrthoChristian.com, art. 65883; “Gabriel Urgebadze,” Wikipedia, drawing on the Georgian Patriarchate materials). That a deacon should be tonsured and raised to the priesthood within a single week was not unusual for a candidate already formed and tested; what the sources stress is not the speed but the name.

Motsameta — the Monastery of the Martyrs, named for the brothers David and Constantine Mkheidze, the eleventh-century Georgian princes martyred under Arab occupation — is itself a fitting place for the tonsure of a man whose life would end under the title Confessor. The choice of monastery is recorded but not elaborated in the restrained sources; the tradition has not made of it the kind of set-piece it has made of the new name.

The Name Gabriel and the Saint It Honors

A monk receives a new name at tonsure as a sign that the old man is dead and a new creature has put on Christ; the name binds the monk to a patron whose life he is to imitate. The name Gabriel is borne in the Church above all by the Archangel Gabriel, the messenger of the Annunciation, and the resonance of an angelic herald is not lost on Gabriel’s devotees. But the sources are specific that the tonsure-name honored a particular human saint: St. Gabriel the Athonite — Gabriel the Iberian (the Georgian), the monk of the Iveron Monastery on Mount Athos — to whom is ascribed the recovery of the Iveron icon of the Theotokos (the Portaitissa) from the sea (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883; A Short Life of St Gabriel of Samtavro, Orthodox England).

The story of that saint is among the best-loved in Georgian and Athonite tradition: the icon, set adrift to save it from iconoclast destruction, appeared standing upright on the waves in a pillar of fire off Athos, and no one could approach it until the Mother of God revealed in a vision that the Georgian monk Gabriel, for his simplicity and faith, was to walk out across the water and bring it to shore. That the Tbilisi hieromonk took the name of a Georgian who walked on the sea in obedience to the Theotokos — a man honored precisely for a holy simplicity — is a detail the tradition reads as foreshadowing the simplicity-as-folly that the later Gabriel would embrace. The reading is the tradition’s; the bare fact the restrained sources carry is the dedication of the name to St. Gabriel the Athonite.

The Years of Ordinary Service

Before the folly there were years of unremarkable, faithful priestly labor, and they should not be elided. The sources place the newly ordained hieromonk first at Sioni Cathedral in Tbilisi (the patriarchal cathedral of the Dormition) from about 1955 to 1960; then at the ancient mountain monastery of Betania from about 1960 to 1962, where he served alongside the elders Father George (Mkheidze) and Hieromonk Vasil(i) (Pirtskhalava); and then at the Old (Holy Trinity) Church of Tbilisi from about 1962 to 1965 (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883; “Gabriel Urgebadze,” Wikipedia). In these same years he carried out the labor for which he is loved in Foundations — building, with his own hands, a small church at the family home on Tetri Tskaro Street, finished around 1962 and covered with icons he had rescued from rubbish dumps where the atheist State had thrown them.

This is the portrait of a sane, devout, hard-working priest of the Georgian Church under the Soviet yoke — a man of normal mind doing the Church’s ordinary work in extraordinary conditions. It matters for what follows, because the folly that came later was not the eccentricity of a disordered temperament but the deliberate act of a man who had spent a decade serving the altar soberly. The salos, the tradition insists, is one who feigns madness; the feigning presupposes the sanity, and the years 1955–1965 are the evidence of it.

The Rupture of 1965 and the Embrace of Folly

The hinge of Gabriel’s life — the burning of the giant portrait of Lenin at the Tbilisi May Day demonstration of 1 May 1965, the near-fatal beating, the KGB interrogation, and the diversion into a psychiatric hospital that almost certainly saved his life — is treated in full in The Burning of the Lenin Portrait and is not re-narrated here. What concerns the present file is its consequence for the form of his sanctity. The State that could not safely execute a priest it had publicly declared insane released him with his priesthood intact but his right to serve the Liturgy publicly withdrawn, and into the long years of suspicion and marginalization that followed (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883; see The Years of Suspicion).

It is in these years, and through the rest of his life, that the monk Gabriel took on yurodstvo — foolishness-for-Christ — as the deliberate form of his discipleship. The behavior the sources record is unmistakably that of the classic holy fool. He turned somersaults in church during the Liturgy — an act attested by Metropolitan Seraphim in his reminiscence (pravoslavie.ru, art. 87682). He carried on his back a jug or pitcher with no bottom, a living parable of the man whose vessel can never be filled: in the words of A Short Life of St Gabriel of Samtavro (Orthodox England), “in his feigned foolishness, he would throw a jug without a bottom over his back… boldly and unceasingly preaching Christ in the streets.” He went barefoot in the winter; for periods he lived in a henhouse rather than accept comfort or honor. The recollections gathered in the Georgian memoir-collections — Nun Parasceva (Rostiashvili)’s cell-attendant memoir (OrthoChristian art. 173714), Dali Mshvenieradze’s Beris Diadema (Tbilisi, 2006–07) — are full of such scenes, which his disciples preserved as marks of sanctity rather than of disorder.

The word the sources press, and the word this collection holds onto, is feigned. The folly was a chosen mask, not a symptom. Its purposes, as the tradition reads them, were several and overlapping: to hide his holiness, refusing the honor that visible sanctity attracts; to mortify pride at its root, since nothing so crushes vanity as being thought a fool; and — the point the next file develops — to make of the “madman” a man who could speak the forbidden name of Christ in the open without the State quite knowing how to stop him.

Shield and Witness

The dual logic of Gabriel’s folly is the theme that binds this section together, and it is sharpened by the particular conditions of the Soviet state. On the one hand, the holy-fool persona functioned as a shield. Soviet punitive psychiatry was prepared to classify religious faith itself as a symptom — Gabriel’s own diagnosis named him “a psychopathic individual who believes in God and angels” (Khrustalyeva, OrthoChristian art. 65883) — and a man already certified mad, who behaved madly, slipped through a gap in the machinery of repression: he was a patient to be managed, not a dissident to be tried. The regime’s own willingness to treat religion as madness met the fool’s willingness to be thought mad, and the meeting spared his life.

On the other hand, the same “madness” was the cover for witness. Under the persona of the harmless fool, the forbidden word could be spoken aloud — Christ preached “boldly and unceasingly… in the streets” (A Short Life, Orthodox England) where a sane and credentialed priest doing the same would have been silenced at once. Fr. John (Russell Grigaitis), writing on “Orthodox Madness” (Mad in America, February 2019), draws out the paradox at the heart of this: the very stigma the regime imposed — the humiliation of being declared insane for believing in God — became, in the fool’s hands, spiritually transformative, the instrument of both his survival and his preaching. The folly, in short, was at once the saint’s armor and his pulpit.

This dual function — protection from the regime and prophetic witness under it — is the matter of the companion file, The Tradition of Holy Folly, which sets Gabriel in the long line of the salos and shows how the scholarship on the form makes both faces of his folly intelligible. The Church gathered both into the double title it gave him at his canonization in 2012: Confessor, for the fearless witness, and Fool-for-Christ, for the form it took.

References

Khrustalyeva, Larisa. Elder Gabriel (Urgebadze): His Life, Miracles, and Service after his Death. Trans. Dimitra Dwelley. OrthoChristian.com, art. 65883, 19 November 2013. The restrained baseline: the ordinations and tonsure of 1955, the name Gabriel, the early service at Sioni, Betania, and Holy Trinity, the post-1965 diagnosis and withdrawal of public service.
“Gabriel Urgebadze.” Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Urgebadze). Drawing on the Georgian Patriarchate materials: the dates of the deacon’s and priest’s ordinations, the tonsure at Motsameta, Bishop Gabriel (Chachanidze), and the service postings.
A Short Life of St Gabriel of Samtavro. Orthodox England (events.orthodoxengland.org.uk). The dedication of the name to St. Gabriel the Athonite; the bottomless jug and the “feigned foolishness… boldly and unceasingly preaching Christ in the streets.”
Metropolitan Seraphim, reminiscence. Pravoslavie.ru, art. 87682. The attestation of the somersaults in church during the Liturgy.
Nun Parasceva (Rostiashvili), memoir. OrthoChristian.com, art. 173714. The cell-attendant’s recollections of the elder’s foolishness and ascetic eccentricity.
Mshvenieradze, Dali. Beris Diadema [“The Elder’s Diadem”]. 2 vols. Tbilisi, 2006–2007. The Georgian memoir-collection standing behind much of the English material.
(Russell) Grigaitis, Fr. John. “Orthodox Madness.” Mad in America, February 2019 (madinamerica.com/2019/02/orthodox-madness/). The paradox of stigma-as-transformation and the bridge between Soviet punitive psychiatry and the holy-fool vocation.