What distinguishes the prophet from the madman?

I had a friend who became mad. I don’t mean extroverted or extra cheerful. I mean mad, really with diagnosis and treatment and everything.

Today he has withdrawn from the world, but the last stretch before that was… creepy and heartbreaking at the same time.

We all know the „ordinary“ madmen. In our city, there is a madman who walks through the shopping street and emits loud sounds like an animal. Recently, he was helped by a homeless assistance program, which cut his gray hair, trimmed his gray beard, and sorted his clothes. He walked through the street looking like a tidy businessman in his sixties.

When the social workers tidied him up, they might have wanted to take away our, the „normal“ people’s, disgust or fear of him. But to me, the well-groomed madman seems even creepier: I realized that you and I are only one misalignment in the brain away from wandering the streets of our city and screaming every ten seconds like a stabbed baboon.

I encountered another homeless person just yesterday while sitting with a friend at the edge of my favorite park discussing the world. This homeless man was very unkempt and visibly confused. After he had been inspecting the railing at the large staircase for minutes, for whatever reason, he sat down on the edge of a flower pot. He had been mumbling something the whole time. But when he sat down, he suddenly began to quote German prose.

I didn’t recognize what he was quoting, but it sounded very much like written, not spoken German. I like to imagine that he was quoting Kafka. And then I want to ask myself how many silly mistakes I am away from sitting on the edge of the flower pot and quoting German prose.

Well, that friend who went mad told things in the months before he withdrew that simply sounded mad. Things that, if said aloud, would probably be a case for both the loony bin and morning visits from the „Our Democracy“ police.

Today, however, a few years later, I see how fragments of his promises given in madness are becoming true, one after the other.

It’s like a self-assembling puzzle. No, truly not all of his puzzle pieces could I fit in – many probably won’t, because they were indeed mad. But significantly more claims than one would expect were not only mad but also accurate.

Our old conspiracy theories have all come true; that’s not new. We have transitioned to the phase where yesterday’s madness becomes the new truth and reality.

I would ask that friend what led him to his predictions back then. It’s no longer possible. His body is still there, but doctors have dimmed the light a bit for him with pills.

No, not everyone who is considered mad is already a prophet. But it is also true that some prophets, apostles, and truth-tellers were considered mad because of their statements.

In the Old Testament:

The prophet is a fool, the man of the spirit is mad! (Hosea 9:7)

In the New Testament:

You are mad, Paul! Your great knowledge drives you to madness. (Acts 26:24)

You are not Galileo Galilei just because the authorities do not take your ideas seriously. You are not William Shakespeare just because you invent new words. And you are not a prophet just because we consider you mad.

What remains true is that being considered mad – even if you are diagnosed as mad and know it yourself – does not exclude the possibility that you might have seen some truth in your madness that remains closed off to the „normal“. (The question remains here again, which came first: the chicken or the egg? The terrible insight or the madness? What follows from what?)

I am not even angry with the doctors who dimmed that person’s light with chemicals. I would probably have done it as a doctor for anyone who asks for it. I know he asked for it. He suffers less now. And if the doctors hadn’t done it, he wouldn’t be suffering at all.

But the question gnaws at me: How did he know all of this? Can one learn it, can one unlock their source without becoming – and ending – like him?