The use of biography needs to be seen in light of our lenses. For instance, if I put on the lens which admires genius and passionate yearning, I can be quite encouraged when I see the ambiguity of the person I am striving to understand.
Right now I am listening to Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, after having watched Immortal Beloved. While I am listening I can easily forgive his human foibles (even though my forgiveness is not necessarily important to Ludgy). This type of lens I compare with being longsighted. The stuff up close, the personal stuff, is blurred out yet the distant genius gleams in the pristine darkness.
Probably the longsighted glasses consist of regular strength and telescopic lenses. The regular strength lens shows the individual in his or her time and setting as a person of extraordinary talent. The telescopic lens may show that person's overall cosmic significance. They then become representatives of Oversoul, or apotheoses (deified beings).
Now let's put on another pair of glasses. The focus is now on the personal but the genius is obscured. Here the banality and pretention in the character looms over the creativity. This shortsighted focus is true but not the whole picture. For example, to live with Ludwig would be a living hell, that is, unless there were some other human features aside from his genius. Features that might be there are humility, honesty, vulnerablity, kindness and compassion. Rumour among biographers has it that he was not as heavily endowed with these qualities as he was with musical genius and personal charisma.
You could glory in Ludwig's achievements but you could never really love him as he was in and of himself. Ludwig would be loved only for his talent. It is more like admiration or respect, but not a sustaining love. Once he went deaf and his genius was affected practically he was not respected; in fact, he was scorned. His limitation was even more apparent to his former genius. It is the gift that is loved with longsighted vision, not necessarily the person. As applauded as he was and with as many people at his funeral as there were, he was little known and little loved as a person.
The purpose of biography as I see it is to encourage us to use lenses appropriately. Maybe the idea is to become bi-focal in our approach, acknowledging genius as a gift of the gods and personality and character as the moral quality of the person. The personality or character can be full of love, forgiveness, compassion and be inspiring despite genius. Genius can be made to serve the greater purpose when we are grateful for it, when genius reminds us of the transcendental grace of God or the Oversoul. What a wonder the world is if it can create the Fifth Symphony even from the likes of Ludwig. ("Nothing to boast about, Ludwig.") If you don't have any conception of God, then and only then can you have pride in your gifts that you didn't directly earn. Karl, Ludwig's nephew, may have worked as hard at music as Ludwig but to no avail. Saliari learned that lesson with respect to Mozart and cursed God for it.
So then, how do we admire our geniuses? Why study great people? Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested that we study great people so that we can get connected to the Source behind them. If we get stuck in their genius, and especially if we identify their talent with their personality, then we can be baffled by their bullshit. Fine words or tunes do not mean much if they are "full of sound and fury signifying nothing", as one genius put it.
I can't help but think of Dante when I think of the way to admire genius. Dante was a craftsman of words, which he used to woo the admiration of cronies and women, and only later became a genius due in great part to his abject failure in politics, unrequited love, and the model of Virgil. Virgil taught him not to be pedantic or pretentious but to reflect upon beauty in a way that all could participate in.
Emerson is correct when he describes the difficulty of finding a good model upon which to build our lives. That task is what I think the reading of biography or seeing movies of great people is about spiritually. We are looking for someone to teach us to be human and even more than human. Emerson discusses, in Icarus terms, the typical result of the task:
Oftener it falls that this winged man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, then leaps and frisks about me as it were from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise like a fowl or fly like a fish, a little way fromthe ground or water; but the all piercing, all feeding, and ocular air of heaven that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead a life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson. "The Poet", The Portable Emerson. p. 247.
A translation is that those we go to for mentoring tend to baffle us with bullshit, confuse us with mental gymnastics and, in the end, are mostly looking for applause. They are talented, maybe even talented geniuses, but not guides. Sometimes thay don't even mean to be so. They are merely doomed with what C.G. Jung called a "manna personality" that attracts people like a magnet. A mana personality is a being so full of some occult and bewitching quality (mana) that he or she is endowed with some magical knowledge or power.
The person with a mana-personality expresses it like this:
I recognize that there is some psychic factor active in me which alludes my conscious will in the most incredible manner. It can put extraordinary ideas in my head, induce in me unwanted and unwelcome moods and emotions, lead me to astonishing actions (even great feats of genius) for which aIl accept no responsibility, upset my relations with other people in a very irritating way. I feel powerless against this fact and what is worse, I am in love with it, so all that I can do is marvel. Poets call this the artistic temperament.
- C.G. Jung. Two Essays In Analytical Psychology, p. 228.
Jesus could have been a sort of mana personality since people flocked to him and he let them down because his ideations did not come true in either the way he or they expected. Only when they moved beyond the human personality of Jesus of Nazareth and reflected on his representative or archetypal qualities did that sense of disappointment diminish. As a universal symbol he had to be applied to their very localized lives. But how were they, limited human beings of the decidedly non-genius variety, to follow the exalted Lord? They couldn't copy him or literalize him but had to engage him and craft their conceptions of him, that is,interpret him in such a way to benefit themselves. In short, they had to find the Christ within. Paul the Apostle called Christ the Representative man or the new Adam. So it is a deep personal work to follow a mentor. You cannot rely just on your psychological projection or on the literal human who contains the power. You must become bi-focal.