Who is the Holy Man? What is his character? It seems that the answer is readily available. To Confucius, he is the superior man of the following passage: “The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.” To Saint Augustine it is also the question of righteousness: “Unclean in the sight of God is everyone who is unrighteous; clean therefore is everyone who is righteous; if not in the sight of men, yet in the sight of God, who judges without error.” Both these characterizations also happen to fit the rather scary figure of Nietzsche’s Ascetic Priest, who appears as a figure of major importance in my individualistic section The Genius And The Schoolman, where he belongs much more properly than in the Religion section, on account of his personality, whereas even the regularly churchgoing public will not necessarily honor the righteous, as Saint Augustine’s above quote strongly suggests. (Surely, his words “in the sight of men” include most respectable, churchgoing men in their number!)
The point of this entry, however, is not to analyze the character of the holy man from the inside, but to look at him from the outside, as a figure of religious veneration. These two angles of vision are understandably confused much of the time, when we try to take a mental measure of the holy man as we see him.
Here is a pertinent paragraph from Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human (143), which I would like to focus my attention on, right now:
“Not what the holy man is, but what he signifies in the eyes of those who are not holy, gives him his world-historical value. It was because one was wrong about him that he gained such an extraordinary power, with which he dominated the imaginations of whole peoples and ages. He did not know himself. He was not an especially good person, even less an especially wise person, but he signified something which exceeded all human measure of goodness and wisdom. Faith in him supported Faith in the divine and miraculous, in a religious meaning of all existence. Even in our time, that no longer believes in God, there are still thinkers (like Schopenhauer) who believe in the holy man.”
This superb insight supports my point that the two angles of vision, from the inside and from the outside, do not coincide with any degree of substantiality. Paraphrasing Saint Augustine, the holy man in the sight of God and the holy man in the sight of man are seldom, if at all, the same.
And yet, there is no religion without at least some kind of cult of the holy man. People need the traditions, and also the superstitions of their culture so that they can comprehend the incomprehensible. They cannot understand the unlimited concept of the Absolute without some degree of limiting reference, and, therefore, they absolutely need their religion, in order to build that bridge. But even that would not be enough. Even their God of Religion is too high up there, to be adequately understood, and some sort of simple, down-to-earth connection is in order. That is why they so much need the presence of a comprehensible mystery and of a comprehensible “miraculous,” and they find that, not as a philosophical abstract of their mind, which only a few can do, but as a palpable reality readily open to their senses, which surrounds the holy man, so they can now, at last, understand the subject of their worship (the God of their Religion). Once again I am pointing to the necessity of an ordinary religious experience and of an ordinary tradition for transcending it extraordinarily, on the upward climb to the Absolute.
From the holy man, to the holy fool. There is a lot to be said here, some other time, perhaps. But, for now, the following will have to suffice. In this connection, I wish to particularly focus on the Russian historical fascination with, and virtually religious veneration of, the “holy fool,” such as was the legendary (although also a solidly historical figure) St. Basil (Vasili Blazhenny), the Holy Fool, of the Red Square fame.
The Russian fascination with mentally disturbed people is by no means unique to the Russian nation. That infamous son of Catholic Papal Italy turned a cantankerous atheist, Benito Mussolini, remarked in a 1904 speech that “the history of the saints is mainly the history of insane people.” A measure of insanity, as the stuff that most Christian saints are made of, has been observed by all critics of Christianity, and thus cannot be limited to the religious tradition of one nation. My choice of Russia, in this case, is a matter of example, rather than of a particular singling out principle.
Let me say right away now that there is no conceptual incongruity between Schopenhauer’s holy man and the Russian holy fool. Ivan-Durák (Ivan the Fool), who is a staple character of the Russian folklore, always turns out at the end as the wisest of them all. I may be contradicted that there is a chasm of difference which separates a wise man masquerading as a fool to fool the fools, and the mentally-ill basket case, whose real-life cult has more religious significance in Russia than the popular admiration for Ivan-Durák of the fairy tales. Yet, there is no discrepancy here, either. The fool on the inside, and the fool on the outside are two different angles of vision, in real terms, but not in the realm of popular perception, where the inside and the outside cannot be so readily separated. In popular perception there is a religiously motivated expectation, as well as a lingering suspicion that inside a fool there hides, indeed, a holy man, and it is this expectation that transforms a fool into a holy fool. After all, if we take into account Apostle Paul’s famous phrase “We are fools for Christ’s sake” (I Corinthians 4:10), the Russian veneration of the fool as a holy man makes even better sense, in terms of its Christian origin and doctrinal consistency.
This important theme is by no means exhausted, even by the limited standards of an entry, and it will, in all likelihood, be continued, later on…
The point of this entry, however, is not to analyze the character of the holy man from the inside, but to look at him from the outside, as a figure of religious veneration. These two angles of vision are understandably confused much of the time, when we try to take a mental measure of the holy man as we see him.
Here is a pertinent paragraph from Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human (143), which I would like to focus my attention on, right now:
“Not what the holy man is, but what he signifies in the eyes of those who are not holy, gives him his world-historical value. It was because one was wrong about him that he gained such an extraordinary power, with which he dominated the imaginations of whole peoples and ages. He did not know himself. He was not an especially good person, even less an especially wise person, but he signified something which exceeded all human measure of goodness and wisdom. Faith in him supported Faith in the divine and miraculous, in a religious meaning of all existence. Even in our time, that no longer believes in God, there are still thinkers (like Schopenhauer) who believe in the holy man.”
This superb insight supports my point that the two angles of vision, from the inside and from the outside, do not coincide with any degree of substantiality. Paraphrasing Saint Augustine, the holy man in the sight of God and the holy man in the sight of man are seldom, if at all, the same.
And yet, there is no religion without at least some kind of cult of the holy man. People need the traditions, and also the superstitions of their culture so that they can comprehend the incomprehensible. They cannot understand the unlimited concept of the Absolute without some degree of limiting reference, and, therefore, they absolutely need their religion, in order to build that bridge. But even that would not be enough. Even their God of Religion is too high up there, to be adequately understood, and some sort of simple, down-to-earth connection is in order. That is why they so much need the presence of a comprehensible mystery and of a comprehensible “miraculous,” and they find that, not as a philosophical abstract of their mind, which only a few can do, but as a palpable reality readily open to their senses, which surrounds the holy man, so they can now, at last, understand the subject of their worship (the God of their Religion). Once again I am pointing to the necessity of an ordinary religious experience and of an ordinary tradition for transcending it extraordinarily, on the upward climb to the Absolute.
From the holy man, to the holy fool. There is a lot to be said here, some other time, perhaps. But, for now, the following will have to suffice. In this connection, I wish to particularly focus on the Russian historical fascination with, and virtually religious veneration of, the “holy fool,” such as was the legendary (although also a solidly historical figure) St. Basil (Vasili Blazhenny), the Holy Fool, of the Red Square fame.
The Russian fascination with mentally disturbed people is by no means unique to the Russian nation. That infamous son of Catholic Papal Italy turned a cantankerous atheist, Benito Mussolini, remarked in a 1904 speech that “the history of the saints is mainly the history of insane people.” A measure of insanity, as the stuff that most Christian saints are made of, has been observed by all critics of Christianity, and thus cannot be limited to the religious tradition of one nation. My choice of Russia, in this case, is a matter of example, rather than of a particular singling out principle.
Let me say right away now that there is no conceptual incongruity between Schopenhauer’s holy man and the Russian holy fool. Ivan-Durák (Ivan the Fool), who is a staple character of the Russian folklore, always turns out at the end as the wisest of them all. I may be contradicted that there is a chasm of difference which separates a wise man masquerading as a fool to fool the fools, and the mentally-ill basket case, whose real-life cult has more religious significance in Russia than the popular admiration for Ivan-Durák of the fairy tales. Yet, there is no discrepancy here, either. The fool on the inside, and the fool on the outside are two different angles of vision, in real terms, but not in the realm of popular perception, where the inside and the outside cannot be so readily separated. In popular perception there is a religiously motivated expectation, as well as a lingering suspicion that inside a fool there hides, indeed, a holy man, and it is this expectation that transforms a fool into a holy fool. After all, if we take into account Apostle Paul’s famous phrase “We are fools for Christ’s sake” (I Corinthians 4:10), the Russian veneration of the fool as a holy man makes even better sense, in terms of its Christian origin and doctrinal consistency.
This important theme is by no means exhausted, even by the limited standards of an entry, and it will, in all likelihood, be continued, later on…
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