The Disenchantment/Re-enchantment of the World: Aesthetics, Secularisation, and the Gods of Greece from Friedrich Schiller to Walter Pater

This article charts part of the literary genealogy of Max Weber's claim that modernity is defined by the ‘disenchantment of the world’. It clarifies the relationship between Weber's disenchantment diagnosis and the gods-in-exile theme as variously rendered by Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, and Walter Pater. It also sheds light on current debates about secularization, particularly on the extent to which the concepts of the ‘pagan’ and the ‘aesthetic’ tend by turns to enable and to destabilize secularization narratives.