Where Inspiration Generates Art: A Critical Analysis of Shaffer’s “Amadeus”

Abstract

This research article is mainly concerned with the dialectic of art and theology with reference to Peter Shaffer’s play “Amadeus.” It delineates comparing divine and artistic creativity as a vital segment of the Greek theology and philosophy of art, and the Christian religious beliefs. The divine forces of the antiquated Greek pantheon are divided into different classifications. In their theology, art and many other concepts of life are not man-made; humans are nothing but tools of several gods, and those gods inspire them to present their arts through these tools and in several forms. Christians think about God and artist in a like manner discourse postulating that God resembles an artist who utilizes his creative energy and makes a universe of rich differing qualities; hence, they likewise do as such in their more scholarly and philosophical compositions.

Introduction

The quest for inspiration is central to the classical Greek thought and writing. Literature, theology, and philosophy draw heavily on the divine unseen powers that nourish the intuitive talented individual with the milk of inspiration. Still, the notion of inspiration is dealt with differently within different historical and epistemic frameworks. As a notion, inspiration is “the urge that acts a poet to work and the devotion that keeps him at it” (Preminger, 1974, pp. 396-397). So far the origin of inspiration is concerned, there are two theories. The first theory is that inspiration comes from outside the poet; the second, that it comes from within him (Preminger, 1974). Although they are distinct in their parameters, the Greek and the Christian world views hinge over the first perception that the poet is inspired by divine powers.

Having insight into the process of poetic inspiration, the Greek and the Christian worldviews stress upon the divinity of poetic creation. This worldview is encoded into Shafer’s “Amadeus.” In their theology, art and many other concepts of life are not man-made; humans are nothing but tools of several gods, and those gods inspire them to present their arts through these tools and in several forms. Christians think about God and artist in a like manner discourse postulating that God resembles an artist who utilizes his creative energy and makes a universe of rich differing qualities; hence, they likewise do as such in their more scholarly and philosophical compositions.

The study is divided into two parts. The first part is devoted to the process of artistic inspiration by theological aspects related to the Greek religious beliefs, on one hand, and the Christian religious beliefs, on the other hand. Inspiration can motivate individuals to complete accomplishments of imaginative splendor, to imagine altogether better approaches for seeing the world and to make stunning masterpieces, writing or music. In the domain of inspiration, one thing is sure for the Greeks, that is, Muses have an extensive part to play, a divine power which they injected it into the individual’s mind. This notion is central to Peter Shaffer’s play “Amadeus,” which is followed by this research article.

In the second part, the study will analyze Peter Shaffer’s play “Amadeus” in its theological context to prove that the inventive individual was picked “to do God’s work.” The muses for the Greeks, Jesus Christ for the Christians, or God himself were the inventive ones who were picking a man as an instrument to satisfy their work. In that way, the obligations regarding the imaginative person’s work lay upon the muses or God and not on the individual who was acting latently. The artists fulfilled just what they were advised to do and couldn’t be reprimanded or applauded for their original thoughts and musings. Due to its course of analysis, the article will demonstrate some instances of “divine inspiration.” It, furthermore, will prove that artists’ great ideas that might issue from God or goddesses could ultimately be seen as true. The study is rounded up with concluding remarks elicited from the critical analysis.

Literature Review

In fact, there are few studies being written on Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. Some critics went to think about the characters, concocted by the author, totally with their genuine models; it is encouraged to be illuminated that Shaffer utilized Mozart and Salieri with anecdotal identities. The characters are manufactured from a mix of creative and accurate highlights. Shaffer took some generally known certainties with failures from different sources—for example, Mozart’s correspondence and Pushkin’s drama “Mozart and Salieri,” first performed in 1832 and incorporated them in the play.

A Study Guide for Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” was published in 2001 by Gale Group. The study gave a glance to several themes devoted in the play. The themes “God and Religion” and “Creativity and Imagination” were served as the sparkle that inspired me to write this research. The Study Guide shows that Shaffer was deliberately exaggerating Mozart’s discourse with rhyming, warmly infantile dialect so as to place it in a stand out from his amicableness. His incessant statements like “telling moving me that my uncle curbuncle” or “today the letter setter from my Papa Ha! Ha!” (Shaffer, 2001, p. xv). By applying this trademark and one of a kind expressional gadget in the play, Shaffer prepared Mozart’s conduct and habits of discourse with the unadulterated aim to pull back a gained inclination of glorifying virtuosos as individuals with lovely taste and conduct.

Martin Hilský, who interpreted Amadeus for the Czech stages, remarks on the character of Salieri as an individual with his own vacancy, which he, because of his better than expected insight, analyzes precisely and that makes him an evil fiendishness not faltering to utilize his position and capacity to obliterate Mozart.

Part 1: The Process of Poetic Inspiration in Greek Paganism and Christian Doctrine

Inspiration and the Greek Pagan Vision

The notion of inspiration becomes central to the classical theory of art. One brief dialogue, Ion, is wholly devoted to a discussion of inspiration. Plato (cited in Preminger, 1974) believes that “as iron filings become magnetized through the power of the magnet, so the poet is inspired through divine power, and that that power is conveyed by him to those who recite poetry” (p. 396). Here and elsewhere, the poet has just become the trumpet of gods and goddesses to scatter the visions and visionary views by and through the craftsmanship of the poet. Moreover, in Phaedrus, the Greek philosopher (Plato, 1973) thinks that no way to compose poetry except the way of the madness of the Muses: “If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane composition never reach perfection” (p. 245). Simply put it, perfection is in insanity. As indicated by Plato (1973) through Socrates, when the inspiration and motivation of the muses grabs hold of the delicate and virgin soul, it rouses him to compose and convey what needs be through verse. In Phaedrus, Socrates says that the crazy person means the artist will constantly out-compose the conscientious and honest versifier by a divine power, and this process of inspiration can be happened with all the various types of art and artists. In fact, such claims create in the recipient that the common Greeks as well as the philosophers believed in the existence of hidden and divine forces belonging to the multiple gods and that divine power actually played the main role in the procedure of creating art works (Plato, 1973). But a question may come to one’s mind: “Does the creation of art works relate to a given group’s culture?”

The gods and heroes of classical antiquity are part of the all nations’ culture. Many of them function as sources of creative inspiration for composers, poets, artists, novelists, designers, and filmmakers. One of the difficulties shared crosswise over cultures and beliefs is the impalpable, inexpressible nature of the divine power. For the Greeks, the need to experience god was not bound to limits. Greek divine beings were wherever on coins, jewels, drinking vessels, domestic wall paintings. Notwithstanding when they were not there, their energy could be felt in the portrayal of the individuals who had felt their energy before in a process of inspiration. They were as inescapable as they were all observing. The Greeks perceived not one otherworldly power, but rather numerous heavenly forces, numerous divine beings, and different creatures ready to exercise some kind of extraordinary impact. Recognizing this impact means communing with these creatures, and to do that, the Greeks needed to realize what they resembled, and where to discover them. Envisioning extraordinary powers and making spaces for them is both precondition and result of religious considering (Keeble, 2009). The questions here are what is this divine power? and Who leads it? Who are the Muses?

To begin with the muses as showed in records by Pausanias, the historian and peripatetic Greek geographer of the second century AD, there were at first three mountain goddesses/muses. Pausanias’ portrayals of Greece took after early Baedeker helpers, and it is in the ninth of his 10 books that we get some answers concerning the three muses. Pausanias (1918) recorded that Ephialtes and Otos were the principal men to give and sacrifice to the Muses on the mountain Helicon, and to declare this mountain as blessed and holy to the Muses. He proceeds to express that, according to Hegesinous, the writer who is pre-dated Pausanias, a home called Askre was set up at the foot of Mount Helicon by the children of Aloeus and by Oioklos, who was parented by Askre and Poseidon. The offspring of Aloeus assumed that there were only three muses called Aoide (melody), Melete (study or practice), and Mneme (memory).

Forster (2007) mentioned that the more famously known and regular belief of the muses from this Period is that there were nine of them, and Pausanias clears up that Pieros of Macedon set up and named them at Thespiai. This number nine is resounded in the Theology of Greeks by Hesiod who lived much sooner than Pausanias, around 700 BC, and inside sight of Mount Helicon in Boeotia.

As Forster (2007) points out that Hesiod acted as a shepherd on his dad’s region and expressed that it was while he was out in the fields one day, tending his sheep that he was gone to by the muses. The muses had given a mace tree (scepter of laurel) and ordered him to wind up noticeably an artist. To be specific, they instructed him to be a poet. Actually to conjure the muses toward the start of any aesthetic and artistic attempt rapidly turned into a tradition and one which gone on for a long time. As Hesiod’s (1988) long poem, Theology, initiates with an ordinary psalm to pay tribute to the muses which keeps going an aggregate of 104 lines and starts, “From the Muses of Helicon, let us begin our singing, that haunt Helicon’s great and holy mountain, and dance on their soft feet round the violet-dark spring and the alter of the mighty son of Kronos” (lines 1-3).

Hesiod states that the muses were of one mind, one identity, favored with brilliant performing voices that they were singing, and that they would sing, celebrate, dance, and move close-by the sacred Mount Helicon. He incorporates they were in like manner regarded with that kind of qualities underneath, which possibly begins to clear up why the muses constantly have been and still are such elusive creatures. In portraying themselves, the muses say as follows: “We know to tell many lies that sound like truth, but we know to sing reality when we will” (Hesiod, 1988, lines 27-28).

In later records, the nine muses were accepted to impact their own particular individual domain of expressions, humanities or science. These domains changed, contingent upon the designs of different circumstances, yet the muses constantly kept a nearby dependability with the art, education, humanities, creativity, and sciences. The most generally detailed arrangements of muses and their domain of inspiration which is specialized in are as follows: Melpomene specializing with the inspiration of Tragedy; Erato with Erotic poetry; Calliope with Epic poetry; Thalia with Comedy and bucolic poetry; Terpsichore with Dance; Euterpe with Music and lyric poetry; Polyhymnia with Sacred lyrics, rhetoric, and geometry; Urania with astronomy and astrology; and finally Clio with History.

These later nine muses, which are female goddesses, were the posterity of the god Zeus and the goddess Mnemosyne, a name which deciphers as memory and which has its underlying foundations in the word for “moon.” This fertile goddess was little girl to the considerable goddess Gaia (Earth) and the god Ouranos (Heaven) and, for those that revered the muses, it was and still viewed as of extraordinary noteworthiness that the muses were from such a primal, natural parentage, which belong to the great Goddesses of Greeks (Graves, 1997, p. 20). At the point when the inspiration of the muses was summoned by Greek specialists, writers or thinkers they would, as a result, be calling upon both the world’s memory and their ability to utilize their creative energy to educate their work or arrangement.

As regards his views on the muses and inspiration, Plato has expressed the process in another dialogue called Ion. In his Ion and again by the way of his trusted character Socrates, Plato stated that for the artist is a light and winged and sacred thing, and there is no innovation in him until he has been motivated by a power of inspiration and is out of his senses, and the intellect is no longer in him. He even portrayed the artists in general and the poets in particular as seers and prophets (Graham, 1925, p. 1). Here, Socrates clarifies that the muses has energy like a magnet which holding three iron rings. First, the muses acting as a magnet that by the power they have inspiring the poet, when the poet is resampling the first iron ring drops all reason for the intoxicating state of motivation. Then, the artist draws his audience of onlookers with the divine power, which originally controlling the artist himself. Here the audience being the third iron ring, where the rhapsode is the second one, and he is the man who reciting the poems (Edward, 1910).

In fact, the Greek history depicts for us that Plato was an idealist. He believes that ideas alone are true and real, and the earthly things such as beauty, goodness, justice, and so on are mere types or copies of the ideal beauty, goodness, and so on which exist in heaven. He regards imitation as mere mimesis or representation of these ideal forms and not expression which is creative. In the Book X of the Republic, he provides a reasoned and elaborate statement of his views on imitation. Plato argues that if true reality consists of the ideas of things, of which individual objects are but reflections or imitations, then anyone who imitates those individual objects is imitating an imitation, and so producing something which is still further removed from ultimate reality which originally created by the first and eternal source, that is god.

It is significant to mention here that Plato builds up this contention first with reference to the painter, and that he takes a basic illustrative perspective of painting. Here the point is clear enough that representational painting is an imitation of a specific object, or a group of objects, and if reality lies not in individual objects but in general ideas or forms, then the painter is not doing anything particularly valuable, however, by his creativity power, from the point of view of the philosopher, whose main interest is in apprehending reality, because in this sense the artist is also getting the inspiration from the objects whom existed by the various goddesses. In this context, the artist is seen as inspiring but indirectly through the around objects of god. On the contrary, what he is doing is not necessarily vicious. Just as the painter, the artist only imitates what he sees and does not know how to make or to use what he sees (he could paint a bed, but not make one), so the artist imitates reality without necessarily understanding it or how he is getting the inspiration to imitate even.

However, the philosophy of artistic inspiration for the Greeks is not limited to a particular type of art, but it is almost universal as taking into consideration all the types of arts. The nine goddess, muses, are competent in different arts and not just poetry; for instance, Thalia was specialized in inspiring Dance and Euterp was for Music and lyrics. The musical inspiration takes an essential part in Greek philosophy and theology. The Greeks clearly believe in the existence of the goddess whose specialization is the musical inspiration.

Proclus Lycaeus (411-485 CE) was the most legitimate scholar generally relic and assumed a critical part in the transmission of Platonic rationality from ancient times to the Middle Ages. Music is mentioned and defined by him as the musical inspiration that originates from Apollo, the god of music according to the Greeks theology and the Muses as well (Proclus, 1985; Tarrant, 2006). That is why it is called the inspired and divine music. As indicated by the Greeks’ religious philosophy and theology, music animates and puts the spirit in movement toward a divine inspiration. Marsilio Ficino who espoused the Platonic philosophy during the 15th century also developed his own philosophy on the inspiration for which he coined the phrase “divine frenzy,” one which was much indebted to Plato’s dialogues on the muses and the holy insanity that he stayed chaste throughout his life. Yet, in the eyes of his contemporaries and patrons, Ficino had divine frenzy aplenty. He was an accomplished musician as well as being an intellectual, doctor, and a priest by 1473. After he played his Orphic lyre one time to the Bishop Campano, the Bishop wrote of his performance that it was “as if curly headed Apollo took up the lyre of Marsilio and fell victim to his own song. Frenzy arises, His eyes catch fire . . . and he discovers music which he never learnt.” See also Westerink (1954).

Pausanias (1918) in his Description of Greece stated that Socrates, the night before Plato was going to be his pupil, dreamed that a swan flew into his bosom. Now the swan is a bird that has a fame for music, for they say that Cycnus, king of the Ligyans across the Eridanus in Celtic territory, was fond of music, and when he died was at Apollo’s desire changed into a bird.

In this way, the poet, musician, rhapsode, painter, and all the other artists are possessed with the power of the several gods of the Greeks. In their theology, the Greeks believe in the artistic inspiration that works on letting the artists produce a very beautiful variety of arts by using all deferent styles and motives of the aesthetic images such as colures, tones, words, thoughts, and so on, all that come to their mind by the divine power of the diverse gods.

Moreover, in the Greeks’ theology and philosophy, the artists are “divinely inspired.” It means that they do not create art as craft, but by virtue of some impulse of a mysterious, nonrational kind, coming from some supernatural source, outside their own personality. They articulate with no sense what the Muse incites them to state; like fountains, they permit to stream out uninhibitedly what comes to it. Henceforth, their professions are problematic and indeterminate. The motivation may stop at any minute. There may be some truth in them, for they are supernaturally inspired; yet such fractional defective truths must be precisely analyzed. Such truths can be no substitute for knowledge based on reason. Moreover, their meaning is not always clear. They are often full of obscurities and contradictions.

. . . If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection. (Plato, 1973, line 245)

Plato, a famous Greek philosopher, scholar, author, and mathematician who was alive and philosophizing from ca. 427-347 BC, made his own intellectual temple to the muses in the grove Academus, where he held his courses. Plato’s philosophical works appeared as dialogues: discussions between his respectable scholarly mouthpiece, Socrates, the more seasoned rationalist to whom the more youthful and more naive Plato had once tuned in, and a clueless second member in the dialogues who frequently gave the counterpoint to Socrates. In the above quotation, Plato in one of his more matured and developed dialogues, the “Phaedrus” lets Socrates to suggest that he and Phaedrus ought to sit on a verdant grassy glade by a winding stream inside earshot of the melodic cicadas to proceed with their discourse.

Art is the gift of Muses to poets. According to Julia Forster (2007), Socrates’ perspective is that the genuine admirer of the muses is not the poet; however, the philosopher and he mentioned the four distinct sorts of the divine madness. As Socrates would like to think, the third kind of possession is by none other than the muses, the goddess of inspiration. As indicated by Plato through Socrates, when the inspiration and motivation of the muses grabs hold of the delicate and virgin soul, it rouses him to compose and convey what needs be through verse. In the previous beautiful vertebra of Plato’s Phaedrus, which should warm the cockles of every single crazed minstrel out there, Socrates says that the crazy person means the artist will constantly out-compose the conscientious and honest versifier by a divine power, and this process of inspiration can be happened with all the various types of art and artists. In fact, such claims create in the recipient that the common Greeks as well as the philosophers believed in the existence of hidden and divine forces belonging to the multiple gods and that divine power actually played the an important role in creating artworks.

The gods of classical antiquity are part of the all nations’ culture. Many of them function as sources of creative inspiration for composers, poets, artists, novelists, designers, and filmmakers. One of the difficulties shared crosswise over cultures and beliefs is the impalpable, inexpressible nature of the divine power. For the Greeks, the need to experience god was not bound to limits. Greek divine beings were wherever on coins, jewels, drinking vessels, domestic wall paintings. Notwithstanding when they were not there, their energy could be felt in the portrayal of the individuals who had felt their energy before in a process of inspiration. They were as inescapable as they were all observing. The Greeks perceived not one otherworldly power, but rather numerous heavenly forces, numerous divine beings, and different creatures ready to exercise some kind of extraordinary impact. Recognizing this impact means communing with these creatures, and to do that, the Greeks needed to realize what they resembled, and where to discover them. Envisioning extraordinary powers and making spaces for them is both precondition and result of religious considering (Keeble, 2009). The questions here are what is this divine power? and Who leads it? Who are the Muses?

Inspiration and the Christian Doctrine

The distinctive difference between the Greek paganism and the Christian faith is, in fact, the difference between two philosophical worldviews. The Greek pagan worldview stresses the concept of plurality of gods; the Christian worldview stresses the oneness of god. Still, divinity is the source of artistic creation. For the Christian doctrine,

Inspiration was an influence of the Holy Spirit on the minds of certain select men, which rendered them the organs of God for the infallible communication of His mind and will. They were in such a sense the organs of God, that what they said God said. (C. Hodge, Systematic Theology, cited by Placher and Nelson, 2017, p. 137)

Art is the capacity for self-exploration that allows a person to express himself and his surroundings in a visual, auditory, or dynamic manner. It can be used to translate the feelings and conflicts that are inherited, not necessarily as an expression of his need for requirements in life; therefore, some scholars think of the art as one of the necessities of life. However, in terms of Christian philosophical and theological ranges, art was comprehended as a cosmic principle, whereby the divine powers show itself in the realm of made things. By forcing request and excellence upon substance, works in impersonation and how God makes the magnificence and request of the world, of how God shapes the request of the creation from the divine intellect as indicated by the infinite conceivable outcomes that legitimately have a place with it, and so along these lines culminate its appearance.

To start with Christianity, it is better to think of what Christians believe about the inspiration religiously. On a large scale, the Christian believed in the “Biblical Inspiration” which according to their theology means that the writers and editors of the Bible were driven or affected by “Holy Spirit” with the outcome that their works might be assigned in some sense the expression of God (Williams, 1990, p. 307). The scripture contains numerous entries in which the writers guarantee divine motivation for their message or report the impacts of such motivation on others. Other than the immediate records of composed disclosure, for example, Moses getting the Ten Instructions, or the Ten Commandments, the Prophets of the Old Testament every now and again asserted that their message was of celestial beginning by introducing the disclosure utilizing the accompanying expression: “Thus says the Lord” (Coffey, 2005, p. 87).

In the New Testament, Peter (2011) the Apostle in his Second Epistle of the Holy Bible claims that no prediction of Sacred writing was ever created by the will of man; however, men talked from God as they were conveyed along by the Holy Spirit (p. 1114). In addition, he infers that Paul’s compositions are divinely inspired as he composes a similar path in every one of his letters, talking in them of these issues. His letters contain a few things that are difficult to comprehend, which unmindful and flimsy individuals twist, as they do alternate Sacred texts, to their own annihilation (Peter, 2011, p. 1116).

In fact, the case of the divine inspiration and its relationship to the Bible and the Christians can be discussed through three different opinions (Lea & Griffin, 1992). The headlines of these three views are Dynamic divine inspiration, Dictation theory, and Verbal plenary inspiration. In case of the “Dictation Theory,” God managed the books of the Bible word by word as though the scriptural writers were directing machines, when for the “Dynamic inspiration” the contemplations contained in the Bible are enlivened—however, the words utilized were left to the individual authors. According to A. C. Myers (1987, p. 98) the “Verbal plenary inspiration” view on the Biblical inspiration gives a more prominent part to the human essayists of the Bible, while keeping up a conviction that God saved the honesty of the expressions of the Bible. The impact of motivation was to move the writers to create the words God wanted (Lea & Griffin, 1992). In this view, the authors’ “individual foundations, individual characteristics, and scholarly styles were genuinely theirs, yet had been fortunately arranged by God for use as his instrument in delivering Scripture” (Lea & Griffin, 1992).

It is important to point out that the focus of divine inspiration in the Christian religion was not restricted to the Bible, but the influence of God extends to all the arts in general and literature in particular. These views are not just claims, but facts set in many books and sources of the history of the Christian literature, dating back to the first literary works that have reached us through the literary historians ranging even from the first century to tell our time. Literally, there are many poets and writers who have written their stories about the Divine Inspiration and the experiences they have experienced themselves, and others have expressed their views of this complex and puzzling process. “Odes of Solomon” and the Anglo-Saxon poet Caedmon and its relation to the artistic inspiration are undeniable evidence.

If we examine the traditions of Christianity and their customs in worshiping, we can see that they always sing with love to the Holy Spirit in beautifully composed psalms and hymns, as a kind of spiritual process that shows their sanctification to the Lord. Some of those hymns were recollected in the congregation for quite a long time, and some were incorporated into the New Testament Literature. One of the most ancient surviving accumulations of hallowed songs that sung in the early places of worship is a collection famously known as the “Odes of Solomon.” There are numerous signs that this collection was compose in the first- or second-century AD. As a matter of fact, “Odes of Solomon” consists of 42 religious hymns, yet Ode 2 and a part of Ode 3 in the accumulation are presently lost. These hymns may have originally written in Syria. Their origin credited to Solomon, and this is even not clarified anywhere and may have been ascribed to him since he was outstanding for astuteness lessons (Harris & Mingana, 1920). The themes of these hymns are varied, but they are all sail in the Christian religious beliefs, for instance, inspiration, crucifixion, resurrection, baptism, and so on.

Dealing with the theme of the inspiration, the Odist of the “Odes of Solomon” has pointed out in several places that he was a person inspired by the Holy Spirit. The Odist could extrapolate to the readers the idea that these hymns had been written through a source that had inspired and helped him, and that source was nothing but the Holy Spirit. For instance, in Ode 38, the Odist portrays himself as a plant that has been planted deep in somewhere. And that plant is constantly watered by the Lord to mature and thrive (Harris, 1911). But that was not all about the inspiration. In Ode 6, the Odist states:

As the wind glides through the harp

And the strings speak,

So the Spirit of the Lord speaks through my members,

The Odes and Psalms of Solomon. And I speak through His love. (Rendel & Harris, 1911, p. 96)

Here, we see that the Odist indicates unmistakably how cognizant he is of being the mouthpiece of the Spirit. The Spirit wrecks what is outsider thus everything that the Odist talks originate from the Lord. The Lord is portrayed as sharp that what had been given to adherents through His effortlessness ought to be known. There is no doubt that these verses show how God uses the artists as tools, and this is how what they are claiming themselves. The Lord’s affection has evoked the Odist’s adoration and workmanship. Aware of the Lord’s earlier love which sustains his heart, the Odist sings forward acclaim by forming psalms. He shouts out in Ode 16:

I will open my mouth,

And His Spirit will speak through me,

The glory of the Lord and His beauty,

The work of His hands,

And the labours of His fingers,

For the multitude of His mercies

And the strength of His Word. (Rendel & Harris, 1911, p. 111)

Creation and nature are the topics of the Odist motivated by the Spirit of the Lord, and creation possesses the focal point of the psalm in this Ode. A series of rhetorical questions pose the question of inspiration, for the theme far outstrips our human capabilities. Subsequently, we may state that the Odes set up the connection between the Odist’s work and the motivation of the Holy Spirit, with Ode 42 discussing the risen Christ’s motivation. The proof reviewed leaves no uncertainty at all. By perusing every one of the odes, we can assume that the Odist trusted himself to be the vehicle of the Holy Spirit, which inspired him to structure these Odes. The dialect utilized—the trip to heaven, the harp, floods of water streaming forward to revive others—shows the feeling of happy experience, of perfect motivation, bringing about the composition of the Odes.

In the Venerable Bede’s record of the most punctual known Anglo-Saxon writer Caedmon, we are informed that Caedmon was an unlettered herder who was not able to partake at night stimulation of his colleagues as he could not sing. At night, after he had left a gathering early due to his shame and sadness, the Holy Spirit came to him in a dream and instructed him to sing of creation, and the outcome is Caedmon’s song, a short sonnet about God’s formation of the world for men, the most wonderful thing about which is its convoluted verbal and metrical structure, which came out from unlettered man. From that point, Caedmon was known to have a gift for writing poetry. His later lyrics were clearly delivered by the educated priests of the cloister retelling to him stories from the Bible which it was said to have bitten over like a cow biting the cud and to have repeated in poetical dialect with awesome sweetness (Wrenn, 1946). It seems clearly that Caedmon received the divine inspiration from a powerful supernatural source to have the ability to compose poetry in a perfect way. In his opinion, the craft of poetry had taken not through men nor instructed by a man: but rather he had gotten the endowment of tune uninhibitedly by divine guide (Alexander, 1983). When he is asked where he got his thoughts from, the British comic virtuoso John Cleese remarks that “A little man in Swindon offers them to me yet I don’t know where he gets them from!” while the author Tchaikovsky figured that it just went to those ready to ace their hesitance. Inspiration is a tricky thing. The writer Gerard Manley Hopkins portrayed the process of inspiration as a temperament of awesome, unusual actually, mental intensity, either lively or receptive. It seems that in all the gifts there is both a divine and human activities. On one hand, each gift is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit; on the other hand, the gifts are expressed through human beings. The gifts are primarily distributions of the Holy Spirit, but the gifts operate in and through persons (Forster, 2007).

To sum up the Christian portion, it appears from these views that there is something in fact inspires the unknown author of the “Odes of Solomon,” Caedmon, and all the artists. In terms of Christianity, all the spiritual gifts, for any artist, are understood in a divine aspect primarily. In that sense, all the gifts are supernatural or extraordinary. This is the case for those seemingly ordinary as well as those seemingly extraordinary gifts. For example, “Odes of Solomon” is just as much a supernatural manifestation as the case of the poet Caedmon, and as the case with the Bible. All are extraordinary and basically supernatural. The artistic gifts of the Holy Spirit, accordingly, are not latent natural talents or trained abilities brought to heightened expression. The spiritual gifts are by no means more of what is already present, no matter how elevated. They are not simply an added spiritual injection that causes talents and abilities to function with greater effectiveness or transposes them to a higher level. They are gifts of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit.

Spenser remarks that art is not a craftsmanship, yet a divine gift, an awesome blessing, and grand nature, not to be gotten by work and adapting, but rather enhanced with both—and filled the wit by a certain enthusiasm and celestial motivation. Shelley has a similar precept as a main priority when he articulates that “poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.” Poetic vitality, as indicated by this view, is motivation or inspiration, long ago considered as a franticness claiming the writer, and in more present day times as a celestial provoking of the sensible soul (Edward, 1910). Here we can claim that the Greek theological philosophers meet the philosophy of the Christian religion to agree that art is a divine dominion, and that the artist is the instrument of God led where He wishes.

Indeed, a divine inspiration of the Holy Spirit may occur with someone regardless of background, experience, or education, as with the case of Caedmon. The Spirit is free to use and often does use—the uneducated and unpracticed—layman to bring about extraordinary results. Of course there is also human activity involved. The statement that “to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit” (Lee, 1999, p. 31) signifies that a person, an individual, is the recipient of the Spirit’s manifestation. Thus, in the operation of the gift, it is the human person, not the Holy Spirit, who acts. In this vein, when the Holy Spirit apportions a charisma such as a word of wisdom or knowledge, tongue or prophecy, it is a human being who speaks.

Part 2: Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus”

To verify these views of inspiration to a literary text, this part of the study brings together specific applications of the theological artistic inspiration in relation to Peter Shaffer’s play “Amadeus” which first performed on a stage in 1979. It will take at the ways in which his play shows the relationship between the artist and his God. Shaffer placed the case of the composer Mozart under the microscope in this work. “Amadeus” is multi-topics, but no previous studies have tackled the idea of artistic inspiration addressed by Shaffer through the internal conflict of Salieri against Mozart and how it would be response to the Greeks’ and Christian’s theology, which is the aim of this study. It is worth mentioning here that the name of Mozart is “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.” Shaffer gives the title “Amadeus” to his play for a specific purpose. According to Davey (2007, p. 71) the name Amadeus originates from the Latin word signifying “love of God” or “Love God!” from the derived two components “Amare” (to love) and “Deus” (God); in other words, Amadeus means the one who is in love with God.

In his article “Images of God: Artistic Inspiration and Pentecostal Theology (a Case Study),” John Harvey states that Evans translates his phenomenal creativity not as indicated by a natural hypothesis but rather with a plan of action to the idea of theopeustia, he trusted himself to be a channel for the immediate inspiration and empowering of God. In this sense, no instruction or foundational capacities are required. Harvey composes Painting to Evans as a gift, blessing that has been given not as a capacity to be made over some extend of time, and it is a completely developed and fully matured by God (Felix, 2015). Shaffer regularly manages theological issues in his plays. The crucial inquiry in “Amadeus” is that about the idea of God and the nature and riddle of the divine inspiration of the artists. The play investigates the competition between Antonio Salieri, the court composer for the emperor of Austria in the late eighteenth century, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Shaffer wound up plainly inspired by the connection between the two musicians in the wake of finding out about Mozart’s baffling demise to death. In this dramatic form of Mozart and Salieri and the portrait of their relationship, Shaffer investigates the riddle of inventive motivation, the divine power of the artists, the scan for other worldly existence, and the results of progress and disappointment. The story of this play is narrated from Salieri’s point of view. Salieri tends as often as possible to speak to the audience directly, now and then in an aside, throughout the play to again support the comprehension of the attendances. This method has also helped readers of this play to understand the personality of Salieri and what is going on in his mind.

Salieri at the beginning of “Amadeus” speaks directly to the audience and reveals his overwhelming desire to get fame, not any fame but is the fame of music and to be a professional musician. He believes that music is a divine art. He has a wish to sing in love to God with other musicians at that time, and this hope has lived inside him since his childhood. “My own requirements were very different. [Pause] I wanted fame. Not to deceive you, I want to blaze like a comet across the firmament of Europe . . . Music is God’s art” (Shaffer, 2001, p. 16). After these claims, Salieri takes us back to his childhood. He reveals that on one of his childhood days he had gone to a church with his father. His father was a man who disliked music and did not have any desire to celebrate his son as an artist by any stretch even if it was just by imagination. In the church, Salieri held an agreement with the Lord which is described as follows:

Signore, let me be a composer! Grant me sufficient fame to enjoy it. In return, I will live with virtue. I will strive to better the lot of my fellows. And I will honor You with much music all the days of my life. (Shaffer, 2001, p. 17)

It is certain that since his Childhood Salieri had faith in the divine inspiration of the artists and arts, and that child had stood between the hands of God and requesting that he be an incredible composer and encompassed by distinction to appreciate and goes with extraordinary enthusiasm for what may convey him to the creative popularity by mastering the music. He has set a few conditions on himself in return; consequently, in the event that he really turned into a well-known composer, he would sing through music with the adoration for God and he would without a doubt be a decent individual, and far from the terrible deeds. At the point when God reacted in response to him inspirationally, “go forward Antonio, serve me and humanity, and you will be honored.” Salieri thanks him and guaranteed to be a decent servant the whole of his life (Shaffer, 2001).

The next day, a family companion abruptly showed up and took him to Vienna, where he mastered music and soon turned to be the court composer there. The narrator took as to the year 1781 when he was 31 years old and a very happy person because the agreement with the God had been accepted, and the Lord had done his part in the Convention. Things look good with Salieri who tells the time of the Mozart’s appearance. Salieri was observing Mozart and describing him as a childish person, full of vices, and he has sexual orientation toward women. But when it comes to music, things are different and Mozart seems fabulous:

Dimly the music sounded from the salon above. Dimly the stars shone on the empty street. I was suddenly frightened. It seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God—and that issued from a creature whose won voice I heard—and it was the voice of an obscene child! (Shaffer, 2001, p. 28)

In terms of Plato’s Ion, Mozart is like the rhapsode Ion and in the same sense he is like any poet. Socrates’ interpretation of the craft of the poet in Plato’s Ion falls in the same standard of Salieri’s opinion about the composer Mozart in Shaffer’s “Amadeus.” According to Plato, an artist is not creating the art by a craft, or through the ability of his own at all, but through the divine inspiration of the Goddess. The inspiration falls on the artist suddenly and then the artist has been possessed by that power and being out of his senses like a mad man—God takes his mind away till the time of the inspiration been up. At the time of inspiration, the artist may be completely different from his real personality, and this has actually happened to both Ion and Mozart. Each one of them has two personalities, one as a common man when the other completely different and exists at the time of the divine inspiration. This idea was in fact a shock to Salieri; he was pondering how a man with an exaggerated childish and obscene character would produce this kind of music: “I simply taken by surprise that the filthy creature could write music at all? . . . Suddenly I felt immensely cheered! I would seek him out and welcome him myself to Vienna!” (Shaffer, 2001, p. 29). Later in the occasion, Salieri composed a melodic piece to welcome Mozart in the imperial court of Vienna, and it was a very trivial march. Mozart quickly corrected the situation and made Salieri’s ridiculous piece of music to another that one which was sung by the angels. The musical beauty that Salieri has asked his Lord to be gifted with unfortunately was found in Mozart.

From a purely Christian point of view, Salieri believes that the Holy Spirit was the one who broadcast music in the depths of Mozart; the Holy Spirit is the source of inspiration for Mozart to help him come with all this vast musical beauty. At the point when Mozart plays, he admits that he hears the voice of God, and he reacts with such pleasure that influences him to tremble. This claim leads us to remember the “Odes of Solomon,” where the Odist again claimed that he was the mouthpiece of the Holy Spirit. According to the original Mozart in his real life, the source of his imaginative ability and local virtuoso was clear through a letter to his father cited by James M. Morris (1977) in which he expressed in 1778, at the age of 22, in a significant confident way: “I am a composer and was born to be a Capellmerister. I neither can nor ought to bury the talent for composition with which God in his goodness has so richly endowed me.”

In Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” Mozart’s wife Constanze has visited Salieri at his home to ask for his help to find a work for her husband in the royal court, because his financial situation is shaky. Constanze Brings with her manuscripts and musical notes that composed by Mozart: “I brought you some manuscripts by Wolfang. . . Will you look at them, please, while I wait? . . . I have to take them back with me. He’ll miss them otherwise. He doesn’t make copies. These are all the originals” (Shaffer, 2001, p. 53). While Salieri is checking them, he is again shocked. He has studied them completely, and so he can heard the music in his mind through the sensual imagination. Mike felt the constant harmony of a superstitious music that made by Mozart: “Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall” (Shaffer, 2001, p. 57). What is surprising Salieri is that these melodies are the original version, which is not revised copies and still without any correction:

She had said that these were his original scores. First and only drafts of the music. Yet they looked like fair copies. They showed no corrections of any kind. It was puzzling—then suddenly alarming. . . I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink stroked at an Absolute Beauty! (Shaffer, 2001, p. 57)

The breech among average quality and virtuoso is seen when Salieri takes note of the idea that Mozart can put on paper whatever he compose, without ever making mistakes from the first attempt, easygoing notes that transform Salieri’s considered ones into dead scratches. The manuscripts of Mozart are resampling the Bible in term of the “Biblical Inspiration” that paralleled with the “Artistic Inspiration.” The two terms are paralleled in the sense of the God’s prophetic agency. By the Greeks point of view, Mozart’s manuscripts are the total results of the muses, the nine goddesses of inspiration, or by Apollo the god of music on one hand. On the other hand, for the Christians, the manuscripts come from the Holy Spirit, so the musical inspiration of the Mozart does not imply that he is negligible transcriber. God utilizes his human identities and encounters simultaneously. Apostles of Jesus Christ, the enlivened men, were not omniscient or by and by trustworthy. However, what they composed was from the brain of God and it was recorded without blunder. Salieri has explained that he has been deceived by God, for He has taken his musical divine inspiration and given it to another person, Mozart in this case: “I know my fate. For the first time I feel my emptiness as Adam felt his nakedness” (Shaffer, 2001, p. 58). Salieri feels that he has lost the attention of God—the divine music was no longer in his possession, and he was like Adam when he lost the existence of being in paradise. Salieri feels betrayed and mocked—he whines with full sadness that he has been a slave for his Lord and he considers himself to be a servant, paying off a deal. He goes to his hatred when he meets and hears crafted by a more skilled composer that is Mozart. As he understands that Mozart, the more youthful, apparently unworthy child, has gotten a legacy considerably more prominent than his, Salieri announces war on God and on his dearest Mozart: “When I return, I’ll tell you about the war I fought with God through His preferred Creature—Mozart, named Amadeus. In the waging of which, of course, the Creature had to be destroyed” (Shaffer, 2001, p. 60). Since his agreement with God ends up being a joke, he is resolved to reproach God’s unfairness and crush his creation, the “Amadeus,” the one cherished by God. Salieri separates when he needs to confront the philosophical and theological issue of God’s inclination for the corrupt and immoral person to be his choice of the divine music.

In the last few days of Mozart’s life, when Salieri has visited him and through a long conversation between the two, Mozart claims something which is strange and terrifying him: “This morning I saw a figure much like the one in my dream—only clear, not misty. And this time I was awake—in my room—in broad daylight. . . Oh God, it spoke! It said—it was terrible! . . .” This means that Mozart is aware of inspiration; although this figure has visited him as long as in his dreams, this time is clearer. In the Greek treatment of the subject, the case of Mozart is similar to that of Hesiod, and for the Christian context it would responses to that of the Anglo-Saxon’s poet Caedmon. Each of the three mentioned that they have met strange figures in their dreams and in reality too. The shepherd Hesiod claims that he has seen the nine goddesses of inspiration (muses) and has learned poetry and how to sing the words from them (Forster, 2007). The illiterate poet Caedmon states that someone has visited him in his dreams, taught him the art of poetry, and seemed to have been the Holy Spirit (Wrenn, 1946). While for Salieri’s philosophy, there is a person that Mozart reported he is frequented coming to him in his dreams and in the real life as well was undoubtedly God who was giving the birth to the music in Mozart’s mind (Shaffer, 2001). Salieri was all listening to Mozart describing his last time meeting that figure in real life:

I was seated at my table working. Suddenly there came three sharp knocks at the door, and a figure entered, all muffled in gray. But now it had a face! A death’s-head!—glaring at me with frozen eyes sunk deep in little caves of bone! . . . It said, “Wolfgang Mozart: you are require now by my master to write a Requiem Mass . . . It must be finished completely when you see me next. And you will tell no one.” I asked, Who has died? Who is Requiem for? . . . Then he turned and left. I went to the window to see him reappear down in the street, but he didn’t. He had vanished! (Shaffer, 2001, p. 96)

Why does this figure require a Mass for someone who seems to have not died yet? The Patient Mozart constantly hesitates and postpones writing the Mass, and when Salieri asks him about the reason, Mozart’s answer is: “Isn’t it obvious? [Pause] It’s for me, that’s all . . . The Mass. It’s for me. Myself. . . It’s ordered. I am to write my own” (Shaffer, 2001, p. 105). In this sense, Mozart indirectly acknowledges that he is in touch with the Lord and that Lord is using him as an instrument to pass through what He wants. Salieri maintains: “Whatever I did—you would fill the world! [Outraged] You left me with nothing! . . . You’re not to blame. It’s His will. I don’t hate you—you’re only an instrument” (Shaffer, 2001, p. 109). But what kind of instrument Mozart is? Due to the incident of the strange figure that has always been visiting Mozart and from a Christian point of view, Mozart in the general frame of his artistic title is a musical composer, but theologically he is a man who is inspired by one type of inspiration and it is called the “Dynamic Inspiration.” Christian theologians clearly recognized the existence of inspiration among the authors of the Bible without doubt, and one of their views is the “Dynamic Inspiration.” With reference to this term, Mozart is getting the divine inspiration of his musical thoughts from his Lord while maintaining his character the same, so God is giving him the divine power and He lets the choice to him.

Even Mozart’s death is different from averaged people because it is connected with divinity. When Mozart had been out of life, according to Salieri the beloved of God “Amadeus” has completed his mission like any prophet who has died but his message has remaining alive, his great legacy and this is what disturbs Salieri:

I came to understand the nature of God’s punishment . . . This was my sentence: I must endure thirty years of being called “distinguished.” . . . When my nose had been rubbed in fame to vomiting—it would be taken away from me . . . Mozart’s music sounded louder and louder through the word. And mine faded completely, till no one played it at all. (Shaffer, 2001, pp. 115-117)

In Plato’s Ion, Socrates has expounded the metaphor of Magnet. He asserts that the magnet as an allegory stands for the divine power that the gods have, who input their attraction into the artist, who at that point charges and impacts on the rhapsode, and who, thus, polarizes his audience, so the audience of an artist also are going to be inspired indirectly to feel the beauty of the gods’ arts. That is why even after the death of Mozart, his music still inspires people from all around the world as Salieri states. Nobody truly thinks or cares about Salieri’s music despite the fact that he’s alive, whereas Mozart’s music even after his demise spreads and spreads like the air all over. It is clear to Salieri that he is not desirable anymore by God to be a famous composer, and even musical inspiration has already been taken from him so he has become unable to compose music, but he decided to get the fame differently—he claims to have poisoned Mozart and he is the main cause of his death believing that the memory of Mozart will lead to his immortality as well. As far as they continue to sing and play Mozart’s music, they will also remember him as his murderer: “After today, whenever men speak of Mozart’s name with love, they will speak of mine with loathing! As his name grows in the world, so will mine—if not in fame, then in infamy” (Shaffer, 2001, pp. 116-117). In this way he thinks he can win his battle with God. For his misfortune, it does not work because the public do not believe that Salieri is the one behind Mozart’s murder. Yet, after the demise of Mozart God uncovers his divine arrangement and Mozart’s music ends up plainly world well known and the world scarcely thinks about Antonio Salieri and his music. Salieri understands that at last God has his direction and that Mozart is the anointed one by God for music. Mozart is resampling the Greek’s portrait of an artist as a free man, God-like; the play ends with Salieri’s attempt to commit suicide due to his disappointment, because God has insisted that Mozart be his undisputed voice of music.

Accordingly, the study draws a line that is given much religious importance to the relationship between Gods and art. It is the line of the inceptions of the artistic inspiration. There are two sections of equivalent significance standing with the divine inspiration of the arts and artists; the first one is the idolatrous, believers of the several Gods and their opinions in terms of the Greeks’ theology, and the second one is in terms of Christian theology.

Throughout all the previous years, from the morning of the world practically until our days, the artists have been and still one a race separated from others—having a divine sparkle; passing on, they stayed deathless and having eternality. The Greeks, those originators of the scholarly life, settled for us the possibility of the artist. He is a man who controlled by a divine power; more holy than the cleric, who is at a best-case scenario a delegate among men and the divine beings, yet in the artist, the God is available and talks on his behalf. The moral and good mental relationship between God and artist is that of a reality of boundless importance. To God Himself, this reality must be one of preeminent imply. Surely, so far as we have explored some information of the divine inspiration, it seems that the artist soul is the one knowledge to whom God can convey His own particular considerations, consequently the main being with whom He can go into social relations.

Concluding Remarks

The comet of inspiration is central, not only to the Greek and Christian theoretical perspectives but also to Shaffer in his application the Greek Worldview to Amadeus. For Shaffer, inspiration is a characteristic conviction of men concerning all the types of arts; and to the more prominent artists themselves, it is something normal to feel it, and for their own works and their perspectives in composing appear higher than themselves. This feeling of possession of being made up into a circle of more noteworthy power is the genuine idyllic franticness, which is so natural thought in Greek as they believed in the goddesses of inspiration, the nine muses, and even for the Christians as they believe in the Holy Spirit as a source of inspiration.

The study has shown that in “Amadeus,” Peter Shaffer obviously tackles the process of artistic inspiration as a holy one. Mozart’s eternal music is the result of artist’s inspiration that responds to the theology of the Greeks as well as to the Christian religion. Shaffer affirms through his character Salieri that there would be no higher art for the innovative demonstration than that of God. When he is a part of the art, the result is an incomparable end, and in satisfaction of the most profound energy of His unceasing nature, generated man in His own particular resemblance. So Mozart’s art is no longer seen by Salieri as a human art at all. In Mozart and Salieri, we see the difference between the virtuoso of the divine which does what it must and the ability of talent which does what it can, and that is exactly common in terms of the Greek and Christians beliefs.