Theologians have – let’s just call it – a bit of a thing for Dostoevsky. I first noticed the term holy fool in one of his books.1
These days I realize that the living Spirit has a regular habit of taking me toward that which I am absolutely intended to see. And this Holy fool thing, once seen, has nibbled away and whispered to my heart ever since.
The thing about Dostoevsky’s holy fools that captures my interest is that his fools who end up holy almost inevitably turn out to be seriously fallen characters. Folks who have the sort of unenviable pasts that no one would put their hand up for. They may well end up among the righteous few, if indeed there is such a category? But they sure as hell don’t begin that way.
Rather, they are the people who eventually get made holy precisely because they are so utterly broken by past misdeeds. What 12-step folk call “rock bottoms.”
Harriet Murav opens her book on the subject, by first stepping briefly outside the Russian context.2 She identifies Francis of Assisi, famed for his radical asceticism, as meeting all the necessary benchmarks to be a signed up member of the Holy fool’s gang.
Indeed, the mystic from Assisi is far from alone. Countless other women and men throughout the centuries have walked this humble path. The commonality between them, if you read between the lines, is that not only do they adopt God dependence (humility) as their central goal, but their holiness remains inextricably linked to their former brokenness.
From Palestine to the Connemara mountains, these strange pursuers of humility emerge in every time and place. However, it is in the Russian Orthodox East, according to Murav, where this model of being an utter fool with Christ, has longstanding and entrenched cultural acceptance.
As mentioned above, it is not just the counter-cultural embrace of poverty that these fools collectively embrace that gets my attention. Although it is impressive. It is rather Dostoevsky’s portrayal of them as deeply flawed, broken people who are down for the count and fully fallen long before they get raised.
There is, it seems to me, a vast chasm between these exemplars of holy living, who make absolute God dependence and radically inclusive love their credo, and the more popular, and let’s be honest much easier, handmade boots and designer suits, prosperity-pursuing modes of spiritual living. But hey, horses for courses. Not everyone walks to the mountaintop in shabby shoes.
It may well be that holy fools are more ‘chosen’ than people who choose that life. One thing is for sure: with all due deference to the Eastern examples, the fools for God have always been amongst us and still are. But you’ve got to get a little crazy to walk in their strange ways.
The entrance level for holy fools is no easy ride, where despite best efforts of striving for this or that in life, you wake one day and find yourself all out of luck, beat-up and broken. In the realm of holy fools, when you’ve down for the count with nowhere left to fall but onto your knees, you’ve arrived. Everything has its price, and the price for a holy fool is complete defeat. Or to put it another way, in the words of a Jewish holy fool from long ago: “Power is made perfect in weakness…When I am weak, I am strong.” (2 Cor 12:9-10).
The path to the holy fool mountain may not be the easiest, but the view for the few that dare to tread in their shoes is boundless and beautiful beyond belief.
— Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts with Epilogue, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Vintage Books, 1992). [↩]
- Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1992), 1-16. [↩]