Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion: The Reconciliation of German Idealism and Platonic Realism. By Alexander J. B. Hampton

Abstract

At once lucid and multifaceted, Alexander J. B. Hampton’s Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion offers a fresh understanding of the German Romantic movement at the turn of the 19th century. As its subtitle promises—and as its cover image illustrates with the personification of Germany and Italy embracing—the book maintains that key figures of the movement reconcile the German post-Kantian emphasis on idealism and immanence with the Platonic-Christian legacy of a realist transcendent absolute. Tracing in particular Early German Romanticism (‘Frühromantik’, 1795–1801) as embodied in Schlegel, Hölderlin, and Novalis, this work argues that the Romantic project was a creative pursuit of a religious nature. It thereby distinguishes itself from two common and simplified characterisations of Romanticism, the first being part of the secularisation narrative, a picture that ‘associate[s] its ideas with the progressive decline and disappearance of religion’, and the second placing the movement firmly in one of two intellectual camps, that is, as ‘a development of either post-Kantian Fichtean aesthetic egoism or Spinozistic monist pantheism’ (p. 6). Both characterisations, according to Hampton, depend on a narrow definition of the term ‘religion’, as institutionally- and doctrinally defined, and as strictly separated from philosophy (pp. 5, 6). Challenging these characterisations, Hampton argues for a Romanticism that had an intrinsic constructive religious dimension by highlighting the movement’s elements of transcendence and the absolute (p. 7).