The man who was arguably the greatest inventor of the Twentieth Century was tall, dark, and handsome, with impeccable taste in clothing. He was gifted with the ability to move among high society, and because he was fluent in at least six languages, he could do so almost anywhere. And yet he lived his

long life without any form of personal partner and without close friends, until his death at age eighty-six.

The aloneness of Nikola Tesla’s long personal journey and the determination with which he constructed his isolation can be baffling, unless viewed through a spiritual lens.

He immigrated to America at age twenty-eight, seeking opportunity but also fleeing his clergyman father’s desire for him to become a pastor. Because Nikola chose a worldly life, his father considered him to have fallen away from spiritual faith.

And yet Nikola often referred to himself as “a monk of science” and mentioned God in his public remarks. Is it possible for him to have maintained an active spiritual life in private, recognizable to God and meaningful in its power?

I believe any viewpoint denying him a legitimate relationship with the Creator is an attempt to fault him for merely being unconventional. His spiritual life was so powerful and deeply consuming for him that he gave up society for the sake of it, and he did so with as much conviction as any meditating monk or cloistered nun.

He often commented to interviewers that he believed his single life was necessary so he could spend days at a time in the laboratory. However, this was an era when married men routinely worked long hours regardless of their family status, and suffered no condemnation at all from society.

The concerns he expressed may have been a cover story, but not, as some might guess, for a closeted life as a gay male during those more prudish days; there’s no evidence of any deep male relationships outside of his work partners in a very busy laboratory. Still, we know there is a universal desire among humans to seek the company of their own kind. So how does a man make himself go home alone every night when he could be with almost any partner he chooses? More importantly, why would he do that?

He lived in the thrall of his own genius and its ability to perceive deep connections between seemingly unconnected objects and forces. His earliest and most fundamental inspiration –- the one leading to the invention of all the technology necessary for the world’s electrical grid — led him to the revelation that a magnet invisibly causes iron to move and therefore drive machinery in the same way that human consciousness connects with the physical body and gives it locomotion. A spiritual outlook was inevitable for a mind such as his.

Religion got a hard introduction to young Nikola’s life, however. His very strict clergyman father used it to make his son miserable. Once he was away from his parents in America and away from the world in his laboratory, he could indulge his genius without guilt from a neglected family or shame over neglected religious duties.

Yet he was hardly worldly by the terms of the day. He wanted nothing to do with personal wealth or private property to show off for the world. All his wealth was recycled into his laboratories, and all their work was directed at the task of making the world a far better place. He did it so well for so long that the only one of his life goals he failed to achieve was to invent and produce a system to transmit electrical power – not information, but power itself – wirelessly around the entire planet. And there is a good case to be made that he actually did invent it, but that the plans were stolen when the U.S. Secret Service raided his hotel room immediately upon his death and emptied out all his papers before his body itself was removed.

At the end of his life, he tried many times to reveal details about his muse. He said she came to him in the form of a white dove. The reader can take that to mean a visitation from the Divine, or perhaps a hallucination, or even a lie.

Except that Tesla never lied in any of his other claims, having proven them all with over seven hundred patents to his name. And no matter how clearly he could visualize his thoughts, he never displayed any confusion between his thinking and the physical world.

That leaves a perception of the Divine. Nikola’s first biographer, John J. O’Neill, claimed that the dove obviously represented Christ, the Prince of Peace. Less literal thinkers have claimed the dove was merely Nikola’s genius giving itself a shape and a name.

However that may be, Nikola’s dove, his muse, always led him back to the music of the spheres that he listened to with such devotion and awe. He remained faithful to it all of his eighty-six years.

How do you see him, then? Is he a fallen-away Christian who gave himself over to idolatry? Is he a simple workaholic who used his lab to hold back real life? Or are you willing to consider the possibility that he was someone who heard the Voice of God in a unique language, and a man who caused his entire life to be a single and sincere act of prayerful devotion?

҉

Anthony Flacco

Seattle

May, 2013