The fool in Christ is a complex figure. He is at the same time a fool, a prophet, a healer, a converter, a visionary. The fool takes the words of Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians literally: he feigns foolishness to be reviled and despised; he walks around the city naked and hungry and thirsty: he provokes to be buffeted, beaten and mistreated; he does everything to be annulled, reduced to nothing, to the “refuse of this world”, “the offscouring of all”. The holy fool abandons the solitary and ascetic life of the desert and leaves for a city, to mock the world, to unmask its falsehoods. In this “anthology of sacred madness”, the reader will travel in the Byzantine and Russian Middle Ages, through the deserts of Egypt and Syria, he/she will come to Constantinople and finish the journey in Kiev and Moscow. Maravić correlates the contradictory and paradoxical figure of the holy fool, with the contemporary theatre. The various typological aspects of salos and jurodivyj (forms of sacred foolishness in Orthodox Christianity) are accosted to strictly theatrical imageries: in Iconic theatre, the image of the holy fool is studied as a passive entity similar to an actor-figure endowed with a kenotic body which becomes an icon; in the Theatre as the epiphany the holy fool is related to the trickster and the ritual clown; in the Theatre as a transformation his apocalyptic and philosophical nature may be discovered. This study restores the vitality to a guardian of an ancient and forgotten knowledge and serves as a vehicle for a philosophical and anthropological reading of the actor’s art and the performer’s function.
