Volume 22, Issue 1

This essay traces the contours of a trans-Atlantic Romantic legacy of aesthetic, moral and religious taste from its inception in Edmund Burke, through its modifications by Immanuel Kant, to its culmination in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful Burke suggests that religious experience is an aspect of aesthetic and moral taste. Immanuel Kant follows suit in the Critique of Judgment, offering a distinct account of religious taste. Emerson alludes to yet significantly refines aspects of both accounts in his Divinity School Address. Whereas Kant and Burke’s variously stoic accounts depict good religious taste as an experience of alienation from God and from the world, Emerson’s religious agent cultivates a modern spirituality quite at home in the world. Adapting Burke’s re-enchanted moral psychology of taste, Emerson offers a distinctively religious, indeed Christian, form of this modern re-enchantment. Yet for Emerson, refined religious taste allows agents to recognize the full spectrum of normative demands in nature and thus to make a home of such a world.

Against anti-realist readings of the Emersonian self, perhaps most influentially Cavell’s reading, this essay argues that Emerson is a devotional writer. Emerson’s notion of subjectivity is based in two complementary modes of action - one receptive and the other expressive - as one works to “align” oneself with the larger forces that constitute and order the universe. How the world is and how we humans make our way through it are not the same and must not be confused. Such confusion is the decisive mistake the anti-realist critic of Emerson makes. The Emersonian subject must experience the laws of reality directly, on one’s own, rather than “secondhand.” Emerson is a dramatist telling the story of how we come to ideas and learn to judge and to act: of how, that is, we come to have experience. Emerson seeks an unshifting ground through a moment of receptivity and a moment of activity. That he often rarely achieves insight does not make him an anti-realist. This essay demonstrates how, by showing - albeit briefly - that Emersonian experience is fundamentally religious: a work of devotion rather than aversion.

This examination provides a history of the problematic characterisation of Early German Romanticism (or Frühromantik) as subjectivist, and challenges this characterisation in light of recent scholarship. From its earliest critical reception in the early nineteenth century, the movement suffered from a set of problematic characterisations made by popular philosophical figures. Goethe, Hegel, Heine, Kierkegaard and others all criticised the movement for holding a dangerous subjective egoism. This characterisation remained with the Frühromantik throughout the twentieth century until it was challenged by recent re-evaluations offered by figures such as Dieter Henrich, Manfred Frank, Friedrich Beiser and Andrew Bowie. Their work has opened new possibilities for the re-interpretation of Frühromantik and our understanding of the movement’s religious thought.

Schelling’s Spätphilosophie is largely neglected in the non-German academy, and where it is addressed, it is usually minimized or misrepresented. It is the contention of this paper that, rather than a final unremarkable departure from his prior philosophical work, Schelling’s Spätphilosophie, and not Hegel’s work, represents the culmination of German idealism. Further, this culmination puts Schelling more directly in dialogue with Romanticism than his previous work had done, while simultaneously guiding him in what might be termed a broadly orthodox direction. By understanding God as entering into a dynamic relationship with humanity to reveal ultimate truth through the medium of history, Schelling’s Spätphilosophie represents a reworking of his earlier Identity Philosophy in a more intentionally Romantic position to yield a definitive Romantic Theology.

This essay focuses on how William Wordsworth’s “Michael can be considered an aesthetic or phenomenological transcription of what it feels like to go through the investiture crisis experienced when one abruptly transitions from the self-enclosed world of local knowledge into the unbounded world of secular modernity. I argue that the poem functions as an example of sacramental poetics, or a poetics that is potentially able to not only signify but also effect grace by affecting the body of the observant participant in a special way. The first of three sections explores how “Michael” might conform to T. S. Eliot’s conception of a dissociation of sensibility, and responds to Marjorie Levinson’s influential reading of the poem. The remaining two sections aim for more novel speculations about what the poem by first drawing upon the work of the political theorist William Connolly and the neurobiologist Joseph LeDoux to explore how the sensibilities “Michael” invokes in its readers might be related to a sacramental poetics that affects the infrasensible dimension of being human. Finally, in the last section I demonstrate how Eric Santner’s conception of psychotheology can be used to further clarify how and why “Michael” might function as a sacramental poetics, and conclude by suggesting how the poem has the potential to help us see more fully what the study of religion and literature might mean in a secular age.