Divine Fury (19 page)

And yet, to leave the matter at that would be to omit a crucial aspect of the story. For what these explanations have all overlooked is the way in which the rise to prominence of the genius figure was the product not only of evolving aesthetic norms and a changing social and economic space, but of an altered religious and political environment—the consequence, on the one hand, of the unprecedented clearing of the heavens of mediating powers and the attendant withdrawal of God, and the related advent, on the other, of the ideal of universal equality. Whereas the one development opened up a space in which the genius could emerge and spread his wings, the other provided a crucial context of dialectic and counterpoint. For the genius was by definition an anomaly—singular, unique, constitutionally different from ordinary men. In a world that heralded human equality he would be the great exception.

A number of the causes of the first set of developments have already been discussed: the innovations introduced by Renaissance philosophers, who imagined genius not as an angelic being, but an indwelling power; the Protestant critique of the cult of the saints and its discounting (though seldom total disavowal) of the angels and their guardian role; and the concerns about magic raised by the Reformation and its Catholic response. Each of these factors played its part in fostering skepticism toward divine companions, mediators, and those who invoked them. The reaction to the excesses of the European witch craze had a similar effect, as did the process of critical inquiry initiated by men like Descartes and the ensuing movements of the Enlightenment that swept across Europe and the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, casting doubt on demons, angels, and spirits of all
kinds. But the very same period that put the angels to flight also experienced the presentiment and perception that God was growing more distant, more remote, and less concerned with the affairs of human beings in the world here below. In this account—and it is one shared by observers who are by no means unsympathetic to religion—this “withdrawal” of God was felt even (and especially) among believers, who likewise struggled to detect the Creator’s presence and despaired of the absence of their “hidden God.” But wherever it was felt, God’s withdrawal had powerful, and contradictory, effects. Positively, it allowed for the emergence of a new type of human agency in a more autonomous and malleable universe. It left “the human community completely to itself,” a development that a number of leading historians have linked to the emergence in the eighteenth century of concepts like “society,” “nation,” and “public opinion,” conceived as autonomous realms largely free from divine manipulation, and subject overwhelmingly to human control. In God’s absence, human beings were free to assume elements of his power, taking upon themselves capacities that they had long attributed to him. Yet this same withdrawal also had a more negative effect, inducing a haunting sense of loneliness and abandonment that was all the stronger for the flight of the angels and the retreat of the guardian companions. To those whom God had partially forsaken, to those without a
comes
or friend, the universe could seem a lonely and disorienting place.
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Bear in mind that this was a predicament without precedent in the history of the world. At no time had human beings lived alone in this way, without mediators and intercessors to the divine. And it was at just this moment (and for closely related reasons) that they began to turn their gaze in earnest from the “always already there” to the “yet to be realized,” focusing intently on the future as the privileged place of human making, the site of the disclosure of the new and the unknown. Rather than dwell solely on the patterns and revelations of old, they began to look forward on time’s horizon, seeking the unexpected, the original, the unknown. It should hardly surprise us that in the midst of this temporal reorientation and in the vast space opened up by God’s withdrawal and the guardians’ flight, a new figure was seized upon to provide a portion of God’s power and an element of the guardian’s comfort. Geniuses offered assurance that special beings still animated the universe, that someone stood between the ordinary and the unknown, the sacred and the profane, that a privileged few could see where the many were blind. Revealing, disclosing, guiding, creating, the genius enchanted a world threatened by disenchantment.
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The emergence of the cult of the genius was thus in part a response to the tectonic shifts of an evolving religious landscape. But the cult also emerged in a changing political environment, one that witnessed a development as unprecedented and monumental in human history as the withdrawal of God. The proclamation of universal equality was, of course, long just that—a proclamation—that only garnered grudging (and imperfect) acceptance after centuries of struggle. Nor were its first, explicit formulations without precedent. As a host of novel theorists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—from Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to Baruch Spinoza and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—would themselves point out, some form of equality was arguably our oldest human endowment, an original condition that had reigned in the state of nature long ago, only to have been surrendered or usurped. Christians, too, could claim, with the Apostle Paul, that all were one in Christ and equal before God—Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free (Gal. 3:28). Indeed, it was radical Christians, first in the Reformation and then in the upheavals of the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century, who initially pushed the claim, turning the world upside down in their effort to realize God’s equality on earth. Yet notwithstanding these important precedents, the broad assertion of human equality—of opportunity, of rights, of general endowments—was largely a novel one in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And as polemicists pressed it with increasing insistence—in theory in the Enlightenment, and in practice in the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—they challenged centuries-old privileges of aristocrats based on birth and blood while begging the question of the equality of women, religious minorities, indigenous peoples, and African slaves. The ideal was far from reality. But the thought had been broached: all human beings were equal, or should be treated as if they were so.
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Scholars are quick to point out—and rightly so—how these sweeping assertions of natural equality elicited equally sweeping claims of natural difference, with anthropology and a host of nascent disciplines pressed into service to justify new forms of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But what these observers have missed is how the new cult of the genius—with its central claim of natural human superiority and difference—also constituted a response to the doctrine of human equality, a protest and reassertion of innate and inherent distinctions, albeit on wholly modern terms. The genius was no aristocrat reborn (though some would claim aristocratic privileges and exceptions), and the relationship to equality
was not without its ambiguities and concessions. But, on the whole, the cult of the genius was reactive, bound up dialectically with the assertion of equality from the late seventeenth century onward, just as it was bound up with the complex process of disenchantment. The two developments, in fact, were reaffirming. For the genius’s exception to equality was a product of his exceptional nature, his rare endowment as a being who walked where the angels and god-men once trod. The creator of genius was no mere mortal, but a “second Maker, a just Prometheus, under Jove.” The line is that of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, from his essay “Advice to Authors,” written at the very beginning of the eighteenth century. It is often repeated, and with reason, for it captures nicely an emergent sense of the exalted and exceptional status of the creator. What is less often remarked, however, is Shaftesbury’s explanation of this process, which tracks closely with the account of the rise of the genius offered here.
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Indeed, in the very same essay in which he hails the power of the poet as a higher being, a “second maker” under God, Shaftesbury calls attention to an ancient opinion that “were it literally true, might be highly serviceable.” The opinion in question was the doctrine “that we have each of us a daemon, genius, angel, or guardian spirit, to whom we were strictly joined and committed from our earliest dawn of reason, or moment of our birth.” As a newly Enlightened man, Shaftesbury refused to countenance the veracity of that opinion, but he keenly felt its loss. For the idea of the spiritual double was the ancients’ way of setting up one part of the mind as a “counselor” and “governor” over the other. By entering into discourse with this better self in the pursuit of “morals and true wisdom,” the ancients sought self-knowledge and that proper “subordinacy, which alone could make us agree with ourselves, and be of a-piece within.” And they regarded this quest for wholeness and self-understanding as a sacred task, “a more religious work than any prayers, or other duty in the temple.”
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Moderns, of course, no longer believed in spirits of this kind, and so neglected the ancient rituals and rites, just as many, too, were setting aside the Christian cult of the guardian angel and the patron saint. But rather than celebrate that fact—cheering the onset of Cartesian clarity and doubt—Shaftesbury drew attention to the costs of disenchantment. For those who denied the existence of the doubles and
daimones
who had guarded humanity from its birth now found it hard to know their own minds, to divine that “obscure implicit language” that all of us harbor within. Alienated and alone, moderns were lost to themselves
and the world, and “for this reason,” he mused, “the right method is to give [our thoughts] voice and accent.” This, “in our default, is what the moralists or philosophers endeavor to do . . . when they hold us out a kind of vocal looking glass, draw sound out of our breast, and instruct us to personate ourselves in the plainest manner.” In other words, great writers and thinkers translate our innermost thoughts by holding up a mirror—a vocal mirror of words that not only speaks the sounds of truth to us, but allows us to comprehend the secret language of our souls, to see ourselves and the world about us more clearly than we otherwise would. Geniuses, in effect, became our
genii
, serving as our guides and better selves, our guardian protectors and moral spectators, who help us negotiate the mysteries of the self and of the world.
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Shaftesbury was far from the only observer in the eighteenth century to make this connection explicit. “Genius is
genius
” the Swiss founder of physiognomy, Johann Caspar Lavater, declared amid a soaring encomium to that special individual who could feel, think, speak, act, compose, create, and build “as if he were dictated to by a
genius
, an invisible being of a higher kind, as if he himself were this being of a higher kind.” The German philosopher and theologian Johann Gottfried von Herder likewise conflated the ancient
genius
with the modern genius in his writings, speaking interchangeably at times of
der Genius
and
das Genie
. There were others, as well, though to draw attention to the fact is not to insist on any crude or direct correspondence between the ancient
genius
and the modern incarnation. Lavater himself was promiscuous in his comparisons, describing the modern genius as the “counterpart of the divine,” a “king of the world,” and a “human god.” Others pressed the comparison with saints, prophets, and apostles. In truth, the modern genius was none of these things, but rather a being sui generis, an original who dared imitate only himself.
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That said, it is the case that the genius preserved in his person—and was perceived to do so—something of this former sacred aura and calling, and thus continued to mediate between ordinary human beings and whatever might dwell above or beyond them. Geniuses translated, decoded, and deciphered the mysteries of the universe, even as they rendered the universe deeper, more complex, and more profound, revealing it to be at once marvelous and terrible in its sublimity. Wonders themselves, they made the world wondrous with their revelations and creations, enchanting at the very moment that they enlightened, clarified, and explained. Geniuses reassured that the universe was still a magical place, and they provided in the absence of the guardians of old
a compensation for the loss and dislocation identified by Shaftesbury. Higher beings, men exalted, geniuses were in possession of a rare and special power.

B
UT WHAT WAS THIS POWER
, this special capacity that bid contemporaries to make of those who possessed it a new type of being, a creature apart? What was it, precisely, that modern geniuses had? The difficulties that contemporaries displayed in responding to that question are themselves revealing of the answer. For despite a discussion that spread across Europe, and spanned the whole of the eighteenth century, the power of genius remained as much a mystery at its end as it had been at the beginning. Nor was this simply the result of the imprecision of language, the fact, as one observer pointed out in 1799, that “genius is a term, like many others, too complex to admit of a regular or precise definition.” Mystery, rather, was central to the thing itself, bound up with its power in the most fundamental way. The poet and critic Edward Young put it best, observing in his influential
Conjectures on Original Composition
of 1759 that “a genius differs from a good Understanding, as a Magician from a good Architect; that raises his structure by means invisible; this by the skillful use of common tools.” Even in the Age of Enlightenment, the genius possessed a hint of magic.
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