Perfect Fools: Sanctity, Madness, and the Theory of Ambiguous Performance

Abstract

The theory of cultural pragmatics describes the process through which social actors guide their symbolic performances. However, this theory has not paid sufficient attention to the audience’s role in constructing the meaning of these performances. Instead of positing that the intended meanings performed by actors are internal states to be either correctly or incorrectly perceived by an audience, my contention is that the purported intentions of actors are in fact audience constructions that are ascribed to actors. I support this claim through the development of what I call ambiguous performances. These are performances that combine elements of incompatible social roles. This combination creates a multistable performance, one that allows for one of several mutually exclusive interpretations. Because of this, ambiguous performances compel each audience member to choose between multiple conflicting interpretations, and in order to choose an interpretation, audience members must look beyond the performance to aspects of their own identity. I illustrate this process through an analysis of holy fools, historical figures who have appeared periodically throughout Christendom over the course of many centuries. These individuals were sometimes canonized as saints, but more often simply considered insane, an interpretive dichotomy that reveals the ambiguous nature of their performances.

1. Introduction

He spent day and night in the streets naked, shunning neither heat nor cold, made game of by the children, and the lads who were idling about.

(Philo Judaeus of Alexandria cited in Rosen 1969, p. 89) (first century CE)

Often, indeed, when his belly sought to do its private function, immediately, and without blushing, he squatted in the market place, wherever he found himself, in front of everyone.

(Leontius of Neapolis 1996, p. 153) (sixth century CE)

Of this kind there are not many, because it is a very harde and colde profession to goe naked in Russia, especially in Winter. Among others at this time they have one at Moscow that walketh naked about the streetes.

(Giles Fletcher [1591] 1966, p. 90) (1591 CE)

Two of the three individuals described above are canonized saints, while one is considered simply to have been mad. But given their similarly aberrant behavior, how does one determine which is which? How does one decide what meaning to ascribe to each of these performances? In the case of the two who were eventually canonized, their social identities were hotly contested in their lifetimes, and identifying them as holy men was neither obvious nor without detractors. One particularly productive way to understand how questions like those raised here are answered is to call on the conceptual paradigm based on what has been called the “Ur-metaphor for life”: the theater (Wilshire 1982, p. 242).

The notion of viewing real-world social interaction through a theatrical prism has had many manifestations since the middle of the twentieth century, including Linton’s role theory, Burke’s dramatism, Goffman’s symbolic interactionism, Geertz’s symbolic action, Butler’s performativity, and the performance studies of Schechner and Turner. More recently, Jeffrey Alexander has developed cultural pragmatics, a conceptual model building on these theories of social performance and explicating the process by which actors draw on cultural meaning structures to guide their behavior. However, while cultural pragmatics provides a compelling conceptual framework that is both dynamic and meaning-centered, it would benefit from a more expansive conceptualization of the audience’s role in meaning-making, a contribution the present paper seeks to offer.

Dramaturgical theories of social performance assert that our social identity is simply “the stylized repetition of acts through time” (Butler 1988, p. 520), and that our “every action is a performance” (Schechner 2006, p. 38). And just as in theatrical performances, such social performances can be said to succeed or fail in varying degrees. From the perspective of cultural pragmatics, performative success has two principal requirements. The first is that the performer’s intended meaning should be correctly apprehended by the audience: “For an action to be successful, an individual or collective actor must be able to communicate the meaning of their actions that they consciously or unconsciously want others to believe” (Alexander 2011a, p. 83; 2006, p. 29; Alexander and Mast 2011, p. 28). The second is that the audience deems the performer authentic in their performance: a successful performance “means that you, as an actor, seem authentic to your audience” (Alexander 2011a, p. 83).

In the case of the second requirement for performative success, cultural pragmatics is consistently committed to a constructivist position in which a performer’s sincerity or authenticity is not an objective, internal state, but rather the way the actor “appears” (Smith 2005, p. 48) to an audience. What is more, this authenticity is always considered an interpretive construction of the audience: “For cultural pragmatics, authenticity is an interpretive category rather than an ontological state. The status of authenticity is arrived at, is contingent, and results from the process of social construction” (Alexander and Mast 2011, p. 13; cf. Mast 2013, p. 11). However, with regard to the other requirement for performative success—that performers “project their meanings effectively” (Alexander 2006, p. 34; 2011a, p. 30)—theorists of cultural pragmatics seem to lose their nerve, wavering between constructivist and essentialist positions. That is, they frequently seem to posit a performer’s intended meaning as an ontological reality that audiences either perceive or fail to perceive. For example, Mast argues that when engaged in social performances, “[actors] communicate their messages” (Mast 2013, p. 10), and similarly, Alexander claims that “Cultural texts are performed so that meanings can be displayed to others” (Alexander 2006, p. 34, italics added). In his reflections on the “performative revolution” in Egypt, Alexander writes the following:

It is consciousness—internal, subjective, and collective—that makes revolutionary movements move. To understand the making of a revolution we must look at it from within, from the inside. What did it mean to those who participated in it, and how did they project these internal meanings to the outside?

(Alexander 2011b, p. x)

My contention is that this focus on “internal meanings” is a mistake, for regardless of whether we consider an actor’s intended meanings ontological states, they are just as epistemologically inaccessible to an audience as the actor’s sense of their own authenticity. Talk of how we can “gain access” to “how social actors feel and think” (Alexander 2011b, p. x) is just as misplaced as talk about how we can gain access to actors’ sincerity or authenticity. We do not have access to any purported interior state of a performer: neither their authenticity nor their intended meanings are available to others. Both are in fact the interpretive constructions of their audience. Blum and McHugh make this point when they argue that “Motive is not something that an actor has—it is not a property of an actor” (Blum and McHugh 1971, p. 103); instead, they insist that “to give a motive is not to locate a cause of the action, but is for some observer to assert how a behavior is socially intelligible by ascribing a socially available actor’s orientation” (Blum and McHugh 1971, p. 100). Alessandro Pizzorno makes a similar point when he argues that the key to an audience’s understanding of social action is its “reception, as opposed to [the] intention” of the actor; the “audience (or public) therefore becomes central” to the meaning-making process (Pizzorno 2008, p. 172).

Among those working within the theory of cultural pragmatics, this tendency toward an essentialist view of performers’ intended meanings has led to an overestimation of the actor’s role in social performances and a disproportionate emphasis on sussing out the actor’s performative strategies (e.g., examining how “Individuals try to shape the prevailing set of meanings through cultural performances” (Smith and Howe 2015, p. 9), “looking at how [social actors] symbolically represent their social experience” (Alexander 2011b, p. x), or determining “the meaning that they, as social actors … wish to have others believe” (Alexander 2006, p. 32). My claim is that this attention should instead be directed toward understanding the audience’s role in social performance, for in the end, it is the audience, not the actor, that will determine the salient meaning of a performance based on their (i.e., the audience’s) system of cultural symbols and their interpretive decisions.

While theories of social performance are in the best analytical position to do so, they are—as currently articulated—unable to explain why behavior such as that described in this paper’s epigraphs gives rise to such divergent interpretations. As I will demonstrate below, it is not an actor’s perceived authenticity (or lack thereof) that constitutes the principal fault line separating their audiences into two opposing camps. Yet until now, actor authenticity has been almost the only hill that social performances have been said to live or die on. One of the confounding factors of this theoretical incapacity has been cultural sociologists’ focus on univocal performances, performances that, given a shared culture, admit of only one reasonable interpretation. This limitation on performance types obscures the fact that it is the audience and not the actor that plays the decisive role in interpreting not only the authenticity of the performer but also the meaning of what is being performed. However, when we expand performance types such that they range along a spectrum from those that are obvious at one pole to those that are indeterminate at the other, we can see that there is a point in between where we can posit ambiguous performances. In viewing social performances as arrayed along a spectrum in this way, the constructed nature of the audience’s interpretation becomes apparent and decisive.

In what follows, I will turn to the performances of so-called “holy fools”, those individuals who have cropped up throughout the historical record to be hailed variously as saints or lunatics. What makes this empirical example such a revealing case is that if one attempts to analyze the performative goals, motivations, or intentions of holy fools (what I am claiming is an errant application of cultural pragmatics), then one has ipso facto prejudiced one’s findings. If a scholar’s theoretical assumption is that actors strategize how they will communicate intended meanings through their performances, then irrational behavior—madness—is not a credible interpretation. Indeed, from the perspective of cultural pragmatics, madness sits in a theoretical blind spot. The fact that holy fools were often interpreted as mad underscores my broader contention that we should center our analyses of performances not on actors’ intended meanings, but on their audience’s construction of meaning.1

2. Ambiguous Performance

The literature on social performance has focused on analyzing an actor’s communication of a single, unified meaning to their audience. The meaning might be complex and consist of multiple elements, but these elements are assumed to be so entwined as to be univocal; they present a single, specific performance whose interpretation is generally obvious to those who share the same culture (e.g., Louis XIV’s performance as the king of France or Einstein’s as a physicist). Cultural pragmatics assumes performances are univocal and explores the means by which they are construed by an audience as either authentic or inauthentic. However, univocal performances cannot alone account for all the social performances we actually encounter. In light of this theoretical incompleteness, I would like to suggest another sort of performance, one that—rather than conveying an obvious, univocal meaning—projects one that is equivocal: an ambiguous performance.

An ambiguous performance projects a single role to its audience, but it is a role that is multistable. Such a performance comprises essential elements of incompatible roles but so unifies them over time as to form a single persona. When faced with such a performance, the audience must choose how to interpret it, favoring one incompatible meaning or the other. To help elucidate one of the key mechanisms underlying ambiguous performances—multistability—an illustration will help.

The ambiguous image of the duck–rabbit (Figure 1) has been employed for decades by psychologists to illustrate the gestalt shift. Through this image, perceptual multistability is obtained because the image leads to an “alternation between two mutually exclusive perceptual states” (Eagleman 2001). And just as the duck–rabbit image is a single representation that admits of only one of two mutually incompatible perceptions at a time, so, too, does an ambiguous performance project a single role that admits of only one of two incompatible interpretations at a time.2 That said, while these roles are incompatible, it would be inaccurate to consider them mere negations of one another (e.g., Ahab could not simultaneously be both captain and first mate of the Pequod, although first mate is not the negation of captain). Interpreting the meaning of a performance in this sense differs from pronouncing a moral or aesthetic evaluation of the performance. It is instead the act of categorizing the type of social identity being performed, not a judgment of that identity.

This is not to suggest that the interpretation of the duck–rabbit image is so relativistic that “anything goes”; so long as the viewers share the same culture, they will not interpret the duck–rabbit image as an ambulance or a sandwich. In the same way, interpretations of ambiguous performances are limited by the shared cultural categories with which an audience makes sense of the world. For this reason, ambiguous performances differ from the sort of ambiguity theorized by Victor Turner.

Turner’s work in developing Arnold van Gennep’s concept of liminality (Turner [1969] 2009, p. 94) has played an important role in discussions of social ambiguity since the 1960s, and indeed, it is an important antecedent to cultural pragmatics more generally. His principal claim in this regard is that liminal states are “indeterminate” (Turner [1969] 2009, p. 95):

The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.

(Turner [1969] 2009, p. 95)

However, the phenomenon of ambiguous performance is determinate. Observers of the duck–rabbit image easily recognize it as either a duck or a rabbit; the image perceived is not “betwixt and between”. It is quite the opposite: to twist Turner’s expression to accurately reflect the character of an ambiguous performance, we would say that the multistable image is “either here or there”; it is interpreted as either a duck or a rabbit, not some indeterminate entity.

In a vein similar to that of Turner, Bernhard Giesen also develops the notion of indeterminate categories when he theorizes the interstitial conceptual space that exists between our stable cultural categories, a space of “undecidedness”, “ambivalence”, and “ambiguity” (Giesen 2012); but this interstitial conceptual space is more nearly the opposite of what I am setting forth. Rather than emerging from the space between social roles, ambiguous performances arise when well-known roles are made to overlap. In Giesen’s investigation, the phenomena under scrutiny are those for which there exist no established roles or categories. Therefore, Giesen’s phenomena are indeterminate on an individual level; each observer must struggle with how to interpret them. However, when it comes to ambiguous performances, salient collective representations do exist, and most audience members will not—as individuals—struggle to identify the meaning of the performance. Instead, the performances are ambiguous at the level of the collectivity. That is to say, while the meaning of an ambiguous performance will appear obvious to most observers, it will carry one “obvious” meaning to some and a different “obvious” meaning to others—just as in the example of the duck–rabbit image.3 In order to demonstrate this in the grit and gristle of social intercourse, I will now turn to an analysis of a social role characterized by ambiguous performance: that of the holy fool.

3. Holy Fools

Holy fools, like martyrs, prophets, apostles, confessors, and ascetics, constitute a unique hagiographic category within the Christian tradition. Although their sanctity is generally recognized in some fashion by most Christian denominations, they are especially revered in the Orthodox Church, where many are canonized and celebrated annually on their saint’s day through the chanting of the saint’s troparion (a short hymn) during the liturgy and veneration through prayers and the kissing of their icon. However, this approbation notwithstanding, holy fools are to most observers some of the most bizarre characters to have walked the stage of history. Observers have consistently considered them repulsive, repellent, repugnant, and worse. And as I will argue below, this interpretive tension is a direct result of the holy fools’ ambiguous performances.

The most conspicuous quality of holy fools is their foolishness. In this, we can include inappropriate social interactions, indecency, pranks, mockery, childishness, imbecility, babbling, fits of violence, and the symptoms of various mental disorders. An early instance of such impropriety on the part of a holy fool can be read in the sixth-century hagiography of St. Symeon of Emesa: “sometimes he pretended to have a limp, sometimes he jumped around, sometimes he dragged himself along on his buttocks, sometimes he stuck out his foot for someone running and tripped him” (Leontius of Neapolis 1996, p. 159). This is not what most would consider the sanctified behavior befitting one of the Church’s holy saints. Indeed, this same saint

often skipped and danced, holding hands with one dancing girl on this side and another on that, and he associated with them and played with them in the middle of the whole circus, so that the disreputable women threw their hands into his lap, fondled him, poked him, and pinched him.

(Leontius of Neapolis 1996, p. 159)

On another occasion, St. Symeon

found a dead dog on a dunghill outside the city, he loosened the rope belt he was wearing, and tied it to the dog’s foot. He dragged the dog as he ran and entered the gate, where there was a children’s school nearby. When the children saw him, they began to cry, “Hey, a crazy abba [i.e., monk]!” And they set about to run after him and box him on the ears.

(Leontius of Neapolis 1996, p. 151)

And then there was Basilakios, a holy fool in 12th-century Byzantium:

When women came to him, he groped their breasts and stared at their legs, muttering nonsense the while and blurting out meaningless words… he ran this way and that, leaping about like a foal and making mad movements with his body. Furthermore, he would swear at those around him.

(Choniates cited in Ivanov 2008, pp. 217–18)

Similarly strange, we read that at the fearful entrance of Ivan the Terrible into the city of Pskov in 1570, St. Nikola Salos galloped on a child’s hobby horse through the cowering crowds (Ivanov 2008, p. 298). In the early twentieth century, the following was reported of the holy fool, Mariia Shudskaia:

Some people she’d hit, others she’d scold, and she’d smash other people’s windows. Sometimes she’d do what would inevitably get her beaten. She could climb into somebody’s stove and pour the broth from the pots. The plainness with which she accused people got her arrested.

(Ivanov 2008, p. 355)

And upon Shudskaia’s institutionalization, within the cell where she was confined, she would scribble across the walls with her fingers dipped in her own feces (Ivanov 2008, p. 355). St. Terence was also repeatedly confined in asylums for his apparent insanity (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 60). Indeed, the concept of insanity, along with confining those who were deemed insane, stretches back to the classical world. However, it was usually the case that those considered mad, but not especially dangerous, simply wandered about, destitute. True to the cultural role of insanity, the holy fool is invariably indigent; he is frequently homeless, habitually hungry, and often nearly or completely naked in public, regardless of the weather. Orthodox theologian Kallistos Ware draws a parallel between the holy fool’s lack of material possessions and his lack of sanity: “Clothed in rags even in the winter cold … he renounces not only material possessions, but also what others regard as his sanity and mental balance” (Ware 2001, p. 99). In the fourteenth century, Blessed Nikolai Kochanov (“The Cabbage”) walked the streets

barefooted and clothed only in old rags. He possessed nothing of his own but lived on what was given to him by pious people. The saint dressed no differently in winter, but endured the most extreme cold wearing only his rags…. He presented himself as a ridiculous simpleton.

(Novakshonoff 1997, p. 19)

Holy fools are sometimes nuns, monks, deacons, or priests, and though they occasionally reside in monastic communities or haunt the lonely regions of the wilderness, more often than not, they spend their days in the midst of great urban centers. While this choice of urban habitation is unusual for those who have dedicated themselves to pursuing the highest degree of Christian sanctity, what makes holy fools so anomalous in the company of other saints is their frequently profane, routinely criminal, often indecent, and occasionally blasphemous behavior. Given this outrageous manner of living, the questions one might reasonably ask of holy fools are “Where is their holiness? How is it that some come to be interpreted as saints?” And this questioning takes us back to the cultural-pragmatic description of how meaning is made.4

4. Scripts and Background Narratives

St. Isidora of fourth-century Egypt is frequently cited as among the earliest holy fools. From that point forward, holy fools appear periodically throughout the historical and hagiographic record. Cultural pragmatics agrees with Geertz’s claim that “most of what we need to comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or whatever is insinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly examined” (Geertz 1973, p. 9). Given this key to understanding how the meaning of a performance is constructed, an inquiry into the background representations—the myths, narratives, history, and culture—shared by the audiences of holy fools is critical to seeing the behavior of holy fools as constituting ambiguous performances.

In their interpretation of holy fools’ performances, audiences make use of a variety of cultural categories, categories that delimit what is “receivable in their culture” (Pizzorno 2008, p. 172). They construct and attribute social identity by dialing up shared notions of what it is to be a Christian saint, but they also draw on codes of madness, immorality, and demonic possession. It is the synthesis of elements from these sets of incompatible roles that renders these performances ambiguous. On this issue, Lisa McCormick suggests that an actor’s script might proceed from the performer’s audience: “Every social performance involves a script—premeditated, improvised, or attributed—that draws on shared background symbols and meanings in order to be both intelligible and meaningful in the manner intended by the author” (McCormick 2006, p. 122, italics added). The first part of this statement highlights the fact that a performer’s intention need not determine the meaning understood by their audience. In fact, I am arguing that since an audience never has direct access to a performer’s intentions, the social meaning of an actor’s performance is always attributed. This attribution might, of course, align with the inscrutable intention of the performer, but it need not. However, the last part of the McCormick passage shows how difficult this idea is to maintain when equipped with only the univocal concept of performance. McCormick backpedals and, with the words “meaningful in the manner intended by the author”, brings the actor’s intention back to a determinative role vis-à-vis the audience’s interpretation of their performance.

Although saintliness takes on a variety of guises in the Christian tradition, there are certain features that have remained central throughout the centuries, and holy fools both follow and flout these characteristics to the confusion and consternation of their spectators. A helpful text in unearthing the particular codes obtained from the time of the earliest holy fools is the sixth-century Words of the Elders. This miscellany of the lives and teachings of early Christian holy men and women has been “massively influential, being quoted again and again in sermons and treatises” (Ward 2003, p. xxxi). Another pivotal work is The Life of Saint Antony, written by St. Athanasius in the fourth century. The Life is generally considered the first Christian hagiography, and as such has been widely circulated, contemplated, and emulated from its first appearance right up to the present.

Among the qualities most regularly associated with Christian saintliness from the fourth century onward are fervent prayer, lack of possessions, charity, humility, fortitude, and, naturally, a Christocentric worldview (Ward 2003). We have already noted several examples of the poverty and fortitude of the holy fools. Along with their incarnation of these virtues, these fools are also models of prayer and humility. “St. Andrew spent his nights in vigil, praying for himself, for the whole world, and especially for those who had offended and injured him” (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 4). In the eleventh century, St. Isaaky the Recluse “locked himself in a small cave … [and] prayed to God with tears” (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 14). In fourteenth-century Novgorod, St. Nicholas Kochanov “was frequently beaten, abused and spat upon. Not only did he endure this patiently, but he covered his offenders with love and secretly prayed for those who offended him” (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 19). Concerning St. Vissarion, living in fifth-century Egypt, we read that

So enrapt was he with prayers to the Savior that he could not bear to lose even a moment of prayer to sleep. When weakness of the body did force him to rest, he refused to lie down, but took a brief nap standing up, leaning against something, or else sitting upright.

(Novakshonoff 1997, p. 9)

Beyond the gift of prayer, and in spite of their destitution, holy fools also manage to give material charity. We read of the fourteenth-century St. Theodore of Novgorod that

he had no permanent dwelling. He walked barefoot and half-naked even in the most cruel frosts. If some pious person gave him something, he would immediately give it away to the poor.

(Novakshonoff 1997, p. 23)

In fifth-century Egypt, we read of St. Serapion that on one occasion he “saw a debtor being dragged past him to prison. He had nothing to give the poor man, so the saint sold his Gospel and paid the man’s debt” (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 6). In early nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, people “thought this strangely dressed, scarcely shod woman [i.e., St. Xenia] was merely a simple-minded beggar” (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 55). When offered pennies as alms, she would accept them, only to turn and immediately “distribute these copper pennies to the poor” (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 55). In the seventeenth century, Blessed Prokopy of Vyatka performed an act so shocking that it seems to test the bounds of charity, if not sanity:

The elder Fr. John’s wife suffered terribly from a tooth pain; the priest met the Saint in the Forerunner Church and said, “Servant of God, pray to the Lord that He will grant healing to my wife who is suffering from tooth illness.” At this, Prokopy tore out one of his own teeth and gave it to the priest saying quietly, “Take it”.

(Novakshonoff 1997, p. 49)

Holy fools perform these qualities of Christian sanctity—extraordinary feats of prayer, poverty, humility, charity, and abandonment to God—exquisitely. However, other essential characteristics of saintliness are not merely eschewed but positively trampled. The cultural code that defines saintliness in Christendom also includes such qualities as quiet, solitude, flight from the city, self-control, discretion, peace-making, segregation from the opposite sex and those considered sinners, modesty with regard to one’s body, wisdom, obedience, and veneration for the Church, its liturgy, its clergy, and its sacraments (Ward 2003).

What is more, beyond merely defying these saintly codes, holy fools zealously assume the characteristics indicative of madness, violence, immorality, and most puzzling of all, demonic possession. For example, when taunted by children, “Blessed Xenia flew at them, waving her cane in the air. The residents of the Storona were so startled at seeing the blessed one in such anger that they took immediate steps to prevent any further offenses toward her” (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 55). Such outbursts and threats of violence are not uncommon in the lives of holy fools. After dinner at the home of a priest, “blessed Prokoppi took a knife and began to brandish it, and he held the knife to [the priest’s] head and to his chest, and everyone was horrified and though he would stab the priest” (Ivanov 2008, p. 325). Such transgressive behavior is the norm for holy fools. An incident from the sixth century reveals multiple egregious violations of the saintly code. There was a village chief who, aware of St. Symeon’s reputation, was dubious as to the authenticity of his dementia. Traveling to Emesa, he

found Symeon by chance while one prostitute was carrying him and another was whipping him. Immediately the village headman was scandalized, and he reasoned with himself and said in Syriac, “Does Satan himself not believe this false abba is fornicating with them?” At once, the fool left the women and came toward the village headman, who was about a stone’s throw away from him, and hit him. And stripping off his tunic, he danced naked and whistled.

(Leontius of Neapolis 1996, p. 160)

In addition to the holy fool’s lunacy and immorality, he also employs the representations of sacrilege, which is perhaps the behavior most antithetical to the code of sanctity. In mockery of the holy order of monasticism, we read that “Whenever any children came to the cave, the fool [St. Prokopy of Ustiug] dressed them as monks. For this, the parents often abused or struck him” (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 16). In another act of desecration, St. Prokopy of Vyatka seized a “young man by the arm, dragged him into the amvon [the raised platform in the middle of a church’s nave] and shoved him through the royal gates into the sanctuary [a sanctified space strictly forbidden to anyone not appropriately ordained]” (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 50). In violation of the most holy, mournful period of the liturgical calendar—a time during which a strict fast is to be observed in remembrance of Christ’s crucifixion—we read of St. Symeon that “From early on the morning of Holy Thursday he sat in the cake shop and gorged himself, so that those who saw him were scandalized” (Leontius of Neapolis 1996, p. 160). And in a crowning act of blasphemy, we read of the same holy fool that

sometimes when Sunday came, he took a string of sausages and wore them as a [deacon’s] stole. In his left hand he held a pot of mustard, and he dipped [the sausages in the mustard] and ate them from morning on. And he smeared mustard on the mouths of those who came to joke with him.

(Leontius of Neapolis 1996, p. 164)

St. Isidora behaved as one who was demonically possessed:

in a convent at Tabennisi in Egypt there was a nun who pretended to be possessed by a demon and to be a fool…. The other nuns called her a sale, for this was the word, Palladios says, which they used for women who were afflicted by demons (paschousai). And since she was supposed to be a sale they beat her and humiliated her.

(Ryden 2001, p. 106)

And Blessed Prokoppi committed murder:

Early one morning the blessed Prokopii [of Viatka] came to the house of the burgher Danil Kalsin … and he lay down on the stove. Danil and his children were then at matins, but his youngest was still asleep, as is proper for infants. Prokopii picked up the child and hurled it down from the stove onto the floor, and it died instantly.

(Ivanov 2008, p. 402)

With such profusion of unholy attributes—even when coupled with a smattering of saintly virtues—it might be difficult to understand how it would occur to anyone that holy fools are anything other than lunatics or demoniacs. Indeed, in his Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium, Youval Rotman describes how “Byzantine readers encountering the holy fool as a hagiographic figure would be incapable of discerning the ‘holy’ from the ‘demonized’” (Rotman 2016, p. 59). But there is another body of background symbols essential to the scripts of holy foolishness: those related to Christian scripture. The shared narratives ensconced in the Old and New Testaments form another significant tributary to the background representations drawn on by holy fools and their audiences. And as we will see, these biblical narratives occupy a nebulous area between the other elements of saintliness and madness as they were lived out in late antiquity and on through the Middle Ages, narratives that, while not constituting holy foolishness themselves, certainly might suggest this sort of performance to some of their readers.

Several of the Hebrew prophets participate in symbolic performances that were considered as bizarre 3000 years ago as they would be today. However, these outlandish prophetic acts had specific symbolic importance. They were understood to be object lessons that symbolized coming events or the spiritual state of God’s people. In fact, madness more commonly figures as a form of punishment in early religious myths and heroic fables: Deuteronomy 6:5 explicitly states that “The Lord will smite thee with madness”. Throughout the Old Testament, we read of many possessed by devils and how the Lord punished Nebuchadnezzar by reducing him to bestial madness. In stark contrast to holy fools, far from embracing the arduous mantle of foolishness, the Hebrew prophet Hosea bitterly complained that “the prophet is considered a fool, the inspired man a maniac” (Hosea 9:7), and Jeremiah denounced the wickedness of Shemaiah when the latter wrote to the priest Zephaniah, insisting that he “should put any madman who acts like a prophet into the stocks and neck irons” (Jeremiah 29:26). In fact, Jeremiah goes so far as to accuse the Lord of leading him to enact his particular prophetic performance. Feeling duped by God, he laments, “I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me” (Jeremiah 20:7). Given this self-consciousness, Rosen concludes that “No one can show that the Israelite prophets were mentally ill in the sense of suffering from psychosis” (Rosen 1969, p. 61). The same cannot be said of holy fools.

In the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth was sometimes seen as a lunatic and possessed by the devil. His family said of him, “He is out of his mind” (Mark 3:21), and the teachers of the law insisted, “He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons” (Mark 3:22). While Jesus performed unconventionally as he cast moneychangers out of the Temple with impassioned indignation, commingled with prostitutes and tax collectors, challenged religious authorities, and flouted purity and dietary regulations, he seems a far cry from the holy fools. He is never imbecilic, deranged, or immodest. On the contrary, he is generally depicted as grave, engages in rational argumentation with some of the most learned men of ancient Palestine, and when accused of being a demoniac, vehemently denies the charge (Mark 3:23–29).

Although Jesus was accused in ways similar to the holy fools, it is the apostle Paul’s exhortation that “If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a ‘fool’ that he may become wise” (I Cor. 3:18), coupled with his claim that he and the other apostles are “fools for Christ” (I Cor. 4:10), that makes the most explicit contribution to holy foolishness as a social type. Here, we have what prima facie appears to be a script for holy foolishness emanating from the heart of the New Testament. The difficulty with this reading—in terms of interpreting it as a license for the type of folly we have seen on the part of the holy fools—is that St. Paul evinces no behavior other than that of a sober, wise, pious, and eminently sane individual. And the express purpose of his admonition comes immediately after the verses cited above when he writes, “Therefore I urge you to imitate me” (I Cor. 4:16). Theologian Lennart Ryden explains that what St. Paul “had in mind was in essence that the Christian message is a matter of belief, not of reason and speculation. This was also how the Fathers understood the text of the Bible” (Ryden 2001, pp. 106–7).

5. Interpreting Ambiguous Performances

Having reviewed the performance of numerous holy fools in the context of their relevant background representations, we can now turn toward their interpretation: how their audiences construe the meaning of this foolery. Alexander observes that “even the best acting … cannot ensure that the audience gets it right” (Alexander 2011a, p. 74). But in the case of a holy fool’s performance, what could “getting it right” possibly mean? Until now, theories of social performances have had only the univocal concept of performance with which to work, reducing nearly all questions of interpretation to matters of actor authenticity. Accordingly, a performance is successful to the degree the audience deems it “natural” and “unfeigned”. However, if this was all there was to decoding such performances, how would someone who felt that the holy fool was authentic interpret their behavior? Are they an authentic saint or an authentic lunatic? The following two historical events, which are separated by nearly a millennium, illustrate this quandary. In the first,

A lunatic who often disturbed religious services, especially at the elevation of the Host by lifting the skirts of praying women, was seized at More’s order and flogged until the lesson “was beaten home.”

(More cited in Rosen 1969, pp. 140–41)

In the second, an individual

took nuts, and entering the church at the beginning of the liturgy, he threw the nuts and put out the candles. When they hurried to run after him, he went up to the pulpit, and from there he pelted the women with nuts. With great trouble, they chased after him, and while he was going out, he overturned the table of the pastry chefs, who (nearly) beat him to death.

(Leontius of Neapolis 1996, p. 151)

While sainthood was granted to one, insanity was ascribed to the other. But on what basis? As I have already noted, actors’ intentions are not directly accessible to an audience, so some other factor must influence an observer’s decision to attribute a particular motive. Of course, in all symbolic action, the audience brings a certain amount of bias to the task, a bias that colors their interpretations of any given performance. Alexander takes pains to show that the increase in audience heterogeneity is what makes authentic, univocal performances so difficult to achieve in our complex, modern society (Alexander 2006; 2011a). However, in the case of an ambiguous performance, its interpretation runs up against a different conundrum; there simply is no way to determine what role is being performed based on the performance itself, because the performance is not univocal. The meaning of the performance must be chosen—consciously or otherwise—by the audience, for each audience member is obliged to look beyond the performance itself and rely on their own interpretive inclination. And literary theorist Norman Holland points to where that interpretive inclination is located, claiming that we can explain “differences in interpretation by examining differences in the personalities of the interpreters” (Holland 1980, p. 123). Putting it succinctly, he adds, “interpretation is a function of identity” (Holland 1980, p. 123, italics in original). I would merely add that while one’s identity is involved in any act of interpretation, when witnessing a univocal performance, this fact is occluded by the interpretive agreement with all other audience members vis-à-vis the actor’s social role.

But things are different in the face of an ambiguous performance. In the presence of these performances—performances in which interpretations diverge across the social group—it is some aspect of an audience member’s identity that is exposed. Specifically, what is revealed through an audience member’s interpretation of an ambiguous performance is their membership in what literary theorist Stanley Fish calls an interpretive community. “Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies,” strategies that constitute approaches to constructing interpretations and “assigning their intentions” (Fish 2004, p. 219, italics added). This last bit is important, because as we have seen, cultural pragmatics has long assumed that performers’ intentions are internal states to be correctly or incorrectly guessed at by an audience. In contrast, I—along with Fish—maintain that performers’ intentions are constructed through the act of audience interpretation in the same way that performers’ authenticity is constructed. What is more, “these [interpretive] strategies exist prior” to the act of reading a text (Fish 2004, p. 219), or, in the present case, prior to observing a performance. In other words, one’s interpretive strategies are part of one’s identity that is brought to bear on one’s interpretations. And the more diverse the interpretive communities within a social group, the more heterogeneous the interpretations of ambiguous performances will be.

The expected interpretive heterogeneity of holy fools’ performances can be readily seen in the historical record. To most observers, St. Symeon seemed “altogether deprived of his senses and mad”, yet there were some who “expressed their respect to him by a bow” (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 10). St. Xenia’s family asserted that she had “taken complete leave of her senses” and was “mentally unbalanced”, whereas a certain Anatova knew “Xenia to be truly saintly” (Novakshonoff 1997, pp. 54, 56). In the case of St. Isidora, while her fellow nuns considered her “a mad woman,” St. Pitirim, when introduced to her, “fell at her feet and said, ‘Bless me, Amma [Mother]’” (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 2). In fact, the interpretation of holy foolishness has been so controversial that the Orthodox Church has actively worked to suppress such performances. In 692, the Council of Trullo censured those “who pretend to be possessed by demons, and in their depraved behavior copy such persons with feigned mimicry” (Ware 1984, p. 179), and in the eleventh century, Nikon of the Black Mountain asserted that “The divine laws condemn those who practice folly after the manner of the great Symeon and of Andrew, and today such things are altogether forbidden” (Ware 1984, p. 180). And these prohibitions continue to the present day (Ware 1984, p. 179).

6. The Parabolic Nature of Ambiguous Performance

One final point should be made about the unique nature of interpreting ambiguous performances.

There is a striking parallel between the performances of holy fools and the pedagogy of Jesus of Nazareth. It is well known that Jesus taught in parables, those pithy stories that—if one could interpret them correctly—carried with them profound truths about the kingdom of heaven. When his disciples desired to know why Jesus did not teach simply and directly, they went to him and asked, “‘Why do you speak to the people in parables?’ He replied, ‘Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them’” (Matthew 13:10–11). In this pivotal passage, Jesus is revealing to the disciples that he speaks ambiguously so that only those whom God has chosen will be able to understand his message. Similarly, when Jesus asked his disciples, referring to himself,

“Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets”. “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven”.

(Matthew 16, pp. 13–17)

In both these instances, Jesus is reflecting on his own ambiguous performance. Based on the available system of cultural symbols, multiple meanings of his parables and his identity are available to his audience members, and the interpretation each audience member chooses is allegedly dictated by the activity—or inactivity—of God in that person’s heart. This gesture toward the audience is the interpretive key to decoding the ambiguous performance of holy foolishness as well. McCormick hints at this when she states that, “Because they are differently positioned, differently equipped, and differently invested in the … performance, segments of the audience draw on different background symbols for their interpretation” (McCormick 2006, pp. 126–27). Similarly, in the case of holy fools, it is differentiation within the audience that is identified as the decisive factor in their interpretations. To wit, in the case of St. Terence, “Many people understood and profited greatly from his spiritual lessons. Others hated him for his foolish ways” (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 60). Similarly, St. Vissarion “taught everyone in the manner of a fool, with actions and words that were comprehensible only to those for whom they were intended” (Novakshonoff 1997, p. 10). The multistability of an ambiguous performance can even be experienced differently by a single individual over time. After having been saved from poisoning by St. Symeon, a tavern keeper “was edified and considered Symeon to be holy.” However, immediately afterward, following a bizarre encounter in the tavern keeper’s home, he changes his mind, avowing that the saint “is completely possessed. I know, and no one can persuade me otherwise. He tried to rape my wife. And he eats meat as if he’s godless” (Leontius of Neapolis 1996, p. 153).

In the end, we see that ambiguous performances are parabolic (i.e., akin to a parable), requiring their audiences to interpret them based on some aspect of the audience members’ own identity. This is the opposite of the cultural pragmatic conceptualization of performances, where actors perform in an effort to “display for others the meaning of their social situation” (Alexander 2011a, p. 28, italics added). Ware sums up this parabolic characteristic of the holy fool’s performance by remarking that the holy fool “is a living parable” (Ware 1984, p. 179).

7. Conclusions

As currently practiced, cultural pragmatics has its thumb on the scale of actors’ communicative autonomy. But the resulting imbalance robs the audience of its interpretive autonomy. Marcel Proust wrote that “each reader is, when he reads, the reader of his own self” (Proust 2003, p. 322, italics added), and the theory of social performance I put forward here is an attempt to reorient cultural pragmatics in light of Proust’s insight. Instead of seeing social performances as merely communicating (or failing to communicate) the performer’s identity, these performances can now also be seen to communicate something about the audience’s identity; indeed, this suggests that performances—to a certain extent—interpret their audiences. In the case of a univocal performance, we simply learn that its audience members share the same general set of background codes; those who share the same cultural meanings will tend to interpret the meaning of the performance similarly. And ambiguous performances, as social performances, are no different. However, ambiguous performances additionally compel their audiences to reveal something else about themselves by forcing them to choose—consciously or not—between a performance’s incompatible interpretations, relying on their own interpretive positions to make their choices. In this way, ambiguous performances fulfill the same function as parables. That is, ambiguous performances are a finer blade, a more subtle analytical tool in that they can distinguish interpretive differences within a social group in a way unavailable to the blunter instrument of unitary performances.

One example of how this reoriented conception of cultural pragmatics is illuminating is in regard to the advent of Artificial Intelligence (or, more to the point—since this term is already in wide usage for behavior that few people actually regard as philosophically interesting—we might substitute the expression synthetic consciousness). In cultural pragmatics as currently practiced, what would “getting it right” mean in terms of an audience’s interpretation of a machine as conscious? Trying to divine a machine’s intended meanings is just as much a fool’s errand as the same attempt made on human actors. Thus, the purported conscious behavior of machines will be an interpretive construction of their audiences in the same way that all social performances are thus constructed. Interestingly, this insight was rejected in the conceptualization of what we know today as the Turing Test.5 Before laying out his test for the presence of machine intelligence, Turing raises the idea of putting such a question to the interpretive community itself through “a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll” (Turing 1950, p. 433). But he immediately rejoins that “this is absurd” (Turing 1950, p. 433). And of course, simply surveying the members of a social group would be methodologically absurd if one were attempting to determine the presence of some sort of ontologically “real” state of consciousness.6 But cultural pragmatics—properly oriented—is not in the business of identifying such phenomena. Instead, what a statistical survey could reveal are the contours and compositions of differing interpretive communities within society, including the particular cultural meanings held by the members of each of those communities. Thus, we can assert that in the event that machines perform ambiguously vis-à-vis their purported consciousness, their performance will (among other things) serve to interpret their audiences, revealing their membership in particular interpretive communities with all that that entails about their social identities.

A less speculative and more mundane example of being confronted by an ambiguous performance is that of political commentator Bret Stephens’s reaction to American President Donald Trump. In a New York Times op-ed piece (3/28/2019), Stephens (2019) asks, “Is Trump Keyser Söze—Or Inspector Clouseau?” That is, is the president a calculating political genius who merely plays at being imbecilic, or is he a bumbling idiot who luckily succeeds in spite of his ineptitude? Stephens describes his own experience of performative multistability when trying to make sense of Trump’s ambiguous performance: “For years I’ve bounced between these two interpretations of the president—at times astonished by his incompetence; at other times amazed by his cunning” (NYT 3/28/2019). Furthermore, Stephens hints at what I am calling the parabolic nature of ambiguous performances (the fact that interpretation is guided by an audience’s own identity rather than the identity of the performer): “The difference between suspicious and shambolic behavior often depends on who is doing the watching. Where some see chaos, others detect patterns. From a certain distance, they can be hard to tell apart” (NYT 3/28/2019). In other words, how one interprets a performance depends on who is doing the interpreting. The closer a performance is to the univocal end of the continuum, the more the interpretation of that performance’s meaning will simply reflect its unitary cultural script, leading to (near) unanimity in interpretation for audiences who share a culture. Contrariwise, the closer a performance is to the ambiguous end of the continuum, the more the audience interpretations will cluster around the society’s disparate interpretive communities.