Apropos to the feast of St. Nicholas the Fool for Christ

'Fools for Christ' were distinguished by rare fearlessness. Blessed Nicholas ran throughout the streets of Pskov pretending insanity rebuking the people for their hidden, sins and prophesying that which will befall them. When Ivan the Terrible entered Pskov, the entire town was in fear and terror of the Terrible Tsar. As a welcome to the Tsar, bread and salt was placed in front of every home but the people did not appear. When the mayor of the town presented the Tsar with bread and salt on a tray before the church, the Tsar pushed the tray away and the bread and salt fell to the ground. At that time, Blessed Nicholas appeared before the Tsar in a long shirt tied with a rope, hopping around on a cane as a child and then cried out: 'Ivanuska, Ivanuska, eat bread and salt and not human blood.' The soldiers rushed out to catch him but he fled and hid. The Tsar learning about this Blessed Nicholas, who and what he is, visited him in his scant living quarters. It was the first week of the Honorable Fast [The First Week of Lent]. Upon hearing that the Tsar was coming to visit him, Nicholas found a piece of raw meat and when the Tsar entered his living quarters, he bowed and offered the meat to the Tsar. 'Eat Ivanusha, eat!' Angrily, the Terrible Tsar replied: 'I am a Christian and I do not eat meat during the Fast Season.' Then the man of God quickly responded to him: 'But you do even worse: you feed on men's flesh and blood, forgetting not only Lent but also God!' This lesson entered profoundly into the heart of Tsar Ivan and he, ashamed, immediately departed Pskov where he had intended to perpetrate a great massacre.
St. Nikolaj (Velimirovic)

In preparation for Great Lent

Today is celebrated the memory of St. Theodora who after the death of her iconoclast husband restored the veneration of icons in 842. Of course this is where the feast we celebrate in two weeks, the Sunday of Orthodoxy, originates. Today's commemorations also "happen" to coincide with the Sunday of the last judgment reminding us that those who do not recognize Christ in "the least of these" will be sent into "the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels". It seems to me reasonable to recognize that seeing Christ in "the least of these" includes many of the saints we venerate on icons. Having recently read the life of St. Symeon of Emesa, fool for Christ, I could not help but see in his life such an example as fools for Christ take on a much more humble position than your run of the mill monk. Recently I posted a great explanation of the fool for Christ phenomenon which well sums up this thought.

And don't forget that today is also the commemoration of St. Blaise of Sebaste the patron of my bosom buddy Bleys, otherwise known as Colonel K.

The fools for Christ

...seem to reject the Apostle Paul's admonition to accept any personal deprivation and sacrifice in order to avoid scandalizing the faithful (1 Cor. 8:13). But what kind of scandal is St. Paul talking about? It is something that causes confusion in the realm of truth, and may thus deprive others of the possibility of participating in truth--the possibility of salvation. If by eating food offered to idols you give your brother's 'weak conscience' grounds for supposing that there is some connection between idol worship and the truth and life of the Church, then the responsibility for the confusion you cause is great indeed.

The challenge of the fools, however, does not create confusion in people's faith, nor does it obscure the Church. It simply surprises those who have identified faith and truth with the secularized concept of moral uprightness and conventional decorum. Fools for Christ have the gift, and the audacity, to manifest openly the human fall and sin which is common to us all: this is the reality of our nature, and it is not cancelled out by individual cases of 'improvement,' nor by concealment behind social externals.

In this sense, every monk in the Orthodox East is a kind of 'fool for Christ.' He wears a garment of mourning, openly declaring that he accepts our common fall and sin; and he withdraws into the ascetic life, waging war on this fall and this sin on behalf of us all. This same acceptance is the calling of every member of the Church. If we persist in ignoring the Gospel of salvation and continue to identify the regeneration of man with the social recognition of individual virtues, with worldly success in gaining individual moral respectability, then the fault is ours alone--and it is an error which bars us from truth and life.

The prototype to which the Church has always looked is not individual moral self-sufficiency, but the monks' lament of repentance. This lament is ultimately joyful--a 'joyful sorrow'--and turns sin into a measure of the acceptance of Christ's love. Man is able to mourn and lament only when he knows exactly what he has lost, and experiences this loss as a personal deprivation, a personal thirst. This is why repentance, the personal sense of the loss of God, is also a first revelation, our first acquaintance with His person, our first discovery of the extent of His love.

In the case of the fools for Christ, certainly their shocking freedom from every law, rule, restriction or code of obligations is not simply didactic in its purpose, reminding us of the danger of identifying virtue and holiness with conventional social decorum and egocentric moral rectitude. No one can ever really teach simply by calling into question mistaken concepts and ways of life: one has to make the fulness of the saving truth incarnate in oneself. The shocking freedom of the fools is first and foremost a total death, a complete mortification of every individual element in their lives. This death is the freedom which can break and destroy every conventional form; it is resurrection into a life of personal distinctiveness, the life of love which knows neither bounds nor barriers.

The example of the 'fools for Christ,' then, is neither extreme nor inexplicable, as it may perhaps seem to many people. It is the incarnation of the Gospel's fundamental message: that it is possible for someone to keep the whole of the Law without managing to free himself from his biological and psychological ego, from corruption and death. And that on the other hand, it is enough is someone humbly accepts his own sin and his fall, without differentiating it from the sin and fall of the rest of mankind, trusting in the love of Christ which transfigures this acceptance into personal nearness and communion, into a life of incorruption and immortality.
Christos Yannaras