Blessed are the foolish — foolish are the blessed

The foolishness of God is wiser than men, the weakness of God is stronger than men… For God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong (I Cor 1:25, 27).

In this chapter of the New Testament we come across one of the most countercultural aspects of Christianity. The original Greek says that the moron of God is wiser than men. For the world, for “mainstream” culture, “moron” is an insult, something undesirable. No one in their right mind wants to be moron. But St Paul turns worldly values on their head.

What the world despised, Christians regard as badges of honour. One of the taunts that the world often uses is “loser” (though, ironically, many of those who use it often spell it “looser”). But Christians follow a loser. As St Paul is at pains to point out, there is nothing that looks more like a loser than Christ crucified. For that reason, any Christian who uses the word “loser” as a taunt for others has quite simply forgotten who his Lord is.

The Beatitudes, too, show how the Christian faith turns the values of the world upside down. “Blessed are the meek”, but for the world, “Blessed are the pushy, for they shall get what they want”.

In recent years there has been a tendency for some to overlook this aspect of the Christian faith. There are some Christian groups that unashamedly appeal to the opposite tendency, going so far as to call their churches Winners Chapel, to give but one example.

In the Orthodox Church, perhaps as a reminder from God that we should not be seduced into that kind of worldly thinking, there is a whole class of saints called “Fools for Christ” (in Greek, sali, in Russian, yurodivi). Sali is one of the words that means “blessed”; and it is also the origin of the English word “silly”. The sali are blessed fools, silly fools.

In our age, “moron” is a term of abuse, as are similar terms like “loser”, “cretin” and others. In a more faith-filled age (which the secularists might call “credulous and superstitious”), however, these were often terms of awe and respect. “Cretin” is derived from the French word “chretienne”, meaning a Christian. An important part of being Christian is remembering that God chose the weak and foolish things of the world, and indeed chose to become weak and foolish himself, as unconvincing in appearance as the crucified.

The calling to be a holy fool is often found within monasticsm, which is itself a call to a countercultural life. The monk renounces much that the world regards as valuable — riches, fame and power. Yet even within monastic society, power struggles can make themselves felt, and in such a situation the holy fool can call the community back to its original vision and purpose.

One of the most revered of the holy fools is St Basil of Moscow. St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, with its fantastic domes, is an international symbol of the city. It was built, not to honour St Basil, but in honour of a victory by Tsar Ivan the Terrible over the Tatars. Basil denounced the Tsar for his bloodthirsty battles and oppressive rule as he wandered half-naked around the Kremlin, but when he died he was buried in the Cathedral, and the people went to his tomb there to seek his prayers, and eventually it became known as St Basil’s Cathdral. Jim and Nancy Forest have written a good description of St Basil and other fools for Christ.

Many of the holy fools have appeared mentally unbalanced, But Leon Bloy, a French writer, when asked about this, replied:

Balance? The devil take it! He has indeed taken it long ago! I am a Christian who accepts the full consequences of my Christianity. What happened at the Fall? The entire world, you understand, with everything in it, lost its balance. Why on earth should I be the one to keep mine? The world and mankind were balanced as long as they were held fast in the arms of the Absolute. What the average man means by balance is the most dangerous one-sidedness into which a man can fall… the renunciation of his heavenly birthright for the pottage of this sinful world (see Pilgrims of the Absolute).

The theme is also found in such things as the Fool card of the Tarot, but I have already blogged about that in more detail in Notes from underground: On Tarot Cards and also at Notes from underground: Morehead’s Musings: Symbolic Countercultures and Rituals of Opposition, so I will not say much more about that aspect of it here.

There has been some discussion about whether the fools for Christ were really mad, or were only simulating madness, to teach a lesson. Probably it was a little of both, and some were more mad than others.

John Saward, in his book Perfect fools makes a couple of interesting points. One is that the holy fools flourished in periods when the Church was comfortable and at ease. They were quite rare in times when the church was being persecuted. It seems that God called more people to holy folly in periods when the Church was in danger of being overwhelmed by respectability.

The second point is that fewer fools for Christ were recognised by the Church in the modern era. After the Enlightenment, there were far fewer fools for Christ canonised in the Orthodox Church. Perhaps this was because of modernity, which Peter the Great sought to impose on the Russian Orthodox Church by suppressing the patriarchate and controlling the Holy Synod through a Procurator appointed by himself. Whatever the reason, one of the very few fools for Christ recognised from this period in Russia was St Xenia of St Petersburg.

Perhaps one reason for this is the emaphasis modernity placed, especially in the Enlightenment period, on the importance of humnan reason. People may have had a greater horror of madness, or even the appearance of madness. Losing one’s reason was no joke. And again, perhaps postmodernity opens the way for the fool for Christ again.

Some, though not all of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyes and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz

In parts of that, one can see echoes of the lives of fools for Christ, but perhaps more important, it reflects a society that might be more open to the message of the fools for Christ.

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This post is part of a synchroblog on God’s calling and choice of what is weak and foolish. Here are links to the other Synchroblog contributions on this topic:

• Fools Rush In by Sonja Andrews
• The Power of Paradox by Julie Clawson
• That Darn Ego by Jonathan Brink
• Won’t Get Fooled Again by Alan Knox
• Strength on the Margins by Igneous Quill
• Foolish Heart by Erin Word
• A Fool’s Choice by Cindy Harvey
• Quiet Now, God’s Calling by Jenelle D’Alessandro
• Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right… By Mike Bursell
• Ship of Fools by David Fisher
• Hut Burning for God by Father Gregory
• God Used This Fool by Cobus van Wyngaard
• Fool if you think its over by Paul Walker
• Blessed are the foolish — foolish are the blessed by Steve Hayes
• What A Fool I’ve Been by Reba Baskett
• My foolish calling by Lisa
• God uses foolish things Sally’s journey
• Blessed Andrew Fool for Christ by Mimi
• The holy fool by Phil Whyman
• St Xenia, Fool for Christ by Elevation Perception

Morehead’s Musings: Symbolic Countercultures and Rituals of Opposition

In his blog Morehead’s Musings: Symbolic Countercultures and Rituals of Opposition John Morehead writes

one of the books I finished last night is J. Milton Yinger’s Countercultures: The Promise and Peril of a World Turned Upside Down (New York: The Free Press, 1982). In his chapter on symbolic countercultures he includes discussion on rituals of opposition and how these serve or function as countercultures. In this section he discusses the belief in “inverted beings” among the Lugbara in what is now known as Uganda. He states that these beings “behaved in ways ‘the opposite of the ways expected of normal socialized persons in Lugbara society today.'”

The description “inverted beings” could also apply, though in different ways to the holy fools found in the Chrsitian world. As Jim Forest puts it

While there is much variety among them, holy fools are in every case ascetic Christians living outside the borders of conventional social behavior — people who in most parts of the developed world would be locked away in asylums or ignored until the elements silenced them.

Karen M. Staller, the author of a book on Runaways, describes in an interview how the 1960s counterculture influenced American society and worldwide youth culture

Q: You argue the counterculture was influential in this discussion. How so?

KS: I make at least three arguments in this regard. First, by using the New York Times as a source of evidence, I trace the construction of “runaway” stories over an eighteen-year period. In the early 1960s, running away was characterized as a private family matter of little public consequence, but by the mid-1970s it was being typified by young teenage prostitutes. This shift is traceable to 1966-67, when runaway accounts commingled with reports on the hippie counterculture. The “safe runaway adventurer story” construction could not survive, and what emerged in the aftermath of the “hippie” phenomena was a new conceptualization of the typical runaway as a much more troubled, street-based child.

Second, I argue that writers of the Beat movement were providing an alternative (and much more hip) version of “dropping out” for a generation of Baby Boomers who were reading works like Kerouac’s On the Road (for example, I use the life histories of two Beat “muses,” Herbert Huncke and Neal Cassady). This version of “running away” stood in sharp contrast with the Establishment’s interpretation. Arguably, a second generation of counterculturists, calling themselves Diggers, picked up on these ideas and created youth communities that embodied much of the “beat” philosophy. Runaways were attracted to these ideas and to the lifestyle being enacted in counterculture communities such as Haight-Ashbury.

Third, during the mid-1960s the Diggers were engaged in a cultural critique in which they attempted to “enact Free.” Their goal was to create a true counterculture that would sustain a community of like-minded social activists free of the social, cultural, moral, and economic constraints of mainstream society. In the process of performing “Free,” Diggers provided free crash pads, free clinics, free food, a free store, and telephone help lines (hence earning them such much-detested labels from mainstream journalists as “psychedelic” social workers, “mod” monks, and “hip” charity workers). Both the messages emanating from these communities about love, peace, and alternative families, and the concrete services being provided, were attractive to younger runaway children. In 1967, as the media, acid rock, and pop music groups of the day promoted a so-called “Summer of Love” in San Francisco, Diggers called on the local community for help in caring for the younger children. The community responded by opening Huckleberry House, the first of what would become a nationwide movement of alternative and radical service providers that sheltered runaway children. The shelters looked quite a bit like the Digger crash pads and incorporated many counterculture values.

Towards the end of the hippie period the film Brother Sun, Sister Moon was released. It showed the life of Francis of Assissi, incorporating the hippie values of the dropout culture. And the early Franciscan movement was certainly countercultural in its own time, in a way that appealed to those involved in or at least sympathetic with the counterculture. In 1960 an Anglican monk, Brother Roger of the Community of the Resurrection, wrote an article with the title God’s cool cat: How Beat were the Franciscans and how Franciscan are the Beats? anticipating Zefirelli by nearly 15 years.

In the early 1970s, however, the theoretical possibilities were taking practical form. Jesus freaks like the Children of God were spreading to cities throughout the world distributing their publication New Nation News, and urging people to see Brother Sun, Sister Moon. They lived in hippie communes, which they called “colonies”, a term also used by the early Christian communities. Here, for anyone who wanted to see, was the new monasticism. Here were the “inverted beings” trying to turn the world upside down, or, from their point of view, right side up.

Unfortunately, as often happens with idealistic movements, things went sour. In the case of the Children of God the leader, Dave Berg, who called himself Moses David or just Mo, became increasingly erratic and authoritarian. In later issues of New Nation News it became apparent that “Mo” was trying to draw people to himself rather than to Jesus, and the pages of the magazine became increasingly filled with sexual innuendo, for which Dave Berg coined the term “flirty fishing”. But that was far from the vision of the Durban colony of the Children of God in 1974, who preached and lived the love of God and urged people to see a film about the life of Francis of Assissi.

I believe that one of the things that went wrong with the “new monasticism” of the Children of God was that it was disconnected from the old monasticism. The Orthodox “fools for Christ” are inverted beings, and very often their behaviour, by the standards of respectable society, is quite bizarre. The Greek word for them, sali, is the root of the English word silly, and a silly fool is a blessed fool, one who has been touched by God.

Also in the 1970s an American, Eugene Rose, became an Orthodox monk. He had studied at the American Institute of Asian Studies in San Francisco where he met Gary Snyder, one of the inspirers of the Beats, immortalised in Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma bums as Japhy Ryder. Eugene Rose took the monastic name Seraphim, and sought to establish an American version of traditional Orthodox monasticism. In the 1990s the example of Fr Seraphim Rose inspired a new generation of youth to distribute a revolutionary Christian zine, Death to the world. It was the same size and format as New Nation News, but it had its roots in 20 centuries of monastic wisdom. “Death to the world is a zine to inspire Truth-seeking and soul searching amidst the modern age of nihilism and despair, promoting the ancient principles of the last true rebellion: to be dead to this world and alive to the other world.” It published testimonies of the new generation of “punx 2 monks”, and its story was told in a book Youth of the Apocalypse.

It is perhaps a coincidence that the traditional dress and external appearance of monks resembled that adopted by many in the counterculture of the 1960s — long hair in pony tails and beards for the male monastics. But the internal rebellion has remained the same through the ages: rejection of the dog-eats-dog consumer society.

One problem is that countercultures keep getting coopted by mainstream cultures. The Beats of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s had various visions of alternative lifestyles. But it wasn’t long before banks were offering “lifestyle banking”, and the lifestyle they promoted in their advertising was one of conspicuous consumption: a yacht, a swimming pool, a fancy car — a far cry indeed from the simple lifestyle advocated by the counterculture. But even the most imaginative copywriter would be hard put to come up with “lifestyle banking” for monks.

The Jesus freaks of the late 1960s and early 1970s promoted “revolution for Jesus”, but it wasn’t long before the slogans and symbols of the revolution were being coopted by young fogeys in suits who ran middle-class youth groups in middle-class suburban churches, and promoted a new line of sanitised Jesus kitsch like patches to put on your pre-faded, pre-shrunk, pre-torn jeans.

The last true rebellion was also the first. There may be a need for a new monasticism, but apart from the old, it will easily be coopted by the world. No mater how the world’s fashions change, monks somehow always look, and are, countercultural.

The unrespectability of our religion

I was transcribing some of my old journals this morning, and came across what I had written when I was 19 in response to reading about Leon Bloy.

When I got home I finished reading Leon Bloy and marvelled at his faith and devotion. He had been prepared to live nearly all his life in poverty — nay, in destitution — for the sake of Jesus.

Like Clement of Alexandria, like St Francis of Assisi, he gave up all for love. “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God.” The beatniks are looking for what St Francis was looking for; they are after the absolute values of God rather than the relative values of this world. “A saintly clergy means a virtuous people; a virtuous clergy means a respectable people; a respectable clergy means a godless people.”

Christians must never become respectable. Respectability is the curse of true religion. The slavish following of convention and the mediocrity it leads to, or springs from, are the enemy of all true Christianity. People become indistinguishable, they merge into the mass of the respectable, conventional mass of unthinking semi-morons that people this globe; they have no variety, and variety is the spice of life. They are tasteless, “and if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?” Most Christians do not take their faith at all seriously — in one sense — they are prepared to live with it, but only just. They will not live for their faith, and certainly will not die for it. Saints were too unconventional, too unrespectable, to be imitated. People pay lip service to the examples of the saints, But if anyone should try to follow their example he is denounced, and they say, “Religion is a good thing, but that is taking it too far.” The person against whom such an accusation is levelled has probably just begun to take religion at all seriously. Christians are a lot of hypocrites people say, but if they try not to be hypocrites, then they are fanatics. The unrespectability of our religion! (Journal entry: 17 August 1960)

That was over 40 years ago. I had been introduced to Leon Bloy by Brother Roger, of the Anglican Community of the Resurrection. Bloy’s ideas were more than 60 years old then, and yet they seemed equally relevant to the 1960s. And now I keep reading about similar ideas in emerging church circles, including such things as urban monasticism. I look back at and cringe a little at the teenage arrogance, and wonder if our generation turned out any better than those we so self-righteously denounced.

Things have not changed much since then, it seems. A recent survey shows that most Christians in many countries see themselves first of all as citizens of this world rather than as citizens of the kingdom of God. Our citizenship is in heaven, says St Paul, but most have other gods. This is perhaps not so surprising in Russia, where atheism was the official state-sponsored religion for two generations, but it is a little more disturbing in other countries.

There also seems to be an anomaly in the case of the USA, where a higher proportion said that they saw themselves as Christians first, and citizens of their country second. But I wonder — I suspect that many of those who said that would respond to their country’s recent wars of aggression in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq by saying “My country, right or wrong”.

On Tarot Cards

Quite a lot of people have been blogging about Tarot cards recently, and there was a quiz on Which of the Greater Trumps are you?.

Some of the other blog posts that mention Tarot cards are Sally on “Why Tarot?”, and Matt Stone on “Incarnating into occulture”.

One thing that struck me about all of these was the horrible images in all of them. The “Which of the Greater Trumps are you?” quiz offered several styles of “Tarot” card to illustrate it, but not one of them was authentic. I chose the least repellant, but it still looks like an insipid Victorian “fairy at the bottom of the garden”.

Matt Stone and Sally both used the Waite pack, which loses the original symbolism of the cards. I then did a Google image search for Tarot cards, and was amazed at the huge variety, but the impossibility of finding a single authentic image.

Or am I just being a modernist old curmudgeon or control freak, and not keeping up with the postmodern spirit of “one man, one Tarot”, and even “one man, one religion”? Am I falling into the trap of saying “This must mean to you what it means to me?”

I first became interested in the Tarot by reading two novels: The sandcastle by Iris Murdoch, and The greater trumps by Charles Williams. Before reading The sandcastle I’d never heard of Tarot cards, so I went and bought a pack at the Mystic Bookshop in Johannesburg, which was a pretty esoteric place, and the only place one could get such things back then.

In The sandcastle the character who uses the Tarots gives them her own meanings, but I was impressed by the imagery of the cards themselves. They spoke of archetypal human experiences, the things that shape our lives. I then read Charles Williams’s The greater trumps and he extended the meaning of the imagery further. I won’t add spoilers here, but just recommend that people read it.

In trying to find what others made of the symbolism, I looked for books on the Tarot, and found that most of them were by cartomancers, and were banal and boring. The cartomancers’ trade relied on human desires for health, wealth, popularity and success, and interpreted them in the light of that. They were no different from the advertising industry, reflecting the values of capitalist materialist society. I went back to Charles Williams for my understanding and interpretation.

Consider the greatest of the Greater Trumps, the Fool. Matt Stone uses the Waite pack, in which the symbolism of the original card is completely lost. I was going to say “original” symbolism, but then I’m not sure that anyone is qualified to say what the original symbolism was. So let me say what it signifies for me.

Waite’s version of the card seems to depict a self-absorbed Victorian fop, careless rather than carefree. The fact that his pilgrim’s staff has turned into a rose might lead us to think that he is a sort of hippie flower child. Perhaps that is what the hippie flower children, or some of them, eventually became, but that is a far cry from the original vision.

Unlike the original card, in Waite’s card the fool’s journey has no purpose, no destination. He is careless of where he is going, because he is so self-absorbed that his surroundings mean nothing to him. His journey is pointless, and the dog seems to be just as pointless.

In the original cards, however, the Fool is the “fool for Christ”, the holy fool who has turned his back on the world, yet looks back inviting us to follow him, if we dare. He is being attacked by an animal, a dog perhaps, or a lynx, but it does not seem to be very much bothered by it. So those on the Christian pilgrimage may be attacked by the devil or his demons or the cares of the world, but are not much bothered by them. The response of the Fool is dispassion rather than unawareness.

He is following a road that few choose. His dress suggests a court jester, but also a pilgrim. He is a silly fool, and the English word “silly” is derived from the Greek sali, blessed, and which is also the Greek term for the saints who are holy fools, the yurodivi. And “blessed” suggests the Beatitudes, where the blessings experienced by the saints are so different from the blessings sought by the world that to the world they seem like curses rather than blessings. Little or nothing of this is suggested by the Waite image.

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