Buddhist Romanticism

place when the work of art was created.
Here Herder borrowed a principle from the work of Johann
Winckelmann, who had almost single-handedly invented the field of art
history. Winckelmann, an ardent admirer and student of Greek art, had
developed the theory—a commonplace today—that art should be
appreciated, not in terms of eternal rules, but in line with its cultural and
historical situation. This meant appreciating how, on the one hand, a work
of art fit into the culture at the moment it was created, in relation to the
philosophy, institutions, and mores of the time. On the other hand, it meant
seeing how the work of art related to other works of art of a similar style
that preceded and inspired it—or that it, in turn, inspired—to show where
it fit into the organic laws of the birth, growth, flowering, or decline of that
particular style.
To this theory of art, Herder added two elements. One, all human
creative endeavors—this included not only the arts, but also science,
philosophy, and religion as well—should be approached as art: i.e., not for
their truth value, but for what they expressed of the heart motivated to
bring them into being. Two, because God was the force shaping not only
the artist’s inspiration but also the context in which the artist worked, the
study of the history of human creative endeavors was not simply a pastime
for the idle, but a way of developing a broader appreciation of the divine
will at work in the universe.
The vast distance separating Herder from Spinoza can be illustrated by
how each treated the Bible. As noted above, Spinoza found nothing
worthwhile in the Bible aside from universal, rational principles on how to
behave morally. For Herder, the most interesting parts of the Bible were the
poems, especially the Psalms, because they were the most accessibly
characteristic expressions of the culture in which they were composed. He
wrote a revolutionary book, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, showing how the
imagery of the Psalms perfectly expressed the distinctive strengths of early
Hebrew culture and gave an insight into God that was missing in later
cultures.
This approach, now called cultural relativism, succeeded both in elevating
and demoting the Bible—and everything else to which Herder applied it. It
elevated aspects of ancient literature that his contemporaries found rough
and barbaric, showing that they, too, had their inner logic and charm.
However, it demoted them by denying that they might have universal
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