This is called the feat of foolishness.

We do not know what foolishness really is. We grin. Is a fool such a fool?

No.

Here is what Archpriest V. Zenkovsky and Archpriest G. Nefyodov write about the essence of foolishness: "Fools despise all earthly comforts, often act contrary to common sense – in the name of the highest truth. Fools take upon themselves the feat of deliberate madness in order to attain freedom from the temptations of the world – but in foolishness there is not a shadow of contempt for the world or rejection of it. Foolishness, first of all, values the external, fussy side of life, despises petty self-gratification, fears worldly comforts and wealth, but does not despise man, does not tear him away from life. In foolishness there is an aspiration for a higher truth, usually obscured by worldly pettiness, and yet it is not spiritualism, but only the same mystical realism, sacrificing the earthly for the sake of the heavenly.

Foolishness yearns for truth and love, and therefore it inevitably turns into the denunciation of all kinds of untruth among people – it has always attacked the state power especially often and severely, which humbly bowed down before the spiritual greatness of foolishness.

Foolishness, in its essence, is not at all hysterical, on the contrary, there is an undoubted supreme sobriety in it, but it is cramped within the boundaries of one earthly principle, in it there is a strong thirst to assert the primacy of spiritual truth both in the individual and in the world. It is radical and bold, and it exudes a genuine, religious inspiration to which everyone bows.

Foolishness is an expression of the fact that in the combination of the divine and the human, the heavenly and the earthly, the heavenly should never bow down before the earthly. Let the divine remain inexpressible, but there should be neither hypocrisy nor rapture in the poetry of the world with oblivion of the heavenly beauty that cannot be contained in our life. This is not Platonism, but the affirmation of the hierarchical principle, i.e., the subordination of the earthly to the heavenly."6

In Russia, they loved and revered holy fools. Of the 36 canonized holy fools, 30 were Russians. According to the historian V. O. Klyuchevsky, the holy fool in Russia was "a walking worldly conscience, a living image of the exposure of human vices."

FROM THE BANKS OF THE MOKSHA TO THE BANKS OF THE NEVA