American Society of Church History

The Romantic Religious Revolution and the Dilemmas of Religious HistoryAuthor(s): Sydney E. AhlstromSource: Church History, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Jun., 1977), pp. 149-170Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3165003 .Accessed: 03/09/2011 13:40

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The Romantic Religious Revolution and the Dilemmas of Religious History

SYDNEY E. 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 Conversations on 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," Church History 44 (December, 1975): 492-504.

This paper was delivered as a Presidential Address to a meeting of the American Society of Church History in Atlanta, Georgia on December 28, 1975. Mr. Ahlstrom is professor of American history and modern religious history in Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

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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 Prince- ton 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 un- touched 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. Church History 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., American Thought, 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.

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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, Connect- icut. 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 Work of 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 evangel- ical 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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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 histori- cal 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.

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"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 Transcenden- talism (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 rein- forced 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 conclu- sion, 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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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 recog- nize 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 Weltanschauung and 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' Hymnen an die Nacht, Maistre's Considerations sur 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).

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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: architec- ture, poetry, landscape gardening, sexual relationships, dress, decora- tion, 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 Condil- lac 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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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 individ- ual 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 scholas- tic 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 Anglo- American 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 ad- dressed 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).

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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 Addresses on 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: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, John Oman,

trans. (New York, 1958), pp. 36, 37, 41. For Niebuhr's judgment see "Friedrich Schleiermacher, " in A Handbook of Christian Theologians, 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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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 Wilhelm Meister. 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 youth- ful conversion experience became itself a provocation, and his recon- struction 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 inward delight in God and divine things .. .was on 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 gradually increased and 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 appearance of divine glory in almost everything. God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and 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. (Minne-

apolis, 1971), p. 190.

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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 essentially consist, 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 immediately exercised in a general good will.... What can it consist in 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 system of existence, and so stands in connection with the whole, what can 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 confes- sion, 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 dimen- sion 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 rehabili- tate the reputation of Spinoza: Johann Gottfried Herder's Gott: Einige Gespraeche ueber 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' Dissertation on the Nature of True Virtue is in many editions of the Works and 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 things around him. ... I certainly would have taken him to be an 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 con- sciousness, 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; Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, p. 40.

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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 intellectual love, 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's Poetry (New Haven, 1964), p. 27. 21. William Wordsworth, "The Prelude," XIII, 85-97. See Abrams, Natural Supernatural-

ism, 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 Modern Pantheism recorded 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 otherwise.... I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so far those

shining laws, that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their

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), Autobiography and 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," Studies in Romanticism 6 (Winter, 1967): 89-97.

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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-same Power that brought me there brought you.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 Mor- mons 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, re- enlivened 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 Os- sian 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, Whence is 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 develop- ment. 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 Athenaeum enjoyed 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 Philosophy of 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.

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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 understand- ing of life and reality; and it was from the company of Transcenden- talists 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 Christentum oder 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., Athenaeum Fragments, pp. 175-76. (See Note 16 above.) 27. Quoted in Hans Eichner, Friedrich Schlegel (New York, 1970), p. 103. In 1808 Schlegel

published Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. 28. On the American impact see Sydney E. Ahlstrom, The American Protestant Encounter

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 Wis- senschaftlehre (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 com-

prehend 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 Phenomenology of the Spirit was published in 1807, and in this, his most Romantic book, his completed system was antici- pated. 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. Weltgeschichte ist 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 univer- salism. In a letter to his friend Niethammer he was able to describe

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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 his- torical 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 dialecti- cal 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 inter- ests. 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,"31 No 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 Schleier- macher) 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 Wilhelm Hegel (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 Enlighten- ment 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 Collection of 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 understand-

ing of the distinctiveness of the Geisteswissenschaften and with this, in turn, 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 Weltanschauungen rise 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 remem- bered 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 grow- ing 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 de-

32. Quoted by Pietro Rossi, "The Ideological Valences of Twentieth-Century Histori- cism," History and Theory, Beiheft (1975), p. 15. See also Hayden V. White, "Histori- cism. History, and the Figurative Imagination," in History and Theory, pp. 48-67.

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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 thinkers- among 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 charac- teristics of communism, but it is more important to bear in mind the Marxian conceptions of dialetic and the bourgeois revolution, post- Reformation 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 princi- ples 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 previ- ously 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."34 The 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

Romanticism 9 (Fall, 1970): 285.