Buddhist Romanticism

“Julius seemed to be inspired with a feeling of universal
tenderness, not just some pragmatic or pitying sympathy for the
masses, but the joy of watching the beauty of mankind—mankind
which lives forever while individuals vanish.
“And he was moved also by a lively, open sensitivity to his own
inmost self and that of others.… No longer did he love the idea of
friendship in his friends but loved them for themselves.… But here
too he found full harmony only in Lucinde’s soul—the soul in which
the germs of everything magnificent and everything holy awaited
only the sunlight of his spirit in order to unfold themselves into the
most beautiful religion.” 27
The fact that Julius keeps returning to Lucinde for spiritual nurture is
where Schlegel’s view of love—shared by the other Romantics—differs
from Plato’s view that carnal love had to be outgrown. This is because, for
Schlegel, the ultimate spiritual reality lies not in abstract, unchanging
Forms of Beauty itself, but in the interconnected give-and-take of
immediate experience. Thus, for the early Romantics in general, spiritual
love never needed to outgrow carnal love. Instead, continued carnal love
was precisely the means to make spiritual love more and more mature. In
contrast to Plato, who saw erotic love as a temporary step in a progression
leading from a temporal to an eternal realm, the Romantics saw love as
eternity united with the moment. As Julius says to Lucinde,
“Love is not merely the quiet longing for eternity: it is also the holy
enjoyment of a lovely presence. It is not merely a mixture, a transition
from mortal to immortal: rather it is the total union of both.” 28
As for the second means for inducing a sense of the infinite organic
unity of the cosmos—the appreciation of beauty—Hölderlin held that
literary artists were the mediators who sensitized others to the physical
beauties of nature and the beauty of the mind through their works of art.
This is because art brings unity to what would otherwise seem to be the
fragmented pieces of life. Although it might be said that philosophy, in
trying to attain unity of knowledge, serves a similar function, Hölderlin felt
that literature was much better suited to conveying the fact that Being is
always in a process of Becoming—undergoing organic change—and only
literature can portray this process in action, as the characters and narrators
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