Divine Fury (4 page)

It is now perfectly common to speak of genius in this general way. But that hasn’t always been the case. Only relatively recently, in fact, and above all since World War II, have genius and intelligence been so closely coupled, as if the one were a simple synonym for the other. At the time of its emergence in Europe, by contrast—and for centuries thereafter—the ideal of genius was most often predicated on the belief that this rare capacity entailed something other than mere learning and intelligence, acquired mastery and knowledge. Genius—and the genius—embodied something else.

What was this something, the distinguishing power or possession that set the genius apart? This entire book will treat of efforts to answer that elusive question, and this chapter begins by examining some of its earliest formulations, a series of Greek and Roman reflections on just what it was that made the greatest men great. For though the
genius
of the ancients was not at all the “genius” of the moderns, early attempts to wrestle with the problem of what set the classical paragons apart influenced later discussions. What was it exactly that made Socrates the wisest of all men? Why was Homer, the blind bard, gifted with such piercing poetic sight? Why were Alexander and Caesar masterminds of statecraft and war? Were they possessed by a higher power? Or did they themselves possess a different nature, a special kind of soul? Were they gods, or were they men? Or beings in between? Focusing such questions on the lives of eminent individuals, ancient commentators worked out a range of responses that would resonate down through the ages, informing subsequent considerations of what divided the many from the few.

But before considering further these early reflections and the outstanding men who prompted them, we must appreciate what these ancient exemplars—what
all
ancient exemplars, whether Greek or Roman, Persian or African, Indian or Chinese—were not. For only in this way can we fully grasp the novelty of the subsequent departure and see clearly what separates modern Western paragons of genius from the heroes of the mind who came before. The wise men and sages who open this chapter provide a perfect foil for the modern creative genius, for in every instance the embodied ideal is one of recollection and retrieval, a preservation and calling to mind of what was first revealed long before. Mental prowess, in this understanding, is essentially an act of recovery, a rearticulation of words earlier spoken, of thoughts previously known. The same is true in art, where imitation and mimesis long structured the human gaze. To reproduce the eternal forms, to render in its ready perfection the world revealed to us, was the great goal of the artisans
whom we now describe as “artists,” those skilled craftsmen who for centuries confined themselves to tracing the patterns and following the lines inscribed in the world by the ancestors and the ancients, by nature, the gods, or God. To create originally, without precedent, pattern, or model, was never the ideal of the ancient artist or sage, and indeed the ancients frequently denied the very prospect. As early as the third millennium
BCE
, the Egyptian scribe Kakheperresenb could comment on the impossibility of writing phrases that “are not already known,” “in language that has not been used,” with “words which men of old have not spoken.” And in the eleventh-century Sanskrit epic song-cycle the
Katha sarit ságara
, or
Ocean of the Streams of Story
, the god Shiva’s lover Parvati begs him to tell her a tale that has never been heard before and that will never be heard again. Shiva was a god of great talents (among his remarkable feats, he maintained an erection for eons). But the best he is able to muster is a pastiche of well-worn tales that are in turn quickly recycled. In this case, true originality is impossible even for a god.
³

The moral of the story is that “there is nothing new under the sun,” a sentiment that will be familiar to readers of Jewish and Christian scripture, but is in fact common to virtually every ancient account in which God or the gods are held to have created the universe and all that it contains, or in which the universe is understood to have always existed. In either instance, genuine originality is, strictly speaking, impossible, for mere mortals must confine themselves to recovering and reproducing what already exists. And insofar as the defining characteristic of modern genius is original creation, it follows that the ancient sage cannot a modern genius be. Rather than look to the horizon of the original and new, the ancient’s gaze is focused instead on the eternal recurrence of perennial forms, or on a “time of origins” in a mythic past that demands constant vigilance. For there in the “absolute past” lies the key to all understanding in the present and future, which will but be an eternal return, as it was in the beginning in a world without end. In the past lie the answers to all questions. In the past lie the solutions to all riddles. In the past lies the map of our fortune and fate.
⁴

Students of ancient mythology and religion have taken pains to show that this general temporal orientation was common to the wisdom traditions and great world religions that took shape in the so-called Axial age that spanned the first millennium
BCE
. Its sway was extensive, and it proved lasting, enduring well into the early modern period in the West and elsewhere besides, a fact that has important implications for the emergence of genius as a cultural ideal. For only when the primacy of the past was challenged and the gods’ monopoly on creation contested
could human beings truly conceive of themselves as creators of the new. Only then could the ideal of modern genius assume form.

Much of this book will be devoted to explaining the emergence of that ideal and to developing its implications, but the basic point may be grasped quickly enough simply by considering the etymology of the words “discovery,” “invention,” and “creation.” Into the eighteenth century, the first two of these terms retained in the various Indo-European tongues their root meanings of “uncovering” or “finding.” To “dis-cover” was to pull away the covering cloth, disclosing what may have been hidden, overlooked, or lost, but that was in any case already there. To “invent,” similarly, was to access that
inventory
of knowledge long ago assembled and put into place: an invention was just a dis-covery, a recovery of an object forgotten, now an
objet trouvé
. The word “creation” provides an even more striking illustration of the point. “To create” was long deemed impossible for mortal human beings; creation—the supreme act—was reserved for the gods.
Solus deus creat
, the medieval theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas affirms in a typical refrain. “God alone creates,” for God as the
creator omnium
was the creator of all. As late as the eighteenth century, French jurists drew on that principle to justify the king’s authority over copyright on all books and ideas. Seeing that God was the author of everything in the universe, it was only just that his representative on earth should oversee how
royalties
were collected and dispersed on behalf of their true creator. Human ideas were but imperfect imitations of the divine original.
⁵

It followed from these same assumptions that those who took it upon themselves to approximate the divine act of parturition—bringing into existence something new—flirted with danger, for they risked usurping a sacred prerogative. The classical myth of Prometheus imparts this message well. The wisest of the Titans, gifted with “forethought” (the literal meaning of his name), Prometheus hailed from a race of monstrous gods who had been defeated by Zeus and the pantheon of Mount Olympus, but who then took vengeance by stealing their fire. He bestowed on humanity that elemental power, which served in turn as the source of many more inventions—language and agriculture, metallurgy and carpentry, medicine, astronomy, and prophecy. But Prometheus was severely punished for his audacity, chained to a rock for all eternity as an eagle pecked out his liver again and again.
⁶

The consequences of usurping creation were no less severe in Judeo-Christian myth. The apocryphal book of Enoch, for example, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, tells a tale not unlike that of Prometheus, elaborating on the biblical account in Genesis 6 of a race of
fallen angels, “the sons of man,” who were moved by lust to couple with women of the earth. The fruit of their unnatural union are giants, part human, part divine, who bring evil and oppression to the world while disclosing knowledge stolen from God—metallurgy, agriculture, writing, and “other eternal secrets made in heaven.” God’s anger is uncompromising. Just as Zeus punishes Prometheus for his theft and disclosure, Yahweh lays waste to the giants and their misshapen world in the great flood that spares only Noah. Christian legend elaborates on a similar theme, telling how Lucifer, the “bringer of light” and wisest of the angels, became Satan, “the enemy,” by daring to usurp the function of creation, which is prohibited even to the angels. In John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, in fact, Satan is depicted famously as a kind of Prometheus himself, a dangerous source of innovation and imagination, justly punished, to be sure, but not without a tragic heroism in his doomed attempt to aspire to godhood. Indeed, the message in these mythic examples is often mixed—for though aspiring to creative prowess is dangerous, hubristic, redolent of sin, it is also heroic. Those who challenge the gods may be monsters and giants, but they tower above ordinary men. And yet those who are raised to great heights have a tremendous way to fall.

The seduction and allure of the ascent is bound up with the attraction of genius, which helps to explain why so many of the powers first attributed to it—creativity, imagination, originality, and “invention,” in the modern sense of making something new—were long regarded as taboo: they were a challenge to the gods. It is largely for that reason that the ideal of creativity only began to emerge as a modern value in the eighteenth century, and that in earlier times imagination was viewed with deep suspicion as a faculty to be controlled and even feared. That is not to say that there was no imagination prior to this point, any more than it is to suggest that people throughout the world somehow lacked creativity of their own. One need think only of gunpowder, the pyramids, or printed paper to dispel such thoughts. Yet to draw attention to the eighteenth century’s novel claims to creativity and genius is to suggest that it was only in this period—and, above all, in the advanced dominions of Europe—that the pervasive belief that there
was
something new under the sun was first put forth in a sustained and systematic way. If, as has been claimed, “the existence of the Creator deprives human beings of their own creativity,” then it could only be where the Creator’s existence was called into question that human creativity could fully emerge. In this respect, genius as a cultural ideal, an embodiment of imagination, innovation, and creative capacity, was a product of a specific time and place, born in the West and given birth in the long
eighteenth century, amid the very first period in the whole of human history to launch a sustained attack on the gods. Undoubtedly, there are analogues and approximations to this ideal in other traditions. But it was above all in Europe and its dependencies that it first assumed widespread prominence, with revolutionary consequences for better and for ill.
⁷

How then to chart the long gestation leading up to the birth of this new being, the slow and sometimes painful delivery? There are, no doubt, different ways. But surely any satisfying account must make sense of that special “something” that set the special apart. Scholars and sophists will make their appearance, along with men of intelligence and learning, poets and bards. But the individuals who must focus our attention are those who were believed to be more than men, those who in their audacity or divine election approached the summit of Mount Olympus and reached up to the heavens. At once dangerous and seductive, monstrous and beautiful, ominous in their power, these special beings were creatures apart. They possessed—or were possessed by—what no other human being could claim. And though there are many examples of such lofty beings among the ancients—from Pythagoras to Archimedes and beyond—one man fascinated and perplexed his peers and posterity like no other. With a philosopher from Athens—the wisest of mortals, who claimed to know nothing—does this history of genius begin.

W
E HEAR OF HIS STRANGE
companion only obliquely, in snippets and asides. “Just as I was about to cross the river,” Socrates explains in one of Plato’s many dialogues, the primary source, however imperfect, of the master’s own beliefs, “the familiar divine sign came to me which, whenever it occurs, always holds me back from something I am about to do.” Elsewhere, Socrates refers to this “sign” (
sêmeion
) as a “voice” that has spoken to him since childhood. But the word that he invariably uses to describe it is
daimonion
, the diminutive of
daimon
, ancestor of our own “demon.” The term had not yet taken on the exclusive connotation of evil that it would develop with the advent of Christianity. Yet that there was already something potentially menacing—something dangerous and revolutionary even—about the
daimonion
in question is given dramatic illustration by the setting in which Socrates was forced to account most fully for its existence. As Socrates’s pupil, the Athenian soldier and historian Xenophon, explained, “It had become notorious that Socrates claimed to be guided by ‘the
daimonion
’: it was out of this claim, I think, that the charge of bringing in strange deities arose.” Accused
by prominent citizens of Athens of having introduced “new demonic beings” (
daimonia kaina
) into the city, Socrates was put on trial as a heretic and corrupter of youth, whose appeal to an unfamiliar power threatened the very stability of the state. He himself denied any such explicit political intent, though he candidly acknowledged that the
daimonion
was the source of his urge to “interfere” in the affairs of others. “I experience a certain divine or daimonic something,” he confessed, “which in fact [has been] caricatured in the indictment. It began in childhood and has been with me ever since, a kind of voice, which whenever I hear it always turns me back from something I was going to do, but never urges me to act. This is what has prevented me from taking part in politics.” Ironically, the very power that kept him from power proved his political undoing. And so the man who “of all men living” was the “most wise,” as the Pythian priestess at Delphi famously declared, was found guilty of introducing strange demons into the city and sentenced to death in 399
BCE
. Socrates apparently drank his hemlock in peace, for, as he told his friends in the hours before his death, his
daimonion
approved his actions, never once holding him back. “That which has happened to me is undoubtedly a good thing,” he concluded, making himself a martyr, if not, strictly speaking, to genius, then at least to his own
daimonic
power.
⁸