A Voice in the Wilderness

A friend reminiscese that a religious magazine he worked for once did a piece on "modern prophets." Who are the modern prophets? They listed mostly theologians, one psychologist.

I think that's well off the mark.

There were philosophers in the ancient world as well--Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle. And while their contribution was vital, it was not the same as that of the prophets, and the ancients would not have confused the two.

Prophets were a wilder and less predictable bunch, who spoke with the heart, not the mind.

It seems clear to me that the people we now call "artists"--at least the great ones--are largely the same people that, in ancient Israel, would have been known as prophets. They are also the same character type that is, in shamanic societies, the shamans. The ones directly in touch with the almighty, the spirit world, or the world-spirit. They are beholden to no organization, but wander the wildernesses eating locusts and wild honey and speaking truth, regardless of the consequences.

George Orwell would be on my own list of modern prophets. Allen Ginsberg; William Blake, surely. TS Eliot. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. WB Yeats. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Come down to it, and it is hard not to think of a really major artist who did not have that edge of prophecy.

This is unique to the modern Western world, perhaps, but then, the concept of the "artist," as opposed to the craftsman, is also unique to the modern Western world. It is how we have chosen to accommodate our prophets and shamans: by having them work as craftsmen.

Of course there are still false prophets as well, as there have always been. The Ezra Pounds, who become powerful voices for unworthy causes.