Divine Fury (16 page)

The work, in this respect, is an early manual of eugenics, and it is significant in that connection that Huarte took pains to ruminate in a revised edition on the etymology of
ingenium
, a word, he believed, that in Latin, as in Spanish (
ingenio
) and Italian (
ingegno
), likely derived from one of three Latin verbs:
gigno
(to beget),
ingigno
(to engender), or
ingenero
(to seed or implant). All three possible roots related to a procreative capacity, and for Huarte that was hardly a coincidence. For
ingenium
also referred to a “generative power” (
potencia generativa
), and man possessed two such powers by virtue of his special place on the Great Chain of Being. The first—the power of physical reproduction—he shared with the animals and plants below him. But the second he held in common with “spiritual substances, God and the angels,” and it enabled him to produce “children” of another sort: ideas, notions, and concepts with which he became “pregnant” and to which he then gave birth. Those who first employed the word
ingenium
, Huarte speculated, were surely conscious of this fertile connection between innate human mental capacities and the spiritual power of angels and of God.
³⁹

In describing
ingenium
in this way—as a seminal, creative force linking man to the divine—Huarte echoed the pronouncements of his countrymen and contemporaries, who were writing of the possession of
ingenium
in ecstatic terms as a God-given tool of invention, left over to man after the Fall, to make use of for better or for worse. “The inventor of all arts and sciences is
ingenium
,” observed the humanist Juan Luis Vives, a friend of Erasmus, whose works were almost certainly known to
Huarte. “All the inventions and discoveries of man have their origin here; the useful and the harmful, the good and the bad.” Speaking variously of
ingenium
as the life force of the soul (
vigor animi
) and the “whole general strength of our mind,” Vives also stressed
ingenium
’s capacity to observe, compare, and seek out the “truth in every thing.” But it was above all his emphasis on creativity and invention that influenced Huarte, and indeed it was this aspect of his work that bore witness to something new, testifying to the emergence of a wider understanding of
ingenium
as the source of what we now think of as “ingenuity,” the ingenious capacity to invent, create, and conceive.
⁴⁰

Neither Huarte nor Vives nor any other of the many theorists of
ingenium
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were Romantics
avant la lettre
. The medieval dictum that God alone can create still resonated in the minds of theorists and practitioners alike, who regarded all art and thought as in large measure an act of recovery and imitation, a re-creation of what God in his perfection had already conceived. Huarte put it well when, employing a loose translation of Aristotle, he defined the man of perfect
ingenium
“as one who knows everything and understands all things.” Adam before the Fall was such a man, born “perfectly instructed with all scientific knowledge infused”—from which it followed that “there is not a phrase or a sentence, in any domain of learning[,] that has not been uttered before.”
⁴¹

Notwithstanding these qualifications,
ingenium
was put to innovative uses, and in Huarte’s likening of the mind to the procreative power of God one finds the seed of a genuine innovation. For those who possessed the very finest
ingenium
could “give voice, without art or study, to things that had never been seen, heard, or written—such subtle, truthful, and prodigious things that no one had thought of them previously.” And while it was understandable that Plato and his followers might think such seminal thoughts to be poured into us from above, the seed, in fact, came ready planted at birth, and required no divine fertilization. To believe that the thoughts of men of great
ingenium
were “divine revelations,” and not products of their particular nature, was a “clear and manifest error.” In Huarte, we see a glimmer of what others in the sixteenth century were beginning to discover for themselves: men—special men—could create on their own, bringing into being the genuinely new.
⁴²

Which is not to say that Huarte, or any of the other apologists for
ingenium
, would have denied that our in-built natures were, at the moment of their inception, divinely conferred. Ficino spoke for the majority when he remarked in a letter to a friend on the subject
of our natal endowments, “I shall in agreement with Aristotle say that this nature itself is a unique and divine gift.”
Ingenium
, the seed that was planted in us at birth, was an offering from God, and most considered the question of why some should receive a more bountiful offering than others as mysterious as why some, and not others, should be saved. Indeed, the notion of
ingenium
, no less than the
furor divinus
, tracked in interesting ways with the Reformation’s debates about grace. Just as the
furor divinus
could be given either a Protestant or Catholic inflection—conceived as an active grace poured into a passive vessel, or as the heavenly reward of the soul that raises itself to God—so
ingenium
could be thought of in Protestant or Catholic ways. For some it was a perfect analogue to the Protestants’
gratia
—a divine seed sown in us, without which we could achieve nothing of worth. But it also lent itself to a more Catholic interpretation, with an emphasis on the “works” required to cultivate our natural gifts. As the celebrated architect and man of letters Leon Battista Alberti affirmed, “the gifts of Nature should be cultivated and increased by industry, study, and practice.” Whatever one’s religious persuasion, that was a message with which most before the eighteenth century would have agreed. As the Roman poet Horace famously emphasized in a widely repeated rule,
ingenium
must be coupled with
industria
and
ars
, the hard work and acquired mastery necessary for perfection. Given their immense respect for the models of the ancients, early modern men and women invariably agreed.
⁴³

Theories of divine inspiration and
ingenium
could thus be appropriated by Protestants and Catholics alike. People of both persuasions adapted these theories to suit their needs, emphasizing nature or nurture, inspiration or works, as they best saw fit. The two theories might still be combined (as Ficino had done)—if, say, inspiration is conceived as descending only on those of great nature, and those of great nature are seen as summoning gifts from on high. Or, they could be maintained separately and in isolation. Well into the seventeenth century and beyond, unrepentant Platonists vigorously denied that the configuration of the bodily humors could ever be the cause of divine fury, great poetry, or art. Aristotelians countered with equal vehemence that fanciful notions of men possessed did little to explain the true possession of excellence, man’s divine
ingenium
.
⁴⁴

Yet where all three variations converged is on the soul of the unique individual, the mind of the great man, which was slowly assuming powers that for centuries had been entrusted to the angels and the demons and to those men and women—the sorcerers and the saints—whose bidding they performed. That process of assumption was clearest in Ficino’s
concept of a heavenly soul that could wing itself upward in the madness of possession, soaring like an angel or
daimon
to God. But it was also apparent in the special
ingenium
of the great-souled man, the man who, on the strength of his natural powers, could perform the very same feats—prophetic, philosophical, poetic—as the man taken up in fury.
Ingenium
, too, was a
genius
of sorts, an angelic power imbedded in our persons, a higher source of self.

In the Protestant countries, at least, this process of co-optation and displacement was accompanied by a far more extensive clearing of the space between heaven and earth. Men and women, Protestants believed, were saved by faith alone: nothing else should stand between their savior and their souls. And so they abolished reliquaries and the cult of the saints as divine companions and intercessors before God. They scoffed at what they saw as the ludicrous speculations of medieval angelology, frowning particularly at the cult of the guardian angel, which smacked dangerously, in their view, of idolatry. Those “who limit the care which God takes of each of us to a single angel,” Calvin observed, “do great injury to themselves and to all the members of the Church.” The Reformers did not dispense with the angels altogether—there were far too many references in Scripture for that. And the Baroque piety of the Catholic Counter-Reformation strongly reaffirmed a belief in personal guardians and angelic beings. Yet it remains the case that the collective impact of the Reformation helped to clear the space between heaven and earth, downplaying, where not discounting altogether, the role of mediators, messengers, and angelic friends. This was an important precondition for the appearance of the genius, in our more modern sense—a being who would succeed in displacing the souls, saints, and spirits who had come before.
⁴⁵

The appearance of the modern genius was still some way off. But an annunciation of sorts could be heard in the declaration of the word, which gradually over the course of the sixteenth century relinquished its exclusive association with the angels and
daimones
of old.
Genius
was used in the 1500s as a direct synonym for the
furor poeticus
, as in the title of a Latin text that reflected this change perfectly:
Genius, sive de furore poetico
(Genius, or the Divine Fury). And in a further sign of such coupling and combination, authors writing in Italian and Latin began to equate
ingenium
and “genius” (
genio
or
genius
) as well. Slowly, over the course of the century, they conflated the two words, employing genius, or
genio
, to signify not a
daimon
, poetic fury, or angelic friend, but our in-built nature and intelligence, our
ingenium
, the genius of man.
⁴⁶

This was a usage that gained currency first in Latin and Italian from the middle of the sixteenth century, and then spread slowly across Europe in the centuries to come. In English,
ingenium
was initially translated as “wit,” and in French as
esprit
, but in the seventeenth century “genius” and
génie
were used with increasing frequency. Jean Nicot’s
Thresor de la langue françoyse
(Treasure of the French language) of 1606, for example, defines
génie
as the “natural inclination of each of us,” and Elisha Coles’s
English Dictionary
of 1676 describes genius as “nature, fancy, or inclination.” The older senses of the word did not simply disappear, of course, but lingered about like disembodied souls. “A good angell, or a familiar evill spirit, the soule,” is the lone entry for “genius” in Henry Cockeram’s
English Dictionarie
of 1623. For the rest of the century those meanings coexisted with the newer sense of the term, a testament to the conflation of
ingenium
, inspiration, and genius carried out over the course of the Renaissance. When the English poet John Dryden paused to reflect in 1695 on the contemporary meaning of the word, he unwittingly (or rather, with wit) summarized over two centuries of debate: “A happy genius is the gift of nature: it depends on the influence of the stars say the astrologers, on the organs of the body, say the naturalists; ’tis the particular gift of heaven, say the divines, both Christians and heathens. How to improve it, many books can teach us; how to obtain it, none: that nothing can be done without it all agree.” Genius, for Dryden, was still a power, not a person, something one had. But though all might have a genius for something—a natural inclination that led them along—those who were led to the very highest heights were held aloft as special men, beings of another order, angelic and divine. Michelangelo provided a vivid illustration of a being so uplifted, an individual blessed with such wondrous
ingenium
, that his contemporaries could only proclaim him at the hour of his death a being apart. Michael of the Angels, a man who was more than man. A creature whose
genius
was himself.
⁴⁷

T
HE BODY ARRIVED
in the early spring of 1564, borne from Rome across the Apennines to the Tuscan town on the Arno—the same town where Donatello had died and Ficino had lived and Michael of the Angels had first entered the world under a “fateful and fortunate star.” He was coming home to a place of rest after a life of sacrifice and devotion, a life of beautifying God’s world. The people of Florence were grateful. They lined the streets as the coffin passed, and filled to overflowing the great church of Santa Croce, which was prepared to receive the “saintly old man.” When the casket was opened on March 11 in the sacristy, it “seemed a great thing to everyone that he was not at all disfigured nor
his body in the least decomposed,” wrote Don Giovanni di Simone, a direct witness. Another observed that “touching his head and his cheeks, which everyone did, they found them to be soft and life-like, as if he had died only a few hours before, and this filled all with amazement,” for in truth, he “had been in the coffin for 22 days or more, and from the day of his death 25 days had passed.” The priest who presided over the preparations for burial declared this a “divine sign,” and Michelangelo’s close friend, the painter-author Giorgio Vasari, echoed that sentiment in the revised edition of his celebrated
Lives of the Artists
. “We were tempted to believe,” he noted there, “that [Michelangelo] was only resting in a sweet and tranquil sleep.”
⁴⁸