We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ.
—Paul the Apostle The distinction between faith and folly can be cut very finely. If truth be told, the dividing line may be invisible to the naked eye. The fool of God, also known as the holy fool, is an even more multifaceted and omnipresent conception from medieval Christianity down to the present day than is the acrobat of God. The two concepts are interrelated, and the figure of the jongleur has sometimes been superimposed upon that of the holy fool.
From one end to the other in both time and space, the Middle Ages were anything but foolproof. That said, the notion of the fool of God or the fool for Christ became disseminated far more widely outside than inside Western Europe. The cultural importance of this type has loomed large, first in the Greek East and later in Russia. One of the first attested examples of such a character is the sixth-century Symeon of Emesa.
Two other cases, both fools who happen to be nuns, are found in the Lausiac History, a major compendium of traditions about the desert fathers that enjoyed popularity through the East. Such figures often make idiots of themselves in public through (un) intentional absurdism. They engage in seemingly weak-minded behavior from which a clear-headed person would refrain. They dispose of all their possessions, sometimes even down to much or all their clothing. They express themselves in babbling or blustering twaddle that others may find inexplicable, meaningless, or even unhinged.
Yet there is method to the madness. From one perspective, these religious fools may appear to profane the sacred. From another lookout point, they take to an extreme what is called in Latin imitatio Christi. That is, they humiliate themselves to imitate the humility and humiliation of Jesus.
Within Western Europe, Saint Francis of Assisi stands out as the paragon of the holy fool, just as of the jongleur. His clowning had the collateral effect of illuminating the degree of his simplicity. The jongleur of God reportedly presented himself likewise as a slow-minded fool or jester of God. He and the first generations of Franciscans paralleled the tumbler in rejecting the finery and splendor of the conventional Church for lowness and abasement. For their stance, they earned regard as what Erasmus called “fools to the world.”
Beyond the general homogeneity of the protagonist in Our Lady’s Tumbler and of holy fools, it bears noting that the exemplum resembles accounts of so-called hidden saints. These secret servants of God are typically retiring in their comportment. They slave at a humble vocation, their sanctity unrecognized by others. An archetype would be Saint Joseph, the carpenter. Such holy men are numerous in Byzantine hagiography. There we encounter individuals whose holiness goes undetected or is even mistaken for negative qualities, such as derangement. A lesson could be drawn from all these stories that communities are not always capable of the discernment required to tell apart a mere jongleur from one of God, or a fool from one of God. For instance, Daniel of Scetis, an Egyptian monk and abbot, tells the tale of Mark the Fool.
This saint pretends to be demented and passes himself off as a raving lunatic. For eight years, he plays the role of a Robin Hood among fools by distributing to others what he begs and steals. It emerges that earlier he had lived fifteen years in a monastic community, before his eight years as a solitary. On the morning after the facts of his life have become known to the pope, Mark dies and subsequently his body emanates the odor of sanctity—a mystical scent of incorruption that was construed as a sign of saintliness. Another example is a narrative recounted in the vita of Daniel himself.
While visiting a convent, he allegedly witnessed a sister there who to all appearances was sprawled intoxicated. That night the future saint and his disciple observed how the same nun would stand in prayer until a passerby appeared, at which point she
would sag to the ground. They brought this behavior to the attention of the abbess, who realized rapidly that the alleged falling-down drunk was a hidden saint. When the report of the sister’s piety spread, she fled the nunnery. Still other tales in the genre have principals who are entertainers, apparently leading unseemly lives but in fact recognized by God as being on the side of the angels.
The type of behavior that these individuals display is attested in Byzantine hagiography throughout the Middle Ages. A memorable case of such holy and high-functioning folly from the fourteenth century is Maximos. This man, a soon-to-be saint, acclaimed from childhood for his devotion to the Virgin, became a monk rather than enter into a marriage arranged for him by his parents. In Constantinople, he dwelled for a time in the gateway of the church of Saint Mary of Blachernae in the guise of a fool for Christ’s sake. Later, on Mount Athos, Maximos earned his colorful cognomen, the Hut-Burner, as a kind of auto-arsonist. Whenever he moved to a new dwelling for greater seclusion, he would torch his old hovel.
Likewise worth mentioning are the later Russian descendants of the Byzantine hidden saints—the holy fools or fools in Christ—who are stock characters in first Muscovy and later Imperial Russia. In Western Europe, fools of God are far from unknown in French literature from the early thirteenth century. To cite only two examples, Life of the Fathers contains a story that goes simply by the short title “Fool,”
and Gautier de Coinci wrote a miracle on the topic.
Distinct from a saint who poses as a fool would be a court jester who has occasion to display miraculous piety. In 1878, the German author Gottfried Keller composed a poem based on a purportedly actual event of 1528. Entitled “The Fool of Count von Zimmern,” the piece describes how an entertainer of this sort was called upon to assist in the office when the chaplain was shorthanded. At the point when a bell was to be tolled, none was to be had, and so the joker improvised by shaking with all his might to jingle his fool’s cap, whereupon a golden glow shone out from the large lidded flagon that held the host for the Eucharist.
In recent times a figure well worth examining in this conjunction is Dario Fo. His first major work after receiving the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature was The Holy Jester Francis. Like the medieval saint, the modern Italian performer immersed himself in folk culture, popular theater, and oral tradition. Although the laureate wrote extensively, his texts presumed performance. He was himself styled a holy jester. His theater entailed mime and pantomime, song and dance, acrobatics, clowning, puppetry, and above all storytelling. Fo’s main stance was as a latter-day jongleur. Accordingly, he termed his one-man show “jonglery.” His objective was to demonstrate how culture belonging to the unempowered masses ha an inherent worth that has been either arrogated or effaced by the dominant cultures of the Church, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie. The Italian author’s conception of a subaltern jongleur suits the tale of the medieval tumbler well. In a way, the paradox of the spiritually inspired fool was hardwired within Our Lady’s Tumbler. The story is built upon the radical innovation and challenge that enabled lay brothers to serve within cenobitism. Of the various trials made in this direction, that of the twelfth-century Cistercians may well have
been “the most successful and significant.” This experiment allowed the depiction of a man without education and culture, who lacked institutional or political muscle but possessed the power of boundless charisma. He was not a fool so much as a simple man of God, not a jester so much as a jongleur of God.
The tumbler may have been a legend based on an otherwise unattested reality.
Then again, he may have been fabricated as an exemplum to occupy a vacancy that real-life personages had not filled. In either case, he perpetuated the image of real-life holy fools who had preceded him. By the same token, he was a proto-Franciscan who anticipated equally actual jongleurs of God who would succeed him. Like all of them, he was a beatific ascetic. He blurred the absolute lines that some have sought to draw between religious and profane, as between monastic and secular.