Divine Fury (2 page)

The depiction of Einstein as a guardian protector and avenging angel—at once saintly creator and righteous destroyer—hints at a central theme of this book: the profound religiosity associated with genius
and the genius figure. “I want to know how God created the world,” Einstein once observed. “I want to know his thoughts.” It was, to be sure, a manner of speaking, like the physicist’s celebrated line about the universe and dice. Still, the aspiration is telling. For genius, from its earliest origins, was a religious notion, and as such was bound up not only with the superhuman and transcendent, but also with the capacity for violence, destruction, and evil that all religions must confront.
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This book tells the story of those surprising connections, tracing the history of genius and the genius figure from the ancient world to the present day. I pay close attention to the many fascinating individuals who brought ideas of genius to life, considering philosophers, poets, artists, composers, military strategists, captains of industry, inventors, scientists, theologians, rulers, and tyrants. But notwithstanding this attention, this book is above all a history of ideas of genius, or better still, a “history in ideas.” A form of long-range intellectual history that examines concepts in multiple contexts across broad expanses of time (the intellectual
longue durée
), this is an approach to the past that until recently might have been glibly dismissed as old-fashioned or methodologically suspect. Lately, however, a revivified history in ideas has shown encouraging signs of new life. Perhaps historians have taken note of the dangers of diminishing returns from an overinvestment in subjects, contexts, and time frames too narrowly conceived. Perhaps their readers have, too. In any case, one of the potential benefits of the kind of approach adopted here is to correct for excessive specialization, showing connections and continuities, ruptures and breaks, across disciplines, time, and place. If this can be done in a style that is accessible to anyone with a bit of curiosity, so much the better. The benefits may be worth the risks.
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A long-range history in ideas is particularly well-suited to teasing out genius’s intimate connection to the divine, a connection that few serious analysts of the subject have explored. On the one hand, natural and social scientists since the nineteenth century have attempted to unlock genius’s secrets, to understand its nature and develop its nurture, probing the conditions that might bring it about. But in their relentless efforts to identify the many attributes of genius—and then to quantify and compare them—these researchers have tended to dismiss genius’s religious reception and appeal as so much superstition. A very different group of scholars, on the other hand, working in the fields of literary theory, art history, and criticism, has been inclined to reject the notion of genius altogether, toppling it from the privileged place it once held as an arbiter of aesthetic distinction. Genius and geniuses, they have argued, are myths that should be deconstructed and then dismissed, like
so many ideological relics from the past. The impetus behind this work was certainly instructive—for the notion of genius, like many religious notions, has undoubtedly served a mythic role. But to simply write it off as an outmoded aesthetic ideal or a vestige from the days when history was concocted as the story of great men is to miss much that is interesting in this potent force.
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Finally, a third group of scholars, far from dismissing the religious appeal of genius, has embraced it. Writing in the 1930s, the American popular historian Will Durant noted that “in an age that would level everything and reverence nothing,” the worship of genius was the “final religion,” demanding obeisance, not critique. “When genius stands in our presence,” Durant declared, “we can only bow down before it as an act of God, a continuance of creation.” More recently, if no less reverently, the well-known critic Harold Bloom has imagined geniuses as Kabbalistic representations of God. “We
need
genius, however envious or uncomfortable it makes many among us,” Bloom affirmed. “Our desire for the transcendental and the extraordinary seems part of our common heritage, and abandons us slowly, and never completely.” Bloom is right about the stubborn desire for transcendence; it will draw close attention in this book. But rather than reproduce the religion of genius, or treat it as a myth that merits only dismissal, the phenomenon must first be understood on its own terms and explained.
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The failure to do so is surprising, given that genius was so long construed in religious terms. The word itself is Latin, and for the ancient Romans who first used it and then bequeathed the term to us, a
genius
was a guardian spirit, a god of one’s birth who accompanied individuals throughout life, connecting them to the divine. The Roman
genius
, without question, was very far from the modern “genius,” conceived as an individual of exceptional creativity and insight. The latter understanding of the word only gained currency in the eighteenth century, for reasons that will be explained. Yet notwithstanding this long passage of time, and the many changes in meaning that intervened as ancient understandings of
genii
gave way to modern understandings of geniuses, the connection to religion endured, persisting well into the twentieth century. “Genius never loses its religious sub-flavour,” the prominent German psychiatrist Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum observed in 1931, the very year that Will Durant was declaring genius to be the “final religion.” “Beyond all question,” Lange-Eichbaum insisted, “the notion, or rather the emotionally-tinged conviction, that genius has a peculiar sanctity is widely diffused throughout the modern world.”
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Unlike Durant, Lange-Eichbaum refused to prostrate himself before this mystical power. Proposing instead to look it in the eye, he argued, in his aptly entitled
Das Genie-Problem
(1931), that the “problem of genius”—human beings’ age-old quest to search out the extraordinary in special human beings—was misconceived. Genius did not dwell as a sacred force in prodigies waiting to be discovered—its “sanctity,” rather, was imputed and ascribed, the product of an inveterate human need to fabricate idols and of an “inborn delight in the exalted, the extreme, the absolute.” The making of a genius was a process akin to the “origination of a god,” a process of “deification” in which human beings invested others with mysterious powers and then bowed before them in awe. It followed that genius was invariably a “relationship” between the many and the one, a relationship that had come into being for specific historical reasons and that would, Lange-Eichbaum ventured, disappear in time. At the present moment, however, the relationship to genius was one of “semi-religious dogmatism.” Therein lay the problem. Charged with supernatural authority and invested with mystery and power, the notion of genius was dangerous.
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Lange-Eichbaum’s judgment was by no means beyond reproach in all matters concerning genius. But his insight regarding the potential danger of deification was prescient. Only two years later, in fact, Germany gave rise to a “genius” who more than fulfilled his fears, an evil genius with whom the good genius of Einstein would clash in apocalyptic struggle. That man was Adolf Hitler, who regarded Einstein as an adversary and threat, and who was strangely obsessed with the intelligence of Jews. He, too, featured on the cover of
Time
magazine, the man of the year for 1938, an “unholy organist” composing a hymn of hate. Like his rival, he changed the course of history. And, like him, he drew the label “genius” throughout the better part of his professional career.
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To speak of Hitler as a genius may seem unsettling, even shocking. Revelations that the singer Michael Jackson did so several years ago provoked an international outcry. But whatever the warped musings of the late pop star, to describe Hitler as a genius here is not to condone his actions or character in any way, or even to comment on his abilities, such as they were. It is simply to call attention to the fact that the label was crucial to his rise to power and public cult.
Time
employed it freely, albeit ironically, in an article entitled “Genius Hitler,” reporting how the Führer was “being pictured as a military as well as political genius” in broadcasts throughout Germany that marked the celebration of his birthday in 1938. Such descriptions were commonplace. Hitler gave voice to them himself as early as 1920, commenting, in a speech delivered on
April 27 of that year, that Germany needed a “dictator who is a genius.” He developed the thought at length in his autobiography
Mein Kampf
, judging that “true genius is always inborn and never cultivated, let alone learned,” while daring to suggest that he was so begotten. A former artist, soldier, and lover of Wagner, it seemed, was the genius Germany needed to save and redeem its people. Germans prepared the way, proclaiming from the nineteenth century onward a cult of genius that critics and followers alike did not hesitate to describe as a “religion.” A visionary creator and breaker of rules, the genius would summon in his person the spirit of the people and make of it a masterpiece, using force to shape the material. As Hitler’s eventual minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, observed in his novel
Michael
in 1931, “the people are for the statesman what stone is for the sculptor.” “Geniuses use up people,” he added chillingly. “That is just the way it is.”
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If such claims seem outrageous to us today, that is not only because of their reprehensible content, but also because we are less familiar with the darker, irrational side of the history of genius than with the heroic image that triumphs with Einstein. That lack of familiarity is itself a product of Einstein’s victory, for just as the
genius
of Augustus Caesar was said by Plutarch to have cowed the
genius
of his rival, Marc Antony, on the eve of their final battle, the good genius of Einstein has largely succeeded in imposing itself on the field. Historians, by and large, have abetted this triumph, showing themselves little inclined to think of genius in connection with a man like Hitler. Their reluctance is understandable. Yet if we wish to appreciate the role that genius has played in the modern world, we must recall the evil with the good, bearing in mind as we do so the uncomfortable thought that genius is ultimately the product of the hopes and longings of ordinary people. We are the ones who marvel and wonder, longing for the salvation genius might bring. We are the ones who pay homage and obeisance. In a very real sense, the creator of genius is us.

Which is not to deny that geniuses almost always possess something special, something real, however elusive that something may be. But it is to recognize the commonsense fact that genius is in part a social creation—what historians like to call a “construction”—and, as such, of service to those who build. That fact reminds us further that for all their originality (and originality is itself a defining feature of genius in its modern form), extraordinary human beings not only define their images but embody them, stepping into molds prepared by the social imaginary and the exemplars who came before. Even outliers as remarkable, as deviant, as Einstein and Hitler are no exceptions to this rule:
however inimitable—however unique—their genius was partly prepared for them, worked out over the course of generations.
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This book recounts the long history of that preparation, following the emergence of the genius as a figure of extraordinary privilege and power. It begins in classical Greece, when poets, philosophers, and statesmen first entertained the question of what makes the greatest men great, initiating a conversation that was continued by the Romans. What power did Socrates possess to make him the wisest of all men? What godlike force moved through Alexander or Julius Caesar as they leveled all before them? Why was the poet Homer able to sing like no other? What special something did these great-souled men possess? What special something possessed them? Christians took up these and related questions in a centuries-long rumination that continued into the early modern period, adapting the language of the ancients to suit their own image of the God-man Christ and the prophets and saints who struggled to imitate his perfection. Possessed by the Holy Spirit, or lifted up by the heavenly angels, the great-souled man might aspire to be perfect as God was perfect. But how could he be sure that an angel was not a demon; that the holy ghost was not a specter, sent by Satan, to tempt him, the way Satan tempted Faust, offering the key to all knowledge in return for one’s soul? How could one be sure that those seized by higher powers were not mad, their souls stirred by dark humors and melancholy fits? Well into the Renaissance, when men like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci sought to render God’s beauty and reproduce the perfection of his creation, these remained vital questions.

It is worth listening closely to the answers. For although there is no single notion of genius that coheres magically over time, there are coherent ways of imagining how the highest beings might appear and what a beautiful mind might entail. Those early imaginings were present at the modern genius’s birth, and they lend insight into what the genius in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would become.

The modern genius was born in the eighteenth century—conceived, in keeping with long-standing prejudices, almost exclusively as a man. There were precedents for this birth, stretching all the way back to antiquity. But that the birth itself occurred in the bright place of deliverance we call “the Enlightenment” is clear. Scholars have long recognized the genius’s emergence in this period as the highest human type, a new paragon of human excellence who was the focus of extensive contemporary comment and observation. What is far less clear is
why
the genius emerged. Why, at that time, in the long eighteenth century? And why there, in the West broadly conceived?
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