In recent years the study of local religious histories, especially in Europe, has gained in prominence. Because of the encounters between different cultural traditions in the Middle Ages and the voyages of discovery, the religious history of the Iberian Peninsula became one of the most complex in Europe. This article focuses on one portion of this history around the turn of the 19th/20th century, and in particular on two attempts to blame the Catholic religion for the general crisis in Spain (...) and Portugal at the start of the modern era. These two forms of critiquing religion are illustrated by the examples of Miguel de Unamuno and Antero de Quental, whose writings were characteristic of the typical relationship between religion and intellectuals in this period. Not only were the Spanish philosopher and the Portuguese poet influential on their own and later generations, but they are also truly representative of a certain tragic ”loss“ of religion in the Iberian Peninsula. (shrink)

Following a lengthy period in which they were glorified and worshiped, several illustrious personages led a seemingly miserable and almost forgotten existence for two thousand years until they appeared sporadically in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, philosophy, and poetry. Apart from a brief moment during the Renaissance, the ancient Greek gods only managed to emerge from their existential shadows at the time of Romanticism, when few poets failed to provide these gods with a fleeting haven in some of their verse, even (...) if this favor was often nothing more than a form of tautological self-identification as their being poets (Calasso 11-12). Subsequently, the gods generally played a merely more or less .. (shrink)

Modernism in the early 20th century has usually been viewed as a radical break with the past and tradition. Nevertheless, there are a great deal of direct references to classical antiquity in many works of modernist artists. This apparent contradiction forces us to rethink the notion of a radical break between the new and the past. It is with this in mind that the present article focuses on one of the most exiting periods in European cultural history. In particular, the (...) article refers to two attempts to revitalize classical antiquity during the first decades of the 20th century. These two attempts are illustrated by the Portuguese writer, Fernando Pessoa, and the Italian painter, Giorgio de Chirico. Their works are not only characteristic of the marked revival of classical antiquity in the first years of Modernism, but they also reveal that this revival is more than a simple “new classicism”. Insofar as this new/ past dualism, the work of Pessoa and de Chirico should be better described as an updated mythological thinking. (shrink)