Buddhist Romanticism

CHAPTER FIVE
Romantic Religion
Friedrich Schleiermacher, in the conversations that issued in his book,
Talks on Religion for Its Cultured Despisers (1799), was the agent primarily
responsible for convincing his fellow early Romantics that their view of
artistic creation was actually an ideal model for religious experience as well.
Just as artists should open themselves and respond creatively to the organic
influences of the infinite unity of the cosmos immediately present to their
awareness, all people should open themselves to an intuition and feeling of
Oneness with the infinite, and then express that feeling creatively. That
feeling, he said, was religion. In the same way that his fellow Romantics
took a novelist’s approach to art and philosophy, Schleiermacher took a
novelist’s approach to the religions of the world.
The “cultured despisers” in the title of his book were people who had
become disillusioned with Christianity or Judaism, both from having read
modern philosophy and from having witnessed, with dismay, the behavior
of established religious institutions. Modern philosophy taught laws of
reason and consciousness with a clarity and consistency that made the
belief systems of conventional monotheism seem murky and crude.
Religious institutions, tied to the state or to old customs and texts, seemed
to betray what were recognized as the good principles in their teachings,
such as harmony, forgiveness, and love.
At the same time, Schleiermacher thought that the efforts of previous
philosophers to make religion respectable to cultured people by providing
it with a rational basis had actually ended up debasing it. In particular,
without naming names, he heaped ridicule on Kant’s and Fichte’s efforts to
justify religion simply as a foundation for the moral law. This, he said,
made religion a servant to narrow, time-bound strictures of right and
wrong. To keep religion from being despised, Schleiermacher saw the need
to portray it, not as a means to a social good, but as an end in and of itself.
His solution to these problems owed an obvious debt to his Pietist roots.
He defined religion not as a system of beliefs, a body of institutions, or a
159