Roberto Calasso: Literature and the Gods

Let’s forgive the modern poet, then, if he follows antique ways, if he adopts the language, style, and manner of the ancients, and likewise if he uses the antique fables, etc., if he pretends to have ancient opinions, if he prefers antique customs, usages, and events, if he imposes on his poetry the character of a bygone age, if he seeks, in short, to be, so far as his spirit and nature are concerned, or to seem ancient. Let’s forgive the poet and the poetry that don’t sound modern, that are not contemporary to this century, for to be contemporary to this century, is, or necessarily involves, not being a poet, not being poetry.

Leopardi was speaking of the writers who named the ancient gods. But there is one writer of whom we may suspect that he saw the gods enargeîs , in all their vividness: Hölderlin. In comparison with his contemporaries, what happened with Hölderlin — as Schmid’s couplet so delicately announces — was something far more radical. One needed to go beyond and behind the gods, to arrive at the pure divine, or rather the “immediate,” as Hölderlin was to write one day in a dazzling comment on Pindar. It is the immediate that escapes not only men but the gods too: “The immediate, strictly speaking, is as impossible for the gods as it is for men.” Hölderlin is referring here to the lines where Pindar speaks of the nómos basileús , the “law that reigns over all, mortals and immortals alike.” Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive. This is the immediate: but pure intensity, as a continuous experience, is “impossible,” overwhelming. To preserve its sovereignty, the immediate must come across to us through the law. If life itself is the supreme unlivable, the law, which allows both mortals and immortals to “distinguish between different worlds” is what transmits life’s nature to us. At least if — staying with Hölderlin — what we mean by “nature” is that which “is above the gods of the West and the East,” and which, as he says, is “generated out of sacred chaos.” At this point Heidegger would later ask: “How can cháos and nómos be brought together?” It is here perhaps that we come to the bold provocative core of Hölderlin’s poetry: never before nor after him would chaos and law be brought so close together, obliged to acknowledge, as in Vedic India — where Daksa, the supreme minister of the law, is son of Aditi, the Unlimited One, and Aditi is daughter of Daksa — a relationship of reciprocal generation. Chaos generates the law, but only the law will allow us to gain access to chaos. The unapproachable immediate is chaos — and “chaos is the sacred itself,” adds Heidegger, and at once he goes on to develop a modulation that would have seemed obvious to the theorists of the nirukta , yet sounds incongruous to Western linguists, from the verb ent-setzen , “to shift,” to the neuter das Entsetzliche , “the awesome,” which is used to define the sacred: “The sacred is the awesome [ das Entsetzliche ] itself.” Then comes a sentence which is rather mysterious: “But its awesomeness remains hidden in the mildness of this light embrace.” Words which clearly — and it was a clarity Heidegger was certainly after — set out to echo Rilke:

Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen.

Since the beautiful is only The beginning of the awesome, as we are barely able to endure it.

But at the same time too we are reminded once more of the words of the young Schmid: “They are light touches, but of sacred power.” Between Schmid and Rilke, between 1797 and 1923, a spark was struck and a fire lit that would prove inextinguishable. This was the period in which the epiphany of a multiplicity of gods went hand in hand with the overturning of established forms, a prolonged contact with the “sacred chaos,” the emancipation of literature from all the authorities it had previously obeyed.

But, even when it comes to this new vision of chaos, it would be misleading to suppose that it was Hölderlin’s exclusive and peculiar property. On the contrary, we can even identify the year in which chaos triumphs. It is 1800. Hölderlin was writing “Wie wenn am Feiertage …,” lines that wouldn’t reach his readers until 1910, when Hellingrath published the poem. Here we find the opening precept: “das Heilige sei mein Wort”—“may the sacred be my word”; here, three lines on, the poet speaks of nature as “reawakened with the clash of arms”; here, immediately afterward, the “sacred chaos” is named. Now in April of 1800, in the fifth issue of the Athenaeum, you would have found Friedrich Schlegel’s “Conversation on Poetry.” And since, in Schlegel, we are not, as with Hölderlin, listening to an indomitably individual voice, but to the expression of a group of kindred spirits — a Bund that went from Novalis to Schelling — we are now obliged to acknowledge that certain words have taken on a resonance hitherto unheard of. Suddenly the word “chaos” gathers exhilarating connotations. Instead of being opposed to form, its enemy, it seems to suggest a higher form, of fragrant vividness, where finally nature and artifice mix together to be separated no more, in the “beautiful muddle of the imagination.” And looking for a symbol that might suggest the “original chaos of human nature,” Schlegel admitted that he knew of none better than the “shining tangle of the ancient gods.” This, then, is the connection by means of which, from now on, the reappearance of the ancient gods can be seen as accomplice and instigator of that breaking-down and recasting of forms that characterizes the most daring literature. As if formal experimentation and divine epiphany had made a pact — and the one could now step forward in place of the other and say: larvatus prodeo , I proceed disguised.

What is unique about Hölderlin, then, is not his perception of a new presence of the ancient gods — all of the Athenaeum group shared that perception and declared it as a new article of faith — but his focusing on the difference that the gods had acquired in now manifesting themselves to the moderns. This, at bottom, is the point at which history impresses itself on all that is, the point at which we are forced to acknowledge that time, in its mere rolling by, has changed something in the world’s very essence.

When Hölderlin names the gods, when he writes that the god is “near/And hard to grasp,” we sense he is speaking of a force that precedes, exceeds, and looms far above every poetic vision. His perception of this force was, we might even say, too precise. But no one more than Hölderlin knew how very different that god was from the god that had appeared to the Greeks. And this is the subject of his most arduous speculations, from the letters to Böhlendorff to the fragments on Antigone . For the Greeks, the god appears as Apollo appeared to the Argonauts in the words of Apollonius Rhodius:

Now, when the immortal light has still to rise, yet all is no longer quite dark but a light glow has spread across the night, and this is when those who awake say that the day is dawning, at that time they hove into port in the deserted island of Thynias, and exhausted from their efforts climbed down on the shore. And unto them the son of Leto, who was coming from Lycia and on his way to visit the innumerable people of the Hyperboreans, appeared; golden curls each side of his head flowed down in clusters as he went; in his left hand he held a silver bow, on his shoulders hung a quiver; and beneath his feet the whole island trembled, and the waves rose on the beach. Those who saw him felt an uncontrollable dismay [ th´mbos]. And no one dared look the god directly in his beautiful eyes. They stood stock still, head bowed; but he, far away, passed over the sea through the air.