The fools in Christ in Russia during the 15th and 16th centuries

This article by Alexandra Gatineau, a student of Professor Vodoff, offers a historical and spiritual study of Russian fools for Christ in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The author examines this ascetic phenomenon through four angles: the outward appearance and public behavior of these saints, their hidden inner life, their social role, and their relationship with tsarist power, particularly under Ivan the Terrible. The article shows how folly for Christ, a form of individual asceticism inherited from the Christian East, became during this period a collective movement with a prophetic and social function, essentially urban and of popular origin. Through the figures of Basil the Blessed, Nicholas Salos, and Ivan the Big Cap, the study highlights the capacity of these saints to challenge political power and to embody a paradoxical holiness, thereby bearing witness to the innovative vitality of the Russian Orthodox Tradition.