Owen Ware, Return of the Gods Mythology in Romantic Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press, 2026; 280 pp.; $46.00 (hardback)
Chris Satoor, York University
“We can divine a golden age, a time when truth becomes fable and fable truth; but what holds this golden age back?” (Schelling, Ages of the World, 1813, pg. 114).
We live in an era where diverse ideologies wrestle with one another on the world stage. Consequently, it remains a difficult task to win over any audience when speaking about a specific historical movement like romanticism, which was extremely influenced by the creativity of mythology. The term ‘romanticism’ is heavily laden with Hollywood tropes, and quite often romantic mythologies embracing this romantic spirit were viewed suspiciously. Many philosophers in the 20th century argued that philosophical mythologies were often employed due to humanity’s disenchantment with the world. This line of argumentation relied heavily on how our fragmented existence impelled us to resort to turning back to the past, invoking a nostalgia for a golden age, or actively reaching up to the heavens seeking guidance from a supernatural power in order to regain a lost innocence. Many of these suspicions surrounding both the romantics and their use of mythology have been largely inaccurate and have often been viewed through a distorted lens from various hasty generalizations.
This is why Owen Ware’s Return of the Gods is a pivotal text, not only for battling these misguided generalizations, but for also for presenting a well-rounded and researched presentation. Ware devotes the first part of the book to ending these false narratives that imply that romantic mythologies lead to radical nationalist movements or somehow conjure up a peculiar secularized natural supernaturalism (13). Neither of these distortions surrounding romantic mythologies, Ware explains, get to the heart of the matter of what the romantics were searching for in their various projects.
In the second part of the text, Ware shows us why both the romantics and the employment of mythologies are important today, including for academic philosophy. Ware’s thesis relies on presenting central figures from the German romantics: Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), Novalis (1772-1801), the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich Hӧlderlin (1770-1843), and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854); as well as the central figures from British romanticism: William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822), John Keats (1795-1821), and William Blake (1757-1827). According to Ware, the romantics had grand metaphysical and moral ambitions behind their creative projects. Essentially, the romantics were seeking out a method of enacting unitive cognitions through the creative medium of mythology (13).
Ware’s investigation is aimed at deciphering the role that mythology played for the romantics and how both the English and the Germans employed common sources of influence. Both circles use romantic mythologies as a vehicle to express what Ware, borrowing from Blake, calls the vegetative eye (10). The vegetative eye allowed the romantics to focus on the ideal aspects of wholeness. This ideal of wholeness was extremely multi-faceted and contained numerous relational parts that brought forward a corresponding concept of wholeness. The concept of wholeness that they were seeking aimed to capture the self-to-self relationship, the self-to-other relationship, and finally the self-to-world relationship (10). Ware explains that both English and German romantics resisted the Enlightenment model, which often consisted of rationalizing the cosmos into subjective and objective, natural and supernatural poles. Instead, the romantics were seeking creative ways to escape these set divisions in favor of exploring and unifying their experiences. This process would blossom, allowing for more unities to naturally emerge together like self and nature.
How could the romantics unify these worldly commitments? Ware argues that the sole device that lies behind the romantics’ usage of mythology surrounds a common principle. The principle of contraries served as a universal law of polarity. This was a principle that unified opposites. The principle, Ware explains, had numerous names, and was even employed by philosophers under the name of the principle of reciprocal interaction (10). The usage of this principle, argues Ware, is a master category that the romantics used to revitalize, reanimate, and invent new myths, all with the sole aim of grasping a union of contraries. What exactly are these unitive cognitions? Ware states that the romantics’ philosophical position used the term ‘unitive cognition’ to express a new fundamental representation of wholeness disclosing the jointure between self and world. The romantics would apply both cognitive and affective registers, states Ware, in order to awaken in mythology the human powers of intellect and feeling (11).
Poetry also had a decisive role to play in leading the romantics to a path of wholeness. Ware shows how important the myth of Orpheus is to harmonizing the connection between the self and the world. According to Ware, Orpheus’ heroic gesture to save his wife, Eurydice, with song and lyre is used by the romantics as both a musical and an aural metaphor of enchanting nature, animal and rock; and likewise offers the reader a deeper sympathy towards nature. The poet is capable of creating moments that can harmonize the self with others and of using musical language as a continuous orphic song (11).
One of the most difficult tasks of the text, Ware explains, is showing how both English and German romantics’ philosophical and poetic projects were interconnected. Due to the breadth and scope of all the thinkers that Ware mentions, unifying their motivations and projects is a large endeavor. Ware relies on the Platonic tradition as a mediator between the English and German traditions. The Platonic tradition was in fact successful in connecting complex theories that invoked both mythology and transcendent knowledge in order to create a stable knowledge of the self and world. Ware provides a brief appendix for readers to see this fertile Platonic tradition and its reception in Britain and Germany (13).
Ware’s text begins with Schiller and the question of whether modern poets and philosophers should return to the world of pagan mythology. According to Schiller, the forces of modernity have separated humanity from nature. In order to regain a sense of wholeness between self and world, the modern scholar must continue forward by reconnecting our powers of reason and imagination together. Schiller implies that it was the dominance of reason that left us estranged from the world, and thus his method is to merge the power of the imagination, which is the sole ground of mythology, with reason in order to create a unified experience with the world. Schiller’s new ideal is what Ware calls complex wholeness (25).
Ware’s second chapter offers an impressive survey of two romantic philosophers, Friedrich Schlegel and Schelling. Both Schlegel and Schelling agree with Schiller that a new bond must be made in order to reconcile the modern divided self. They both seek to enrich the role of mythmaking for self-consciousness. Schlegel is an important figure in the text because he is in search of a new poetic sensibility (64). A new mythology is sought by Schlegel as an answer to the problem of self-fragmentation. What ancient mythology encompassed was an original bond of self-unity and imagination. Ware presents Schlegel as committed to revitalizing the spirit for active thinking in order to reconstruct our experience with the world. Schlegel’s projects sought an active idealism of the subject that would reunite the bonds of a social, and cosmic, object or soul of the world. The process of going outside of ourselves and seeing something wholly other is a fundamental moment in the text. This process discloses how the human subject can realize their own cognitive powers and return to themselves with a greater grasp of self-recognition.
Ware’s research on the young Schelling and his relationship to mythology is one of the book’s striking features. Ware begins by looking at Schelling’s first philosophical essays in 1793, as well as focusing on his role in the Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism. Ware also delves deep into investigating the complex philosophical ideas behind the System of Transcendental Idealism. Ware sees a dedicated mission in early Schellingian philosophy devoted to creating a new mythology. Schelling leaves this project open-ended and returns to the mission of creating a philosophy of mythology in his old age.
According to both Schelling and Hӧlderlin, a new mythology must be cultivated as the modern age has seen a devastating decline in the mythopoetic worldview. It was this mythopoetic worldview that expressed the full powers of the human imagination in its most vivid state (59). Schelling saw the value in mythical philosophy especially through the Platonic dialogues. He had a profound connection with the cosmic creation story in the Timaeus. For Schelling, mythical philosophy can be metaphysical, and this early idea would stay with him throughout his philosophical career (49). The reason why Schelling is an important player in Ware’s text is that in Schelling’s works mythology has a fundamental role as a medium for bringing a greater synthesis together between ideas and images where other forms of representation were unsuccessful (48).
The English poets, too, saw the birth of a new mythology awakening in the human mind, a metaphysical truth of unity. Blake’s poetry, for Ware, contains the basic kernel of the romantic spirit enacted through the unity of opposites, such as: soul and body, reason and imagination, and self and other (12). The English romantics, like their German counterparts, were seeking a possible return to self-unity. Blake has similar influences through Neo-Platonism and the theosophy of Jacob Boheme. However, for Ware, Blake plays an important role in creating new symbols and stories to trace the path of how humanity fell into this state of self-fragmentation. Blake’s goal is devoted to a possible return to unity (12).
According to Ware, Schelling’s unfinished works leave the spark for a new mythology. This open-ended mission for a new mythology is the beating heart to the fourth chapter in Ware’s book. It focuses on Hӧlderlin’s Hyperion, Schlegel’s Lucinde, and Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Through all of these works, Ware shows that Hӧlderlin’s, Schlegel’s, and Novalis’ works embody the attempts to create a new mythology. What the fourth chapter shows is how these works revolutionize the vision of a new world grounded in the power of poetry (12). Mythology and poetry can reanimate the spirit of philosophy by putting ‘flesh and blood’ back on it so that the medium can finally speak the language of the heart to humanity.
The conclusion of the book offers positive insight for the role that romantic mythologies play in human life. Ware explains that the romantics were not seeking the reactionary power of nationalism or hoping to uncover some supernatural-naturalism. Both the English and the German romantics’ sole mission was to create new symbols and stories guiding humanity back to a path of wholeness in order to end our fragmentation from ourselves and from the world. Ware’s text expertly shows how the romantics’ creative, poetic, and philosophical projects were attempts to make us “become conscious of our poetic powers, whether we look to the past in interpreting old myths or to the future in inventing new ones” (216). The text is a fantastic example of what interdisciplinary scholarship can offer to the humanities.