Buddhist Romanticism

Romantic circle in Jena. In fact, Schlegel’s friendship with Schleiermacher
became so close that they shared a house with two other friends from 1797
to 1799.
It was in the Herz salon that Schlegel also encountered Dorothea
Mendelssohn Veit (1764–1839)—the first woman he had met with anything
like Caroline Böhmer’s intellect and charm. Dorothea, the daughter of the
eminent Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (see Chapter
Three), was trapped in a loveless marriage to a banker. In what was
apparently a case of love at first sight, she and Schlegel began an affair.
After obtaining a divorce from her husband in 1798, she moved in with
Schlegel. The two did not become married, however, until 1804, because
had they married before then she would have lost custody of the younger
of her two surviving sons with Veit.
Based on the affair, Schlegel wrote a novel, Lucinde, which he published
in 1799. Immediately denounced as pornographic, the novel provoked a
storm of controversy in Berlin. By modern standards, there is nothing
pornographic about the novel at all, and even by the standards of the time,
the descriptions of lovemaking, though fervid, were very vague. What
apparently offended the good people of Berlin was that the two main
characters in the novel, Schlegel/Julian and Dorothea/Lucinde, were
having an adulterous affair and yet were not punished at the end of the
novel for their sins. Instead, the novel was an unapologetic celebration of a
love presented as far more holy than formal matrimony.
The word “holy,” here, was not meant to be strictly metaphorical.
Schlegel announced that he intended Lucinde to be the first of a series of
books that would constitute a new Bible for modern times. However, as
was to become a typical pattern in his life, he never completed the project.
Still, Lucinde is an important document for the study of Romantic religion,
and we will look more closely at its religious implications in Chapters Four
and Five.
To escape the scandal in Berlin, Schlegel and Dorothea moved to Jena,
where August—now married to Caroline—had become a professor at the
university. There, at August and Caroline’s home, the “Jena circle” began to
meet.
The core members of the circle were the Schlegel brothers and their
wives, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Tieck, Clemens Brentano, and Sophie
Mereau. Novalis would join their discussions when his work permitted,
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