For most of human history, the word 'create' was reserved for God alone. Humans could make things, craft things, discover things—but create? That was above our pay grade. The Latin creatio meant bringing something from nothing, and only the divine could manage that particular trick.

Fast forward to your last job interview, where you were probably asked to describe your 'creative problem-solving skills.' Somewhere between medieval theology and modern HR departments, creativity underwent one of history's most dramatic career changes—from forbidden divine attribute to mandatory professional competency. How did we get here, and what did we lose along the way?

Medieval thinkers were quite clear on this point: humans don't create, they discover. A poet didn't create beauty; he uncovered eternal forms already existing in the mind of God. A mathematician didn't invent theorems; he found truths that had always been there. This wasn't modesty—it was metaphysics. Creation ex nihilo, from nothing, was definitionally impossible for finite beings working with pre-existing materials.

The ancient Greeks had similar reservations. They had no word for creativity as we understand it. Artists and poets were vessels for the Muses, conduits rather than originators. Plato famously worried about poets precisely because they seemed to access something beyond rational control—divine madness, not personal genius. The craftsman who made a beautiful chair was imitating ideal forms, not innovating.

This framework had real consequences. Innovation was often suspicious, associated with hubris or heresy. Why would you need to create something new if God's creation was already perfect? The Renaissance began cracking this theological ceiling, with figures like Leonardo claiming that the artist's imagination could rival nature itself. But even then, 'creativity' as a human attribute remained philosophically fraught—a borrowed power, not an intrinsic one.

Takeaway

For most of history, claiming to 'create' was either blasphemy or confusion—a reminder that our current assumptions about human capability are cultural achievements, not obvious truths.

The Romantics staged a coup. By the early nineteenth century, poets like Coleridge were explicitly arguing that human imagination was a 'repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation.' Notice the move: creativity wasn't stolen from God but shared with humans as part of our divine inheritance. Every person carried a spark of the creative fire.

This was revolutionary and slightly terrifying to contemporaries. If everyone possessed creative capacity, what happened to hierarchy? The Romantics answered: genius wasn't about social position but about accessing one's authentic inner depths. The artist became the model human being—someone who expressed their unique vision rather than copying established forms. Originality became the highest value.

But here's the twist the Romantics didn't anticipate: once creativity became a human birthright rather than a rare gift, it became something you could be blamed for lacking. If everyone is potentially creative, then uncreative people are simply failing to access what they already possess. The democratization of creativity planted seeds for its eventual weaponization as an obligation rather than a blessing.

Takeaway

Celebrating creativity as universal human potential created its shadow: the possibility of being judged deficient in something you supposedly already have.

Somewhere around the 1950s, creativity escaped the arts and entered the boardroom. Advertising executive Alex Osborn coined 'brainstorming' in 1953. Management theorists began measuring 'creative thinking.' By the 1990s, Richard Florida was declaring that the 'creative class' would drive economic growth. Creativity had completed its journey from divine attribute to job requirement.

This transformation served specific economic needs. Post-industrial capitalism doesn't just want compliant workers; it wants workers who generate new ideas, solve novel problems, and—crucially—do so enthusiastically without extra compensation. Framing labor as 'creative expression' makes exploitation feel like self-actualization. Your job isn't just a job; it's your art.

The irony is exquisite. Medieval theologians reserved creativity for God to protect the sacred from human presumption. Romantic poets claimed creativity for humanity to elevate human dignity. Corporate culture demands creativity from everyone to extract more value from labor. The concept that once marked the boundary between human and divine now marks the boundary between employed and unemployable.

Takeaway

When creativity becomes mandatory rather than celebrated, it transforms from a gift into a debt—something you owe to employers rather than something you offer to the world.

The next time someone asks about your 'creative skills,' you're participating in a conversation that runs through medieval monasteries, Romantic salons, and mid-century advertising agencies. Each era borrowed the concept and reshaped it for different purposes—theological, aesthetic, economic.

Understanding this history doesn't free you from the demand to be creative. But it might help you recognize that creativity's current mandatory status is a historical accident, not an eternal truth. What we owe to ourselves and others is always open for renegotiation.