Holy Fools: Normativity, Existentialism, Place

"For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written: 'He catches the wise in their craftiness.' " (1 Corinthians 3:19)

"In this film it is my message that it is impossible to pass on experience to others or learn from others. We must live our own experience, we cannot inherit it." (Tarkovsky interviewed in "A Poet in Cinema")

"Beauty is in the balance of the parts. And the paradox is that the more perfect the work, the more clearly does one feel the absence of any associations generated by it." (Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, pg. 47)

Recently, watching some classic Soviet films, I was struck by the character of the holy fool. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, a holy fool is ignorant of worldly ways, and has been struck by dumb by God's grace. This sort of ignorance is a good ignorance, as these fools are blind to the corrupting ways of fallen man.

Unsurprisingly, scholarly work on the holy fool seems to be most prevalent in theology. I found research describing early Christian ascetics and how they trained to be ignorant (of corporal temptations) before God. Updating these discussions, there was an attempt to bring the holy fool before Foucault's theorization. Here the holy fool-ascetic learns a technique of self-discipline and self-control in their task of self-mastery before God.

These discussions are all very interesting, and I wish I had the time and the faculty to closely read them. In my own time, I got to thinking about the holy fool in a certain brand of Kiergaardian and Heideggerian existentialism and the relation of the holy fool to normative place. I discuss several theories on normativity and the individual in the face of society. Then I look at several holy fools from Russian cinema and their tactics (indeed, their lack thereof) in normative and emotive situations . Finally, I conclude on the relation of the holy fool to place.

Important to the power-knowledge theorization of Foucault is the bottom-up enforcement of normativity in society. An individual learns their place, or disposition, through the configurations of any given society. From their social disposition, they will appeal to a certain assortment of mentors - in family, church, education, literature, etc., who aid them in a particular moral cultivation. Eventually, this cultivation is turned inward, and thus we have the voice of God speaking directly into the mind of the Catholic of Protestant individual. This is governmentality writ large, or better yet, writ diffusedly and pervasively. The religious subject is both subjected and before the Subject of God - Althusser's dual subjectivity.

Now stepping back to Kierkegaard, we can see the individual as subject not only to a religious subjectivation, but also subject to a secular levelling. The modern age, with its press and Public, enacts a sort of secular-normative levelling on an individual, distracting and depriving them of a relationship to God. The reduction of the singular individual to the mass, of the religious subject to the civil subject, is a very sinister abstraction, as it leads one to in fact bow before the variegations of secular living. The best one can do is live an ethical life - a normative life - and re-utter the most complacent doxa about good living. The religious life, the life that a holy fool must live, before God and in awe of God at the expense of a human morality is cast aside.

For Heidegger, and perhaps in extension, Sartre, we find the normative individual living an inauthentic life, a life of bad faith. Making no significant decisions, a normative subject is resigned to a life, and a world, designed and controlled by others - by the averageness of the abstract mass. An authentic individual makes all the decisions that matter in the face of, and perhaps despite of, normativity.

What exactly is the role of a holy fool? A trained ascetic would be a subject to a discipline of asceticism and therefore a particular religious orthodoxy. The ascetic makes a conscious decision to assume their religious role, beginning the necessary regimen of preparation, and living out the conditions of hermetism. This would seem an authentic position, a singular turn to the eternal life before God, yet the decision is still adopting a normative orthodoxy. Indeed, following in the footsteps of other in any religious practice, could be taken as a move of the mass: reacting to religious opinions through particular religious conditions as any abstracted subject would: "... we shrink back from the 'great mass' as they shrink back." (Being and Time pg 164)

The sort of holy fool to whom I was initially drawn is the fool that cannot speak, as madness is forever relegated to silence - to being unheard. The holy fool has no voice and therefore no direction to share with others, as their life is indeed a silent singularity before God as others never moulded them, and they themselves have no intention or possibility of pedagogy. In distinction to the ascetic, the true holy fool has made no conscious decision to be authentic before eternity, but have been thrust by God onto the world as truly ignorant beings. They don't need to make a decision to be anything, as they are deprived of the decision altogether.

Prince Myshkin in Dostoevky's "The Idiot," and Vladimir in Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible" are holy fools, but not to the logical extreme of the "true holy fool" I just described. These holy fools, in their regular practice, reflect the desire, designs, and moods of others. Myshkin can't distance himself from the partial loves he is implicated in, and can't deny himself the relations of cynical men. As a "positively good man," Myshkin is a product of the situations he finds himself in, never extending an ethical self outside of the ethical worlds others contain him in at a given moment. Vladimir covets what him mother, Efrosinia covets, but only during the radiant expression of coveting. Like the black body of physicists, Vladimir absorbs and emits the emotions and projects of others. Yet in moments of disjuncture, before others, usually his mother, react to a situation, Vladimir is clearly at a loss of how to react - he can't make his own decision.

Durochka from Tarkovksy's Andrei Rublev is a true holy fool. She exists in a state of eternal delight - playful in any setting, eats with the voraciousness of an animal, and can't discern or decide who ought to be friend or foe. Her innocence inspires the icon painter Rublev, she survives with him the sack of Vladimir, and is eventually led away by the very Tartars that have razed and slaughtered her community. Throughout the entire situation, she remains in a state of delight, and when the Tartars effuse more joy than the distressed Rublev, she follows them to her likely doom. Durochka's fate always lies in the situation, but she does not absorb and emit like Myshkin or Vladimir. Her childlike ignorance is a permanent disposition, the self-state of a being completely existing despite the levelling process and ethical situation of the world. She knows only the religious and the eternal, and is incapable of aesthetic or ethical pursuits (her pursuit of joy is that of joy before God and in spite of the world, and not joy in personal pursuit - note her animal-like unrefinements). Life is not a concern, and therefore when death does arrive, she will be completely unawares.

The position of the holy fool in a place as social milieu is that of complete detachment. The fool reflects the sentiments of others, or the mood of the world, but does not project their own designs upon it. Before God and outside of the world, the holy fool moves through the world without abiding by or contributing to its normativity. The true holy fool lives so despite the world that they are completely incapable of decisions within it, they simply go with the world. This going-with the world is entirely different from a normative inauthentic going-with the world because decisions, ends, and means are entirely irrelevant. No ethical dilemmas play out. One can imagine a society composed entirely of such fools and how quickly, and how without malice or even consideration of others, it would die out. Its death would be unimportant, however, because it was always and anti-society, a temporal arrangement of singular eternities.