Anyone familiar with the work of American author, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry will quickly recognize his two hallmarks: his beautiful, bittersweet reflections on love, community, and living well, and his staunch disapproval of aspects of modern life most of us would not think twice about, like computers and grocery stores. In a word, Wendell Berry is a curmudgeon.
And nowhere is this more evident than the opening lines of his poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front:”
“Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.”
However, what initially comes across as a simple diatribe develops into a radical vision of life that stands antithetical to modern preoccupations in its concern for unconditional love, delight in the world, and investment in community and legacy.
This poem is only the beginning of a series of poems that center around the character of the “Mad Farmer,” who, in many ways, acts as a stand-in for Berry himself. While Berry’s views soften and shift over the course of these poems, the core message remains unchanged: deliberately live against what the world values. Be a contrarian, for only through such resistance to the “quick-profit” and the “ready- made” can you discover real life.
Interestingly, Berry’s Mad Farmer carries echoes of another contrarian, crafted by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Idiot. In this novel, Dostoevsky ponders what it would look like for someone to live a saintly life in our sinful world. While less of a curmudgeon than Berry’s alter ego, the main character and titular idiot, Prince Myshkin, embodies divine charity and selflessness to the extent that those around him regard him as a complete charlatan or a “regular blessed innocent, and God loves such as you.”
Through the character of the Prince, Dostoevsky embodies the Holy Fool, a term used in the Orthodox tradition to describe an individual who delivers profound spiritual insight under the guise of eccentricity or even insanity, a man who preaches the gospel at all times and, when necessary, uses words.
To put it in Berry’s terms, the Holy Fool is a contrarian in the sense that how he views and acts in the world is so fundamentally opposed to how the world operates that the rest of society judges him as a charlatan or an idiot.
Though their goals and motivations differ, Berry and Dostoevsky’s deepest fears and ideals become embodied in their respective Holy Fools, Berry in his Mad Farmer and Dostoevsky in his Prince. Through these characters, the authors attempt to understand if their vision can actually survive in a world antithetical to it, whether it is 19th-century Russia or 20th-century America.
At first glance, the answer seems to be a decided “no.” At the end of Dostoevsky’s novel, Prince Myshkin is driven to such a state that he cannot even remember his name; his epilepsy, a disease he has striven against the entire novel completely overcoming him. The people he encountered continue with their lives as before. It seems that Dostoevsky’s Holy Fool has failed. And if such a saint has failed, where does that leave the Mad Farmer? Is he too destined for oblivion?
Was the Idiot, Dostoevsky’s ideal and saint, a failure at all? Or, is our measure of success simply incorrect?
As Christians living in modernity, it is easy to fall into the trap of viewing success with the same eyes as the rest of the world, expecting it will ultimately be pleasant, attainable in our lifetimes, and evident to the praise and envy of those around us.
However, this perspective is exactly the kind of thinking that the Mad Farmer detests, and his poem provides an alternative to such a view:
“. . . Love the Lord.
Love the world. . .
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.”
At least for the Mad Farmer, success does not rely on what you can see or measure but on ordinary faithfulness in everyday life, a quiet defiance of love. For that is the love that Prince Myshkin embodies, and it is how he confounds all around him, a love that offers grace to a lost woman and strokes the hair of a murderer, a love that can find mercy for even the darkest of human vices, a love that may be overwhelmed but will not be, cannot be, ultimately defeated.
As Christians, this is the love and the life we are made for, to become fools for Christ, for “the foolishness of God is wiser than men.” In many ways, the gospel is the greatest piece of foolishness the world has ever seen. Yet it is true and, therefore, changes everything.
It may be that the Mad Farmer, like the Idiot, is destined for failure; however, such a notion does not excuse us from not living like them. We are commanded not to be successful but to be faithful. As the writer of Hebrews notes, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” We live in the hope of the renewal of all things, a hope that we will not likely see with our human eyes. It is a fool’s hope, a madman’s hope, but the hope to which we are called.
So, be a Holy Fool. Plant trees you will never see. Love the unlovable. Delight in beauty. Practice resurrection. Embrace, no, glory in the label of madman and idiot. For, as one poet noted, “Much madness is divinest sense.”
