Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion
The Reconciliation of German Idealism and Platonic Realism

Examines how early German Romanticism combined post-Kantian idealism and Platonic-Christian realism to develop a new aesthetics of religion.

Alexander J. B. Hampton (Author)

9781108452878, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 13 April 2023

265 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.436 kg

'The main thesis of Hampton's book is compelling … Hampton does a great service to the history of this period by explaining exactly how disputes over Spinoza and Fichte indelibly shaped a new generation of philosophers, artists, and poets in their mission to rearticulate the terms of a viable modern religiosity.' Evan Kuehn, Reading Religion

Early German Romanticism sought to respond to a comprehensive sense of spiritual crisis that characterised the late eighteenth century. The study demonstrates how the Romantics sought to bring together the new post-Kantian idealist philosophy with the inheritance of the realist Platonic-Christian tradition. With idealism they continued to champion the individual, while from Platonism they took the notion that all reality, including the self, participated in absolute being. This insight was expressed, not in the language of theology or philosophy, but through aesthetics, which recognised the potentiality of all creation, including artistic creation, to disclose the divine. In explicating the religious vision of Romanticism, this study offers a new historical appreciation of the movement, and furthermore demonstrates its importance for our understanding of religion today.

Part I. Romantic Religion: Transcendence for an Age of Immanence: 1. The romantic vocation
2. Realism, idealism and the transcendentals
3. Re-contextualising romanticism: the problem of subjectivity
4. Re-contextualising romanticism: the question of Religion
Part II. Give Me a Place to Stand: The Absolute at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: 5. The immanent absolute: Spinoza and Fichte
6. Jacobi and the transcendence of the absolute
7. Herder and the immanent presence of the transcendent absolute
8. Moritz and the aesthetics of the absolute
Part III. Romantic Religion: The Transcendent Absolute: 9. Platonism and the transcendent absolute
10. Schlegel: the poetic search for an unknown God
11. Holderlin: becoming and dissolution in the absolute
12. Novalis: the desire to be at home in the world
Part IV. Our Romantic Future.

Subject Areas: Christian theology [HRCM], Philosophy of religion [HRAB], Religion: general [HRA], Western philosophy: c 1600 to c 1900 [HPCD]