From the series ‘60/60 the best of SPCh’ (33) [60 most interesting publications from 60 years of SPCh]
2025-09-22
Patrick Madigan: Expressive Individualism, the Cult of the Artist as Genius, and Milton’s Lucifer [Studia Philosophiae Christianae 51(2015)2, pp. 173–185].
DESCRIPTION: Patrick Madigan (born 1945) is an American philosopher associated with Heythrop College in London, where he lectured in philosophy and served as editor of the Heythrop Journal. He is a historian of ideas. His publications include Completion of the Project of the West and its Romantic Sequel. Essays in the History of Western Culture (The University of Chicago Press, 2005). In the article in question, the author begins with what American sociologist Robert Bellah and Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor call ‘expressive individualism’ and present as the default lifestyle of our times, especially in the West. He gives several examples and then asks about the origins of this lifestyle. First, he refers to the cult of the artist worshipped as a ‘genius,’ which flourished in the 19th century; this cult has been democratised and popularised in our times. He then goes even further back to John Milton's description of Lucifer in his poem Paradise Lost; in Milton's reimagining, Lucifer rejects not only Jesus as the supreme being, but also the Father as father. He declares, ‘I know no one before me: I am self-begotten.’ The author notes that if we accept ‘expressive individualism’ as the ethic of our time, we implicitly recognise Milton's Lucifer as the archetype of human fulfilment. He suggests that this may be a harmful model. "To the extent then that we embrace “expressive individualism” as the default lifestyle of our time, we are implicitly committed to Milton's Lucifer as the archetype of human fulfilment or self-realisation, which I believe, however, to be a toxic model. This not only transforms a previously heretical comportment into a now-tolerated form of behaviour, it unveils and proclaims this as the no-longer-secret ideal of human development. In an inversion of the West’s traditional set of primary symbols, what was previously the deepest and most offensive blasphemy is installed and spelled out as orthodoxy. In a clever and well-disguised terrorist raid on the religious temple, not only is an astounding desecration perpetrated but has succeeded in subtly insinuating itself as the new creed of the community" (p. 185).
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