American Society of Church History

The Romantic Religious Revolution and the Dilemmas of Religious History

Author(s): Sydney E. Ahlstrom
Source: Church History, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Jun., 1977), pp. 149-170
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church History
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The RomanticReligious Revolutionand the

Dilemmasof Religious History
SYDNEYE. AHLSTROM
Members and friends of the American Society of Church History:
We gather here in Atlanta for our annual meeting only a few months
after President Ford inaugurated a Bicentennial Era of unspecified
duration. My address tonight, however, will not treat of the Republic's
founding but with the Romantic Revolution and some of its implications
for the scholarly tasks of this society.1 Yet it must be said at the outset
that these two phenomena, the American Revolution and the Romantic
Revolution, are significantly interrelated even though they manifest
themselves through very different kinds of human activity. One of them
is a fairly specific political event with many intellectual and spiritual
corollaries; the other is an extraordinarily complex intellectual and
artistic movement with many political implications. The most obvious
interrelationship of these two "events" is chronological, with Goethe's
personal declaration of independence in The Sorrows of Young Werther
appearing in the year of the First Continental Congress (1774), and his
Frankfurt friend, Friedrich Maximillian Klinger's epoch-naming Sturm
und Drang in 1776. In 1778 Rousseau brought his long vendetta with the
world to a close with The Reveries of a Solitary Promeneur. Kant's first
critique coincides with the great battle of Yorktown, and Herder's
Conversationson God with the constitutional convention and so one could
go on almost indefinitely. In a certain qualified sense, moreover, the
American Revolution as apprehended in Europe was a "romantic"
event: in the pristine wilderness the human race was making a new start.
At the same time this new republic was making itself an example of what
would come to be known as "romantic" nationalism.2 Most momentous
of all was the outbreak of the French Revolution, the chief catalyst of the
1. Except for the addition of some annotation, the restoration of a few passages deleted
for lack of time, and the minor revisions suggested by the shift from the spoken to the
written word, the text remains that of the original address.
2. See my "Religion, Revolution, and the Rise of Modern Nationalism: Reflections on the
American Experience," ChurchHistory 44 (December, 1975): 492-504.

This paper was deliveredas a PresidentialAddressto a meetingof the American

Society of Church History in Atlanta, Georgia on December28, 1975. Mr.
Ahlstromis professorof American historyand modernreligious historyin Yale
University,New Haven, Connecticut.
149

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CHURCH HISTORY

Romantic thinking, two months after the inauguration of George

Washington.
One of the forces drawing me toward this subject-matter at this time
may have been the fact that at long last it gave me an opportunity to
provide a sequel to the first paper I delivered before this society, an essay
on "The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology."3 My purpose
then was to describe the philosophical and theological origins of the
Scottish Enlightenment, and to trace the process by which it became a
powerful international movement of thought. My particular concern was
to explain its overwhelming attraction across nearly the entire spectrum
of American Protestantism, from the most liberal champions of Boston
Unitarianism to the arch-defenders of Reformed orthodoxy at Princeton Seminary, and including those intermediate forms of "New School"
revivalism being fostered at Andover, Gettysburg, and Yale. When one
considers the simultaneous enthusiasm shown for the economic ideas of
Adam Smith, one might wonder why the new country, in its search for a
name, did not call itself New Caledonia.
An equally great cause for retrospective wonder is the capacity of
Scottish Common Sense to sustain itself in America long after it had
fallen into disrepute elsewhere, for it was only amid the multiple crises
that arose after the Civil War that it finally lost its appeal. Perry Miller
refers to its demise as the great but unspoken intellectual event of the
Gilded Age.4
The problem of interpreting the Scottish philosophy in America,
however, does not arise from its early reception during the days of Reid,
Stuart, and Witherspoon, when it provided a lucid dualistic Christian
apologetic that countered the deistic and sceptical thought of the
Enlightenment. What is far more difficult to explain is its remarkable
longevity, and by the same token the tardiness of American responses to
the Romantic movement. On this matter the most plausible explanation
may be the fact that American evangelicalism remained relatively untouched by the new currents of scholarship, scientific thinking, religious
thought, and artistic expression that were transforming European
thought and culture during the early nineteenth century. Even the great
evangelical leaders such as Nathaniel William Taylor, Albert Barnes, and
Lyman Beecher seemed quite satisfied with their modifications of the
Puritan tradition. The absence of academic freedom in their institutions
of learning also contributed to this complacency, which meant that any
dissenting voices heard were for the most part dismissed as heretical.5
3. ChurchHistory 24 (September, 1955): 257-272.
4. "One of the most radical revolutions in the history of the American mind took place in
two or three decades after the Civil War. . . . Scottish Realism vanished from the
American colleges, leaving not a rack behind." Perry Miller, ed., AmericanThought,Civil
War to World War I (New York, 1954), p. ix.
5. Extreme self-assurance, anti-intellectualism, and fear of doctrinal subversion militated
against the entertainment of modern thought, not to mention theological innovation.

ROMANTIC RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION

151

There was in America, however, at least one magnificent exception to

almost all I have said about the unresponsiveness of the American
scholarly tradition, and this is, of course, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
whose investigative genius and intellectual boldness became apparent
even while he was a youth in the parsonage at East Windsor, Connecticut. Equally remarkable was his maintenance of this stance to the very
end despite the handicaps of existence on the frontier of Christendom,
the distractions of a tumultuous career, and the seeming (but only
seeming) external restrictions of a well-institutionalized tradition of strict
Reformed orthodoxy. In Edwards the rising age of science found an
American interpreter who showed an astonishing awareness of its
implications for true religion. Before his busy pen was stilled he had
reformulated the faith of his fathers and placed it in the context of a
modern philosophy of nature. This bold enterprise brought him to the
verge of Averroism, and for this reason, perhaps, he was viewed with
misgiving by many later Evangelicals. In later times, however, he has
been recognized as a proto-Romantic.6 In this light one can agree with
the judgment of Joseph Haroutunian, the Calvin scholar and Reformed
theologian, that compared with the project that Edwards advanced, "the
Reformation ... was a negligible theological performance."7 Except for a
small band of New Divinity men, however, Edwardsianism expired with
Edwards' death. He was remembered (whether for execration or praise)
chiefly as a living symbol of revivalism. And during the nineteenth
century his most widely read book was a volume of posthumously
published sermons on The History of the Workof Redemption.Not until the
1930s did the restoration of his reputation begin.
In addition to Edwards' amazing anticipations, there was also at least
one major denominational exception to the prevailing forms of evangelical authoritarianism. This was the Unitarian movement which took its
rise from Charles Chauncy's attacks on the Great Awakening and which
had by 1810 shaped a relatively broad and catholic ethos at Harvard and
among the socially dominant church people of the northeastern coastal
towns from Longfellow's Portland to Channing's Newport. It was in this
liberal context that Channing, while yet a student at Harvard, confessed
in retrospect that his reading of the Platonically inclined Richard Price
had "saved me" from Locke. He remained committed to the Scottish
philosophy to the end, but he also devoted his life to the cause of a more
Qeeply spiritual Christian witness. Along with Washington Allston he
was among the very first Americans to give the poetry of Wordsworth a
sympathetic reading; and when he took his belated grand tour in Europe
6. Averroism may be too strong a term, but Edwards' theological or religious discourse
(like Hegel's, though with the opposite balance) falls into two categories, one
traditional, and the other modern and philosophic.
7. Joseph Haroutunian, Piety versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology
(1932, reprinted New York, 1970).

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CHURCH HISTORY

in 1822, the two days that he remembered reverentially as religious

experiences were his widely spaced visits to the homes of Wordsworth
and Coleridge.8 Emerson would be speaking the truth when in his old
age he declared Channing to have been the "bishop" of the young
Transcendentalists.9 It was also under Unitarian auspices that after
1815 promising young American scholars began to seek out the German
universities for advanced studies in philosophy, theology and the historical disciplines. Almost invariably they returned with widened cultural
horizons and a determination to extend the boundaries of accepted
belief.
It goes without saying, nevertheless, that there were sensitive spirits in
several other denominations who, though not entirely free to speak their
minds, did share the rising sense of religious disquietude. The cool
winds of Enlightened thought that had once seemed to be such a
refreshing alternative to the overheated emotionalism of the Great
Awakening began to lose their revivifying power. In other circles the
smoke of many burned-over districts had made evangelical revivalism a
source of acute discomfort. During the 1840s John Williamson Nevin, a
former holder of several portfolios in the Benevolent Empire, came to
see the awful figure of the Anti-Christ in the resultant sectarianism. And
one of his first acts after his shift to the German Reformed Church was
to translate Friedrich Rauch's book on psychology into English, thus
giving a wider audience to the first American exposition of Hegelian
thought. The Congregationalist James March had published his justly
famous Preliminary Essay to an American edition of Coleridge's Aids to
Reflection in 1828 and his translation of Herder's The Spirit of Hebrew
Poetry in 1833. In 1835 the Orthodox biblical scholar, Moses Stuart, was
even bold enough to publish a translation of an essay by Schleiermacher
on the Trinity. By 1836 German scholarship and theology had become a
subject of lively debate.
It came to pass, however, that it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who first
climbed the mount of vision and issued the summons to America that
could not be ignored. In fact, he more than any other American thinker
and writer has been recognized as the national prophet. Just when he
experienced the crucial epiphany cannot be precisely determined, but it
surely came during those years between his resignation from the
ministry of Second Church in 1832 and those three great deliverances of
1836, 1837, and 1838: the book, Nature; his Phi Beta Kappa Address,
8. William H. Channing, The Life of William Ellery Channing. D.D. (Boston, 1880), pp.
333-344; on Price and Locke, 34.
9. In a conversation with Elizabeth Peabody; see Arthur W. Brown's biography of
Channing, Always Youngfor Liberty(Syracuse, N.Y., 1956), p. 221.

ROMANTIC RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION

153

"The American Scholar"; and his Address to the graduating class of the
Harvard Divinity School. Given Emerson's wide-ranging mind, the
tracing of influences has so far been a surprisingly unrewarding form of
scholarship, but the list of "blood-warm" writers he mentions in the last
paragraph of "The American Scholar" is a valuable confession. It seems
to have been Thomas Carlyle, above all, who catalyzed both his essential
message and his sense of vocation during the preceding years of stress
and uncertainty.10
It was precisely this pursuit of the intellectual sources of Transcendentalism (if I may intrude an autobiographical note) that diverted me from
devoting a Fulbright Fellowship in Europe to further research on the
Scottish philosophy and sent me instead to the sources of that great
modern impulse which finally planted its flag upon the ruins of the
Enlightenment.
The movement that accomplished this transformation of Western
thought and feeling has, of course, been described in hundreds of text
books and monographs, and the adjective "Romantic" has won a secure
place in popular parlance. But the persistence of this custom or habit has
in no sense led to any consensus regarding the concept of Romanticism.
Indeed, A. O. Lovejoy long ago in an essay, "On the Discrimination of
Romanticisms" (1924), raised doubts as to the movement's existence as a
unitary phenomenon. Nominalists, on other grounds, have objected to
all such holistic conceptions. Still other schools of thought in the
rationalistic or positivistic spirit see Romanticism as an old, even
perennial aberration. From diverse angles both Plato and Saint Paul
have been praised or blamed for setting this current of thought in
motion. Countering these interpretations, on the other hand, are
scholars such as Rene Wellek, whose answer to Lovejoy, written many
years later, developed very convincing arguments for the existence of a
relatively unified international literary movement that flourished during
a specific time in history. As this approach was pursued by authorities in
other fields such as music and architecture, however, the result reinforced the position of Lovejoy due to the great diversity of the
phenomena studied. And so one could go on until the impression was
given that the concept of Romanticism was indeed without form and
void, and that the coordinate problems of definition and periodizing
were insoluble.
The present essay, however, is directed toward the opposite conclusion, though not with the sanguinity that led Morse Peckham to believe
10. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus first appeared in book form in the American edition which
Emerson sponsored with a preface in 1836. In later years, however, their minds
followed very different paths.

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CHURCH HISTORY

that "we can hope for an accepted theory of romanticism."1' We must

recognize at the outset the methodological principle (referred to by some
as Ahlstrom's Law) that in dealing with spiritual movements of this sort,
definitional specificity is an inverse function of chronological specificity.
If one defines a movement's essence narrowly, that essential trait will
often be found in many times and places. If, on the other hand, one
places primary emphasis on the period, no single trait or tendency is
likely to make itself obvious. As an historian I have, of course, taken the
anti-essentialist approach which accepts the fact that any culture or age is
filled with diversity, but which requires nevertheless that one seek out
and try to understand those who constitute the avant-garde, those who
identify themselves as the party of innovation and change, who recognize each other as fellow spirits, and who at least informally work
together to advance a common cause. One very important result of such
an effort is that it tends to break down artificial disciplinary boundaries
and reveals an underlying sympathy of spirit that is best understood as
religious. What is even more important, one discovers that the
Romantics themselves believed that the new age which they were
inaugurating did involve the passing away of one Weltanschauungand the
dawn of another. Their rejuvenation of historical study and the new
scope they gave to church history are among the major themes which we
shall shortly be considering.
Proceeding in this manner, my dating of the Romantic Age can be,
and is, entirely conventional: from 1760 to 1840. These eight decades
have the advantage that they include the most influential works of
Rousseau, La Nouvelle Helloise and Emile, as well as the German Sturm
und Drang at one end, and the zenith of both the French and the
American movements at the other end. Precisely in the center,
moreover, one has that astonishing turn-of-the-century efflux of
Romantic genius, which not quite accidentally coincides with Napoleon's
coup d'etat. One is almost enchanted by the flowering which this lustrum
experienced: Beethoven's Eroica, Schiller's Wallenstein, Chateaubriand's
three great works, Rene, Atala, and the Genie du Christianisme,
Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, Schleiermacher's Reden
and Monologen, Fichte's rejoinder on atheism, Goethe's Hermann und
Dorothea, Schelling's Ideen, Hegel's lectures on Fichte and Schelling,
Madame de Stael's De la Literature,Novalis' Hymnenan die Nacht, Maistre's
Considerationssur la France, and many other landmarks in the history of
Western culture. Given such a list it is hardly remarkable that we tend to
assign the Enlightenment to the eighteenth century and concede the
future to the Romantics.
11. Lovejoy's essay, as well as Wellek's "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History"
(1949) and Peckham's "Toward a Theory of Romanticism" (1951) are reprinted in
Robert Gleckner & Gerald E. Enscoe, eds., Romanticism:Points of View (Detroit, 1975).

ROMANTIC RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION

155

This roll call of Romantic productions has a larger function, however,

than simply to mark the center point of a spiritual revolution. What
it does above all is to accent the immense range of the movement and its
extreme diversity. We see, for one thing, that it was by no means simply a
belletristic controversy but rather the announcement of a revised view of
reality which profoundly affected one's view of other activities: architecture, poetry, landscape gardening, sexual relationships, dress, decoration, scholarly methods, political theory, patriotism, religious worship
and prayer, and life-styles. In fact, so fundamental were the questions
the Romantics were posing, and so basic was the overall shift of attitudes
toward humanity, nature, and God, that the religious category is
probably the most adequate way of dealing with the phenomenon as a
whole. Within the movement itself, moreover, one may observe a
widespread awareness of the need for broader, more inclusive modes of
interpretation. For this reason they developed the disciplines of the
philosophy of religion and the history of philosophy and attacked the
academic conventions that had kept theology, dogmatics, and church
history in very narrow channels. Even more crucial to their undertaking
was the dismantling of those rationalistic attitudes and mechanistic
interpretations by which Enlightened thinkers, from Locke and Condillac to the Ideologues of Napoleon's time, were kept from understanding
the moral, connative, imaginative and affective aspects of life, not to
mention dreams and the subconscious, the mysterious, the occult and
the mystical. No single judgment of the Romantics was so universal or
vehement as their dissatisfaction with the Age of Reason.
Their dominant mood, however, was not negative. They proclaimed
the coming of a new age in which the full potentialities of human life
would find release from the bondage of legalism and conventionality,
when the imagination and the creative dimensions of humanity would be
realized, by persons and nations alike. They saw artistic expression in
all genres as a way of truth and a ground for hope. Liberation from the
past would lead to self-realization for men and women alike, even for
children. Revelation was not bound by doctrinaire tradition but was
plenary; it could be drawn from dreams, from folk tales, from the depths
of consciousness, and from nature itself. Even the secrets of the hermetic
tradition were a source of light. Cabalistic lore became a powerful leaven
in highly diverse contexts. Like the Puritans of an earlier age,
they sought a root and branch renewal of life and culture. Shelley would
even make this identification explicit: "The literature of England," he
declared, "has arisen as it were from a new birth. We live among such
philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have
appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty."12
12. Quoted from A Defense of Poetry in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism:Tradition
and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971), p. 11.

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CHURCH HISTORY

Those who enlisted in this cause or who were caught up in this contagion
saw themselves as participating in a spiritual revolution. We may see
them in fact as marking the advent of the modern.
Having made so sweeping a statement, it now remains for me to
suggest in more specific terms the content of this versatile movement.
My method shall be to single out three interlocking themes that seem to
be most directly relevant for a society devoted to the religious history of
Christendom. The topics to be considered, with such brevity as time and
space require, are the following: (1) Subjectivity and Idealism, (2) Nature
and Neo-Pantheism, and (3) History and Historicism.
1. SUBJECTIVITY AND IDEALISM

As with Emerson, so with Romantics in general, the first attack was on

the "corpse-cold" rationalism of the preceding age. They sought to
liberate the human spirit from the mechanistic prison. They would
explore the boundless mysteries of human consciousness, both individual and collective. As with the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards they
would assert the primacy of the affections. This is to say that they were
distant legatees of William Perkins and William Ames in making an
historic break with Christendom's traditional mode of identifying a
Christian on external or objective grounds. Puritans insisted, to the
contrary, on an internal or subjective warrant of a person's assurance of
salvation. And in thus shifting their emphasis to the realm of inner
experience they made an immense departure from the world of scholastic orthodoxy, both evangelical and Roman. They also undermined the
claims of comprehensive religious establishments and opened the way
toward individualism in matters of faith and practice.
The form of Evangelical piety that grew out of this emphasis on the
conversion experience was by no means restricted to the AngloAmerican churches, however; it spread to the Netherlands and to
Germany and then during the eighteenth century became part of the
great Pietistic revivals that reached to Scandinavia as well.13 And no
single person dramatizes the connection between the pietistic religion
and the Romantic impulse so effectively (even by his own confession) as
Friedrich Schleiermacher. What this child of Ellerite Pietism did with
such marvelously evocative power was to extend a call to the religious life
that did not depend on traditional nurture and catechetics. He addressed the human condition directly and referred his listeners to their
own feelings. He redefined religion as "a surrender, a submission to be
moved by the Whole that stands over against us.... The contemplation
of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of
all finite things in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in
13. See E. Ernest Stoefler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Leiden, 1971).

ROMANTIC RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION

157

and through the Eternal. Religion is to seek this and find it in all that
lives and moves, in all growth and change, in all doing and suffering....
But in order that you may understand what I mean by this unity and
difference of religion, science and art, we shall endeavor to descend into
the inmost sanctuary of life....
There alone you discover the original
relation of intuition and feeling from which alone this identity in
difference is to be understood. But I must direct you to your own selves.
You must apprehend a living moment. You must know how to listen to
yourselves before your own consciousness."
These passages are drawn from his Addresseson Religion to its Cultured
Despisers, which created a sensation when they were published in 1799.
They were followed a year later by the equally compelling Monologen.
Taken together these two works express the essence of what might be called
Romantic religion. And anyone who reads them will easily understand
why Richard R. Niebuhr would say in 1965 that "religiously speaking, we
must concede the nineteenth century to Schleiermacher."14 Yet it must
be remembered that a basically idealistic point of view underlies this
religious position and that he, like so many of his contemporaries, were
inescapably post-Kantian thinkers. And the importance of Immanuel
Kant to all that followed must be clearly stated. Schleiermacher, despite
disagreements, would have agreed, and his greatest biographer has
insisted upon it.
The Kantian Critiques, needless to say, did not come into the world ex
nihilo. He was awakened from his dogmatic slumbers by the two greatest
subversives of the Enlightenment: Hume and Rousseau, who themselves
had a fitful friendship. Even Herder anticipated some of his positions,
and he, in turn, recognized a similar tendency in Vico. At the same time
one must insist that the Romantic protest did not simply rise up out of
Kant's critical philosophy. Yet the fact remains that Kant stands at the
head of the stream; no other system of thought put its mark so heavily
on the minds of future thinkers than his "Copernican Revolution."15
After Kant the notion that reality was an ideal construction of mind
became a vital source of philosophical innovation. Consciousness, in the
famous saying, came to be seen as preceding existence; or as
Schopenhauer would put it (after Fichte had clarified things) the world
is will and idea. Nor can Fichte for one moment be displaced from his
crucial place in the history of Romantic idealism, for his was a dogged
and passionate effort to clarify the nature of knowledge and give a
powerful moral basis to it. He made Kant "available" for Romantic
14. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speechesto its Cultured Despisers,John Oman,
trans. (New York, 1958), pp. 36, 37, 41. For Niebuhr's judgment see "Friedrich
Schleiermacher, " in A Handbookof ChristianTheologians, Dean G. Peerman and Martin
E. Marty, eds. (New York, 1965), p. 17.
15. See Josiah Royce on "The Rediscovery of the Inner Life" and "The Romantic School in
Philosophy" in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston, 1892).

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CHURCH HISTORY

purposes by formulating a dialectically profound idealistic system that

was unencumbered by a mysterious noumenal reality that was beyond
human experience. Fichte insisted that the construction of a public sense
of reality required an act of will, corporate human endeavor. Friedrich
Schlegel was not being simply playful when he declared in Fragment No.
216 that "Fichte's philosophy" is one of "the three greatest tendencies of
the age," the other two being the French Revolution and Goethe's
WilhelmMeister. Whoever is offended by this juxtaposition, he went on to
say, "has not achieved a lofty perspective on the history of mankind."16
Schlegel's dogmatic statement is hardly the last word, but it can be said
with considerable confidence that the tradition of Romantic idealism was
a revolutionary culmination of a centuries-long search to establish the
primacy of spirit in human affairs.
2. NATURE AND NEO-PANTHEISM

If there is a prevailing commonplace about the Romantics it is to

associate them with a close and tender regard for nature. And it is true
that the relating of human being to being generally considered was so
central in their minds, that many interpreters have seen it as central. As
one might expect, therefore, Jonathan Edwards also in this respect
anticipated an important tendency in modern thought. His own youthful conversion experience became itself a provocation, and his reconstruction of those times of rapture reveals the central concern and
tendency of his life and thought.
Absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God. But my first
conviction was not so. The first instance that I remember of that sort of
inwarddelight in God and divine things .. .wason reading those words of I
Tim. 1:4: Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise
God, be honor and glory for ever and ever Amen.... After this my sense of
divine things graduallyincreasedand became more lively, and had more of
that inward sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered; there
seemed to be, as it were, a calm sweet cast, or appearanceof divine glory in
almosteverything.God'sexcellency,his wisdom,his purityand love seemed
to appear in everything;in the sun, moon, and stars,in the clouds and blue
sky, in the grass, flowers, trees, in the water and all nature, which used
greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon for
continuance,and in the day spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky
to behold the sweet glory of God in these things.
When he wrote these words Edwards could hardly know that his
testimony would earn him a place in an anthology of Romanticism; but
he did know very well that experiences of this sort had no place in the
Puritan literature on conversion and this led him to a long process of
rethinking the whole problem of the religious affections. For present
16. Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinda and the Fragments, Peter Firchow, ed. and trans. (Minneapolis, 1971), p. 190.

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ROMANTIC RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION

purposes, however, it is more important for us to see in this experience

the origins of his life-long concern for the beauty of true virtue and thus
to the ethical corollary which he expounded in one of his last writings.
Virtue is the beauty of the qualities and exercises of the heart, or those
actions which proceed from them.... This is the same as to enquire what
that is which renders any habit, disposition, or exercise of the heart truly
beautiful.... When we are enquiring wherein this true and general beauty
of the heart does most essentiallyconsist, my answer to the enquiry: True
virtue most essentially consists in benevolence to being in general....

It is

that consent, propensity and union of heart to being in general which is

immediatelyexercised in a general good will.... Whatcan it consistin but a
consent and good will to being in general? Beauty does not consist in
discord and dissent but in consent and agreement. And if every intelligent
being is some way related to being in general, and is part of the universal
systemof existence, and so standsin connection with the whole, whatcan its
general and true beauty be, but its consent with the great whole?17
Giving special meaning to this counsel was Edwards' conviction that
this "whole system of existence" was the continuing creation of God and
that this creation

was the emanation

of God's fulness,

". .. a fountain

flowing out in abundant streams, as beams from the sun." Responding

thus to the demands for a new mode of thinking about nature made by
Descartes, Newton, and Locke yet committed to the Westminster confession, and living entirely within a pre-critical view of Holy Scripture,
Edwards had marked out the road which possibly unbeknownst to him
had been already traveled by Spinoza, and which had been rendered
aesthetically more pleasing by Shaftsbury's Hymn to Nature. This road
would become in due course a great Romantic highway. The signs of this
new tendency of thought were everywhere during the later eighteenth
century. More than anyone, Jean Jacques Rousseau awakened Europe
to the joys of the natural world (as against the artificial pleasures of
rococo civilization); but he also conveyed a profound religious dimension to the whole system of nature generally considered.
What brought the subject of pantheism into public prominence,
however, was the Spinoza Controversy which was precipitated by Jacobi
in 1775 in connection with Moses Mendelssohn's interest in Lessing's
religious views. Then in 1787 appeared the first great effort to rehabilitate the reputation of Spinoza: Johann Gottfried Herder's Gott: Einige
Gespraecheueber Spinoza's System. Its point and spirit is best indicated by
the admission wrung from Philolaus after he has heard Theophron's
defense of the saintly lens-grinder. "Here I am with my Spinoza. It is
plain on every page that he is no atheist. For him the idea of God is the
17. Personal Narrative. David Levin, ed., Jonathan Edwards: A Profile (New York, 1969)
contains an excellently edited version. Edwards' Dissertationon the Nature of True Virtue
is in many editions of the Worksand in anthologies. I quote from the early pages of the
first chapter.

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first and last, yes, I might even say the only idea of all, for on it he bases
knowledge of the world and of nature, consciousness of self and of all
I certainly would have taken him to be an
things around him. ...
enthusiast concerning the question of God, than a doubter or denier of
it. He placed all mankind's perfection, virtue and blessedness in the
knowledge and love of God."18
Yet it is not Herder so much as Schleiermacher who placed this
dynamic and reinterpreted Spinoza at the center of Romantic theology.
"Offer with me reverently a tribute to the manes of the holy rejected
Spinoza," he declared in his opening discourse. "The high World-Spirit
pervaded him, the Infinite was his beginning and his end; the Universe
was his only and his everlasting love. In holy innocence and in deep
humility he beheld himself mirrored in the eternal world, and perceived
how he also was its most worthy mirror. He was full of religion, full of
the Holy Spirit. Wherefore, he stands there alone and unequalled;
master in his art, yet without disciples and without citizenship, sublime
above the profane tribe."19 It was Schleiermacher, too, who seems to
have inspired Fichte after the latter's move from Jena to Berlin. This
influence becomes especially apparent in Fichte's Anweisung zum seligen
Lebei, oder Religionslehre(1806) where he explicitly affirms the union of
the finite consciousness and the infinite ego. It is in this almost mystical
work that one may see the religious implications of Fichte's "ontologism,"
that is, the view that "knowledge is not mere knowledge in and of itself
but of being and of the one being that truly is, namely, God."
It is not in Fichte, however, but in the Naturphilosophie of Schelling
that Neo-Spinozism becomes a dynamic element in the Romantic consciousness, for in seeking to establish an identity of Spirit and Nature
Schelling very deliberately and painstakingly reinterprets Spinoza's
system. He is far more thorough than Herder had been. Especially
during his years at Jena, moreover, he becomes almost the philosopher of
the Romantic movement. Even Goethe becomes his pupil and disciple,
and then through Coleridge and Carlyle Schelling's ideas make their
mark on the English-speaking Romantics, most notably through that
remarkable symbiosis of Coleridge and Wordsworth. And I suppose it is
through Tintern Abbey that this outlook entered the English-speaking
consciousness more powerfully than through any other channel.
... I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
18. Johann Gottfried Herder, God, Some Conversations, ed. and trans. Frederick H.
Burkhardt, with a valuable introduction (Indianapolis, 1940), p. 95.
19. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion; Speechesto its CulturedDespisers, p. 40.

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161

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
"What moved the poet [Wordsworth] sometimes, somewhere as a
personal feeling," writes Geoffrey Hartman, "becomes a principle
animating the world."20
In his autobiographical Prelude the imagination as he and Coleridge
had come to conceive it, becomes the basis and the means of a new
theodicy. Here in a sustained epic of personal growth Wordsworth
proclaims that in the interchanges and reciprocations of mind and
nature "the imagination plays a role equivalent to that of the Redeemer
in Milton's providential plot."
Imagination having been our theme,
So also hath that intellectuallove,
For they are each in each, and cannot stand
Dividually.-There must thou be, O Man!
Strength to thyself; no Helper hast thou here;
Here keepest thou thy individual state:
No other can divide with thee this work,
No secondary hand can intervene
To fashion this ability;'tis thine,
The prime and vital principle is thine
In the recesses of thy nature, far
From any reach of outward fellowship,
Else 'tis not thine at all.21
When this Romantic summons came to a spiritually desolate evangelical
such as William Hale White, he could only compare its effect to the
experience of Paul on the road to Damascus. "God was brought from
that heaven of the books, and dwelt on the downs in the far-away
distances, and in every cloud-shadow which wandered across the valley.
... Wordsworth unconsciously did for me what every religious reformer
has done,-he re-created my Supreme Divinity; substituting a new and
living spirit for the old deity, once alive, but gradually hardened into an
20. Wordsworth'sPoetry (New Haven, 1964), p. 27.
21. William Wordsworth, "The Prelude," XIII, 85-97. See Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, especially on "The Redemptive Imagination," pp. 117-122.

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idol."22 One can only guess how many others, over the decades,
experienced a similar exaltation of spirit, but the testimonies are many.
The anonymous translater of Emile Saiset's ModernPantheismrecorded
the alarm of a British divine concerning the growing attractions of
monistic thought. "The snow has melted in Germany and we have a
flood in England."23 The perception was correct, though the general
tendency he had noted was far more widespread than the statement
indicates. All across Europe one finds a major turning toward this
Spinozan solution for the religious and philosophic dilemmas of the
times, from the exiled Russian Decembrist Alexander Herzen studying
Schelling in Munich to Victor Cousin in Paris and his critic Vincenzo
Gioberti in Italy. Sometimes the interpretation is materialistic, as with
Karl Marx, but more often it was idealistic, with insights drawn from
India. And among them, we must remember, was Ralph Waldo Emerson
in America. The sources of his inspiration are not easily traced, though it
would seem that in his writings of the 1830s one can hear clear echoes of
Carlyle's "natural supernaturalism" and the distinctions between the
Reason and the Understanding that Coleridge had drawn from his
studies in Germany. In any case he made his convictions explicit in the
"sublime creed" set forth in the Divinity School Address.
"The World is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of
one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the
star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that will, is
everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so, and not
I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so far those
otherwise....
that
he shall see them come full circle; shall see their
shining laws,
rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the
soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart;
and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with
Beauty, and with Joy."
In the closing lines of one of his finest poems he spoke with even
simpler clarity.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
22. William Hale White (pseud. Mark Rutherford), Autobiographyand Deliverance (New
York, 1969), pp. 18-20. In later life White became an admirer and translater of
Spinoza.
23. Emile Saiset, Modern Pantheism: An Essay in Religious Philosophy, 2 vols. (Edinburgh,
1863), 2:193. Perhaps more momentous than the theological issue was the emergence
of philosophical and scientific organicism. See Alfred North Whitehead on
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Mill and others in the famous fifth chapter of
Science and the Modern World (New York, 1925) and Daniel Stempel, "Coleridge and
Organic Form: The English Tradition," Studiesin Romanticism6 (Winter, 1967): 89-97.

ROMANTIC RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION

163

Why wert thou there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew:
But in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self-samePowerthat brought me there broughtyou.24
3.

HISTORY AND HISTORICISM

The historical spirit of Western civilization, let it be clearly said, can in

no sense be attributed to Romanticism. It is the Bible, most basically the
Hebrew Scriptures, which tell the great story from the Alpha to the
Omega in which Jews, Christians, Moslems, Marxists, and even Mormons locate themselves and pursue their ends. No factor has done more
to shape what is distinctively Western about Western culture. During
Christendom's first millenium, St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei set the
major patterns for understanding time and history. The Renaissance
and Reformation era provided two additional stages. In scholars like
Lorenzo Valla we perceive the emergence of critical methods and more
naturalistic explanations. The Reformation, on the other hand, reenlivened the biblical accent on the urgency of time and aroused the
concern of Protestants for scriptural answers to eschatological questions.
Only with Giambatista Vico's responses to Cartesianism in his Nuova
Scienza of 1725 can one point to the rise of a modern historical outlook.
During the following century, much more than many Romantics would
admit, the Enlightenment furthered this "conquest of the historical
world," notably in the great works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and
Gibbon, but also through the proto-Romantic confessional writings of
Rousseau wherein the existential texture of living in history is so
powerfully revealed.
The awakening of interest in the past and in the search for a reliable
account of past events was not simply the work of a few masterful
historians; it resulted from a profound change in human attitudes that
showed itself through changing literary tastes. One sees premonitory
signs of this historical renascence among pietistic church historians, in
the popularity throughout Europe of McPherson's fabrication of the Ossian literature, and in the overwhelming popularity of Walter Scott's
enormous oeuvre. The disruptions of the established order wrought by
the French Revolution and Napoleon's conquests may have deepened
these needs. The aspirations aroused by the American Revolution and
the birth of nationalism added other reasons. In Germany especially,
where the cultural actuality of a nation had been without political
recognition for centuries, these feelings seem to have been especially
strong, among the intellectuals as well as in the popular consciousness.
24. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Rhodora: On Being Asked the Question, Whenceis the Flower,
1839.

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One can observe a widespread search for national identity which only
knowledge of the past could satisfy.
Intensifying these feelings and conducive to an enlivened sense of
human history was a deeper current of thought, the apprehension that
the whole natural world was involved in an organic process of development. Especially provocative were the theories of Johann Gottfried
Herder who established an intrinsic relationship between his dynamic
interpretation of Spinoza and the interpretation of human history. "The
history of mankind," he said, "is necessarily whole, that is, a chain of
socialness and plastic tradition from the first link to the last.... Admit
active human powers in a determinate relation to the age and to their
place on earth and all the vicissitudes in the history of man will ensue."25
Kant's demonstration of the transcendental a priori, and thus of the
phenomenal character of knowledge, introduced another vital factor.
The actual rise of an historical movement within a self-consciously
"romantic" context, however, occured among a group of fellow spirits
who were at a crucial time gathered in Berlin. Here, during the
turn-of-century years, the ideas of the brothers Schlegel, Novalis,
Schleiermacher, Tieck, Fichte, and several other men and women
flowed together in a mutually significant way that in retrospect seems
almost as important as Friedrich Schlegel said it was.
Here, too, the Athenaeumenjoyed its brief life as the harbinger of the
new tidings. And in its pages appeared Friedrich Schlegel's famous
Fragment No. 116, a statement which historians have singled out as
epoch making both for its content and for its fastening of a name to the
new impulse.
"Romantic poetry," he said in his Orphic manner, "is a progressive,
universal poetry .... The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of
becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be
becoming and never be perfected. It can be exhausted by no theory and
only divinitory criticism would dare to try to characterize its ideal. It
alone is infinite, just as it alone is free; and it recognizes as its first
commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above
itself."26
A full unpacking of this excerpt could fill a book, but the point to be
stressed now is the notion of historical process which Schlegel expounds.
It was a conviction, moreover, which was to lead him to a new contextual
style of literary criticism and which would also soon be making him one
of Europe's leading authorities on Sanskrit literature and a major
interpreter of Indian religious thought. Herder, Goethe, Tieck and
25. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideas Toward a Philosophyof History (1784), quoted from T.
Churchill's translation (London, 1800) in Ronald H. Nash, ed., Ideas of History, 2 vols.
(New York, 1969), 2:73.

ROMANTIC RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION

165

others shared this thirst for historical knowledge of the East, but none
exceeded Schlegel's high evaluation of India's past glory and potential
contribution in the future. In a letter to Tieck in 1803 he declared that
"quite precisely India is the source of all speech, all thought, and all
poetry of the human spirit; alles, alles, stamt aus Indien, ohne Ausnahme
("all, all originates from India, without exception").27 Beneath this
enthusiasm we must not fail to see the emergence of the history of
religions as a new and revolutionary impulse in the life of Christendom.
Emerson too would hear this call and in due course declare that the
greatest wisdom "dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the
devout and contemplative East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached
its purest expression but in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe
has always owed to oriental genius its divine impulses." With the passing
years the light of Asia became increasingly important to his understanding of life and reality; and it was from the company of Transcendentalists whom he influenced that the serious study of world religions in
America began.28
Arising in a very similar way at the same time was a new appreciation
of Roman Catholicism and the mediaeval past. Of seminal significance
for this new enthusiasm was the academic sojourn of Wackenroder and
Tieck in south Germany, out of which came an anonymous publication
which even Goethe had to disclaim, but which nevertheless did much to
foster an idealized view of Catholic art, pageantry and culture as well as a
deeper understanding of the mystical piety of the Middle Ages. Novalis's
Christentumoder Europa is another major exposition of this momentous
reversal; but the event which most dramatized it was the joint conversion
of Friedrich Schlegel and his wife, Dorothea Mendelssohn, in Cologne
Cathedral on 18 April, 1808, followed by their move to Vienna to
advance the cause of wahre Kaisertum.The papacy would later condemn
the "Romantic Catholicism" that Schlegel was to expound, but the shock
of this double conversion was great, and the tendency it represented was
followed by many others, among them John Henry Newman and
Orestes Brownson. As in the realm of oriental studies, moreover, his
example greatly stimulated historical study and theological concern.
Interest in every aspect of Catholicism was enlivened and the history of
mediaeval Europe was put on a new course.29
26. Peter Firchow, ed., AthenaeumFragments, pp. 175-76. (See Note 16 above.)
27. Quoted in Hans Eichner, FriedrichSchlegel (New York, 1970), p. 103. In 1808 Schlegel
published Uber die Sprache und Weisheitder Indier.
28. On the American impact see Sydney E. Ahlstrom, The American ProtestantEncounter
with World Religions. Emerson's words are from the Divinity School Address.
29. Wackenroder's posthumous Herzensergiessungen appeared in 1787. Yet nothing
dramatized this Romantic re-evaluation of Catholicism, the Middle Ages, and the
Gothic more than the conversion of the Schlegels. The conversion of Chateaubriand
in Catholic France was less shocking.

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In addition to the important developments, both specific and general,

already alluded to, any adequate explanation of the great historical
renaissance of the nineteenth century requires consideration of at least
two immediate factors. The first of these is the rise of a philosophic
movement possessing the depth and power necessary to awaken the
interest in history among the leading intellectuals of the age. The second
was the development of a political and institutional context that would
facilitate the training and support the efforts of truly gifted historians.
Put briefly, there was need for an inspiring rationale and the actual
presence of powerfully motivated scholars. That the historical enterprise
became the dominant intellectual impulse of the century suggests that
both of these elements were present. Quite literally, everything, indeed
reality itself, was put under the historical lens, from the idea of selfhood
to the heavenly nebulae. Only a library of bibliographies could reveal or
depict the historical revolution in a concrete way.
As with nearly all things Romantic, the point of departure for this
great impulse was Kant's Copernican revolution and the dynamic
monism derived from Spinoza in a post-Kantian context. Providing
crucial stimulation at the right time was the idealism of Fichte's Wissenschaftlehre(1796). Leopold von Ranke, for example, was a serious
student of Kant and an admirer of Fichte. Then out of Schelling's
departures from his sometime mentor emerged an effort to comprehend the real and the ideal in a system of Naturphilosophie,which also
attempted to take account of recent advances in the natural sciences. But
it was only in 1801, when Hegel came to Jena (aided by Schelling's
mediation) that the most crucial development of historical thought took
place. It was in Hegel's early lectures on the distinctions between the
Fichtean and Schellingian systems that his own sense of an historical
dialectic began to take definite shape. But his first major statement of his
system was sent off to the printer in 1806, amid the turmoil created by
Napoleon's invading army and his crushing defeat of the Prussians in
the Battle of Jena. The Phenomenologyof the Spirit was published in 1807,
and in this, his most Romantic book, his completed system was anticipated. It has been described as being in its every word two things: a
summation akin to Aristotle's intellectual and spiritual experience of the
West, and at the same time an exposition of his own philosophical
conviction that the real is rational and the rational real. Hegel thus
contended that there was a dialectical logic of history that is borne out in
the experience of mankind. Weltgeschichteist Weltgericht(World history is
the world's court of judgment.)
That Hegel could hold to these views despite his experience of
invasion and defeat by the French, reveals something of his universalism. In a letter to his friend Niethammer he was able to describe

ROMANTIC RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION

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Napoleon's parade through the city of Jena with singular objectivity:

"The Emperor! this world soul (Weltseele).What a wonderful experience
to see such an individual, here concentrated on a single point, sitting on
a horse, he who rules over the world." The event also underlines the
significance of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests for
the Romantic experience as a whole, and in particular for its attitudes
toward the historical process.
To what extent Hegel contributed to the rise of historical interest and
to what extent he was a product of that resurgence is beyond human
calculation; in the Preface to the Phenomenology,however, he described
the dawn of a new era in a famous and beautiful passage; and there can
be no doubt but that he saw a deepened historical consciousness as a
central feature of the new world that was dawning.30 Both before and
after his death in 1831 his influence was enormous. Despite undulations
of favor and disfavor, diverse interpretations of his thought led to the
rise of many distinct schools of thought, most of which stimulated historical thought in many different realms. There arose an Hegelian Right
that included Marheinecke, Daub, and perhaps Baur; and also an
Hegelian Left that included Feuerbach, Strauss and Marx, with many
mediators and eclectics among all of these. Philip Schaff, the founder of
the American Society of Church History, owed much to Hegel's dialectical genius, as did two other thinkers at Mercersburg: Friedrich Rauch and
John W. Nevin. From the standpoint of a thoroughgoing traditionalist
such as Hengstenberg in Germany or Charles Hodge in America, even
Marheinecke was a radical. J. M. Findlay reminds us, moreover, that this
radicalism is not confined to Hegel's admittedly bold speculative interests. He speaks of "the toughness, the empirical richness, and the
astonishing selfsubversive movement of Hegel's thought." He also finds
him far from both Berkeley and Kant "and more nearly a dialectical
materialist than most Hegelians have realized,"31No other thinker so fully
embodies a concern for both the subjective and the objective elements of
the historical process; and nobody did so much (unless it was Schleiermacher) to broaden the scope of the religious category and to see it,
perhaps, as the determinative element in the shaping of civilization.
If the sources and development of the historical revival were to be
adequately discussed, far more than this Hegelian influence would have
30. The letter on Napoleon is quoted by Franz Wiedmann, Georg Friedrich WilhelmHegel
(Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1965), p. 35. "We could properly name the young Hegel as
one of the most important thinkers in the mainstream of the Enlightenment, if it were
not for the fact, that in finding his way, he transcended the boundaries of Enlightenment thought altogether, and provided us rather with a very carefully thought out
statement of the Romantic position." H. S. Harris, Hegel's Development: Toward the
Sunlight, 1770-1801 (Oxford, 1972), p. xviii.
31. J. N. Findlay, "The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel" in Hegel: A Collectionof Critical
Essays, ed. A. MacIntyre, (New York, 1972), pp. 2, 14.

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to be treated-and other countries than Germany would be considered.

More important than rectifying this imbalance, however, is recognizing
the remarkable way in which an immensely creative historical movement
evolved during the next century. This included not only magisterial
works of historical exposition such as those of Leopold von Ranke in
Germany, Jules Michelet in France, and George Bancroft in America,
but a vast outpouring of monographic work on almost every kind of
human activity from folk tales to nation-states. This enthusiasm for
history, moreover, was accompanied by an extremely rich body of
theoretical work by philosopher-historians such as Wilhelm Dilthey,
Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, and Wilhelm Windelband. Out of the
ensuing methodological controversies came a much clearer understandand with this, in turn,
ing of the distinctiveness of the Geisteswissenschaften
far more discriminating and sensitive ways of interpreting religious
phenomena.
Even more important was the concept of historicism which, as it has
continued to be clarified and discussed, has greatly widened the circle of
thinkers who no longer consider historical research and criticism to be
destructive, negative, or nihilistic but who now see that the historian's
enterprise provides a view of the changing constructions of reality
according to which the course of human events is described and
progressively reinterpreted as Weltanschauungenrise and pass away and as
scientific revolutions succeed each other. It is in this light that one beholds
the grandeur of religious history as a potential human task or challenge.
After Hegel the two modern historian-theorists who did most to
identify this challenge were Dilthey and Troeltsch. Dilthey is remembered as the first major commentator and editor of Hegel's early
writings. In this effort as in his work on the surviving papers of Novalis
and his monumental biography of Schleiermacher, he instantiated his
call for a Verstehen-hermeneutic that would recognize the unique nature
of human intentionality and action. He also set forth an important theory
of Weltanschauung research which Alfred North Whitehead and Carl
Becker would put to such invaluable use. Most important was his
statement on historicism in 1910, wherein he clarified the implications of
the gradual accretion of historical knowledge. He interpreted the growing awareness of the finitude of all historical judgments and of every
personal or social situation, seeing the resultant relativity of belief not
as a reason for despair but "as a step toward the liberation of man."32
Ernst Troeltsch worked for very much the same end, and in his massive
Historismus und seine Probleme, a survey of post-Kantian historical de32. Quoted by Pietro Rossi, "The Ideological Valences of Twentieth-Century Historicism," History and Theory, Beiheft (1975), p. 15. See also Hayden V. White, "Historicism. History, and the Figurative Imagination," in History and Theory, pp. 48-67.

ROMANTIC RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION

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velopments almost as formidable as Hegel's Phenomenology, he moved

toward a similar conclusion, that all things human are historical without
remainder and that the relativistic predicament is inescapable. Later in
the century, a similar point of view was upheld by other thinkersamong them Karl Mannheim, Croce, Max Weber and H. Richard
Niebuhr.
Finally and emphatically to be considered in this post-Hegelian lineage
is Karl Marx, the most socially consequential of all, but also one who put
an indelible mark on the world's historiography. Every one of the
thinkers mentioned immediately above was significantly affected. Most
basic for historians was the Marxian emphasis on the social substructure
whether they were seeking the sources of human belief or the springs of
political action. He sounds an imperative that historians look down as
well as up when explaining historical events. The modern historian
probably does well to recognize the churchly and even biblical characteristics of communism, but it is more important to bear in mind the
Marxian conceptions of dialetic and the bourgeois revolution, postReformation developments, including Puritanism, and the democratic
revolutions. In some ways more pertinent to the religious historian is the
great debate on the concept of ideology which Marx inaugurated in his
early writings and which since then has led to many penetrating analyses
of nationalism, civil religion, reform movements, and established principles and ideals. One might say further that the publication of Marx's
early manuscripts during the 1930s, and the movement "from Marx to
Hegel" which this stimulated, has over the intervening years evoked an
ongoing international discussion of philosophical and methodological
issues which for depth and relevance to the historian has not been
equalled in the twentieth century.33
Needless to say, none of the foregoing discussion is meant to suggest
that history is the Balm in Gilead; nor is this essay to be taken as a
confessional statement, except in the vocational sense. It would seem to
be the case, however, that the view of the historical enterprise here
described, if combined with those other Romantic contributions previously considered, does present all historians, and perhaps especially
historians of religion, with at least two important obligations: to enlarge
their conception of the religious category, and to accept a complete
historical explanation of reality as an ideal, even while recognizing the
impossibility of realizing it.
In a large sense, of course, we recognize that these are but a few of the
many themes that made the Romantic movement revolutionary, and this
awareness might well lead us to take account of the many other ways in
33. One thinks in this regard of the German Frankfurt School and its followers elsewhere,
Alexandre Kojeve, Lucien Goldman, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others in France;
George Lichtheim, Marcuse and Genovese in America, etc.

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which we are legatees of that great movement in Western thought.

Father Francis Xavier Shea, SJ., makes the essential point in this regard:
"I hold," he said, "that the change in consciousness and culture which
occurred at the close of the eighteenth century in the Western world
constituted a radical discontinuity with almost everything that preceded.
... The last two centuries have witnessed a new departure for the human
spirit and have provided a new continuity of their own."34The Romantic
movement may have begun as a largely literary quarrel about the relative
values of the Ancient and the Modern. In retrospect we can see that, in
fact, it marked the advent of the Modern.
34. Francis Xavier Shea, S. J., "Religion and the Romantic Movement," Studies in
Romanticism9 (Fall, 1970): 285.