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1 Introduction Art, Religion, and Philology In winter semester 1802–03, F. W. J. von Schelling gave one of the last courses he was to give at the University of Jena. It was entitled Philosophie der Kunst (Philosophy of Art). There is no mistaking the significance of this choice. For the first time ever, someone holding a chair of philosophy was giving a course on art, thus conferring upon art the dignity of being something more than an object of reflection: namely, a form of philosophy. Schelling uses a somewhat different term: he calls art, simply, a “power,” that is, a presentation of the Absolute as a whole raised to a certain power. To give his course, he mobilized all the philological knowledge he had amassed in the few years that he had just spent in Jena; most of it stemmed from exchanges with the Schlegel brothers and their wives or mistresses. Not only did Schelling steal all their philological knowledge; the elder Schlegel also continued to provide him, in letter after letter, with all the information he needed to meet the philological requirements of his philosophical program, and he did so most graciously, although Schelling had diverted rather more than just Schlegel’s philological expertise to his own ends. In his course, then, Schelling writes: “The basic law of every figuration of the gods is the law of beauty.”1 Even if this passage does not spell it out and even if Schelling seems to be very explicit when he says “every figuration of the gods,” what is in question here is plainly figuration , that is to say, mythological production. At the same time, of course, religion is in question as well: not just any religion, but the kind the nineteenth century would somewhat later label “mythological religion” in order to distinguish it from “prophetic” or “monotheistic” religion. It was already Aryans versus Semites, and none of the subsequent scholarly precautions would alter that in the least. Of course, a philology of the Semites would also eventually come into existence. But, plainly, philology began as Aryan philology. The philology of the Semites sprang up only in counterpoint to it and in reaction against it; moreover, as a general rule, it borrowed its instruments and concepts from its predecessor. It was also careful to point out, at all times, that the Aryans’ “mythopoetic” capacity had philological precedence—meaning their capacity (good or bad) for fabricating myths and figuring gods. In any case, there we have it: art is at the origins of religion. 2 Introduction But that is not all. A bit further on, Schelling writes, invoking a new proposition that links art to mythology, historically this time: “Mythology is the necessary condition and raw material for all art.”2 Thus we have a circular relationship between mythological religion and what might be termed the “aesthetic principle.” For, at the origins of religion, we find art in the form of a law of beauty. It is by means of art, by means of an operation of a manifestly artistic kind, that the “figuration” of the gods is realized. Conversely, however, art itself, in its historical reality, presupposes religion, at least in its mythological form (whatever Schelling means by that here). It presupposes a mythological religion that has withdrawn and ceded its place, while continuing to have effects even in its absence . It is by coming to an end that mythology becomes something eternal. It becomes something eternal in mourning. Art is mourning for mythology. Thus we have to do with a complex, twofold relationship between art and mythology or between art and religion. Art presents itself once as origin and a second time as mourning. And it is the origin or mourning of the same thing each time: of mythology and the gods. A philosophical interest in myths and mythology is a constant in Schelling’s work throughout, from the essays of his youth to the posthumous Philosophy of Mythology. Yet it seems to me that the circular relation between mythology and the aesthetic principle , between art and religion, is altogether characteristic of the early Romantic period in general, of the small group of people who, from Jena to Berlin, during the fabulous ten years that ran from 1795 to 1805, invented philology out of whole cloth, and with it, of course, literature as well. This circular relation is already the object of Friedrich Schlegel’s pastiche or paraphrase in his 1800 Dialogue on Poetry (pastiche is largely synonymous with...

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