Roberto Calasso is our foremost interpreter of the mythology of modern life. This is a tremendous achievement, because modern life is not supposed to have a mythology. We are supposed to live in what Max Weber called a disenchanted world, with rational systems all around us, and above us, as John Lennon said, only sky. The history of the secular West, however, proves this frame of mind to be neither tenable nor rewarding. We remain Homo religiosus, and those who believe in nothing keep falling for anything.
“The Unnamable Present” is the ninth in Mr. Calasso's kaleidoscopic series of investigations into the spiritual biography of the secular West. Like its predecessors, “The Unnamable Present” (translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon) is aphoristic in exposition, allusive in interpretation and uncompromising in erudition. Mr. Calasso's previous volumes include anthropological reflections on sacrificial motifs in myths from Greek (“The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”), Vedic (“Ardor”) and Hindu (“Ka”) texts. He has explored the religion of art in Tiepolo (“Tiepelo Pink”), Baudelaire (“La Folie Baudelaire”) and Kafka (“K”). He has also produced the genre-defying “Ruin of Kasch,” which traced the rise of secular politics in the decades after the French Revolution, as well as “Literature and the Gods,” a small 2001 volume to which “The Unnamable Present” might be considered a companion.
In “Literature and the Gods,” Mr. Calasso traced the fateful convergence in the late 18th century of German Romantic philosophy, secular politics and the search for a new, eastward-looking “mythology” that might replace Christianity. His touchstone was a document called “The First Systematic Program of German Idealism”—dated to around 1797, written in Hegel's hand, and attributed either to Hegel or Schelling: “So long as we are unable to make our ideas aesthetic,” its author asserts, “which is to say mythological, they can be of no interest to the people. The two long essays in “The Unnamable Present” examine the effects of novel and often dangerous mythologies—democracy, nationalism, Darwinism, race theory—in 20th-century Europe.
