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

Abstract

Since the early decades of the twentieth century, theologians, intellectual historians, and scholars of the study of religion have investigated the phenomenon of religion from the perspective of modern developments in society, culture, economics, and politics. This is especially so for those scholars who see the arc of global history since the sixteenth century bending towards progress. The overriding assumption has been that modernity presented unique conditions for all facets of human existence, including religious belief and practice. Scholars of such a bent correlate religion with features of modernity to explain religion as a function of historical and social processes. Alexander J. B. Hampton’s book Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion contributes a distinctive perspective to this discussion. Hampton investigates German Romanticism, the movement taking place in Jena around the work of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), and Novalis (born Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801) in late eighteenth-century Germany, specifically the years from 1795 to 1801. Hampton contends that this period, known as “Frühromantik” or “early Romanticism,” was much more than a literary and philosophical quest for the elusive feeling of longing for the Absolute. Rather, he argues, early Romanticism is indispensable for understanding the modern notion of “transcendence” at the basis of modern religion. Whereas modernity is commonly associated with “disenchantment,” or the loss of transcendence in an increasingly industrialized and mechanized world, the early Romantics, as Hampton argues, celebrated the natural world, mysticism, and noncognitive dimensions of consciousness to convey the human desire for divinity’s relation to the world. The Romantics inscribed modernity with distinctive philosophical and religious questions and thereby opened possibilities for religious experience and subjectivity that resisted suppression by the secular tendencies of modern society.