Two Great Humanist Icons: Thomas Paine and Leonardo da Vinci
Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence by Harlow Giles Unger, 2019 — When I read through the eloquent works of Thomas Paine many years ago, I was struck by the degree to which the words seemed to flow like lightning from his pen. Every page of prudent thought and meticulous argument in Common Sense seemed to be the product of a man who was desperate to make up for lost time and stymied ambition. It might be said that he was the most unlikely hero of the revolution. A longtime excise officer and tax collector for the British government, the first 40 years of Paine’s life were suffused by a series of professional and creative disappointments, including his perpetual financial insecurities and his rather loveless marriage to a demur Quaker wife who refused to share his bed. It was a fortuitous stroke of luck for classical liberals everywhere that the career horizons of this self-taught autodidact began to expand significantly after a chance encounter with Benjamin Franklin in London. On the strength of the great man’s reputation, Paine arrived in America at the age of 37, his keen mind alive to the possibility of a full break with Britain. The fiery rhetoric and egalitarian principles of this rather staid Englishman converged with the revolutionary passions of his adopted country. Common Sense soon became the hallmark of America’s newfound ethos.
As a thinker, Paine was many things: an abolitionist, a heterodox deist, a true globalist, a proto-feminist (at least by the standards of his patriarchal times), and an economic and political liberal. He lived a life of self-imposed hardship by munificently donating all of his book proceeds to the war effort. He was also an amateur inventor who created an early prototype of an iron bridge, which though impractical would prove to be a model for the future. But Paine’s ultimate gift was as an activist who translated polemical thought into political reality. While Locke and Rousseau may have mounted a philosophical assault against the divine rights of kings, Paine devoted himself completely to the overthrow of entire monarchies. His words had the power to stir people to action based merely on “simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense.”
But if Paine was destined to embrace America, it does not necessarily mean that America was destined to embrace him. Due in part to his fatal habit of alienating his ardent friends and giving succor to his enemies, Paine had a special talent for turning everyone against him. His “obsession with justice and equality and his diatribes against slavery,” Unger writes, undermined his status with the ruling class, while his fervent advocacy of a national bank drew the charge that he was a charlatan and financial grifter who, as one opponent wrote, “prostitutes his pen to the ruin of the country” under the sway of the moneyed elites. With his pride deeply wounded, he resolved to quit America entirely in 1787 and return home to England. This period gave rise to some of his most brilliant and caustic rhetoric, but it also earned him further enmity from all quarters. It also marked the start of his physical and emotional dissolution. The publication of Rights of Man, which called openly for an English revolution, made him a wanted man in Britain. Age of Reason, his bracing diatribe against the nostrums of religious salvation (in which he adopted a tone of mocking irreverence toward the Bible and its various contradictions), brought him more social opprobrium in America. John Adams, who once called Paine “my adopted political son,” now pilloried him as a despicable blackguard.
In the 1790s, Paine temporarily found his sense of purpose once again as a major figure of the French Revolution. His eloquent and thankless defense in the National Assembly against the execution of Louis XVI was perhaps the finest moment of his political career. But in the end, the revolution he helped to stoke with his writing began to consume itself and then nearly consumed him. In retaliation for his vigorous campaign to thwart the king’s execution (which caused Robespierre no end of humiliation), Paine had to endure the harrowing experience of imprisonment and near death. With his health ailing and his psychological state tenuous and breaking, Paine became bitter, indignant, and confrontational; he wrote a rather scathing and intemperate indictment against George Washington, whom he blamed for allowing him to languish in the cramped cell without a word of protest. But Paine’s aim was almost certainly off the mark. More likely, the blame squarely lies with the reprehensible inaction of the US Ambassador, Gouverneur Morris, who never forgave Paine for exposing the shady financial transactions he was involved with.
After narrowly escaping the guillotine in France, Paine eventually returned to his adopted country and continued to sporadically promote the cause of freedom in letters and newspapers, but he would never again attempt another great work. Once out of the limelight, Paine managed to cultivate close relationships that would enrich him for the rest of his life. This was probably beneficial for his physical and mental well-being. His strange idiosyncratic beliefs did not endear him fully to any one particular ideological group (and it turns out that many people did not share his rather broad and comprehensive views on liberty). He loudly expressed his beliefs and did not care whom it offended. And in my estimation he did not get everything right. He had a bizarre hatred of paper money. But he nevertheless evinced great courage with the fastidious defense of his principles, even at the cost of nearly everything, including his life. He died in 1809, loathed or forgotten by all but a small cadre of friends. Today Paine is remembered almost exclusively for his rousing call to revolution. The rest of his life, including his vociferous defense of deism (which never quite caught on), is elided in a hazy mélange of historical memory. But nothing about this intriguing life should be forgotten.
Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson, 2017 — Leonardo da Vinci was another great humanist icon. He possessed within his grasp a truly endless and bountiful imagination, mostly devoid of ego, fixated on lofty ideas, overcome with passions, indulgent in life’s pleasures, generous to a fault, and a lover of both surfaces and depths. A visionary artist working in a world of demanding earthbound patrons, Leonardo’s retreat into dreamy fantasy — which culminated in a lifelong habit of missed deadlines, unfinished work, and abandoned projects — was perhaps more likely to endear him to the fawning hagiographers of posterity than to the frustrated aristocrats who employed him in their service. But this too was part of his charm. His life represents the great struggle of the creative mind and the profound disappointment in the immense gulf between a perfectly formed idea and its rather prosaic physical realization — in other words, the thought and the act. But da Vinci was no indolent dreamer. For an artist of his caliber, the translation of ideas into physical form, conveyed through style, composition, and lighting, contained its own unique pleasures that couldn’t quite be captured by thought alone.
The lasting impression of the quintessential “Renaissance Man,” embodied most of all by Leonardo’s haunting composition of the man in red chalk (which may very well be a self-portrait, shown in the picture above), is sagacious, wise, and iconoclastic, with the divine mark of genius recorded on every furrow of the face, as if his ideas were conceived on a registry pitched too high for the average human mind to comprehend; but this lavish hagiography does a disservice to the man himself. While he certainly had the touch of brilliance about him, da Vinci also owed much of his success to more prosaic and earthbound factors, including his keen powers of observation, his systematic way of thinking, and his ability to cross over disciplines with ease. The natural world often furnished him with the inspirational ballast necessary for his lofty ideas to take flight. When he realized that the art of painting was inseparable from the study of optics, he set about gathering data about light, shadow, perspective, human anatomy, and other aspects of nature. This led to the formulation of some truly revolutionary ideas well ahead of their time. For instance, his research on the valves of the heart would be confirmed only 450 years later. Perhaps the lesson here isn’t that da Vinci saw so much, but that most people don’t even bother to look at all.