Divine Fury (41 page)

“A
MONG MANY PROBLEMS
hitherto unsolved in the Mystery of the Mind stands the prominent question of genius,” Helena Blavatsky observed in 1889. The Russian-born American citizen was the founder of the Theosophical Society, which was devoted to exploring the occult mysteries of the universe. She considered genius a fitting subject for exploration. “Whence, and what is genius?” she asked in an essay devoted to the subject, what was “its
raison d’être
, and what were the causes of its excessive rarity?” Was genius a “gift of heaven,” and if so, why did it descend on some, while others languished in “dullness of intellect or even idiocy”? Was it the product of “blind chance,” dependent, as the materialists would have it, “on physical causes alone”? Perhaps genius was an “abnormal aptitude of the mind,” or a growth of the “physical brain”? Or perhaps, as the Romantics maintained, it was the faculty of growth itself, a vital power that could take one beyond oneself?
⁵⁹

In entertaining these speculations, Blavatsky demonstrated an impressive familiarity with the authoritative positions on genius of her age. But to these she offered her own, rather surprising, suggestion: “Perchance, in their unsophisticated wisdom,” she ventured, “the philosophers of old were nearer the truth than our modern wiseacres, when they endowed man with a tutelary Deity, a spirit whom they called genius.” Here, in the belief in a personal spirit that outlived the physical self, unique to each and common to the universal all, interceding on high and conveying messages from the beyond, was a doctrine closer to the truth, Blavatsky believed, than anything the moderns could muster. To be sure, she hastened to qualify the point in keeping with the particulars of her own esoteric philosophy, which drew eclectically on Buddhism and Indian religion to posit a belief in the reincarnation of the ego and its karmic movement toward (or away from) an all-encompassing “Over-soul.” Still, the central belief of the ancients, Blavatsky maintained, and the key to understanding their hero worship, was the notion that what distinguished the greatest men “was the imprisoned Spirit, the exiled
‘god’ within.” That notion, she insisted, retained its basic truth. In “every manifestation of genius,” Blavatsky continued, “in the warrior or the Bard, the great painter, artist, statesman or man of Science,” one could discern “the undeniable presence of the celestial exile, the divine Ego whose jailor thou art, Oh man of matter!” What was called “deification” applied to the “immortal God within.”

Blavatsky was well aware that most scientists would dismiss her ecstatic musings. “The very idea that every man with a ‘soul’ in him is the vehicle of (a) genius will appear supremely absurd, even to [religious] believers, while the materialist will fall foul of it as ‘crass superstition.’” Yet, lest we grant our assent too readily, it is well to bear in mind that her invocation of the occult was far from an aberration, and her theosophical teaching hardly an isolated phenomenon. A number of scholars have argued recently that theosophy and spiritualism were central to modern culture. Certainly, theosophy interested a great number of eminent writers, artists, and intellectuals, including, to name only a few, William Butler Yeats, Rudolf Steiner, Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, and even Thomas Edison. Fascination with spiritual forces turned up in surprising places. The great French writer Victor Hugo, for example, experimented throughout his life with the occult, holding séances and invoking the spirits of the dead. During one such session, he and friends managed to contact the
genius
of Shakespeare, who kindly dictated the first act of a new play, in French! Other encounters led to conversations with the spirits of Dante, Racine, and Molière. In Germany and England, those who ventured into occult worlds, flirting with theosophy, hypnotism, mesmerism, and alchemy, could readily conceive, like the leaders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London, of a higher, angelic, or godlike self—a “Genius”—who acted as an intercessor to the divine.
⁶⁰

Whether beliefs of this type, which enjoyed an undeniable vogue toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, represent truly modern creations, or illustrate instead the tenacious persistence of the past, is a debatable question. But what is clear, at least where matters of genius are concerned, is their continued resonance. Blavatsky’s general claim that the phenomenon of genius entailed something like the
divinum quiddam
of the ancients—a piece of the divine in us—could readily appeal to men and women who would not have shared other aspects of her esoteric philosophy, with its Eastern allusions and proto–New Age language. The theosophist’s contention that genius involved a connection between the individual (Ego) and a transcendent “over-soul,” in fact, was not far removed from the Romantic belief
that the genius participated in what German idealists conceived as the noumenal realm of Idea or Spirit, what Shelley called the “eternal, the infinite, and the one.” Christians, too, could recognize in the ancient idea of a
genius
, or its modern incarnation in man, a connection to the demons, spirits, and angels that had long attended human beings or the eternal souls that animated their flesh, raising them to God. The phenomenon of genius, in short, seemed to underscore the point that there was more to the world than positivists could explain, defying the desacralizing efforts of modern science. Call it superstition, but it remained the case that the “unsophisticated” and “uneducated masses” registered a truth nonetheless in their confrontations with genius, Blavatsky wrote. “Feeling themselves in the presence of that which in the enormous majority is ever hidden, of something incomprehensible to their matter-of-fact minds, they experience the same awe that popular masses felt in days of old when their fancy, often more unerring than cultured reason, created of their heroes gods.” The genius made manifest the marvelous, and so the masses made of the genius an exalted being who was more than a man.
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Despite the exorcizing efforts of the science of genius throughout the whole of the nineteenth century, then,
genii
continued to haunt the genius;
daimones
were still detectable in daemonic man. Nor was this lingering presence simply the consequence of the failure of science to penetrate down to men and women on the streets. On the contrary, the magical and mystical aura that continued to surround the genius was the product, in part, of that science itself. Exorcisms, no less than incantations, are religious rites, and in their efforts to perform them, men as varied as Gall and Galton, Moreau and Broca, and Lombroso and Lélut succeeded, in spite of themselves, in further enchanting the creature whose demons they intended to purge.

Admittedly, the genius, in their reckoning, was a natural creation, but in his singularity and election he resembled a variation of the genius of Kant, through whom nature spoke its truth to art, providing epiphanies of a more beautiful world. The genius, in other words, continued to be conceived as a medium, an oracle who channeled nature’s revelations, disclosing its truths, revealing its wonders, and laying down its laws—and not only in art. For genius was a power, like
g
, common to eminence in many domains. Those chosen creatures who possessed it remained creatures apart, marked by stigmata, as Lombroso contended, or stigmatized by signs, singled out by virtue of their madness, disease, or exalted physique. One in a million, one in ten million, the genius was like no other, the exception who defied the rule(s).

How ironic, then, that Terman could declare, in announcing the advent of the science of genius, that its inception had been long retarded by the “influence of current beliefs, partaking of the nature of superstitions, regarding the essential nature of the Great Man, who has commonly been regarded by the masses as qualitatively set off from the rest of mankind, the product of supernatural causes.” For the science that he and others advocated did as much to qualitatively set the Great Man apart as any received superstition. By substituting natural for supernatural causes, they granted the imprimatur of science to what remained, fundamentally, a myth regarding the right and capacity of higher beings to rule the world. Further enhancing the genius’s favored inequality and exceptional status, they objectified his difference from ordinary human beings. And yet the pathogens and pieces of brain, the hereditary intelligence and genetic force that scientists of genius discovered in the places where the
genii
once roamed, could not succeed in entirely displacing them. The very effort to purge the body of spirits was in some sense to credit their existence.
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Indeed, that the genius might still be haunted by demons was a prospect on which both advocates of science and their more spiritual detractors could frequently, if surprisingly, agree. While Lombroso and his followers speculated openly about the genius’s potential for madness, revolution, and crime, Blavatsky observed that, “like the good and bad
genii
of old with whom human genius is made so appropriately to share the name, it takes its helpless possessor by the hand and leads him, one day to the pinnacles of fame, fortune, and glory, but to plunge him on the following day into an abyss of shame, despair, often of crime.” Even the acolytes of Galton, though denying genius’s inherent pathology, might agree that, were one of these grand human animals to catch an evil scent, he might ravage the world with catastrophic results, like a terrible, prowling beast. To a recovering Romantic like Friedrich Nietzsche, that was not an altogether unpleasant thought. Men of genius, he observed, “were like explosives,” the danger in them “extraordinary.” The power of destruction was the natural counterpart to the power of creation. When that power, legitimated by science and consecrated by a militant religion, was put to the service of politics, the consequences proved truly apocalyptic.
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CHAPTER VI

THE RELIGION OF GENIUS

I
N THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY
, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard published a short essay with an intriguing title, “On the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle.” Like so many of Kierkegaard’s occasional writings, the essay called attention to what he regarded as a disturbing tendency of the present age. Science and learning had confused Christianity, he charged, with the result that religious discourse was adopting science’s terms. Pastors now described the likes of Saint Paul as a “genius,” hailing his brilliance and lauding his style. The praise was well intentioned, but the consequence was a fatal conflation: “Esprit and the Spirit, revelation and originality, a call from God and genius, all end by meaning more or less the same thing.” In truth, Kierkegaard insisted, a “genius and an Apostle are qualitatively different.” A man like St. Paul “has no connection whatsoever with Plato or Shakespeare.”
¹

Kierkegaard’s essay was prompted by the case of the contemporary Danish pastor and philosopher Adolph Peter Adler, who claimed to have received a new revelation from God, and then amended the account under scrutiny, explaining it as a revelation of genius instead. But as Kierkegaard well knew, confusion of this kind was by no means an isolated occurrence: across Europe in the nineteenth century, Christian apologists lauded the heroes of their faith in similar terms, concurring with the abbé Louis Bautain, who observed that “it is by men of genius, prophets, poets, apostles . . . that the life of heaven has been communicated to humanity since the beginning.” Among Protestants, Martin Luther emerged in the nineteenth century as a robust example of the Christian genius. At the same time, Catholics redefined their own prophets and saints, calling attention on occasion, in a pious nod to the
science of the time, to signs of holy madness and enthusiasm as symptoms of an underlying genius. True, only skeptics dared suggest that Jesus himself suffered from a morbid pathology. But disciples and disbelievers alike could agree that Jesus was a “great man” and an “original genius,” a claim that was increasingly common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (to say nothing of our own). When Ernest Renan penned his controversial biography of Jesus,
La vie de Jésus
, in 1863, he followed David Friedrich Strauss in making that claim central to his account, prompting the withering scorn of Nietzsche, who later observed that the “concept of genius” was completely inappropriate when applied to the “Jesus type.”
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With that much, at least, Kierkegaard would have agreed, for as he rightly appreciated, to apply the label “genius” to an apostle of God was to recognize a standard of authority that was human, not divine. Just as it would be treason “to ask whether a king is a genius” as a condition of loyalty, or it would be an act of filial rebellion to maintain that “I obey my father, not because he is my father but because he is a genius,” it was misconceived to base the divinely conferred power of an apostle on aesthetic or intellectual grounds. “To ask whether Christ is profound is blasphemy,” Kierkegaard maintained. Genius and divine authority were entirely different things.
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The blurring of that distinction concerned Kierkegaard primarily insofar as it weakened and humanized Christianity, tacitly recognizing the genius as the highest human type. But there was a related consequence that the Danish philosopher hinted at with his examples of filial rebellion and
lèse-majesté
. Genius was becoming a criterion of political authority, assuming the awe and aura once reserved for divinely conferred majesty. Just as the apostle could be confused with the genius, the genius could be confused with the apostle and hailed as a prophet, a redeemer, a savior, and ruler of men.