As the title indicates, this paper investigates the pre-Christian
origins of a cult that develops and blossoms only during the Christian
history of the Eastern Slavs. Relying on its historical parameters,
the existing studies of jurodstvo concentrate primarily on its
Christian interpretation. This approach fails to explain why
foolishness for Christ's sake
receives its consistent
indoctrination only in the Russian church tradition. Another offshoot
of the exclusively Christian reading of the phenomenon has been the
unacceptable conflation of this and other types of sainthood found in
the Orthodox East (see Kovalevskij 1895; Fedotov 1946; Lixa&chachek;ev
and Pan&chachek;enko 1976; Saward 1980; et al.).
This paper offers a parallel reading of jurodstvo, on one hand, and
the traditional model of Christian sainthood, on the other, tracing
the two back to two different mechanisms for ascribing religious form
to objects and people. The underlying assumption is that these
mechanisms predate and necessarily pre-configure the matrix of
Christianity in Medieval Rus&soft;. Alongside the
celestially
oriented religious forms, the argument
runs, the pagan beliefs of the Eastern Slavs have preserved another
treatment of the sacred, which can be symbolically related to the
terrestrial sphere. Both the celestial
and the
terrestrial
are used here to refer not to physical but
to semantic areas: they stand for the meanings associated with the
respective strata in the mythological concept of space. To the extent
to which this concept can be reconstructed from the available
mythological and folkloric evidence, the paper argues that the
jurodivye functioned as the human targets of a religious form that
existed in the collective consciousness of the ethnos before the
Christianization of Rus&soft; and has continued to be active for long
afterward. The Orthodox church can only attempt to accommodate this
form in accordance with its own doctrines, but cannot obliterate its
genetic code.