Divine Fury (6 page)

This ancient notion of the utter passivity of the poet was given its most explicit formulation well after the fact by Socrates’s pupil Plato, who develops in his early and middle dialogues, the
Ion
and the
Phaedrus
, a theory of inspiration that would exert a tremendous influence on later understandings of genius. There Plato puts forth the view that poets and rhapsodists who recite their works are inhabited and taken over by the Muse in moments of production and performance. “God takes away the mind of these men,” he says, “and uses them as his ministers, just as he does soothsayers and godly seers.” Like ecstatic prophets, poets are filled by the divine breath—they are inspired, possessed. God is the source of their power.
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Nor is that all. For to be possessed, Plato insists, is to lose one’s mind, to cede one’s self entirely to the god. “Unable ever to compose until he has been inspired and put out of his senses, and his mind is no longer in him,” the poet experiences radical alienation in the enthusiasm of composition. He is caught up in the grips of
mania
, a form of madness or inspiration that Latin commentators, on Plato’s example, would later describe as the
furor poeticus
, the poetic “fury” or “frenzy” that claims a poet in the midst of impassioned composition or recital. In such an enthusiastic trance, the poet’s mind is literally not his own. Temporarily insane, he is in ecstasy (from the Greek
ek-stasis
, literally a standing outside of oneself), a condition that Plato explicitly relates in the
Phaedrus
to other forms of divine alienation. Playing on the close similarity in Greek between the words
for madness (
manike
or
mania
) and prophecy (
mantike
), Plato describes there how the Sybil and other priestesses in the ancient world delivered their ecstatic pronouncements while possessed, predicting the future, and granting oracles, inspired by the god Apollo. This “prophetic madness,” like “poetic madness,” bore a direct affinity to what Plato describes as a kind of “mystical madness,” induced by the god Dionysius during cultic rites, which filled religious devotees with ecstasy and enthusiasm, taking them temporarily out of themselves.
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Plato insisted that these forms of “divine madness” owed not to sickness or disease, but to a divinely inspired presence. As such, they were gifts of the gods. And yet it should also be clear that his account was not without its ambiguities, particularly where poets were concerned. For by taking the position that poets were nothing but empty vessels—and totally out of their minds!—Plato denied them any merit or knowledge of their own. And while there was ample precedent for that claim, by the time Plato formulated it in the fourth century
BCE
, the Greeks had also elaborated a notion of poetry as an art—a
technê
, or craft—whose rules could be learned and intricacies perfected by practice and the accumulation of skill. The poet needed inspiration, to be sure, but that divine gift could be refined through cultivation.

Plato, however, explicitly denies that poetry is an art of this kind, taking pains in the
Ion
to demonstrate that all good poets compose and utter their work “not from art, but as inspired and possessed.” And if the poet, like the prophet and the religious ecstatic, practices an art that is no art, he can have no real knowledge of what he does, no wisdom at all. His madness may be divine, but it is madness all the same, irrational and potentially dangerous. Poets, Plato seems to suggest, are a little bit crazy and so must be watched, and indeed in the
Republic
he makes that suggestion explicit, calling, in an oft-cited discussion, for the poets to be censored in his ideal community, and even banished, until they can give a proper account of their benefit to the state. Ironically, the theory of poetic inspiration that would later prove so influential among poets was used by Plato to challenge their claim to authority.
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Plato’s subtle critique of the poets, however, should not be read as animus toward poetry per se—his entire oeuvre resounds with a love of poetic language and skill—but rather as a frank acknowledgment of poetry’s seductive power. The divine gifts of language and imagination, he recognized, may easily be abused, above all in a political setting, where they can quickly inflame the passions and sway the soul. If the poet, in Plato’s celebrated description, was a “light, winged, holy thing,” this same angelic being could prove a demon.

Which raises an interesting question. What was the difference between a poet driven mad by the Muse and a philosopher like Socrates, whose
daimonion
whispered in his ear? Weren’t they likewise possessed, and so equally dangerous? The question takes on added drama when we bear in mind that one of Socrates’s principal accusers, the Athenian citizen Miletus, was a poet himself. Was Plato simply avenging his master in banishing the bards from the Republic? Or worse, was he committing the very same crime that the rulers of Athens had committed against his beloved teacher, condemning the appeal to a god he could not control?

The distinction between the two cases becomes clearer when the divine madness of poetry, prophecy, and religious ecstasy are contrasted with what Plato describes in the
Phaedrus
as a fourth type of mania, the divine madness of love, which offers a glimpse of yet another way of conceiving that special something said to distinguish the most exalted human beings. Love, too, is a potentially dangerous force, which may possess us utterly and completely, as a shuddering orgasm or a jealous rage make only too clear. But though the gods who impart it—Eros and Aphrodite—can be the bearers of a fury and frenzy of their own, Plato maintained that they could be channeled and controlled, given direction and course. By choosing an exalted object of desire, we might not just be led along, but lead ourselves, learning to love in a process that Sigmund Freud would later describe as sublimation, the redirection of erotic energy to “higher” things. This is a theme of much of Plato’s work, but immediately following his discussion of divine madness in the
Phaedrus
, he gives it a particularly arresting articulation by focusing on the vehicle of ascent. That vehicle is the soul, he says, “immortal,” “self-moving,” and endowed metaphorically with wings, “which have the power to lift up heavy things and raise them aloft where the gods all dwell.” The soul, he claims further, is composed of three parts—reason, will, and desire—which he likens in a famous image to a charioteer hitched to two winged horses, one white and noble, the other black and unruly. The driver, who occupies the place of reason, attempts to goad the two horses—his will and desire—ever upward in an effort to return the soul to the place whence it came: the realm of the immortal gods. But those souls that get weighed down by earthly things—their dark horse led astray—will never soar to the heights of truth. Only those led successfully by reason can do so, and in Plato’s view, it is the philosopher (
philosophos
), the passionate lover of truth, who achieves the greatest heights. Striving to discipline his will and curb his unruly desires, the philosopher orients himself toward lofty things, standing “outside human concerns” in order to “draw close to the divine.” Ordinary people will “think he is disturbed and rebuke
him for this, unaware that he is possessed by god.” They will “charge that he is mad.” But his madness is in truth the highest form of wisdom. “Perfect as perfect can be,” he knows the
furor divinus
, the divine fury, and is privy to extraordinary vision and power. Like Socrates, this philosopher lives in the “grip of something divine.”
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Here then was a form of divine inspiration that, while unruly and potentially dangerous, like all forms of possession, could nonetheless be cultivated and at least partially controlled by the appropriate forms of training. Philosophy, unlike poetry or prophecy, was a craft that could be learned, and throughout his works, Plato places a good deal of emphasis on the kind of education necessary to acquire it. Which is not to imply that Plato believed that philosophy could simply be imparted to any and all: the vision of truth that it afforded could only be glimpsed by the special few. On several occasions, Plato suggests that Socrates alone had succeeded in training his eye to see in this way. To “live in the grip of something divine”—and to see accordingly—was a privilege of very special souls.

Did that mean that Socrates’s own philosophical soul was constitutionally different from that of other men? That his nature—and that of other great-souled individuals like him—was somehow distinctive and unique? To put the question another way, can it be said that Socrates was not only possessed by, but in possession of, a special power? Any speculation to that effect in the context of Plato’s thought must bear in mind that he likely shared with other early Greeks, such as Pindar and Protagoras, a belief in metempsychosis, or the transmigration of the soul. If all souls are shaped by their past experiences, and are born into the world bearing the imprint of prior knowledge, then it follows that they would indeed be “unequal” at birth, endowed with varying capacities. It is also true that in a famous passage in the
Republic
, Plato acknowledges the expediency of conceiving of human beings as constitutionally unequal in this way. It would be useful, he maintains, to perpetuate the belief that social hierarchies are natural, that the body politic reflected the composition of souls. The rulers of his ideal republic are taught to believe that they have souls of “gold,” while their auxiliaries possess souls of “silver,” and the lowly workers and craftsman, souls of “iron” or bronze. Plato describes this fiction as a “magnificent myth” or “noble lie”—politically useful, if not true.
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Men’s souls, clearly, are not composed of gold. But that their “metal” might be measured in another way is suggested in a fascinating aside in Plato’s dialogue
Timaeus
, where he repeats an assertion made elsewhere that every man has a
daimon
, an attendant guardian, linking him to the
divine. Rather than describe this
daimon
as a separate being, as he does on other occasions, however, Plato equates it directly with the rational part of one’s soul, whose seat, he says, is in the head. It is that part of us—human reason (
logos
or
nous
)—that is most heavenly and divine, the part that can be “fed” and nourished by learning and contemplation. Critically, Plato adds that insofar as one is “forever tending his divine part and duly magnifying that
daimon
who dwells along with him, he must be supremely blessed,” he must have a great
daimon
. The suggestion would seem to be that a man like Socrates, who cultivated the rational part of his soul more assiduously than anyone before him, should be singled out not just for his state of possession but also for what he possessed. His special sign, his
daimonion
, on this interpretation, was not an extrinsic spirit or god, but his own elevated soul, his own beautiful mind.
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Plato never made that suggestion perfectly clear. But others did. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, for example, observed cryptically in a surviving fragment that “man’s character is his
daimon
” (
ethos anthropoi daimon
), implying that soul and spirit were one. And later the Roman Platonist Apuleius argued in his celebrated treatise on Socrates’s
daimonion, De Deo Socratis
, that “in a certain sense even the human mind itself, even while still located in the body, can be called a
daimon
.” But if there was thus some basis in Platonic terms for thinking of the mind as the possessor of its own exalted power, posterity would tend to seize on the more arresting image in Plato of the mind possessed—of the prophet, poet, mystic, or philosopher seized in divine fury by an alien power, whether a
daimon
, an angel, or the Holy Ghost. For the contrasting model of the mind as the generative source of its own imaginings, posterity turned to a different tradition—one that also originated with the poets, but that culminated not in the tradition of Plato, but in that of his leading student, Aristotle.
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T
HE TRADITION CAN BE TRACED
to the poet Pindar, who lived about a hundred years before Plato in the second half of the fifth century
BCE
, and who seems to have been the first to formulate a view of innate talent in Greece. Suggesting that the gods endowed “different men with different skills,” and that each should strive to live “according to his nature” (
phusis
), Pindar contrasted inborn capacities with learning, art, or craft and came down decidedly on the side of the former. Nature trumped nurture: “Everything that is natural is best.” Extraordinary poetic ability, on this view—and by extension supreme talents of every kind—must be present from birth. The great-souled or great-natured individual—the
megalophues
—could lay claim to an inherent capacity that could never be acquired simply by practice or rivaled by learning and craft.
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This opposition between the skill acquired by learning and the gifts conferred by nature was invoked by many critics in the ancient world, and eventually served as the basis for a particularly modern prejudice—that true genius is always born, never learned—with Pindar himself held up in the eighteenth century as a case in point, a paragon of the original genius. In the ancient world, however, and for centuries thereafter, nurture and nature (
ars et ingenium
) were most often seen as complementary, and the same is true of the belief in natural endowment and the theory of poetic inspiration. For though the two views of the creative process could be contrasted as competing ideal types, more frequently they were paired. Nowhere does Pindar himself, for example, present nature and inspiration in opposition. Natural gifts, after all, were themselves divinely conferred, bestowed on the individual at birth by the gods. In this sense, there was nothing “natural” about the man of natural endowment. Just like the man possessed, the possessor of great nature was divinely touched, singled out and chosen by the gods. There was no good reason why a man so favored should not receive further offerings from the Muse, blown directly into his soul. Those who have shall receive.
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