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Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ's Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality
Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.
- GenresChristianityReligion
260 pages, Hardcover
First published December 4, 1979
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 16, 2025
First, what I liked.
Saward does an excellent job at the outset giving a good definition of the holy fool. In short, while all Christian’s are fools in the sight of the world, the holy fool is ALSO a fool in the sight of the church. The complicated nature of this folly is, in the best cases, usually interpreted retrospectively as saintliness. This is mostly substantiated by the Eastern Orthodox fool tradition, where folly really is on full display.
But here’s my biggest (not only) issue: almost as soon as Saward turns to the Western tradition, he abandons the stricter criteria laid out in the introduction and includes fairly basic monastic principles (like poverty, care of the poor and ill, general societal disinterest) as examples of folly for Christ’s sake. In other words, most of the examples provided seem to fit squarely in his general foolishness category, the kind all Christians are called to. Rarely does someone truly break free of his into the realm of real folly by the world’s and the church’s standards. Yet these are meant to be examples of holy folly in the West.
A couple of notable exceptions: almost all the women mentioned seemed more in line with the eastern understanding of holy folly, the kind outside the world’s and church’s standards of what is good and reasonable. Louise du Neant in particular provides a haunting example of the line between true mental instability and folly for Christ’s sake. She was actually taken to an asylum and spent a good deal of time there thinking she was possessed and damned. After a revelatory moment, she regained mental stability but then continued to live and care for other patients in holy foolish kinds of ways. I’m not saying her life is something to necessarily emulate, but it doesn’t shy away from the complexity of the issue at hand, and for that, it’s worth the space in the book that it gets.
One more worthwhile mention, and one of the only men from this book’s western candidates to make my own list of true holy fools, is Jean-Joseph Surin. Similar to Louise du Neant, Surin faced real mental illness. After an excruciatingly long exorcism of over a year (in which Surin was sent into a convent as an exorcist), Surin faced mental breakdown and spent nearly 20 years in a catatonic state which included multiple suicide attempts. It’s also worth mentioning that Surin prayed to bear the torment of the nun he was sent to exorcise in her place, and that soon after she was relieved of her own mental torture, he became debilitating ill. Also like du Neant,this period of his life ended in a revelatory moment that then led to a kind of willed holy folly. The result is quite moving, but one wonders what to make of the times, spanning decades, when he would wander monastery grounds naked and covered in his own excrement blaspheming God and the sacraments. To be clear, with both Surin and du Neant, the period of holy folly is identified with the time AFTER the period of mental instability and schizophrenic tendencies, but their post-illness embodiment of holy folly is compelling.
The last thing I’ll say is that I was disappointed in this book as a critical work. Saward’s commitment to Catholicism and the saints often shirks legitimate questions and refuses to engage with valid criticism. He’s also horribly imprecise with theological language, and at times, he uses terms anachronistically to characterize homogeneously very diverse theological positions This book seemed to cover a large selection primary sources with little expertise and not nearly enough secondary source engagement.
Saward does an excellent job at the outset giving a good definition of the holy fool. In short, while all Christian’s are fools in the sight of the world, the holy fool is ALSO a fool in the sight of the church. The complicated nature of this folly is, in the best cases, usually interpreted retrospectively as saintliness. This is mostly substantiated by the Eastern Orthodox fool tradition, where folly really is on full display.
But here’s my biggest (not only) issue: almost as soon as Saward turns to the Western tradition, he abandons the stricter criteria laid out in the introduction and includes fairly basic monastic principles (like poverty, care of the poor and ill, general societal disinterest) as examples of folly for Christ’s sake. In other words, most of the examples provided seem to fit squarely in his general foolishness category, the kind all Christians are called to. Rarely does someone truly break free of his into the realm of real folly by the world’s and the church’s standards. Yet these are meant to be examples of holy folly in the West.
A couple of notable exceptions: almost all the women mentioned seemed more in line with the eastern understanding of holy folly, the kind outside the world’s and church’s standards of what is good and reasonable. Louise du Neant in particular provides a haunting example of the line between true mental instability and folly for Christ’s sake. She was actually taken to an asylum and spent a good deal of time there thinking she was possessed and damned. After a revelatory moment, she regained mental stability but then continued to live and care for other patients in holy foolish kinds of ways. I’m not saying her life is something to necessarily emulate, but it doesn’t shy away from the complexity of the issue at hand, and for that, it’s worth the space in the book that it gets.
One more worthwhile mention, and one of the only men from this book’s western candidates to make my own list of true holy fools, is Jean-Joseph Surin. Similar to Louise du Neant, Surin faced real mental illness. After an excruciatingly long exorcism of over a year (in which Surin was sent into a convent as an exorcist), Surin faced mental breakdown and spent nearly 20 years in a catatonic state which included multiple suicide attempts. It’s also worth mentioning that Surin prayed to bear the torment of the nun he was sent to exorcise in her place, and that soon after she was relieved of her own mental torture, he became debilitating ill. Also like du Neant,this period of his life ended in a revelatory moment that then led to a kind of willed holy folly. The result is quite moving, but one wonders what to make of the times, spanning decades, when he would wander monastery grounds naked and covered in his own excrement blaspheming God and the sacraments. To be clear, with both Surin and du Neant, the period of holy folly is identified with the time AFTER the period of mental instability and schizophrenic tendencies, but their post-illness embodiment of holy folly is compelling.
The last thing I’ll say is that I was disappointed in this book as a critical work. Saward’s commitment to Catholicism and the saints often shirks legitimate questions and refuses to engage with valid criticism. He’s also horribly imprecise with theological language, and at times, he uses terms anachronistically to characterize homogeneously very diverse theological positions This book seemed to cover a large selection primary sources with little expertise and not nearly enough secondary source engagement.
October 16, 2016
Still the authoritative work on this important and powerful subject. The best work for a western soul to read.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews