Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern 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.

'Hampton's book is very bold but very needed. It is an attempt at a comprehensive interpretation of early German romanticism, one that strives to recreate its central concerns and ideals and to do justice to them. Hampton's interpretation is a timely attempt to find the via media between the one-sided idealist and realist, transcendent and secular, interpretations of early romanticism. It is one of the strengths of his interpretation that it puts Platonism in the very heart of Early German Romanticism, which is exactly where it belongs. This is a very valuable contribution to the growing literature on the subject, one that avoids and corrects the trendy reductivist interpretations current today.' Frederick Beiser, University of Syracuse

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