But is this not merely setting back the onset of Modernism by half a century? If you wish to see ‘the disenchantment of the world’ as a key ingredient in Modernism, a critic of this line of thought might argue, is not what you are doing merely eliding Modernism and Romanticism? To pose these questions is once again to misunderstand what is at issue. It is to deny that Hegel's present tense, his insistent ‘now … now … now …’, is still the present tense for us — i.e., that we still live in the world Hegel so movingly describes. That, I suspect, is what divides English and continental philosophy, and that is the task of this book: to try to bring home to readers the sense in which Hegel's present tense is still present for us.
There is a further point. To see Modernism as beginning in 1800 rather than 1850 is short-sighted in another way. T.S. Eliot famously located a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in the mid-seventeenth century, while cultural critics like Heller and Blumenberg, perhaps taking their cue from Weber, would take it back even further, to the early sixteenth century and the coming of Protestantism. Heller even, and only half in jest, once pointed to a moment in 1529 when, he said, the problems of modern poetry began. The occasion was a disputation in the ducal castle in Marburg between Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, who had been brought together by Philip of Hesse in an attempt to heal the splits that were beginning to show in the ranks of the Reformers less than a dozen years after Luther had nailed his theses to the Castle Church doors in Wittenberg and unwittingly set the Reformation in train. The subject of dispute was the nature of the eucharist: were the bread and wine administered by the priest, as Luther, in this still a man of the Middle Ages, insisted, really the body and blood of Christ, or were they, as the Humanist Zwingli maintained, merely symbolic? Zwingli could not believe that Luther, who had challenged the authority of pope and councils and denounced pilgrimages and purgatory as superstitious practices designed to make money for the Church, could really believe that Christ, who sat in heaven on the right hand of God, could also be present in the wine and bread used by priests all over Christendom every day of the year. But Luther, for his part, clung to his belief: a cultured man like Zwingli might laugh, but he knew in his soul that the mystery of the eucharist was real, that the ritual was not designed merely to bring to the memory of the participant that first sacrifice of Christ; it was actually to partake, in some way, in that sacrifice.
The parties could not agree and could not even devise a face-saving formula. As Heller points out, the dispute was not even new, since theologians had been arguing about the precise nature of transubstantiation for centuries. But it had taken on a new importance and after the Marburg disputation there was no going back, for theology or for Western man. ‘Of course,’ says Heller,
I do not confuse a theological controversy with an exercise in aesthetic theory. But I do suggest that at the end of a period that we rather vaguely call the Middle Ages there occurred a radical change in man's idea of reality, in that complex fabric of unconsciously held convictions about what is real and what is not. This was a revolution comparable to that earlier one which Nietzsche called the victory of the Socratic mind over the spirit of Dionysian tragedy. And indeed both victories saddled us with the unending bother of aesthetic philosophy.
The Marburg debate brings out the fact that the Protestant revolution was not one thing which in a single moment changed the face of European politics, religion and thought. The world did not become disenchanted overnight. It was, rather, the coming out into the open of doubts and confusions that had not, until then, found a clear voice. As Luther's stance at Marburg suggests, the ‘medieval’ and the ‘modern’ were to coexist for a long while yet. But the fabric of thought was changing. Take the Reformers' polemics against Purgatory. The idea that there was a middle state ‘in which’, as a recent historian has put it, ‘those whom God loved would have a chance to perfect the hard slog towards holiness that they had begun so imperfectly in their brief earthly life’ was nowhere to be found in the Bible, and by the fifteenth century, when rich nobles could set up chantry chapels and hire priests to sing daily masses in perpetuity to help speed them through Purgatory as quickly as possible, the whole doctrine had begun, to some, to seem meaningless and mechanical. But the idea of men on earth, by their devotions, helping those who had died and earning themselves benefit from their labours in the eyes of God was one which would have been understood by most so-called primitive peoples, for it is based on the belief that there is a profound link between groups of human beings and between the living and the dead. In the Choephori of Aeschylus, the second play of his trilogy about the House of Agamemnon, known as the Oresteia, Agamemnon's two surviving children, Electra and Orestes, egged on by the chorus, pray at the tomb of their murdered father for him to help them avenge his fate on the culprit, their mother. At the climax of this extraordinary scene Orestes cries out to his father:
And do not wipe out this Pelopid seed; for then [i.e. if you do suffer them to be wiped out], even though dead, you will not have perished. For to a dead man his children are the fame that preserves him; like corks they bear the net up, keeping safe the spun flax that stretches up from the depths.
(ll.503–7, tr. Alan H. Somerstein)
For Aeschylus, the unit is not the individual but the family, the House, here defined by reference to the first ancestor, Pelops. Man by himself is nothing; only the family, the House, gives meaning to his life. Just as for Aristotle a little later, man is less than human if he is not functioning within a unit larger than himself, the polis or city state. When in the sixteenth century Reformers everywhere rounded on the doctrine of Purgatory, they were, like Zwingli in his argument with Luther, absolutely right in their own eyes; what they were attacking was nonsense, it was a form of superstition. But what they could not see was that their new clear-sightedness was the result of the disappearance of an older way of looking at things which was itself dependent on older forms of social organisation. In the nineteenth century scholars were in no doubt at all that the Reformers were right every time, that they were finally waking up to the absurdities of superstition. In the twentieth century, though voices like those of Keith Thomas were still in the majority, there were some who were no longer quite so sure. And there were some, like Heller, who were prepared to see what had got lost in the transition as well as what had been gained, who would even see the transition as tragic. That certainly, is the stance of Thomas Mann, in the most eloquent artistic exploration of the issue, his last major novel, Doctor Faustus.
Adrian Leverkühn, the novel's composer-hero, is profoundly aware, as his friend and biographer Serenus Zeitblom is not, of the crisis that has engulfed art since the sixteenth century; Leverkühn's entire intellectual and artistic life is built out of a deep awareness of the contrast between the ‘age of cult’ and the ‘age of the individual’, that is, between the Middle Ages and what followed. Practically every page of this long novel has some remarkable critical insight based on that distinction, so, rather than following the well-trodden paths and examining again what is said in a general and philosophical way in the central chapters of the book, let me turn to a passage close to the end, where Mann/Zeitblom is attempting to describe the effect of Leverkühn's last great work, ‘The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus’: