Book Review

Trailing clouds of glory

Creation: artists, gods and origins

Peter Conrad's latest book "describes the long illness and eventual demise of the Christian God and shows how artists were ready and eager to take over a creative role that was once a heavenly prerogative".

Conrad sees the book as a "critique of religion" and a "celebration of art" but he is not a secular fundamentalist of the Dawkins school. He even believes in "genius"; as intellectually disreputable an admission as church attendance. And he has suffered for this faith. He cites one of his Oxford students, who challenged him when he remarked on the "genius" of a poet: "I don't understand what it means to call him that. He was just a person."

The book examines his pantheon of artistic sans pareils, from Plato to the more contentious likes of Klee and Schoenberg, and in most cases he amply demonstrates what in many cases - Leonardo, Shakespeare, Mozart - is self-evident, that they are beyond explanation, godlike in their mysterious supremacy, which is indeed a bold belief in this relentlessly egalitarian age.

Investigating "the generative power that sometimes seems inexplicable" of these geniuses, "who look at the world in a unique, idiosyncratic way", is the main thrust of Conrad's text. Genius is not God-given but geniuses create, and trying to understand the contradictory word "creation" and its "splintered history" may help us to understand them. The result is a great ramble, clearly expressed but so stuffed with information that it requires a cold shower between chapters to refocus the wandering mind.

Conrad became interested in the aesthetics, theology and science of creation as an adult, but it was as a boy that the word first intrigued him. For his parents, "Stop your creating!" meant that he should stop making a fuss. Later, as a youth in Portugal, he discovered a quite different usage. A maid in the house, the position itself described as criada, described the various birds and animals she kept for the pot as her criação. Was it possible to think of creation without imagining its opposite, destruction? The seed for this book was sown.

He begins with Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. This is a sop to women, as he admits, to correct the long male ascendancy in artistic and religious affairs - as recently as 1956 Freud's disciple and biographer Ernest Jones told a New York audience that "creative thinking" was a male compensation for the inability to give birth. Conrad, whose own rough list of artistic geniuses contains no women, ends with the conclusion that mankind too is now master of its fate, perhaps with terminal consequences.

The Renaissance was when the balance of power between man and God shifted. Columbus discovered a continent whose inhabitants had no knowledge of Christ. Copernicus and Galileo proved that the Earth moved round the Sun and was not the fixed centre of God's Creation; the telescope aimed at the heavens introduced a new, chilling sense of universal solitude. The Church's initial refusal to believe this discovery established the popular misconception that religion and science are incompatible, and, especially, that the Vatican is science's enemy. In fact the Church has long been fascinated by science: Conrad might be surprised to know that a conference of the world's astronomers was held in the Vatican this month.

Most of Conrad's geniuses and the weight of the book post-date the Middle Ages, although the argument skips back and forth within the chronology. Leonardo is the first artistic genius he honours with a solo chapter. "The painter", Leonardo declared, "disputes and competes with nature." He believed that  man's godlike powers derived from seeing. His pictorial science relied on butchery, immaculate anatomical drawings the product of endless dissections in conditions so squalid that he congratulated himself on the moral courage required to complete them. Among his prophecies was that it might be nature's wish "to extinguish the human race, because it ... spoils all things".

Next comes Shakespeare, of whom Victor Hugo wrote: "One man has no right to be everything." As for J.S. Bach: "If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach it is God," wrote the philosopher E.M. Cioran in 1952. Conrad is strong on music and clear in his poetic analyses, without excluding the stories, here as elsewhere. Wagner, to get into creative mode, required unending supplies of money, the use of other men's wives and rooms muffled in silk, satin and velvet. "I cannot live like a dog," he explained to Liszt. 

The Enlightenment brought wit to bear in the attack on belief. Voltaire in Candide describes the burning of heretics to placate the angry God who caused the Lisbon earthquake: "The spectacle of a few people being ceremonially burned over a low flame is the infallible secret of preventing earthquakes."

The elements play a critical role. There is a delightful chapter on man's relation to the sky. First Protestantism reduced God to a private possession, an inward idea, thus doing away with celestial clouds on the ceiling. Then the French Revolution tried to replace the mysteries of religion with political abstractions. But Romanticism opened the eye to the majesty of nature. Even if Romanticism was "spilt religion", as T.E. Hulme put it, God made a comeback. Emerson described the sky as "the daily bread of the eyes". The Irish poet Thomas Moore, visiting Niagara Falls, called it the "very residence of the Deity".

With industrial society spiritual ardour took a new form. For Henry Adams in 1904 it became the "energy of modern science". To plug into this new power source he learned to ride a bicycle at the age of 50, but later concluded that "all the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres". Conrad provides a corrective interpretation of this sacrilegious thought: "While science may have made God redundant, it has not done away with our need for art."

That is the nub of his argument. And one can only ask why, if God is redundant, have the science-based totalitarian slave states passed away and, certainly where Soviet Communism prevailed, Christianity and other faiths have flourished with renewed vigour since 1989? Will he concede that the Church's prayers for the conversion of Russia, ordained by the Virgin through the children at Fátima, were answered? He might also ponder why only 1 per cent of the population of the world's most powerful and scientifically advanced nation admits to being atheist or even agnostic. As the blurb says: "Despite the best efforts of scientists, theologians and aestheticians, creation and creativity both remain mysterious." Thanks be to God.

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