Author explores sources of genius
Print Edition
What does the genius have that the rest of us lack? What is that special “something” that sets him apart? That’s easy. It’s a little spirit that takes over his mind, like the one that possessed Socrates. Or perhaps it has something to do with the birthday god that shapes a man’s personality, like the genius (from the Latin for “to beget”) who watched over Augustus Caesar.
It’s also possible that certain exemplary people — let’s call them saints — have angelic souls that give them direct access to God’s own truths. How else did Thomas Aquinas manage such feats of brilliance as dictating to multiple scribes at once? Other suggestions are more scientific. Genius might result from an exceptionally large brain or from a kind of mental illness. More futuristically, you could see genius as a heritable trait of the sort proposed by the Victorian eugenicist Francis Galton, who imagined the selective breeding of a new race of “gifted men.” Today we scoff at such ideas. In our enlightened age, we rest secure in our knowledge of what actually explains the greatness of a Shakespeare or a Michaelangelo — 10,000 hours of practice, is it? At least that’s what Malcolm Gladwell says in “Outliers.”
One of the satisfactions of “Divine Fury,” Darrin M. McMahon’s engaging history of genius, is that he does not presume to fix a single definition of genius and then trace exemplars back through time. While he does recount the lives and accomplishments of many idols of the mind — scientists, poets, strategists — he has not written a reverent Great Man history.
Instead, McMahon, a professor at Florida State University whose previous book was a history of happiness, has written a history of ideas of genius. His story ranges from attempts in antiquity and early Christianity to understand what made men great (Alexander) or holy (Francis of Assisi), to early modern thinking about innate gifts (Mozart); to Romantic notions of a wild, even dangerous creative power (Byron); to the peculiar logic of 20th-century cults of genius, according to which Lenin, for example, was a “genius of revolution” (Stalin’s phrase), whose brain was studied after his death to determine the “material substrate” of his intellectual powers.
McMahon does not try to distill a single notion of genius, but he does have a unified story to tell. His guiding insight is that the very earliest figures of eminent accomplishment were understood to be closely connected to the divine. But by the 18th century, as the divine retreated from direct involvement in daily life, genius became associated with an autonomous capacity for creativity and insight. The twist, in McMahon’s telling, is that genius retained its associations with mystery (how did Mozart improvise so?) and worshipfulness (recall that Einstein was asked to be the president of Israel). Genius became an enchanting force in a disenchanted world.
If McMahon has not written a stodgy history of great men — and it is men in this book; historically, arbiters of genius were blind to the talents of women — he has also avoided a fashionable cynicism. McMahon can historicize with the best of them; he argues that even Einstein stepped into a role “partly prepared” for him by social factors. But McMahon is refreshingly unafraid to embrace the mythic dimension of his subject as part of its true importance, an approach that offers to deepen, not undermine, our appreciation of genius.
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