Buddhist Romanticism

taught to appreciate higher and more refined levels of beauty—in customs,
laws, and institutions—until it was able, in contemplation, to perceive the
eternal form of beauty itself. From that contemplation one was able to give
birth, “not to images of virtue—because one is in touch with no images—
but to true virtue—because one is in touch with the true Beauty. The love of
the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and
nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be
he.” 5
In both dialogues, Socrates was quite insistent on the point that although
appreciation of beauty may begin with erotic lust, it quickly has to outgrow
sexual activity if it is to lead upward. This point, though, went right past
the Romantics. They were more struck by the fact that Socrates—unlike
Christianity and philosophers such as Kant—taught that lust was far from
being antithetical to the divine and was instead a necessary part of the path
leading there. Love for another person activated one’s appreciation for the
divine forces at work in the world. That appreciation was then extended,
through love of humanity, love of nature, and love of art, to a level where
one’s expressive artistic creations absorbed more and more of the universe,
and so were able to transcend—as much as humanly possible—the
limitations of one’s culture. In so doing, they could inspire in others the
sense of love and fellowship through which a truly free society could grow.
As long as one’s love could stimulate these higher dimensions, the early
Romantics thought, there was no need to abandon the beauties of carnal
pleasures.
This was where the ideology of Romantic love, as both a personal and a
political program, began.
LITERATURE
With love such an important part of the growth of wisdom and a sense
of one’s true place—vis à vis the world and its creator—it became obvious
to the early Romantics that philosophy, as taught in the universities, was
not the best medium for expressing and generating the whole of wisdom.
There was no place for love in the academic classroom. At best, academic
philosophy could offer rigor in exploring only part of human nature:
reason. The whole of human nature, in all its emotional variety, required a
different and vaster genre entirely: literature.
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