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St. Isidora of Egypt
00:16:41
Taylor Kemp and Dr. Elizabeth Klein discuss the life of a lesser-known monastic saint from the 4th century, St. Isidora of Egypt. She is one of the oldest recorded “holy fool” saints – a saint archetype lesser known in the West but well known in the East. How she lived humility in her Christian life was highly despised and scorned by the world. Her feast day is May 1.
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- [00:02]
A
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Catholic Saints. My name is Taylor Kemp, the vice President of content at the Augustine Institute. And with me is Dr. Elizabeth Klein, professor for our Graduate School of Theology. And today we are talking about Saint Isadora of Egypt, whose feast day is May 1st. I know nothing about Saint Isadora of egypt, so I'm excited to learn almost
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B
nothing is known about Saint Israel until today.
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A
Dr. Klein, you should have the subtitles
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of like which saints are like Dr. Klein's wacky saints make some subgroup Tiger
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Klein's lesser known but now growing devotion.
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B
Yeah, I'm promoting devotion to lesser known saints. I really love the story of Saint Isidore of Egypt, but very little is known about her. Basically, what is known about her amounts to two or three pages in the Lausiac history by Palladius of espuna. So the Lasiac history is a 4th century monastic history that tells stories of all kinds of saints of Egypt around Claudius time. If you're like me and like weird monastic Saints from the 4th century, highly recommend picking up a copy of the Lousy Eye history and having a browse through it. So you might wonder, if almost nothing's in about her, why do I want to talk about her?
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I was wondering. We're going to find out.
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B
Yeah, you're going to find out. So she, she lived in the fourth century. We don't really know her dates, something like 300 to 365. The reason I wanted to talk about her is because she's probably the oldest recorded holy fool. So a holy fool is a kind of saint archetype, you might want to say, or a path to holiness that we're not quite as familiar with in the west but is very common in the East. So holy fools are almost always associated with the passage from First Corinthians, the kind of Pauline tagline, if anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. So the only saint in the West I can think of who's a little bit of kind of like a holy fool is Saint Francis of Assisi, you know, who's kind of like doing things that are purposely to make people think he's crazy or acting in a way where you're not like fully sure if he's all there. This is what a holy fool does. A holy fool kind of specifically acts in a way so as to be despised by the world in a way that seems not logical or not sane.
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Just a living contradiction to the world.
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Yeah. In order to sort of achieve this high level of holiness. So Isidora's story is that she's a nun of the Tabenna monastery in Egypt. This is one of our earliest stories, sort of group women's monasteries. So something we've talked a little bit about with by other wacky saints of the early church is that a lot of especially early female saints lived a form of kind of urban monasticism where they may have turned their estate into a monastery or lived a kind of private holy life. So this is one of the first kind of formal monasteries founded for women. It was founded by Saint Pachomius, Sister Maria. Saint Pacomius is credited with sort of founding stuff, cenobitic monasticism, that being not hermits. So monastics who live together in groups as opposed to anchoritic. So anchoritic is hermits, cenobitic is gathering in groups. So he's kind of contemporaneous with Anthony of the desert. So you got Anthony of the desert, king of hermits, Pacomius, a sort of king of monks who hang out together.
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Okay.
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So this is in Egypt. His sister has this women's monastery. According to Lasik's history, 400 women live in this monastery at the time.
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A
Wow, that's huge.
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I know, isn't it? Yeah, man. Monasticism, people, there's like a thirst for it. I feel like this happens in church history where it's like that just goes in sort of cycles where like you just have this explosive desire of people to like get away from the world.
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I could, I get that.
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Yeah. I mean this happens with Bernard of Clairvaux, for example. The Cistercians just have this like, you know, they found like 200 monasteries in like a year.
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Everyone's just like, get me out.
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Yes.
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This is not it.
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Yeah. So obviously in the Roman Empire we had a pent up demand for women's monastics life. So they had this huge monastery. So Isadora was generally despised by all the other sisters. She apparently wandered around randomly doing the dirty and most menial jobs. She especially lurked around the kitchen doing a lot of sort of cooking and cleaning up. She wore a dish rag on her head instead of the. Most of the sisters would have like had cropped hair and wear a hood, so she wore a dish rag on her head. She was reportedly never seen to be eating ever. And she just sort of like sponged up the crumbs that the Other sisters left over, so she never sat down to eat. So she was basically considered crazy and treated badly, although she was reported never to have retaliated or complained. And the accounts of her life so in the lasiac history and a couple other short places indicate that this was intentional, that she desired to be afflicted and appears an afflicted one. So how do we find out that Isadore is not crazy? How we find out is that a well known nearby hermit named Pitirim receives a vision of an angel. The angel tells him that he thinks that he has made a lot of progress in holiness, but actually he is very prideful. And he tells him to go to Isidore's monastery and to find the one who is truly holy. He says he'll recognize her because she's wearing a diadem on her head.
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Is this the dish rag?
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It's the dish rag. Spoilers Surprise reveal. The diadem is a dish rag. So he goes to the monastery, you know, he's looking amongst all the sisters for the one that he's searching for. This like, reminds me of like Cinderella, like driving around the kingdom looking for the one who the glass slipper will fit. But they're like, well, this is all of us. And finally they admit there is one more sister locked up in the tower. So they, with difficulty bring Isadora before him. He sees the dish rag, immediately perceives that she is the one that he's been looking for. He asks for her blessing and she asks for his blessing. The other sisters accuse her of mocking him, but he says that she's in fact their spiritual mother and that they, they don't understand. And then this apparently prompts all the sisters to start confessing all the offenses they've committed against Isadora.
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This is very much like David, right? Like, like the Cinderella story too. Like, where's, where's the brothers? No. Nope, nope. Is there no one else? And then David's in the field.
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It's like, oh, there's that crazy chick with the dish rag.
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Yeah, like, honestly. But then, you know, I feel like the startling thing is like it's so difficult for us to perceive holiness, which could like, often look crazy or it just looks different or it's.
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It's.
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So you could say holiness. Is it at a minimum, very surprising?
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Often, yes. And especially, especially in this case. And then this, the ending of the story is also sort of like shocking, which is that a few days later, Isadora is unable to bear the fact that it's been found out that she's actually holy and disappears. Never to be seen again.
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That is amazing.
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Never to be seen again.
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Oh, that's so great.
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So that's basically all we know about St. Isadora, but I just really love this story, and I thought it would be a good chance to talk about this form of sanctity, which is not familiar, I think, to most of us in sort of Western Christianity, uh, and is sort of. It's. It's very challenging. Right, Because I think a lot of people would say, oh, is this like a form of deception? You know, you're pretending to be something you're not, you're tricking other people or something like that. But I actually think this is really. This is really instructive because as Christians, we're always, like, trying to be something we're not. Insofar as we're trying to be holier than we are, we're trying to be more charitable than we are. And, you know, I think about tres of Lisieux saying, like, oh, I was specifically nicer to somebody I didn't like. And you're like, is that a form of deception? No, it's not a form of deception. It's an attempt to, like, give the charity that you don't actually have and make room for God to, like, fill you up with his grace and actually make charity easier. Or I'm reminded of Francis de Sales saying, like, when we first try to be charitable, we're like kind of like chickens, like, hopping up, flapping our wings, like, sort of like flying for small birds. But eventually charity becomes our nature, and we're like a hawk, you know, soaring and that. I like, we. We talk about humility as Christians. This is incredibly important, perhaps the most important virtue for achieving charity. Because the original sin of Adam and Eve is pride, right? Trying to be God, trying to make the world revolve around them, trying to govern their own life and be the master of their own story. Uh, but, like, how seriously do we take the call to humility? This is a very serious take to the call of humility to actually, like, actively attempt to be despised by the world.
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A
Yep. Yeah, I agree. And it's. It's so, like, complete because. Yeah, being that pride is the. The root sin of the fall, it's so deep in us. Like, we can choose humility in, like, a couple ways, but then completely reject it in other ways. And then, yeah, as you were talking about how central humility is to the Christian life, you know, Christ open the Beatitudes, which Augustine calls the Magna Carta of The Christian life, and it's blessed are the poor in spirit, which is effectively a call to humility to realize that, like, at root, we're all poor, we're all beggars before God. And yet every single day you have to, like, choose against your nature or accept humiliations or accept whatever. And so then to take St. Isadora as I am going to actively, like, become that, I am going to actively become despised by the world. Yeah. I feel like I'm looking at this, like, portrait of her and you're like, I. I don't want to do that. I don't know how I would do that. And, you know, whatever. But it's. It's a startling example.
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It is a specific path of holiness. I mean, it's not like every single person necessarily called to be a holy fool. It's not what I'm saying. And, you know, if you're.
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Oh, I know, I know.
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If you're, you know, I wouldn't have
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a job if I, you know, that's. I gotta.
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Maybe I would get really famous if I came home. Perhaps that might be opposite to the point. Yeah. You know, and Augustine talks about how it's difficult as, like, a bishop because your reputation is tied to the Church's reputation.
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And so it's not for everybody.
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But one thing I absolutely love about Saint Isidora is that she's not even a holy fool in the world. She's a holy fool in a monastery, in the Church.
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Yeah.
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And so, because spiritual pride is actually the most insidious form of pride. So Avagrius, who's a famous spiritual master writing around this time, he's the first one who has the list of the seven deadly sins. Pride. He said spiritual pride is the worst of all sins. And he says if you fall to spiritual pride, you go right back down to the bottom of the lack of sins, which is, like, eerily true. Like, how many people spawn to spiritual pride and go right back down to lust, which is like the bottom of the rung. It just seems like that's so patently obvious in many recent scenarios. But, like, she's specifically mocking their, like, monastic habit. Right. Like, she's, like, wearing the dish rag on her head because it's like, well, you think you're something because you've cut your hair, because you've taken. Because you're tonsured, because you've taken the veil. This is all foolishness for Christ. Like, what this actually is is supposed to be this, like, total abasement in humility. And I just think that that's, like, so, like, almost cutting and poignant, but also, like, great. It's great to, like, laugh at ourselves. That's such a cure to humility or to pride. And I think that's part of the whole holy fool shtick is that, like, we're ridiculous little ants, you know, like, we're going around here, like, scraping up our little piles of prestige, like, collecting our little piles of money that are gonna be gone because we're gonna die. And it's just to laugh at, like, human effort and just. Yeah. Realize that before God, it's all foolishness. Right. Which is the point of the Pauline line. Right. To realize that human wisdom is foolishness before the eternity of God. And I just think that it's so refreshing as a form of sanctity. And you can see why this is a kind of recurring pattern to have these people. Usually they show up actually in monasteries. Usually it's like the monastery has their, like, holy fool or whatever. And so I wanted to recommend a movie is free on YouTube. You can watch about a contemporary Russian holy fool. The movie is called the island, which there are more than one movie with that name, so you have to, like, type like the island Russian holy Fool or something, but you can watch the whole thing for free. And, yeah, it's about this man who commits a serious crime in his youth and sort of in penance becomes this holy fool at a monastery. And the main conflict is between the one brother who's, like, celebrating liturgy 100%, you know, really upright, really good monk, and this, like, crazy dude who's like, sort of like, is he really part of the monastery? And it's just. It's very beautiful. They have a very beautiful sort of relationship and reconciliation at the end, and they're, you know, all the holier for it. But I just thought that's. It's like a more updated version of this, but something.
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Is it in English or.
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It's subtitled?
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It's subtitled.
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Yeah, it's subtitled.
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The Island.
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Have no fear. Don't need to know Russian.
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Okay, so I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit here, so if we. For, you know, let's take it on. Most listeners are probably not in a monastery, probably married, single, living in the world. What are some ways that we can grow in humility rather than putting a dish rag on our head in the midst of our monastery?
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Well, that is one way.
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That is one way.
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I do think that this. You could pray the litany of humility. I always Say that I can pray the first half a minute, but not the second half a minute of the litany. Like, I can pray it, but I don't, like, really mean it, you know. But I do think there are all kinds of circumstances where we could act in a way where we are specifically trying to not look as good as we could, or at the very least refrain from saying something that would make us look good. I mean, like, really, really simple example is like, you're in a conversation and someone says, oh, do you remember when so and so said that brilliant thing in class and it was actually you that said it. You're like, you don't say anything.
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Just let it go.
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You know, you just let it go. Not taking credit for things that. Where the credit really belongs to you. I think of that image in C.S. lewis's great divorce where he says, like, before you enter heaven, you sort of go through this. I think it's like a stream. And then, like, all of the particular merits of everybody are shared by everybody and enjoyed equally by everybody and not as a private possession. And, like, is that attractive to you? You know, I think there are lots of little ways in which you can. You can be a holy fool and either deflect attention to yourself through. Through laughing at yourself, or through refraining from drawing attention to yourself, which is so. It's almost so automatic to draw attention to yourself that, like, it's like, out of your mouth before you. You're like, I shouldn't have said that, you know.
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Yep. Or. Or it seems to me, as you were talking, like, truly, in a sense, like only celebrating others, like the goods of others, while completely neglecting, like, one's own self, glorification, merit credit, whatever it
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may be, and then also taking on tasks that are beneath you. So there's the famous story of Mother Teresa, like, cleaning bathrooms on a plane because she doesn't want to let pride get ahead of her and think that she's too good for these kinds of tasks. So, yeah, I mean, if you're a parent, you do these kinds of terrible things all the time, but terrible tasks. But, yeah, there's lots of instances where we could think we're above a certain level, above doing a certain thing that we're asked to do and to accept those things or even to seek them out if we feel maybe that this is an area we need to improve in.
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A
I agree, and I think that is a great place to end. Thank you, Dr. Klein, for joining us. And thank you to all of our listeners out there for joining us. On Catholic Saints. Please subscribe to the podcast. You can send them to your friends. We want to make these just available for all to be inspired and edified by the lives of the Saints. So thank you so much for joining us. We will see you next time on Catholic Saints.