Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion

Alexander J. B. Hampton is Assistant Professor in Christianity at the University of Toronto. He specialises in the philosophy of religion and religious aesthetics, with his research considering the role of poetics and Platonism in the shaping of the Christian tradition.

• Part I. Romantic Religion: Transcendence for an Age of Immanence: 1. The romantic vocation; 2. Realism, idealism and the transcendentals; 3. Re-contextualising romanticism: the problem of subjectivity; 4. Re-contextualising romanticism: the question of Religion; Part II. Give Me a Place to Stand: The Absolute at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: 5. The immanent absolute: Spinoza and Fichte; 6. Jacobi and the transcendence of the absolute; 7. Herder and the immanent presence of the transcendent absolute; 8. Moritz and the aesthetics of the absolute; Part III. Romantic Religion: The Transcendent Absolute: 9. Platonism and the transcendent absolute; 10. Schlegel: the poetic search for an unknown God; 11. Holderlin: becoming and dissolution in the absolute; 12. Novalis: the desire to be at home in the world; Part IV. Our Romantic Future.

'Hampton's book is very bold but very needed. It is an attempt at a comprehensive interpretation of early German romanticism, one that strives to recreate its central concerns and ideals and to do justice to them. Hampton's interpretation is a timely attempt to find the via media between the one-sided idealist and realist, transcendent and secular, interpretations of early romanticism. It is one of the strengths of his interpretation that it puts Platonism in the very heart of Early German Romanticism, which is exactly where it belongs. This is a very valuable contribution to the growing literature on the subject, one that avoids and corrects the trendy reductivist interpretations current today.' Frederick Beiser, University of Syracuse