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 philosophical system, but as a feeling. And, just as the Pietist universe had room for only one genuine religious feeling—a feeling of God’s presence—Schleiermacher’s universe had room for only one religious feeling, regardless of one’s religious background. However, he, like his audience, had abandoned the views of the universe in which the Pietists and orthodox followers of every other monotheistic religion believed. So he explained the religious feeling, not in monotheistic terms as a felt relationship to God, but in terms of the psychology and cosmology of infinite organic unity: a felt relationship to the infinite.

Further, Schleiermacher claimed to provide an objective explanation, not of a particular religion, but of the universal laws of the religious feeling itself. In his terms, he was describing, “not only something that may be in religion universally, but precisely what must be in it universally [italics added].”1 He was attempting a transcendental analysis—in Kant’s sense of the term—of what the structure of the religious experience, as a natural phenomenon, had to be for all human beings everywhere. In his eyes, there was one religious experience common to all—composed of an intuition combined with a feeling for the infinite—that individual people interpreted in various ways in line with their temperament, their individual Bildung, and the general culture of their time and place. However, these interpretations fell into a fixed number of types, based on the structure of human personality and the structure of how an intuition and a feeling occurred.

Schleiermacher presented these theories in line with the general Romantic view of the universe as an infinite organic unity, at the same time making specific references to the natural sciences on which that view was based. Some of his most striking images came from astronomy, chemistry, and biology; and these sciences influenced more than just his imagery. His understanding of the psychology of the religious experience and the place of religion in the ongoing development of the universe was strongly shaped by the biology and astronomy of his time. These sciences provided the transcendental categories that, he felt, governed the way all religious experiences had to occur.

The Religious Experience

The object of religion, according to Schleiermacher, was the relationship of humanity to the universe. Now, metaphysics and morality also have this same relationship as their object, so Schleiermacher found it necessary to show how religion differs from them. Metaphysics, he said, is concerned with describing the place of humanity within the system of laws that govern the universe. Morality is concerned with formulating rules for how humanity should behave in the universe. Religion, however, is something more immediate and personal than either of these. It is a feeling derived from a direct experience of the infinite universe acting directly on one’s consciousness.

Schleiermacher analyzed this direct experience as a combination of two processes—intuition and feeling—starting from a moment in which both processes are experienced as a single process and before they split into separate phenomena. On the one hand, there is the intuition of the infinite acting on one’s consciousness. Here Schleiermacher is using the word “intuition” in his own technical sense. In line with the psychology that he learned both from Kant and from Schelling, he notes that every intuition of every kind is the impression of an object acting on one’s consciousness. This impression does not tell you everything about the object, for two reasons.

First, it tells you only about that particular action of the object on your consciousness. It cannot tell you anything more about the object than that.

This right here raises the question of how one could know that the infinite was actually acting on one’s consciousness, as there is no such thing as an infinite action that a finite mind could comprehend as infinite. All the mind can register are finite actions, beyond which it cannot see. What feels infinite may simply be Really Big but nevertheless finite. This problem is fatal to Schleiermacher’s theory—how can one have a taste for the infinite if one cannot know that what has left an impression is actually infinite?—but he brushes right past it.

Schleiermacher’s second reason for why the impression does not tell you everything about the object is that the level of your receptivity to the intuition will determine how you register the impact and what you take away from it. This “what you take away from it”—your subjective response to the intuition—is a feeling. At the moment of contact, the intuition and feeling seem to be one and the same, but when the intuition ends, the feeling continues on its own. It then grows into a natural urge to express the feeling to others.

In a case of the direct experience of the infinite, the moment when intuition and feeling are One—when the individual feels totally One with the impact of the infinite—is the sacred moment of the encounter. This moment has a healing effect on the mind because, as Schleiermacher held, the human personality is divided into three parts: one oriented inward, to one’s own self; one oriented outward, to the world outside; and a third, running back and forth between the other two and never finding rest until they are brought into union. Thus when there is a feeling of Oneness with the infinite, the personality as a whole is brought into Oneness as well, and all the parts find rest. Schleiermacher compares this moment to the brief length of time in a lover’s embrace when one experiences the other as one’s self.

This healing moment, however, cannot last forever. It is, after all, conditioned, dependent on actions both within and without—the inner receptivity of the individual and the outer action of the infinite—that can last only a brief span of time. Here again, Schleiermacher leaves unanswered the question of why, if the infinite is really infinite, it can act on an individual only briefly in this way. However, this issue is not central to his discussion, for even if the infinite were acting on the individual incessantly, the limited receptivity of the individual would be enough to support his conclusion: that even though one may intuit the infinite, one cannot experience the infinite as a transcendent dimension, i.e., lying outside of space and time. (Note that transcendent in this sense differs from Kant’s use of the term transcendental.) The individual’s intuition of the infinite, like all intuitions, is totally immanent, i.e., contained within the conditions of organic causality and the dimensions of space and time.

When the intuition inevitably ends, there remains just the feeling of having been healed. This feeling, according to Schleiermacher, is religion. As he phrased it in one of his most famous definitions of religion, “[R]eligion is the sensibility and taste for the infinite.”2 In other words, religion belongs not to the category of knowledge or reason, but to the category of aesthetics: It is a taste, in Kant’s terms, for the sublime, but it senses the feeling of the sublime as a therapeutic rather than a terrifying experience.

From this feeling come all forms of religious expression—attempts to communicate truths derived from that feeling concerning the relationship of humanity to the universe—defining what a human being is and can know, describing what the universe is, and what the proper relationship is between the two. Often these expressions come in the form of worldviews, beliefs about the infinite, beliefs about gods, moral codes, etc. These expressions, however, are not religion, and they should not be taken as representing any eternal truths about the infinite. They are simply expressions of that particular feeling in that particular individual at that particular point in time.

In other words, the expressions of religious feeling are a branch of art: the creative expression of human feelings. For this reason, in Schleiermacher’s eyes, these expressions should follow the imperatives that the Romantics set for all art. We have already seen two of these imperatives at work in his theory—that religion must result from a receptive state of mind and that it must be expressive—but Schleiermacher gave even more space in his argument for the third: that religion must evolve. After all, the infinite as an organic unity is constantly evolving, so one’s understanding of one’s place within it must evolve as well.

For this reason, when one has expressed one’s religious feelings, one should not make a fetish of those expressions. Otherwise, one closes off the possibility of having further religious experiences. Even more so, other people should not take one’s expressions as authoritative or as imposing duties for them to follow, for that would stifle their innate potential for having religious experiences of their own. The more one tries to systematize the expressions of religion into a coherent worldview or moral system, the further one grows from genuine religion and the more one is left with nothing but “dead letters” and “empty mythology.”

These are psychological reasons for not giving authority to any expression of religion. In addition, Schleiermacher also gives cosmological reasons drawn from the astronomy of his time. Because human beings are finite, any statement or system of rules formulated by finite human beings has to be finite as well. But the universe is infinite, so no finite ideas can encompass it. Furthermore, the universe is infinite not only in size, but also in its power to evolve and produce new forms of life and expression. Thus, what may be true for one moment in time cannot possibly hold true for other moments in time. This is why religious expressions from the past are, in his image, nothing better than flowers that have died after being pollinated. In his words, “Religion is never supposed to rest.”3 In this way, religion functions as an organism within the larger organism of the universe, and so has to evolve in order to survive.

The obverse side of Schleiermacher’s claim that no external expression of religion carries authority is his claim that all religions must be accepted and tolerated. No one person can judge another person’s religious expression, for no one can judge that person’s intuition of the infinite. One must accept all religious expressions as appropriate for their particular place and time.

Here again Schleiermacher gives both psychological and cosmological reasons for his claim. The psychological reason for tolerating all religions is that the more one is able to empathize with every possible expression of the experience of the infinite, the more one will be able to intuit the infinite oneself. If one’s views about what can and cannot be tolerated in religious expression are narrow, one’s mind will be too narrow to receive the actions of the infinite on it. As for the cosmological reasons for tolerance, Schleiermacher stated that because the universe is infinite in its power, it has to display that power by producing every possible form of behavior. Because it is infinite in scope, there is room for all these possibilities to coexist without infringing on one another. Each deserves its time and space.

Schleiermacher was quick to note that, to the uneducated ear, these claims may sound like every other view about human beings and their place in the universe that derives from the religious experience—in other words, these claims should be regarded as expressions of feelings, rather than descriptions of the truth. In line with his general dismissal of other religious worldviews, this would mean that they should carry no authority. But he asserts that this is not the case: His claims are derived from the very structure of what it means to intuit the infinite, and thus—like Kant’s transcendental categories—convey a higher level of truth. However, Schleiermacher does not explain this point any further, and as we will see, this issue was to become a continuing paradox wherever Romantic views on religion are found: They claim that no religious view about humanity and the universe carries authority, but their arguments for this claim depend on accepting as authoritative their views about how human beings relate to the universe as a whole.

Religious Bildung

A similar irony marks Schleiermacher’s recommendations for how to formulate a Bildung that will encourage people to experience religion directly for themselves. As noted above, every intuition is shaped not only by the external object acting on the mind, but also by the mind’s receptivity to that action. In an age like his, he claims, where economic activity has consumed the attentions of all levels of society, the innate human desire and receptivity for contact with the infinite has been stifled. However, individuals can cultivate their taste and sensibility for the infinite and so reawaken their innate potential to be receptive to the sense of healing Oneness that an intuition of the infinite can provide—when the infinite is moved to do so. In fact, Schleiermacher states that this is the purpose of his talks: to induce his listeners to undertake this cultivation so that they will be prepared when the infinite chooses to act.

Here he faces a quandary, in that—properly speaking—no one person can teach religion to another, and no one can tell another exactly how to open to the infinite. Because religion is a matter of taste, each person will have to develop a taste for the infinite in his or her own way. This is why there is no single path to the infinite, and each person has to take the path he or she finds most attractive.

Still, Schleiermacher hopes that there are some people who will resonate with his message, and for them he offers a religious Bildung that parallels the general Romantic Bildung. It has its descriptive side—talking about the religious experience in an inspiring way—and its performative side: recommending specific activities to induce a receptive mind-state that will allow an intuition of the infinite to occur. But more than to simply occur—and this is where the irony comes in. Despite his strictures that religious expressions should not be judged and that there is a place in the cosmos for every kind of religious expression, Schleiermacher believes that some religious expressions are more evolved than others. This is because the people who gain the experience on which those expressions are based were first primed to see the universe in a more evolved way. His proposed Bildung is aimed at priming his listeners in this direction.

In his analysis, there are three ways of intuiting the infinite. The least evolved is to see it as an undifferentiated unity—a single mass of chaotic events. This way of intuiting the infinite comes from not trying to look for laws governing its behavior, and tends to produce animistic religions, in which people worship idols and fetishes.

A more advanced way to intuit the infinite is to see it as a multiplicity, a system of discrete, separate things, interacting in line with orderly laws, but with no overall unity. This way of intuiting the infinite comes from looking for the laws that govern its behavior but not yet succeeding in finding any overarching system for those laws. This tends to lead to polytheistic religions.

The highest way to intuit the infinite is to see it as a multiplicity encompassed in an overall unity—e.g., like the organic unity of the Romantic universe. This way of intuiting the infinite comes from finding the overarching system of laws that governs all behavior in the universe. This level of intuition may yield a monotheistic religion, although Schleiermacher held that a higher form of this intuition dispenses with a personal God entirely, and sees the whole of the infinite animated by a World Soul. In other words, the highest religion sees infinity as entirely immanent, with no transcendent dimension outside the infinity of the cosmos. Moreover, true religion does not seek personal immortality outside of the universe, for that would be contrary to the ideal religious desire: to lose oneself in the infinite. Instead, immortality should be sought in the moment: “To be One with the infinite in the midst of the finite,” he said, “and to be eternal in a moment, that is the immortality of religion.”4

Here, again, Schleiermacher maintains that his three categories are descriptive rather than merely expressive. They are not the result of a religious feeling. Instead, they derive, again, from the structure of what it means to intuit the infinite. But yet again, he does not explain his point further. However, he explains his ranking of these three categories—with mere unity as the lowest, and unity encompassing multiplicity as the highest—as based on an overview of how religions have developed and progressed throughout human history. In his words, echoing Schelling, history shows religion as “a work of the world spirit progressing into infinity.”5 Schleiermacher’s Bildung is designed to continue the arc of that progress, by inducing the mind to look for unity within multiplicity.

Just as the performative side of the general Romantic Bildung to induce an experience of the infinite organic unity of the universe was based on cultivating sensitivity in two ways—through love and through an appreciation of beauty—the performative side of Schleiermacher’s religious Bildung was based on cultivating erotic love on the one hand, and an appreciation of the beauty of the infinite on the other.

Love, he says, is a necessary preparation for religion in that when one has found another person who, in one’s eyes, reflects the entire world, one realizes that one’s own humanity is lacking if one desires only small selfish goals. One’s humanity will be complete only if one broadens one’s horizons and desires the infinite. This desire is what then opens one to the enjoyment of the infinite.

In fact, the experience of love, for Schleiermacher, is not only a preparation for religion. It is actually an image—and can be a direct manifestation—of the religious experience itself.

As for Bildung in learning to appreciate the beauty of the infinite, Schleiermacher recommends meditations that open the mind to the infinite both without and within. Although he does not make the connection himself, the meditations he recommends fall into two types that seem to correspond to the first two types of personal orientation—inward and outward—and, beginning there, strengthen within both orientations the third type of orientation: the one that moves back and forth between the two and will find no rest until they are brought together as One.

Some of the meditations are quite extended, but two short versions will give an idea of the longer ones. First, a meditation that begins within and is aimed at dissolving all sense of self, leaving just the infinite:

Second, a meditation that begins with the world outside and, through a back-and-forth movement, finds that everything outside is inside as well:

To aid with this second type of meditation, Schleiermacher recommends a study of the infinite variety of the religions of the world. What is striking about the religions he mentions is that—even though Herder and others had made fragments of Indian religious texts available in German translations, and Islam had long been known to Europe—Schleiermacher’s list covers only five religions: Egyptian, Greek, and Roman religions, along with Christianity, and Judaism.

His main point, however, would hold for the study of any religion: One must be careful to approach all religions with the proper method. Instead of judging religions as right or wrong, high or low, noble or grotesque, one should look for the way in which every religious expression comes from an intuition of the infinite, seeing how each has its place within the infinite’s boundless productive power. This, as we have noted, is to approach religions as the Romantics would advise approaching a novel. When one tries to inhabit the perspective of others and to empathize even with what seems most strange, one sees oneself within them, and them within oneself. This helps to break down the boundaries between what is inward and outward, and allows the mind to become receptive to an intuition of the infinite.

Of course, the Bildung that Schleiermacher recommends aims at making religion complete in more than just that respect. When one has discovered the infinite within and without, one’s expression of the resulting feeling should ideally contribute to the continued evolution of religion. In this way, one’s relationship with religion becomes fully organic, falling in line with the general Romantic program: to grow by being open to the influences of the infinite, and to help the universe grow toward perfection by responding creatively to those influences.

A few more quotations from Schleiermacher’s Talks will help to round out his picture of religion and show its parallels with Romantic thought in general.

On the miracle of the commonplace:

On tolerance:

On the danger of giving authority to religious texts:

On the illegitimacy of imposing religious duties or rules for behavior:

And on the need for religions to evolve:

Schleiermacher’s Reception

Schleiermacher’s Talks proved very controversial, and as he grew older he revised them, in 1806 and 1821, to soften some of their more unorthodox positions.

But among his early Romantic friends, the first edition of the Talks found an eager and receptive audience. Schlegel quibbled with some of Schleiermacher’s points, but for the most part the Romantics accepted his ideas wholeheartedly. And they did more than just accept them. They responded to them creatively, as they began addressing the topic of religion themselves. In some ways, they simply echoed his thoughts, as when Schlegel wrote that “Every relation of man to the infinite is religion; that is, man in the entire fullness of his humanity.”15 Schlegel also agreed that the experience of the infinite was prior to any concept of God, and that such a concept expressed a person’s feelings more than it represented an actual being. In Schlegel’s terminology, it was a product of the imagination: “The mind, says the author of the Talks on Religion, can understand only the universe. Let imagination take over and you will have a God. Quite right: for the imagination is man’s faculty for perceiving divinity.”16 And: “A definite relationship to God must seem as intolerable to the mystic as a particular conception or notion of God.”17

In other ways, the early Romantics expanded on Schleiermacher’s ideas. Hölderlin and Schlegel, for instance, writing independently of each other, drew similar conclusions from Schleiermacher’s point that religious texts should be read primarily for their expressiveness. Because the feeling for the infinite was immediate and direct, and because finite words get in the way of that directness, they argued, there is no way that language can adequately express that feeling. And yet there is the felt need to express it. The solution to this dilemma was to realize that the only appropriate language for religion was that of myth and allegory, because these modes of language told stories pointing explicitly to meanings beyond them. Myth and allegory united the historical—concrete deeds and descriptions—with the intellectual—the meaning behind those descriptions. Because it was blatantly suggestive, their language was the best way for words to point beyond themselves. This meant, in Hölderlin’s words, that “All religion is in its essence poetic.”18

Here Hölderlin was shifting Schleiermacher’s meaning of “religion” from the feeling of the infinite to the expression of that feeling. Schlegel, in his Ideas, shifted the meaning of the word in the same way. This shift was to have important consequences for the academic study of religion later on. As we will see, humanistic psychology and comparative religion came to focus on these twin poles in their study of religion as a psychological and historical phenomenon.

In this area, too, the early Romantics led the way, primarily in Schelling’s and Schlegel’s programs on how the study of religion could function as a part of the Bildung that would further the progress of freedom.

The descriptive/prescriptive side of this Bildung lay in their program for how they and future generations should approach the academic study of religion. Schelling, in his Method of Academic Study, called for theologians to look at the history of religion, not through the lens of their belief systems, but from a “supra-confessional” perspective. The “supra-” here, of course, means “above.” Schelling felt that his theory of the development of the universe through the activity of the World Soul afforded a higher vantage point from which all religious activity should be understood. Whatever truths were contained within a particular belief system should be viewed simply as products of that system’s historical circumstances. Historicism was to have the final word on the value of those truths and how far their validity should extend.

Schlegel, in his article, “On Philosophy” (1799), had already outlined the basic assumptions on which such a study should be based. In a reference to Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, he called for a study of “religion within the limits of art.” By this he meant that the study of religion should pay attention to how the finite and infinite were combined in mythic, symbolic forms “whose symbolism consisted… in that by which, everywhere, the appearance of the finite is placed in relation with the truth of the eternal and in this manner, precisely dissolved therein.” Whether those finite symbols were originally meant to symbolize the infinite was not a question that Schlegel thought to ask. Religion was about one’s relationship to the infinite, period. As for the underlying assumptions of this course of study: “The infinitude of the human spirit, the divinity of all natural things, and the humanity of the gods, should remain the great eternal theme of all these variations.”19 In other words, whatever a particular religion said about these topics, Schlegel’s assumptions about humanity, nature, and the gods were to be treated as higher truths from which that religion should be judged.

In his Conversations on Poetry (1800), Schlegel offered the somewhat postmodern comment that these assumptions were a myth, just like the myths that they were meant to judge. But then he added that the historian’s myth served a pragmatic purpose: It furthered the progress of human freedom by offering a framework for understanding how the meaning and purpose of history headed in the direction of that freedom. Here the descriptive power of this study became prescriptive, as it was in Schleiermacher’s Talks: The study of the history of religions showed not only the fact that religions change over time, but also that they should change—or be changed. Schlegel’s program called for the liberation of religion. “Liberate religion,” he said in one of his Ideas, “and a new race of men will be born.”20 And further, “Let us awaken all religions from their graves and through the omnipotence of art and science reanimate and reorganize those that are immortal.”21

For guidance on how religion should be liberated through art and science, Schlegel looked to India, because what little he knew of Indian religion convinced him that India embodied Romantic ideals. “In the Orient,” he said—and by this he later said he meant India—“we must seek that highest Romanticism.”22

What he meant by Romanticism in this case, he further explained in Voyage to France (1803): “[T]he spiritual self-denial of the Christian and the wildest, most exuberant materialism in the religion of the Greeks both found their higher archetype in the common fatherland, in India.” This “sublime manner of thinking,” in which these extremes are brought together under the concept of “divinity without difference in its infinity” provided the foundations of a “truly universal Bildung.”23 It was for this reason, Schlegel intimated, that he had gone to France, to study Sanskrit in Paris.

Now, as we’ve already gathered from Lucinde, Schlegel was obviously not interested in what Sanskrit texts taught about spiritual self-denial. His focus was more on India’s exuberant side. This, he felt, would provide justification for the performative side of his Bildung: the claim that erotic love offered a genuine and direct experience of the infinite, and so should be regarded as a holy source of religious renewal within each person. Here Schlegel took a theme that Schleiermacher had touched on in his talks as an “Eleusinian mystery” and stated it openly:

When Lucinde was printed, it met with a chorus of protest that it was immoral. Schleiermacher rose to its defense in 1800, writing an entire novel in the form of fictional letters, Confidential Letters Concerning Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, to refute the criticisms and to assert instead that the book was actually a holy text, embodying the principles of true religion and showing that a taste and sensibility for the infinite could be developed through erotic love. As Ernestine—Schleiermacher’s feminine alter ego in the book—comments, a physical embrace is actually an experience of the embrace of God:

Thus, when the Romantics described love as holy or as an act of worship, they were not engaging in mere hyperbole. They wanted to be taken seriously: that erotic love was a portal for the infinite and a source for renewing genuine religion and morality in a world where religious teachings and institutions had sent religion to its grave. By engaging in truly loving relationships—even if adulterous—they were not abandoning their moral duty. Instead, they were obeying a higher moral duty that would bring what is finite and divided back into infinite Oneness.

Recognizing Romantic Religion

Because the following chapters aim at showing how these Romantic views on religion survived into the 20th and 21st centuries, it will be convenient to have a short checklist to identify precisely what counts as Romantic religion. That way we will be able to recognize Romantic religious ideas as they are transmitted, to gauge the extent to which the transmission alters them, and to recognize them as they resurface in Buddhist Romanticism.

So here is a list of the twenty main points that characterize Romantic religion. The remainder of this book will make frequent reference to these points, so bear them in mind.

The first point identifies the question that all religion, according to the Romantics, aims to answer.

The next two points give the basic Romantic answer to that question.

These first three points are the basis for all the remaining points.

The next six points focus on the religious experience and the psychological illness that it heals.

The next four points focus on the cultivation of the religious experience.

The final seven points deal with the results of the religious experience.

So we have twenty points to apply in identifying the Romantic influence on modern Western Buddhism. Schlegel’s concept of irony appears in the list, as one possible interpretation of Points 15–17, but there is a larger, unintended irony underlying the list as a whole, to which we have already alluded. Although Points 16–18 insist that no one person’s religious beliefs about human identity and duties in the universe have any authority over anyone else’s beliefs, all twenty points derive their authority from the belief system expressed in the first three. In other words, you are free to believe or disbelieve what you want, but not free to disbelieve the first three points.

There is also an underlying inconsistency in that Points 17 and 18 deny any specific duties of right and wrong in the religious life, whereas Points 3 and 20 insist on the duty to trust one’s inner drives and to further the organic development of the universe as a whole. This inconsistency is further aggravated by the Romantics’ own conflicting ideas of what duty means for a human organism that is part of the infinite organic unity that is the cosmos.

These conflicting ideas come from the various ways the Romantics defined freedom and inner Oneness for such a human being. As we saw in the preceding chapter, Schlegel and Hölderlin maintained that freedom meant being free to contradict oneself from moment to moment. For Hölderlin, inner Oneness meant adopting whatever philosophy integrated well with one’s emotional needs at any particular moment so as to arrive at a sense of inner peace. For Schlegel, inner Oneness meant adopting whatever philosophy allowed for the greatest freedom in expressing—again, at any moment—one’s creative powers. Thus for both of them, one’s duty was to follow the needs of one’s inner nature, as expressed in one’s emotions, so as to experience inner Oneness.

For Schelling, however, the whole idea of freedom was a pernicious myth. The belief in individual freedom of choice, he taught, was the source of all evil. As part of the overarching organic unity of the universe, one’s duty was to renounce one’s individual will and to accept the will of the universe as it acted through one’s innate nature. Only then could one experience the freedom from inner conflict that, for Schelling, was what inner Oneness meant.

These are major inconsistencies. The Romantics, with their attitude toward inconsistency, might have argued that inconsistencies of this sort are actually a form of freedom, which—as Schlegel commented—is the whole purpose of formulating these religious views to begin with. But if you don’t accept the general Romantic view about the nature of the universe, their arguments about inconsistency, duty, and freedom don’t hold.

As we will see, these inconsistencies, the differing notions of duty, and the limited notion of freedom in the Romantic religious Bildung have carried over into Buddhist Romanticism. In particular, the inconsistency is manifest not only in the specific changes that Buddhist Romantics force on the Dhamma, but also in their justification for doing so. Some changes are justified on the grounds that Romantic principles of religion are objectively true, that all great religions should recognize them, so if Buddhism lacks any of them, people are doing it a favor by introducing them into the Dhamma. Other changes are justified on the grounds that there are no objectively true principles of religion: Each individual has not only the right to create his/her own set of beliefs, but also the duty to change his/her tradition. So the tradition has no right to object to whatever those beliefs might be. Either way, the Dhamma loses out.

This connects with a second irony: Although most of the scientific and philosophical underpinnings for the twenty points have since fallen away, the points themselves have continued to exert influence over Western views on religion in general, and Buddhist Romanticism in particular, to the present day. This continued influence can be explained by the fact that, regardless of how science and philosophy are currently taught in the academy, these points have gained and maintained the status of unquestioned assumptions in three areas of thought: humanistic psychology, the academic study of the history of religions, and popular writings on “perennial philosophy.” The next chapter will examine how this has happened, and how these three areas of thought have helped to create—and justify the creation of—Buddhist Romanticism.

But first, to help clarify what actually does and doesn’t count as a Romantic influence on Buddhist Romanticism, it’s useful to review what the Dhamma teaches about the twenty points listed above. So here is a second list, drawn from Chapter Two, that will allow you to compare point-by-point where the Dhamma and Romanticism are similar and where they part ways. This way you will be able to recognize what is Buddhist and what is Romantic in modern Buddhist Romanticism.

These two lists diverge at the outset. They differ on the purpose of religion, the nature of the universe, and the place of the individual within the universe. Because these first three points are basic to the Romantic program, this means that the Dhamma and the Romantic program part ways from the ground up. However, it’s also important to note that they contain similarities in some of the more derivative points—similarities that have allowed for Dhamma and the Romantic program to become confused with each other.

On the object of the Dhamma:

On the individual and the universe:

On the ultimate religious experience and the spiritual illness it cures:

On cultivating awakening:

On the results of awakening:

Three of these points are especially important:

• Point 1, that the Dhamma is not concerned with the same question as Romantic religion, and that the Romantic question is phrased in terms that (a) place limitations on one’s ability to experience the transcendent and (b) stand in the way of answering the question the Dhamma addresses;

• Point 5, that unbinding lies beyond the highest religious experience recognized by the Romantics; and

• Point 7, that the freedom the Dhamma offers is not confined by the limitations surrounding the Romantic notion of freedom.

These three points show clearly that the Dhamma lies outside the “laws” and “duties” that the Romantics formulated for the religious life. This is because the Dhamma focuses on an issue entirely different from the Romantic conception of the focus of religious life, and points to a freedom vastly superior to the highest freedom the Romantics proposed. It’s ironic, then, that Buddhist Romanticism treats the Dhamma under Romantic laws. The following chapter will look at some of the reasons why this ironic situation came about, and why Buddhist Romanticism gives more authority to early Romantic theories than to the best available records of the Dhamma the Buddha taught.

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