In 1956, the great French philosopher Jacques Maritain gave a lecture at the University of Chicago in which he rebuked his fellow Europeans for a “grand slander” against America. “All this talk about American materialism is no more than a curtain of silly gossip and slander,” he said. “What I know is that the basic characteristics of the American people are generosity, good will, the sense of human fellowship.”

For Maritain, the United States was not the shallow image that even some Americans hold. Yes, there is a part of the nation that is all about commerce, advertising and consumption, but there is a parallel, and equally American, spiritual current that is about taking care of the land and our neighbors and seeing the dignity in what is humble. 

Quoting a French philosopher may seem a strange way to begin a remembrance of Wendell Berry, who died on Aug. 31. But to me, Berry embodies perhaps more than any other writer that other America. I might almost say that he embodies our conscience. As much as we are a boisterous, entrepreneurial nation, we have always been a people who place a high value on community and neighborliness. We have always been quite self-critical, too. For every advance in technology, every expansion of government power, every leap in economic life, every moral error, there must be a Jeremiah who calls out the ways in which we have strayed and reminds us of our responsibilities. Wendell Berry was such a one. 

While Berry is known for his decades-long fight against industrial agriculture, corporate greed and environmental destruction, none of this would matter were this fight not rooted in a deeper spiritual and moral vision. In a vast quantity of books, essays, stories and poems, Berry fleshed out this picture of a different America, one in which people put down roots, commit themselves to each other and love the ground they stand on. If criticism were not driven by love, it would remain mere whining. But Wendell Berry was a lover, and it is precisely his affections that make his criticisms worth listening to. 

It is interesting that no one has ever quite been able to decide whether Berry was a liberal or a conservative. I know both conservatives and liberals who are deep admirers. He does not talk like an ideologue but instead expresses certain values that stir the American heart on a level deeper than partisanship. His great moral insight was that particulars are more important than abstractions. Genuine love is always love for some particular being. We do not love humanity in general or the environment in general. What we love are particular human beings, particular trees, lakes, woods and critters. Berry was against whatever abstractions threatened to crush and destroy the real world of particular, lovable things.

This is why he was against ideology. In the name of abstractions like “national glory” or “the worker,” men committed the most heinous crimes imaginable in the last century. Communist and fascist brutality were manifest in the worship of abstractions at the cost of concretely existing human beings. “Abstraction,” he said, “is the enemy wherever it is found.”

It was the same reason he disliked big business. When corporations become too large, they no longer think in particular terms, but in statistics, calculations and data. If it doesn’t show up on the balance sheet, it isn’t important. This has led to the putrefying of our rivers, the decay of our soil and the loss of our wild places. All the same, he hated big government. A central, over-powerful state ignores and bulldozes over the particular affections of local communities. “The evil of the industrial economy (capitalist or communist),” he wrote, “is the abstractness inherent in its procedures—its inability to distinguish one place or person or creature from another.” You can see how his opposition to bigness and his love of smallness cuts against both sides of American political discourse. 

‘It all turns on affection’

“It all turns on affection,” Berry famously said. This idea underlies all his thinking, and in order to understand what he was about, I propose that three great affections were the motifs that played throughout the symphony of his life: for the land and its creatures, for people and for God.

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all, our most pleasing responsibility,” Berry wrote of the first affection. This wasn’t hippie-dippie talk but an explicitly biblical view, a reference to the fact that God makes humanity the caretaker of his world. The only way that we can do this well is by first learning to love our own particular place. Intimacy with the fields, trees and birds around us naturally builds affection and a desire to protect.

Everyone wants to conserve the lake he or she knows best. To the extent that we become detached from our local surroundings, chiefly by remaining indoors and consuming entertainment, we become ignorant and therefore destructive of our natural home. Most of us never see the sludgy river by the factory where they make our phones, or the dark, filthy compounds where our chicken nuggets come from, or the gouged landscape of the Congo where slave laborers dig up the metals that make our computers work.

For Berry, our economic life would become healthier and less destructive if we “practiced” affection for our local place. By committing ourselves to a place and loving it for its own sake, we stand as a bulwark against those who would view the earth as nothing but raw material to be exploited for economic gain. Berry wrote that this is particularly embodied in the small farmer, who farms on a scale that is within his ability to care for the land and animals he holds. 

This affection for the land was necessarily connected to affection for people. That is, I love the land in part because I love my family and friends who live on it. If Berry’s more political essays and speeches could sound harsh and pessimistic, his stories (like Hannah Coulter) and poems are often gentle and affectionate appreciations of the places and people he holds dear.

By Berry’s reasoning, we need to commit ourselves to our relationships, learning how to imagine the lives of others from their own perspectives: “By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place.”

Just as with the natural world, our love for humanity at large can only come about through the love of particular persons. As Berry said in a lecture in 2012:

By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

Finally, it is by way of these loves, earthly and human, that we enter into the love of God. In the collection Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013-2023, Berry writes in the third person in describing how the love of his wife, Tanya, communicated to him that the world was created by love: 

But the old man knows, contrarily, that this world
was made by love. He knows it because that love
came to him one time in the person of a girl
and it abides in the girl’s great-grandmotherhood.
[“2022, Poem I”]

For Berry, in loving a place, and in working to care for it, we participate in the Love that made all things:

your love for this place as it was…
now brings alive in you Love that made
the heaven and the earth. Highest
and whole, that love is the Sabbath morning
where you at last may come to rest.
[“2023, Poem I”]

This, ultimately, is what makes Berry more than a mere environmental activist or political commentator. In his poems, novels and stories, he plumbs the depths of human suffering, hope and loss, seeking the redemptive love of God as it appears within our human stories. The great theme of all his poetry and fiction is to identify those moments, persons and creatures in which we witness the eternal present in time, the divine in the earthly, the spiritual in the material. 

This profound love for God, for the world and for its people is what lay beneath his sometimes combative political voice. The anger was that of a man who saw his loved ones being abused. The aim of this criticism, though, was not some political triumph or ideological victory but instead a participation in the redeeming work of Love. As Berry wrote in his essay “Health Is Membership”:

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love which subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.

Perhaps all of this would remain only talk if it were not integrally connected with real life. What has always made Berry’s voice credible is the fact that he did indeed commit to the family farm, where he remained for his entire life. Perhaps the greatest tribute since his passing can be found not in the encomiums to his literary work or his environmental advocacy but in the headline from the Louisville Courier Journal, the paper of record in his part of Kentucky: “In Henry County, Wendell Berry was a pillar, a friend and a neighbor.”

[Read next: “Wendell Berry: the cranky farmer, poet and essayist you just can’t ignore.”]

Nathan Beacom writes from Des Moines, Iowa. His writing has previously appeared in Plough Quarterly, Comment Magazine and elsewhere.