The Holy Fool in European Cinema

Alina G. Birzache

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317310624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Literatura y artes en el cristianismo

This monograph explores the way that the profile and the critical functions of the holy fool have developed in European cinema, allowing this traditional figure to capture the imagination of new generations in an age of religious pluralism and secularization. Alina Birzache traces the cultural origins of the figure of the holy fool across a variety of European traditions. In so doing, she examines the critical functions of the holy fool as well as how filmmakers have used the figure to respond to and critique aspects of the modern world. Using a comparative approach, this study for the first time offers a comprehensive explanation of the enduring appeal of this protean and fascinating cinematic character. Birzache examines the trope of holy foolishness in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, French cinema, and Danish cinema, corresponding broadly to and permitting analysis of the three main orientations in European Christianity: Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. This study will be of keen interest to scholars of religion and film, European cinema, and comparative religion.

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The Pauline Holy Fool and Its Successors

We fools counted their life madness, and their end to be without honour. How are they numbered among the children of God, and their lot is among the saints!

St Ciprian, The Treaties

One of the most striking aspects of the holy fool in European culture is its ubiquity: the figure appears in various guises across many nationalities and traditions. This is made possible because of the protean nature of the figure, for holy foolishness is a concept that can hold different emphases depending on the particular cultural background. Rather like a medieval palimpsest, new meanings are frequently grafted onto older forms. It is no surprise, therefore, that many of these variegated forms of holy foolishness have percolated into the modern cinematic medium. If, however, we are to account for the functions and attractions of the figure across such a wide cultural space, we need to understand its origin and development. By unpicking the cultural and religious roots of the figure, it will be possible to understand how contemporary forms have sprouted out of older traditions, accommodating and adapting to particular national and cultural contexts. This is particularly true when interpreting the modern critical functions of holy foolishness, which, I argue, need to be read through their common origin in a shared religious tradition. Before we can begin to analyse its impact in modern cinema, we therefore first need to explain the roots of the concept. This chapter will map the holy fool from its earliest appearance, through its development in various European contexts, in order to explain its entry into the twentieth-century cinematic world.

To understand the roots of holy foolishness in the European cultural space, we need to return to the very earliest expressions of Christian belief. The theological context of the idea stems from the concept of foolishness for Christ, expressed in the Epistles of St Paul, which justified the flouting of social and intellectual conventions for religious ends. For the early Christian communities, this became a powerful and practical theme, first in the context of widespread persecution, and later through the development of monastic and ascetic practices. With the spread of Christianity across Europe, the concept of divine folly percolated widely into different cultural spaces, developing distinct forms in Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Roman or Latin) Christian traditions. This chapter will unpick these developments, beginning with an analysis of the theological roots of the concept, as offered in the opening four chapters from The First Epistle to the Corinthians. This Epistle is a frequent reference in later hagiographic accounts featuring holy fools and I will pay particular attention to the way in which St Paul endowed holy foolishness with a critical function. With this outlined, the chapter will explain the theoretical and practical interpretations of holy foolishness as developed by Christian communities in both Western and Eastern Europe. The overview will conclude by looking at the reconfiguration of these religious traditions for a modern age in the writings of the nineteenth-century thinkers Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. These writers, I will demonstrate, updated the holy fool’s critical function in profound ways that were to shape the profile of the cinematic holy fool in the twentieth century and beyond.

The First Epistle to the Corinthians as a Foundation Text for Holy Foolishness

Although there are striking examples of unconventional asceticism by the Jewish prophets, it is in the New Testament, and specifically in The First Epistle to the Corinthians, that the idea of holy foolishness is explicitly explained. In the Old Testament the themes of wisdom and folly can be frequently encountered in prophetic and sapiential literature, but wisdom is always identified as God’s attribute, while foolishness is only ascribed to His people.¹ Apart from the basic meaning, rooted in the classical Greek, of deficiency in understanding and judgment, in the Old Testament the term acquires contextual meanings that range from a lack of true knowledge of God, to rebellion against Him and blasphemy.² Much of the New Testament follows in the same tradition, until we reach the Pauline Epistles. Remarkably, The First Epistle to the Corinthians stands out as the only text in the whole of Scripture that speaks, through a radical redefinition of the term moria, about the ‘foolishness of God’ as manifested in Christ crucified.³ Moreover, ‘foolish’ and ‘fool’ (moros) are turned on their head to designate the authentic mode of Christian existence. The Epistle also contains an explicit injunction that came to form a reference for the practice of holy foolishness first recorded in the fifth century in Constantinople: ‘If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.’ (3:18). St Paul’s exhortation, denoting more than a taste for paradoxical verbal constructions, was predicated on the message of the Gospels. On this account he fashions himself as a ‘fool for Christ’.⁴ How can we explain Paul’s radical redefinition of foolishness in the Epistle?

A first look at the context behind the composition of the Pauline Epistles illuminates the reasons for such a strategy. They are linked to the apostolic proclamation as form, content and practical consequence. The ‘preaching of the cross’ lies at the heart of the kerygma of the early church and is tell-ingly encapsulated in the Pauline letters and particularly in his First Epistle to the Corinthians (1:18). Why would the apostle provide such a reminder to a community already familiar with the narrative of the Gospel? While the message of the crucified Saviour was the driving force of the apostolic proclamation, it also had the potential to be offensive to a culturally alien audience. As a result, the risk arose of the message losing its centrality in church life. This is exactly what happened in Corinth, where a composite Christian community made up of Jews and Gentiles, mainly of rather low wealth but also belonging to the social and political elite, was embracing a ‘self-sufficient, self-congratulatory culture… coupled with an obsession about peer-group prestige, success in competition, their devaluing of tradition and universals, and near contempt for those standing in some chosen value system’.⁵ This infiltration of the secular ethos had affected the very core of the apostolic proclamation. As a result St Paul designed his letter to challenge his opponents in Corinth, who were attempting to water down the offence caused by the cross.⁶ He also seized the chance to sum up the various attitudes that rejected the message of the cross, spelling out their serious soteriological implications.

The first four chapters of 1 Corinthians reveal St Paul preoccupied with explaining his own understanding of true wisdom (sophia), which in his view takes the form of the folly (moria) of the cross. At the heart of this distinction is a critical attitude towards the conventions of the world. The overriding theme of this Epistle is the reaffirmation of the entirely different system of values and the new spiritual realities brought about by the cross and the resurrection.⁷ Directly subordinate to this is the issue of the lack of communion amongst the members of the church in Corinth. Paul is also, however, aware there is some opposition to himself: for this reason the first four chapters acquire a justificatory tone, with the apostle finding himself in a position from which he needs to defend his own missionary activity.

Paul starts by assessing the reasons for the state of conflict that has arisen in the community between the various factions aligned to different preachers. In Paul’s view, those listening to his vision of a kerygma centered on the folly of the cross can be divided into believers and non-believers. First, he reminds the Corinthians of two categories of audience that have a negative response to the message of the cross and points out the nature of their objections. For those of Jewish origin, who are trained to look for signs of divine intervention, Christ crucified is ‘a stumbling block’, contradicting their messianic expectations. For those from Greek culture, who value wisdom, the cross can only appear foolish, lacking conformity with the standard criteria for wisdom, be they formal or substantial. The Corinthians belong to neither of these categories since they are those who ‘are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints with all who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ’ (1:2).

Yet there were doctrinal tensions between the rival factions destroying the unity of the church in Corinth, apparently rooted in a conflict about social status between the cultured elite and their subordinates.⁸ Paul seems to allude to this when he writes that ‘not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called’ (1:26). His assertion demarcates two opposing groups in terms of wisdom and power. As a consequence, his discourse is meant to deflate the arrogance of the cultured and powerful elite by exposing their claims to wisdom and honour as matters alien to a spirituality centred on the cross. Hence the apostle begins his argumentation by announcing that God made foolish the wisdom of the world (1:20). Since human wisdom could not lead to salvation, it pleased God to achieve this through the foolishness of the message preached (1:21), which he further clarifies as having at its core ‘Christ crucified’ (1:23). This foolishness of the cross conceals the true divine wisdom, which is wiser than that of humankind (1:25). Therefore, God has chosen the foolish and the weak things of the world in order to put to shame the wise and the mighty (1:27). Divine wisdom takes on a mysterious quality, being ‘the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory’ (2:7). The Corinthians might seem wise, but in order to be truly wise they need to become ‘fools’ (3:18).

Biblical scholars have tended to read this passage either in terms of the ideological variances expressed or the socio-political allegiances of different parties. As a result, the scholarship on 1 Corinthians 1–4 has witnessed an ongoing debate about the meaning ascribed to ‘wisdom’ (sophia) by the community of Corinth, seeing it as vital for understanding the Pauline argumentation about the foolishness of the cross. The main approaches have interpreted sophia variously as: Greco-Roman rhetoric or sophistry (Wither-ington, Pogoloff), Gnostic wisdom (Bultmann, Schmithals, Wilckens, Winter, Barett), a Jewish wisdom tradition (Windisch, Dupont, Conzelmann, Feuillet) or an Hellenistic Jewish wisdom in the tradition of Philo of Alexandria (Horsley, Pearson, Davis).⁹ Other scholars have favoured a political and social interpretation, with the result that the Corinthian conflict is read less in terms of knowledge and more in terms of power. On this scheme the divisions inside the community were not primordially theological but rather socially determined.¹⁰ Subscribing to Raymond F. Collins’s assertion that ‘the search for a particular kind of wisdom’ is ‘a search that does not admit of resolution’, it is helpful to adopt an inclusive position which sees the ideological and the social aspects behind Paul’s message as interrelated. This reflects a set of concepts that work in tandem: first, wisdom and power, and secondly, foolishness and weakness: each entering a parallel relationship. However, these two alliances are ultimately upset by an inversion strategy which reveals the foolishness of God to be His wisdom, and His ‘weakness’ as power.

Given the competing interpretations of ‘worldly wisdom’ in modern scholarship, it is worth reconsidering what Paul wanted to convey to his first-century audience. Is ‘the foolishness of the cross’ dependent on an accurate grasping of the meaning of ‘wisdom’ as practiced in Corinth, with which ‘the folly of the cross’ then enters into a dialectic relationship? In fact, in his argumentation Paul consistently takes as a point of reference divine wisdom (or by the same token divine folly) against which all comparisons are made. Even if all the full meanings ascribed by the Corinthians to the word ‘wisdom’ were identified, this would not explain what divine wisdom is, but rather would delimit it from what Paul thinks it is not. In other words, placing wisdom and foolishness in a dialectic relationship does not render the folly of the cross dependent on worldly wisdom for sense-making purposes. On the contrary, it is the folly of the cross, which St Paul takes as divine wisdom, which remains constant, while worldly wisdom is variable and unsecured. Scholarly disagreement over the precise historical meaning of world...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Holy Fool in European Cinema
• 1 The Pauline Holy Fool and Its Successors
• 2 Speaking Truth to Power: The Holy Fool in Soviet and Russian Cinema
• 3 Holy Fools in the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky
• 4 The Suffering Fool in French Cinema
• 5 The Bressonian Holy Fool
• 6 The Fool’s Challenge to Reason in Danish Cinema
• 7 Idiocy as Technique: The Dogme 95 Movement
• Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Index