Hidden motives

We are all of us products of our heredity and environment (or nature and nurture if you prefer). But while most of us muddle along, some few react so strongly against nature and/or nurture that something extraordinary happens. Creativity is born, new ideas are expressed: and some of these ideas change the world.

In what follows I am not attempting to explain creativity. That remains inexplicable. I am wondering, taking some extreme, random examples that occurred to me as I was writing, if circumstances might have provoked an original idea or feeling in some extraordinary people.

That an indelible picture of the tragic fall of Satan, and with him, Adam and Eve, should have been imagined by a republican pamphleteer and heretical Anglican is surprising. That it was such a vivid picture that for many it replaced the similar one in the bible was extraordinary.

How did a deaf alcoholic come to prefigure the ideals of the Age of Revolution, and those of the Romantic Movement, apparently living them out in his life and music? How did an inept politician come to describe the picture of democracy under threat so memorably it has echoed down the ages to our time? Why did a sinful saint come up with the concept of Original Sin, and make it reverberate in our consciousness ever since?

All questions aside, I just want to look at these, and others you might think of, afresh. They deserve it.

Milton: the blind seer

The English poet John Milton spent the last 20 years of his life completely blind. He lost his sight by age 46, yet then composed the epic Paradise Lost, dictating it to assistants who wrote it down for him. It was published as he was approaching the age of 60, only seven years before his death in 1674. Milton was strongly opposed to Catholicism, held heterodox theological views, advocated disestablishment of the Church of England, and was a passionate proponent of republicanism, the only defence he saw from the arrogance and ineptitude of absolute rulers, whose divine right to rule he denied.

Paradise Lost tells the story of the heroic rebellion of Satan against god, and his attempt to dethrone the divine king. For a man who was part of Oliver Cromwell’s republican government and implicated in the death of King Charles I, it seems odd to see him praise the victory of god and the overthrow of the rebel who would have unseated him from his throne.

Republicanism was obviously not an option in Heaven. Milton’s poem goes on to show the corruption of Adam and Eve, the loss of Paradise, and the exile of the first humans in a real but imperfect world. Most of what we are familiar with about this story come from Milton’s poem, not the bible.

Did Milton’d blindness impact on his political views, making him more tolerant of monarchy, that of a divine king? Milton fought for freedom of the press, for religious freedom, yet thought the soul must submit to god.

Beethoven and the sounds of silence

The Classical music composer Ludwig van Beethoven spent his last ten years unable to hear. From age 46 in 1817 he was totally deaf. He had first gone deaf in 1798 after suffering a fit, but partially recovered for a while. Deafness did not prevent him composing. Plagued with ill health (he suffered lifelong crippling abdominal pain he attempted to deaden by excessive intake of alcohol, which damaged his liver); Beethoven’s work began, and continued to his middle years, as that of a composer and performer in the manner of Mozart. He studied under Haydn, and was famous for his works for piano.

From about 1804, shortly after his first attack of deafness and during his period of impaired hearing, Beethoven’s work became ‘epic’, grandiose, with a very loud sound, for large orchestras, and programmic, similar to that of composers of the Romantic movement of 1he later 19th century. From 1815 Beethoven, now quite deaf, produced works of deeply felt individualism, and used innovative techniques which startled his audience but which sounded revolutionary to them. The revolutionary period of European history was beginning {the Reform Act was passed in Britain 1832, the Communist Manifesto published 1848 and revolution that year flared up across Europe).

Was Beethoven expressing his anger, his need for control, a sense of power that could overcome difficulties such as deafness, in his later music?

Demosthenes: the dumb orator

The fourth century BC Greek orator and politician Demosthenes was afflicted as a young man with a bad stutter. He held ordinary conversations with difficulty. Demosthenes had been left a fortune by his father, but the money had been misappropriated, he suspected. Needing to go to a court of law and claim his inheritance, and impeach his guardian, Demosthenes taught himself how to speak in public. He practised speaking with a pebble in his mouth, speaking while running and out of breath, spoke in front of a large mirror and corrected his deportment, and kept at it for two entire years. Eventually he became confident, even seemed to have a successful legal career before him.

Analysing the political situation in Greece, Demosthenes overestimated the cohesion and self sacrifice of the free Greek states; and underestimated the political acumen and military strength of Philip of Macedon, the greatest general of his day, and the father of Alexander the Great. Demosthenes marshalled an unenthusiastic opposition to Philip, and attacked him in a series of inflammatory speeches.

The Greeks failed to resist Philip and then Alexander, and Demosthenes committed suicide rather than suffer the revenge planned by the Macedonians. His speeches, called the Philippics, were greatly admired in antiquity. Cicero, the most influential of classical writers on Western Europe, thought them the greatest ever written, and they greatly affected his own style, which in turn influenced later speakers, including Churchill.

But would Demosthenes have written his Philippics had he remained a diffident speaker? Did his own success make him blind to the real political situation in Greece?

Augustine: the sinful saint

The Christian theologian Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in Algeria (ancient Numidia) converted to Christianity in 386 AD, at the age of 31. He had heard a voice, in the way that Paul of Tarsus had, which resulted, like Paul, in a violent rejection of his previous beliefs. Augustine became Bishop of Hippo in 395, wrote, among other works, his Confessions in 397, and died in 430. Central to Augustine’s thought was his awareness of guilt about his sexual emotions. He had previously led a normal life typical of s wealthy man of his time, followed the popular, dualistic religion of Manichaeism, kept a mistress, and studied philosophy. He was close to his mother Monica, a devout Christian, and this relationship may have been the foundation of his guilt.

Augustine’s guilt, spelt out in detail in his Confessions, is an emotion, what Freud wold call a neurosis, not caused at all by his behaviour, which was exemplary. But it strongly influenced his theology, in particular his doctrine of Original Sin. The book of Genesis says that Adam and Eve were punished for their sin – which Augustine saw as one of lust – by the loss of Paradise. This was not enough for Augustine, who thought every human being was born with Adam’s sin, destined for Hell and saved only by Jesus’ death on the cross. The sign of Original Sin was our sexual instincts.

Augustine’s thought has been extremely influential. Aquinas, and especially Calvin and Luther, adopted his views, and so he could be described as both the father of orthodoxy and fundamentalism. Did Augustine’s guilt driven sexuality change the course of Christian theology, and the ideas of Western Christendom?

Influences

We don’t really know where new ideas come from, except from some combination of heredity and environment. What happens next seems to be a factor of how cultures develop, or rather an interaction between societies and ideas.

Lutheranism for example was an outcrop of European nationalism, a feeling of distrust of pan European organisations such as the Holy Roman Empire (which showed its origins in its name) and the Catholic church. In this context a claim that there was an Elect chosen by god and destined for Heaven justified rebellion from traditional authority: one of Augustine’s ideas became for a time revolutionary.

Other revolutions sought justification in the ideal of democracy. That ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, both nebulous ideas, were worth fighting and dying for were ideals that fuelled the American, French and Communist revolutions. At hand were the speeches of Demosthenes and the idea that failure somehow didn’t matter, that a noble cause should be fought for no matter what. So monolithic empires crumbled as a result. Demosthenes put his trust, as President Kennedy did, in democracy, and it failed them both, but democracy survived – just.

Artists are a different matter. They produce works that influence the imaginations, if successful, of millions. Their effect is incalculable, but everyone knows how they make a difference to the way we tackle problems and opportunities.

We don’t just read a book, repeat quotations, give an historical example. Once our imaginations are engaged, new ideas evoke other new ideas, We become a little more, rather than a little less.