Locos de cristo
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- 2) I. G. Pryžovs ethnograhic works
- 3) Xenia of Saint Petersburg
- 4) Jurodstvo in Damaskins menology
- 5) Jurodstvo in the Pravoslavnaja Enciklopedija
- 6.1. Temporal Spread
- 6.2. Geographical patterns
- 6.3. Jurodstvo and power
- 6.4. Femenization of jurodstvo
canonized during this time declines from its previous apex to zero. This new imaginary is characterized by the creation of a line that divides Russian culture since those days. This line is a process of secularization that in different forms survives in the present. 2) I. G. Pryžov's ethnograhic works From this point the sources begin to show different dimensions of the phenomenon. In the first half of the 19 th century, ethnographic works (Pryžov 1996 and 2008) provide a completely different approach to the phenomenon. He described near twenty jurodivye living in Moscow. These cases illustrate the role that cognition plays in the phenomenon, showing how certain societal groups are more favorable to recognizing the saintliness of the jurodivye than others. At the same time, the ethnography is a vivid description of how individuals manipulated the phenomenon to reach personal goals. These works are a window and an opportunity to explore some of the subsystems that may have defined the phenomenon previously covered by the religious nature of the sources. A new fascination for the human body and its eventual aberrations finds its way in interaction with the phenomenon. Monstrosity, and other scatological motifs are incorporated to the narrative. Such a a new motifs play a special role in magical practices. It is also true that during the 19 th century, the Russian imaginary was not isolated from the European conceptions that unified the concepts of nation and essence. The Slavophiles led an entire reconstruction of national memory. jurodstvo found its more productive recreation as a national symbol and became a productive topos in literature and other arts. The 19 th and 20 th century provided the consolidation of another dimension of the phenomenon. jurodstvo meets academic and etic constructs. jurodstvo has been understood as both a paradox and as an extremely relevant component of Russian culture. If it is a component of a culture, we should first consider for a moment: what do we understand by culture? Modern anthropology distinguishes two different approaches to the concept of culture. The first view of culture, which may be called the essentialist view, was by far the most widespread. This view understood culture as the collective heritage of a group, that is, as a catalog of ideas and practices that shape both the collective and the individual lives and thoughts of all members. Culture thus appeared as a mold that shaped lives. This approach is static; there are no significant changes in the 336 cultural sets of which culture consists. The second view of culture, which may be called the processual view, explains culture as an on-going process. It only exists in the act of being performed, and it can never stand still or repeat itself without changing its meaning (Baumann 1999). It seems that the understanding of the role of jurodivye in Russian culture has been primarily closer to the first idea of culture, one constituted as the integral possession of a people, organized into a coherent, or proudly incoherent, as in the case of Russia, bounded society. In my opinion, scholars had progressively moved to the second view: culture as an on-going process. It is this context that my research has developed and to which my findings show support. When a paragraph above introduced the idea of secularization as a boundary within two different dimensions in the Russian imaginary, we did not mean that those dimensions do not interact with each other. Obviously, the religious dimension of the phenomenon had new and continuous manifestations and developments until our days. These constitute a subsystem in another dimension. This dimension of the phenomenon, which crosses a secular line while still immersed in faith, is involved since the 19 th century in an interesting recreation. 3) Xenia of Saint Petersburg Xenia's vita 180 is the result of a compilation of legends, oral testimonies and notes collected in a small chapel. The chapel, located in the cemetery of Smolensk, was dedicated first to St. Xenia of Rome but now worship is focused on Xenia of Petersburg. The only real basis of Xenia's story is the inscription of her epitaph. The information offered by the epitaph is brief but extremely significant. Xenia is a female holy fool. This fact constitutes a rupture in the Russian tradition, since there are no other female holy fools in Russian jurodstvo before Xenia. The recognition of female holy fools is a complex question. Xenia took for herself her husband's name and his clothes. Bodin (2009) has analyzed this motif in Xenia´s vita according to queer theory. Transvestism and the adoption of another person´s name is novel for jurodstvo. Both actions are related to Xenia's difficulties associated with her painful mourning process. It seems that Xenia's jurodstvo is a cognitive or emotional solution developed to face her loss. 180The Life and Miracles of Blessed Xenia of St.Petersburg. Holy Trinity Monastery. Jordanville-New York, 1997. 337 The chapel's archive has also collected a long number of testimonies proving the continuation of the cult of Xenia during the past couple centuries up to the present. The records collected in Xenia's life mainly cover the end of the 19 th c and the beginning of the 20th c. Testimonies describe a cult focus on the suffering of the working classes and their lack of social protections. Such a reorientation of the cult constitutes an innovation for jurodstvo and it is closely linked to the social situation at the beginning of the 20th c. Xenia is the first example of jurodstvo connected with believers seeking a job or a salary increase, or asking for the resolution of a conflict between an employee and employer. Since another innovation is the growing presence of women in the phenomenon, the consequences of her social gender are extremely significant. Xenia was a widow and her husband's death is imagined in a context of alcohol abuse. Alcoholism is a well-known problem in Russian society. An alcoholic husband leads to economic instability and potential risk of physical abuse and poverty. Records show how Russian women find a reference to their suffering in Xenia's cult when they face these kinds of problems. On the other hand, other motifs characteristic of jurodstvo show a continuation in Xenia's cult, such as the healing of illnesses. I must point out that the healing of illness applies to all social strata, not only to the working class. The aristocracy didn't suffer the problems of the proletariat but they were not immune to illness. Once rational medicine failed, they turned to magic procedures. Some religious objects, such as sand from the grave or oil from the chapel's lamp, are believed to have a magical property. These practices generate an interesting feedback between beliefs and material necessities. Our records came from the processing of these payments, which generates a correspondence describing the cult of Xenia. The interaction with the aristocracy, officers of the army and even the tsarist family is a way of reciprocal legitimation. The high strata of society legitimized Xenia's cult with their support, and reciprocally Xenia acts as a sacred symbol for the imperial structure. During Soviet times, this reciprocal legitimation will be turned on its head. Xenia, as a sacred symbol, constitutes an opposition to Soviet power and the established power is no longer a legitimation for the cult. 338 4) Jurodstvo in Damaskin's menology Damaskin's menology constitutes an innovation for the hagiographical tradition. A text as close as possible to hagiographic references is built, unifying oral testimonies and official documents about the Soviet repression. Damaskin's holy fools support the former imperial power and they show their discomfort with Soviet authorities. Such a political subjectivity didn't exist in the phenomenon and it is common in the lives of the New Martyrs. This new recreation of the phenomenon, based on the reconstruction of recent history, is a memory exercise and it is clearly subjective. The goal of this work is not only to glorify the religious victims of the Soviet repression but to elevate the memory of the previous political regime to the sacred. The understanding of jurodivye as martyrs plays a significant role in the reconstruction of the Soviet past. In a new sociocultural context a new type of worship is linked to jurodstvo. During the social context of the Revolution, the war and the difficulties for a religious community going through the processes of collectivization, jurodivye are forced to carry on their asceticism in secret. This secrecy is completely new for jurodstvo. People continued asking them for help using secret notes. This way jurodstvo lost its scandalous performance, its traditional political power and is relegated to a simple oracle. Following this idea, jurodivye forecast the future to religious persons predicting their suffering under soviet repression, their arrest, detention in a camp or death. Jurodivye's connection with the monasteries is related to their memory and to their future. The saint is not only involved in the sacrilization of the suffering under the Soviet period, but he is also a link to the future of the monastery. Their predictions go further than the Soviet repression announcing the reconstruction of the community and the recovery of religion in Russia. 339 5) Jurodstvo in the Pravoslavnaja Enciklopedija The Pravoslavnaja Enciklopedija is an online resource created by the Orthodox Church in order to establish a reference, in terms of academical knowledge of their own history and culture. It is a promising work in progress that introduces researchers with elaborated emic explanations of the Orthodoxy and its view of the world. This collection of articles are an effort carried on by the ecclesiastical inteligentsia aiming to reconstruct the lost pieces of memory under the Soviet repression. The information related to manifestations of jurodstvo, from the 19th and 20th centuries, had been rigorously compiled and are a potential basis for future canonizations. These materials had been analyzed showing a continuation of the evolution of the phenomenon. 6) Conclusions In this study a new methodological framework for the understanding of jurodstvo has been introduced. This framework is based on a new systemic definition of jurodstvo and attempts to provide a better understanding of the complexity of the phenomenon. This new approach understands jurodstvo as an on-going process, which in its dimensions is not only religious but socio-cultural. Such an approach also proposes a mechanism that provides a rational explanation to the diversity shown in the manifestations of jurodstvo and in the temporal distribution of the phenomenon. Thus, this diversity is shown to result from the continuous interaction of the different components of the phenomenon. These interactions, some causal and others random, are ruled only by probability and their results may be positive or negative for the evolution of jurodstvo. This new approach provides conceptual tools to facilitate the study of every manifestation of jurodstvo. Every jurodivyj is different and every jurodivyj may show or fail to show common features with others. As we have already indicated, this diversity is a result of the interactions of the components of the phenomenon. These components and their potential mechanism of interaction have been described in the present study. The convenience of a “system approach” has been shown through the practical reconstruction of the history of jurodstvo. The focus of this new approach reformulates the fragmentary information provided by the available sources in terms of agency and interrelation with the different cultural environments. The analysis, based on concrete examples, manifests itself 340 as a potential source of new lines of study of the phenomenon and unifies the pieces of the puzzle formed by previous observations. This rethinking of jurodstvo attemps to provide a more complex understanding of the jurodivye and jurodstvo, past, present, and future. Conclusions are traced on questions such as the paradoxical homogeneity of the hagiographical archetype of jurodstvo and the heterogeneity shown in its manifestations, emergencies and disappearances of jurodstvo through history, magical practices related to the phenomenon and the interaction of jurodstvo within physical elements and places. 6.1. Temporal Spread Regarding the temporal spread of the canonizations we see two moments of dramatic increase. These moments are related to different processes of “massive canonizations.” These are connected in the first case to the emergence of the new state, which created a entire Russian symbolic world, mainly based on religion. The second increase in canonizations is linked to a process of reemergence of a State following the Soviet period and a rehabilitation of religious symbology. In sharp contrast the status of fools-for-Christ's-sake changed once more with the modernization of Russia and the Petrine and subsequent later periods of development, approximating a European pattern. And finally this secular tendency has been broken in recent times with the new canonization of nearly a dozen holy fools. 6.2. Geographical patterns The first manifestation of jurodstvo appeared in an emerging Kiev. The Christianization of Rus' is not only a way to legitimize the new political order in Kiev, but it also constitutes a new cognitive framework. Its construction based in the reconstruction of the byzantine patterns constituted a positive environment for the continuation of the salos in Rus'. Abstract constructs and their physical manifestation such as translations, icons, churches and monastic communities moved from one center of power to another. In this way jurodstvo appeared again in Novgorod to be soon replaced by Moscovian jurodstvo. 341 With the fall of Constantinople the previous sociocultural enviroment is dramatically transformed into a new one based in the new position of Moscow as the inheritor of this spiritual authority, i.e., the new Rome. During this period, Russia “reconstructed” and “redefined” itself through the new reformulation of its territory and internal organization. For example, from 1547 to 1554 several Russian Orthodox Church councils canonized almost forty saints. The need for more Russian saints was a good opportunity for local cults. This, in turn, had obvious consequences and a remarkably positive interaction for our object of study. The symbolic meaning of Saint Petersburg is a complex question. The old capital was founded by Peter the Great following a new spirit of modernization. Those measures had a negative influence in jurodstvo. There are no more examples of institutionalized jurodstvo until Xenia's canonization. With this canonization, the Russian Orthodox church began to reconnect to its religious heritage associated with jurodstvo. The social context chooses Saint Petersburg as an attempt to relegitimize the old imperial Russia in order to heal from the traumatic Soviet history. This process is a major work in progress in actual Russian culture. Bodin (2009) points that to link jurodstvo to Saint Petersburg is also a way to russify the old capital. Beyond the 20th c., within a growing population of Russians abroad, the cult goes beyond the Russian borders. Xenia's canonization by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in New York is the confirmation of the internationalization of the cult. Nowadays there are several parishes dedicated to Xenia all over the world, for example in Guatemala, Portugal, United States, Germany or Canada. At the same time we can find the life of Xenia on several websites. She is also the first jurodivyj to have a facebook profile and quite a few entries in Youtube. The Orthodox institutions willing to reach the Russians abroad have found a very productive tool in the Internet, its growing presence on the net a key factor in the globalization of Russian culture. Nowadays, jurodstvo shows itself as a very fixed and local cult in other manifestations, such as the continuous emergencies in Diveevo monastery. This emergence is connected to the new role played by the rehabilitated places, such as reconstructed churches or monasteries, as a symbol of the current process or reconstruction and rehabilitation of the Russian Orthodox Church. 342 6.3. Jurodstvo and power The interaction between jurodstvo and power is one of the most malleable motifs of the phenomenon. Tradition understands jurodstvo as an embodiment of the people’s voice against a tyrannic Tsar. This motif is poorly attested in some of the vitae from the 16 th c. In contrast, during the social context of the Revolution, the war and the difficulties for a religious community going through the processes of collectivization, holy fools had to carry on their asceticism in secret. In this way jurodstvo lost its scandalous performance and its traditional political power. Another example of the malleability of this motif is in Xenia's case. The high strata of society legitimized Xenia's cult with their support, and reciprocally Xenia acts as a sacred symbol for the imperial structure. During Soviet times, this reciprocal legitimation will be turned on its head. Xenia, as a sacred symbol, constitutes an opposition to Soviet power and the established power is no longer a legitimation for the cult. Xenia and the new emergences of jurodstvo are not only a sacred symbol of the opposition to Soviet dictatorship but they are also a strong pillar in the reconstruction of Russian modern history, in a post-Soviet period, when emigrants and new Russian powers are reunited to construct a new present and rebuild a collective memory of the traumatic 20th c. As part of this process, Damaskin's holy fools support the former imperial power and how they show their discomfort with Soviet authorities. 6.4. Femenization of jurodstvo The slowly emancipation of women over the last few centuries had resulted in the growing presence of women in the phenomenon. Xenia is the first female holy fool. This fact constitutes a rupture in the Russian tradition. The consequences of her social gender are extremely significant for the phenomenon. Working women in Russia at the beginning of 20th c. were suffering not only from the problems related to their social class, but also from others related to her gender. Economic dependence on their husbands, who easily lost their jobs or failed in their marital obligations, is a new reason to pray to a holy fool. Xenia´s feminization of jurodstvo continues in the most recent emergences. For example, Pelagija's life emphasized the motifs relating to the suffering of women under the abuses of a 343 violent husband. The cult developed a parallelism between the suffering of the working class females and the suffering of the ascetic manifestation of jurodstvo. 344 Document Outline
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