Yurodstvo, holy foolishness, names a distinctive Eastern Orthodox, especially Russian, form of asceticism in which a person, the yurodivy, deliberately adopts behavior that appears mad, socially transgressive or simply foolish as a spiritual discipline, drawing scriptural warrant from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, we are fools for Christ's sake, read as license for a form of holiness that inverts ordinary social respectability rather than pursuing it.
A yurodivy typically lived in extreme poverty, often went half clothed or unclothed even in harsh Russian winters, wandered rather than settling, and behaved in ways that could appear irrational or disruptive by ordinary social standards, a self chosen humiliation the tradition read as a genuine spiritual achievement precisely because it required abandoning the dignity and social status an ordinary ascetic could still claim through visible piety and discipline. Basil the Blessed, a sixteenth century Moscow yurodivy after whom Saint Basil's Cathedral on Red Square is popularly named, is among the tradition's best known and most venerated figures, canonized as a saint within the wider category of holy foolishness the Russian church formally recognized.