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c h a p t e r 1 1 A New Religion? In this final chapter I return to a subject that had been at the heart of the preceding analysis of the Romantic mind. Religion is a difficult topic, partly because the religious conditions of Europe in the early nineteenth century were unprecedentedly complex and varied from one region to another. This much, however, appears clear: the secularization that had begun with the Enlightenment and had culminated in the rabid anticlericalism of the Revolution was giving way to a religious revival. That revival, however, seldom implied a return to the past. Romantic religion differed from traditional faith. Schleiermacher, the principal Romantic theologian, appeared to have understood the situation quite well when he addressed his Discourses on Religion “to its cultured despisers.” All English, French, and German Romantic poets, with the exception of Coleridge, had moved away from any kind of dogmatic faith. Byron and Shelley had departed ostentatiously from Christianity. Goethe and Schiller severed their ties less noisily but no less decisively. In France, Lamartine, de Musset, and Hugo were believing Catholics in their youth but later left the Church. Only de Vigny died with the rites of the Catholic Church. Yet all of them were seeking an ideal that surpassed the reach of ordinary human capacities, and most framed that search in religious terms. Even those whose thinking was furthest removed from traditional monotheist faith continued to speak its language. Reli gion after the French Revolution After the Republican government had suppressed all traditional forms of public worship in France, Napoleon’s Concordat with the Catholic 309 Church, signed in 1801, was an armistice in the battle between Church and state, even though it was not the end of the war. The Catholic Church in France renounced its earlier possessions but regained control over its sanctuaries. The clergy were to receive salaries and pensions from the state, like other state functionaries. The smoldering conflict flared up again when the emperor held Pope Pius VII, who was unwilling to serve his political plans, captive in Savona. This incident, in which Napoleon overplayed his hand, caused an unexpected outpouring of sympathy for the Roman pontiff. Ultramontanism suddenly gained a strong foothold in the traditionally Gallican French Church. In 1819, Joseph de Maistre in Du pape proposed a global theocracy of European nations under the pope as the only means of halting the continuing political chaos. His appeal, so totally at odds with the principles that had guided French society for the past thirty years, received an amazingly positive response. It even initiated a new school of thought in France, which, with the conservative political thinker Louis-Gabriel de Bonald and later with L.E. Bautain, raised tradition to the level of supreme authority in matters of faith. This traditionalism would later be condemned by the pope, who was unwilling to deprive revelation of its philosophical support as well as of his own interpretation of it. An early and unusually eloquent advocate of papal supremacy was the convert Félicité de Lamennais (1782–1854). Before he embraced the liberal ideas for which he eventually was condemned by the Church, Lamennais defended both the pope and the ecclesiastical tradition as intransigently as Joseph de Maistre had done. In his Essai sur l’indifférence (1817) he rejected the supreme authority of abstract reason in favor of the universal wisdom of the human race, as incorporated in religion and its traditional institutions. Chateaubriand also appealed to the historical wisdom of the Catholic Church and to the beauty of the culture she had introduced in France. His Génie du Christianisme revived the sagging spirits of French Catholics after the Revolution. That event, which until recently had dominated all minds, appeared less significant if viewed from the historical perspective of many centuries. Under the two Bourbon kings, the Church in France regained much of its previous power. A number of laws practically restored Catholicism as the state religion. Yet the ideas of the Enlightenment gradually repos310 | syntheses of roman tic thought sessed the intellectual elite, to a point where the period between 1800 and 1840 has been called l’âge des secondes lumières (the time of the second Enlightenment).1 Religiously, the Restoration was a period of little inspiration , much opportunism, and nearly universal hypocrisy. The July Revolution of 1830 ended the reactionary, clergy-ridden regime of the Bourbons. Some of the Church’s legislative successes and all of its problems survived the...

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