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The Romantic Religious Revolution and the Dilemmas of Religious History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Extract
Members and friends of the American Society of Church History: We gather here in Atlanta for our annual meeting only a few months after President Ford inaugurated a Bicentennial Era of unspecified duration. My address tonight, however, will not treat of the Republic's founding but with the Romantic Revolution and some of its implications for the scholarly tasks of this society.1
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- Copyright © American Society of Church History 1977
References
1. Except for the addition of some annotation, the restoration of a few passages deleted for lack of time, and the minor revisions suggested by the shift from the spoken to the written word, the text remains that of the original address.
2. See my “Religion, Revolution, and the Rise of Modern Nationalism: Reflections on the American Experience,” Church History 44 (12, 1975): 492–504.Google Scholar
3. Church History 24 (09, 1955): 257–272.Google Scholar
4. “One of the most radical revolutions in the history of the American mind took place in two or three decades after the Civil War⃜ Scottish Realism vanished from the American colleges, leaving not a rack behind.” Miller, Perry, ed., American Thought, Civil War to World War I (New York, 1954), p. ix.Google Scholar
5. Extreme self-assurance, anti-intellectualism, and fear of doctrinal subversion militated against the entertainment of modern thought, not to mention theological innovation.
6. Averroism may be too strong a term, but Edwards' theological or religious discourse (like Hegel's, though with the opposite balance) falls into two categories, one traditional, and the other modern and philosophic.
7. Haroutunian, Joseph, Piety versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (1932, reprinted New York, 1970).Google Scholar
8. Channing, William H., The Life of William Ellery Channing. D.D. (Boston, 1880), pp. 333–344;Google Scholar on Price and Locke, 34.
9. In a conversation with Elizabeth Peabody; see Brown's, Arthur W. biography of Channing, Always Young for Liberty (Syracuse, N.Y., 1956), p. 221.Google Scholar
10. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus first appeared in book form in the American edition which Emerson sponsored with a preface in 1836. In later years, however, their minds followed very different paths.
11. Lovejoy's essay, as well as Wellek's “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History” (1949) and Peckham's “Toward a Theory of Romanticism” (1951) are reprinted in Gleckner, Robert & Enscoe, Gerald E., eds., Romanticism: Points of View (Detroit, 1975).Google Scholar
12. Quoted from A Defense of Poetry in Abrams, M. H., Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971), p. 11.Google Scholar
13. See Stoefler, E. Ernest, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Leiden, 1971).Google Scholar
14. Schleiermacher, Friedrich, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, Oman, John, trans. (New York, 1958), pp. 36, 37, 41.Google Scholar For Niebuhr's judgment see “Friedrich Schleiermacher,” in A Handbook of Christian Theologians, Dean G. Peerman and Martin E. Marty, eds. (New York, 1965), p. 17.Google Scholar
15. See Royce, Josiah on “The Rediscovery of the Inner Life” and “The Romantic School in Philosophy,” in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston, 1892).Google Scholar
16. Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinda and the Fragments, Peter Firchow, ed. and trans. (Minneapolis, 1971), p. 190.Google Scholar
17. Personal Narrative. Levin, David, ed., Jonathan Edwards: A Profile (New York, 1969)Google Scholar contains an excellently edited version. Edwards' Dissertation on the Nature of True Virtue is in many editions of the Works and in anthologies. I quote from the early pages of the first chapter.
18. Herder, Johann Gottfried, God, Some Conversations, ed. and trans. Burkhardt, Frederick H., with a valuable introduction (Indianapolis, 1940), P. 95.Google Scholar
19. Friedrich, Schleiermacher, On Religion; Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, p. 40.Google Scholar
20. Wordsworth's Poetry (New Haven, 1964), p. 27.Google Scholar
21. Wordsworth, William, “The Prelude,” XIII, 85–97.Google Scholar See Abrams, , Natural Supernaturalism, especially on “The Redemptive Imagination,” pp. 117–122.Google Scholar
22. White, William Hale (pseud. Mark Rutherford), Autobiography and Deliverance (New York, 1969), pp. 18–20.Google Scholar In later life White became an admirer and translater of Spinoza.
23. Saiset, Emile, Modern Pantheism: An Essay in Religious Philosophy, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1863), 2: 193.Google Scholar Perhaps more momentous than the theological issue was the emergence of philosophical and scientific organicism. See Alfred North Whitehead on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Mill and others in the famous Fifth chapter of Science and the Modern World (New York, 1925)Google Scholar and Stempel, Daniel, “Coleridge and Organic Form: The English Tradition,” Studies in Romanticism 6 (Winter, 1967): 89–97.Google Scholar
24. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Rhodora: On Being Asked the Question, Whence is the Flower, 1839.Google Scholar
25. Herder, Johann Gottfried, Ideas Toward a Philosophy of History (1784),Google Scholar quoted from T. Churchill's translation (London, 1800) in Nash, Ronald H., ed., Ideas of History, 2 vols. (New York, 1969), 2:73.Google Scholar
26. Firchow, Peter, ed., Athenaeum Fragments, pp. 175–76.Google Scholar (See Note 16 above.)
27. Quoted in Eichner, Hans, Friedrich Schlegel (New York, 1970), p. 103.Google Scholar In 1808 Schlegel published Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier.
28. On the American impact see Sydney E. Ahlstrom, The American Protestant Encounter with World Religions. Emerson's words are from the Divinity School Address.
29. Wackenroder's posthumous Herzensergiessungen appeared in 1787. Yet nothing dramatized this Romantic re-evaluation of Catholicism, the Middle Ages, and the Gothic more than the conversion of the Schlegels. The conversion of Chateaubriand in Catholic France was less shocking.
30. The letter on Napoleon is quoted by Wiedmann, Franz, George Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1965), p. 35.Google Scholar “We could properly name the young Hegel as one of the most important thinkers in the mainstream of the Enlightenment, if it were not for the fact, that in finding his way, he transcended the boundaries of Enlightenment thought altogether, and provided us rather with a very carefully thought Out statement of the Romantic position.” Harris, H. S., Hegel's Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770–1801(Oxford, 1972), p. xviii.Google Scholar
31. Findlay, J. N., “The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel” in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Maclntyre, A., (New York, 1972), pp. 2, 14.Google Scholar
32. Quoted by Rossi, Pietro, “The Ideological Valences of Twentieth-Century Historicism,” History and Theory, Beiheft (1975), p. 15.Google Scholar See also White, Hayden V., “Historicism. History, and the Figurative Imagination,” in History and Theory, pp. 48–67.Google Scholar
33. One thinks in this regard of the German Frankfurt School and its followers elsewhere, Alexandre Kojeve, Lucien Goldman, Sartre, Mérleau-Ponty and others in France; George Lichtheim, Marcuse and Genovese in America, etc.
34. Shea, Francis Xavier, S. J., “Religion and the Romantic Movement,” Studies in Romanticism 9 (Fall, 1970): 285.Google Scholar