Emulation and Creativitiy

"Play, become suddenly and unexpectedly too real, confuses the emotions."
    --Algernon Blackwood, "The Wings of Horus"

J.E. Lendon's Soldiers and Ghosts (Yale, 2006) continues to haunt me four years after I first read it. There are many things there to chew over, but for the present, I want to draw attention to the sometimes literal imitation of the mythic heroes of Greece and Rome by warriors and generals. The examples that struck me most forcefully are the attempts by Julian (sometimes called the Apostate, the last formally pagan emperor of Rome) during his final, Persian campaign in 363. (Ledon details this in his evocatively titled Chapter XIII, "Julian in Persia, AD 363: Triumph of the Ghosts.") Julian literally tried to repeat various scenes from the life of Alexander and the Trojan War, even at the risk of his life and his army. He was emulating Achilles, Odysseus, and Alexander because it was the correct thing to do, just as emulation of past forms was the correct way of writing at the time. There was no real possibility of creativity or originality. Julian was reviving something essentially dead.

In a previous post ("Churchill and the Personal"), I noted Winston Churchill's tendency to emulate his father and his ancestor Marlborough. One can possibly see a similarity to Julian in this behavior, particularly his antics in instigating a cavalry charge at Omdurman in 1898, and in the defense of Antwerp in 1914. Whatever he was doing, he was certainly playing in some very deep and serious sense, but I do not get the impression he was trying to revive something. In his own creative and peculiar way, he was trying to learn as well as to lead. Had he not done these things, and many others, had he not written his way through the four volumes of Marlborough, the story of an earlier war between Britain and a power that sought world domination, could he have emerged in 1940 as the savior of his country? Could he have worked as he did with Eisenhower and FDR without having so completely internalized the ideal of coalition warfare create by Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy?

The difference, I think, between Julian and Churchill is between emulation for its own sake and emulation as a creative process. The latter is a process that has shaped civilization in many times and many places. It is under appreciated today, for we have moved away from it, but it was the essence of the Renaissance and much of what emerged from it. This is something I will return to in later posts. For now, it is enough to note its existence.