This chapter explores the presence of religious narratives and traditions in Modernist literature, arguing that it shapes both what authors write about and how they write. Drawing on texts by Trakl, Rilke, Brecht, Musil, Thomas Mann, Wolfenstein, Kafka and Sachs, the chapter explores the wide range of attitudes both towards established religion (Christianity and Judaism) and alternative forms of spirituality (occultism and spiritualism). For all their differences, Modernist authors focus on a set of recurring concerns: the tension between tradition and modernity; the relationship between self and God, and between self and other; the changing role of community; and existential experiences such as suffering, persecution and death. In times of war, social change and political upheaval, the relationship between literature and religion remains mutually productive. Modernist texts reflect the crisis of established religious traditions, but literature is also an active agent, a site where old and new attitudes towards spiritual matters can be explored.

Notions of decadence, decline, and decay are intrinsically linked to the history of art. The discipline’s three recognized forefathers ? Giorgio Vasari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Heinrich Wölfflin ? all relied on the concept of decadence (and its antonym, progress) to make sense of the history of the visual arts and to evaluate the art of their times. A developmental model of art was central to the interpretative schemes of these art historians. In this organicist model, earlier developments prepare the stage for what comes later; and after a particular style flourishes for a time, its decline is inevitable as newer styles overtake it. Decadent artists such as Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley mock aesthetic standards and moral rules, precluding universal appreciation, and proudly so. Decadent artists and decadent audiences are estranged from their society and feel disdain for those who are scandalized by decadent art’s innovative form and immoral subject matter.

In sociological terms, decadence serves as a classifier for categorizing pathological social conditions that catalyse ‘decline.’ While the term ‘decadence’ itself has not been explicitly used in much sociological scholarship, the structure of decadence has been deployed to situate related concepts like anomie and alienation in narratives of decline. With respect to artistic production, the ‘decadent role’ may be such that pathological attributes become accepted or expected to the point that they confer artistic legitimacy. Hence the decadent role becomes acceptable under a creative mandate; that is, individual artists may present the pathological features of social decline so long as they connect those decadent attributes to creative output. This sociological dynamic helps to explain why the work of certain nineteenth-century decadents ? such as Oscar Wilde ? is now held in high artistic regard. In the case of Wilde, his reputation as an artist has survived efforts to label him as pathological, so he has posthumously ‘lived up’ to the creative mandate his decadence entailed.

This chapter argues that Plato effectively pre-empts the Stoics in defining virtuous action as conformity with cosmic order. Scholarship has been beguiled by Alcibiades’ striking analysis of Socrates in the Symposium as someone ugly to look at but beautiful within, and misled into thinking that Plato defines virtue as ‘inner beauty’, something private which only accidentally manifests itself in public benefit. In fact, as a closer examination of Diotima’s account of the lover’s ascent towards beauty in the same dialogue shows that the distinction that actually interests Plato is that between the body and its activity – not the body and the soul as such. And by referencing this activity to cosmic order (as he does most clearly in Gorgias 507e-508), Plato guarantees essentially that virtue is not only publicly manifest but of essential benefit to others as well as self.