Foolishness for Christ
The prophet Isaiah walked naked and barefoot for about three years, predicting a forthcoming captivity in Egypt (Isaiah 20:2, 3); the prophet Ezekiel lay before a stone, which symbolized beleaguered Jerusalem, and though God instructed him to eat bread baked on human waste, ultimately he asked to use cow dung instead (Ezekiel 4:9–15); Hosea married a harlot to symbolize the infidelity of Israel before God (Hosea 3).
By the opinion of certain scholars,[4] these prophets were not counted as fools by their contemporaries, as they just carried out separate actions to attract people's attention and to awake their repentance.
[4] According to Christian ideas, "foolishness" included consistent rejection of worldly cares and imitating Christ, who endured mockery and humiliation from the crowd.
The spiritual meaning of "foolishness" from the early ages of Christianity was closely related to that of rejection of common social rules of hypocrisy, brutality and quest for power and gains.
[5] Other notable lay men who led saintly albeit eccentric lifestyles were Blessed Peter of Trevi, Teobaldo Roggeri, Benedict Joseph Labre, St. Salaun of Brittany Ludovico Morbioli and Casimiro Barello among others.
The key characteristics of foolishness for Christ in Western Christianity are sleeping rough (outdoors) and homelessness, a minimalistic lifestyle with very few if any possessions and a strict dedication to prayer and self-renunciation.
The Eastern Orthodox Church holds that holy fools voluntarily take up the guise of insanity in order to conceal their perfection from the world, and thus avoid praise.
The first reported fool-for-Christ in Russia was St. Procopius (Prokopiy), who came from the lands of the Holy Roman Empire to Novgorod, then moved to Ustyug, pretending to be a fool and leading an ascetic way of life (slept naked on church-porches, prayed throughout the whole night, received food only from poor people).
[12] In 2007, author Frank Schaeffer titled his autobiography Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.
[13] In the same year Stephen Prothero, author and chairman of Boston University's Department of Religion, wrote in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin: "I am crazy for people who are crazy for God: people nearly as inscrutable to me as divinity, who leave wives and children to become forest-dwelling monks in Thailand, who wander naked across the belly of India in search of self-realization, who speak in tongues and take up serpents in Appalachia because the Bible says they can.
Through six essays dealing with various "fools," Pelikan explores the motif of fool-for-Christ in relationship to the problem of understanding the numinous: The Holy is too great and too terrible when encountered directly for men of normal sanity to be able to contemplate it comfortably.
[16][17] In Pushkin's narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, the character of Evgenii is based in the tradition of the holy fools in his confrontation with the animated statue of Peter the Great.
The Idiot explores the ramifications of placing a holy fool (the compassionate and insightful epileptic Prince Myshkin) in a secular world dominated by vanity and desire.
[19] According to Joseph Frank "though the gentlemanly and well-educated prince bears no external resemblance to these eccentric figures, he does possess their traditional gift of spiritual insight, which operates instinctively, below any level of conscious awareness or doctrinal commitment.
"[20] In Demons, the madwoman Marya Lebyadkina displays many of the attributes of the holy fool,[21] as do the characters of Sofya Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment and Lizaveta in The Brothers Karamazov.
