Reardon - Religion In The Age Of Romanticism

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Reardon (Who)

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Skeptical Anglican and "distinguished modern church historian; he taught at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne from its inauguration in 1963 until his retirement in 1978, when he vacated the post of Head of the Department of Religious Studies.

His special field was religious thought in the 19th century, and he was also an authority on the Modernist movement in the Roman Catholic Church which flourished briefly until its condemnation by pope Pius X in 1907. Later Reardon wrote an historical study of Reformation theology and a number of books on philosophical theology."

Ultimately distanced himself from orthodox Christian belief

Reardon was essentially an empiricist in outlook - his favourite Victorian was Matthew Arnold - and he disliked all ideological thinking, whether religious or secular.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1514121/The-Reverend-Bernard-Reardon.html

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Reardon (Review-Summary)

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"The present work describes aspects of Christianity depicted by some of the romanticist thinkers in Germany, Italy, and France during the regime of spiritual turmoil lasting from the French Revolution until after the revolutions of 1848. The continental romanticists expressed both "the urges to conserve and to change" that were so potent at the time (ix); they sought to discern and depict the resolution of the prevailing tensions between the old order's heteronomous and arbitrary institutions and doctrine and the new order's autonomous, rational moralism and politics. Their view was that the path toward a livable and Christian future lay through an intuitive grasp of "the totality of things in their essential unity" (146), the evidence of which is already available to the mind in its own essential character as intuitive activity. Romanticists often saw this path as marked out by a primal revelation containing the one unitary essence of human cultural and Christian tradition. This divine "Idea" of the essential unity of things was to be fulfilled in a society of humans who possess a heightened individual awareness of Being, in a repristinated Church Universal and/or in an exemplary ethos at once national and spiritual. In the future lay a congruence of institutional/juridical and moral authority, of liberty and law. Along this path lay philosophical Idealism, with its denial of ultimate spiritual divisions, hints of pantheism, a nostalgia for a universal and united Christian communion; thus, notable conversions to Roman Catholicism, for some Catholics the demand for an ascendant papacy, Christian nationalism; authoritarianism in belief, morality and political economy. Reardon finds "fundamental ambiguities" (174, at passim) in the ideas of his subjects."

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Reardon (thesis)

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Despite multifarious manifestations romanticism represented a via media between traditional dogmatism and sterile rationalism by conserving the attitudes of religious orthodoxy but dispensing with its forms and meanings.


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..."religious interpretation of the cosmos, or at any rate such a spiritual view of life and the world as to leave room for the preservation of religious attitudes, though the forms of Christian orthodoxy might have to be radically modified or even abandoned" (vii).

So, reinterpretation of the spirituality and the world to maintain the attitudes of Christianity, while possibly changing its forms.

Thus the term "God" could be a symbol for the Absolute, WorldSoul, etc.; anything except the orthodox interpretation of God.

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Reardon (via media)

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" . . . reaction against both rationalism and orthodox dogma, with their common assumption of a duality of worlds, the natural and the supernatural, the her and the hereafter, the realm fo humanity and the realm of God" (4).

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Reardon (romanticism and reason)

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Romanticism was a reaction both to pre-enlightenment orthodoxy and enlightenment rationalism. The former exercised undue external authority on the individual through static, historically-conditioned religious forms. The latter applied reason too narrowly to the individual so as not to account for the totality of human experience.

Romanticism built on rationalism's critique of orthodoxy's, but went beyond 18th C. rationalist doctrine to a view of religion that accounted for all of human experience.

"In the process it was both objectivized - i.e. seen as a historical and social phenomenon - in a manner hitherto unconsidered, and subjectivized - i.e. its primary 'objectivities,' the content of an alleged divine revelation, interpreted with reference to the psychological needs and moral aspirations of the believer himself" (viii).

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Reardon (the essence of romanticism)

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"The essence of romanticism . . . lies in the inexpugnable feeling that the finite is not self-explanatory and self-justifying, but that behind it and within it—shining, as it were, through it—there is always an infinite 'beyond' " (p. 3).

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Reardon (characteristics of romanticism)

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pantheism: R. is the infinite in the finite, which essentially destroys the distinctions between the objective and subjective. The universe is divine and the divine is the universe, is the totality of being. R. metaphysics is all pervasive.

sense of history and continuity: nature and history are manifestations of the infinite; therefore, history is not the reflection on objective facts or events, but the divine made manifest through time, with particular emphasis on the present experience [hence the R. emphasis on history, but in a constructive, not destructive way]

subjectivity and personalism: religious truth is not an objective datum; it exists subjectively. The ego, which is situated in nature and the world becomes the medium of truth. The individual is unique and therefore the ego is the measure of reality. This reality of the divine as nature and history is knowledge gained through intution, presumably unmediated.

aestheticism: the individual's affections and imaginations offer the clearest notions of reality and truth.

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Reardon (Schleiermacher and R.'s thesis)

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Pastor of Church of the Triune God (united Lutheran and Reformed congregation).

Setting: K. conceives religion as moral consciousness. K. upheld religion on terms of man's experience of religion as a moral being. This autonomous criterion of religion severed ties to authority external to man. This growing autonomy and self-authority moved from a view of God over nature to self-confident humanism. Religion became irrelevant. S., thus, presents a fresh interpretation of religion to those who had come to despise it.

Where Kant wanted to ground religion in practical reason, S. grounded religion before and beyond rationality in a pre-reflective consciousness that exists before knowing and willing (34).

The pre-reflective consciousness is the Gefühl, the immediate feeling or intuition of the Infinite or Eternal. Religion is immediate consciousness of the Whole, not knowledge (orthodoxy) or moral action (Kant).

S. rejuvenates religion from irrelevance not by reaffirming orthodox Christianity, but instead by assigning new meanings to traditional terms in order to adapt to modern culture. God and the world become indistinct, revelation becomes immediate experience, religion is self-consciousness of God, Christ is the the highest of those who have god-consciousness, redemption is growth of recognition of absolute dependence on God.

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Reardon (Hegel and R.'s thesis)

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Lutheran architect of Absolute Idealism. Religion is knowledge (contra Schleiermacher). H. is a product of Enlightenment rationalism, but a romantic in his unification of the finite and infinite, of the object and subject in the realm of history.

God is reinterpreted as Absolute Mind who has himself as its object. Christians can apprehend God through speculative reflection of (1) God in himself, (2) God alienated from his creation, and (3) God unified to to the universe. Reality is this repeated alienation and eventual unity of the Geist or Spirit with itself within history. Christianity's myths provide the best Vorstellungen or representations of this process, and the Trinity is the fundamental manifestation of this reality. In the Son, God the Father objectifying himself, vice versa. He is every identifying himself and differentiating himself. Sin is the process of alienation and redemption is reunification of the Geist to the universe. Thus, redemption is certain.

Only through rational speculation can we understand this process. Philosophy helps authenticate the Geist's self-consciousness through speculative, rational reflection. An interpretation of Christianity, through its historic forms persists and finds value in a rationalistic environment, however, its forms and meanings change.

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Reardon (Schelling and R.'s thesis)

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Lutheran, roommate and eventual rival of Hegel. Follower of Fichte until he rejects Fichte's absolute subjectivism.

All knowledge begins with the Absolute Ego, the ultimate real, or pure being. The Absolute Ego is known through intuition. The subject and object are unified. Nothing exists except Ego.

Using religious language "we may say that God has his existence in and through his progressive revelation in human experience, so that man is himself the cause or ground of God's being. But since the process occurs only in the Absolute, ans is in fact identificable with the Absolute, it is no less true tos ay that God is self-caused , arriving at self-knowledge by the actualizing of his inherent potentiality" (101). S. advances God's immanentism.

"God is an aspect of the Absolute rather than the whole of it" (101). Although beyond comprehension, he is revealed in history or three epochs: Nature (the ancient world with naturalistic religions), Fate (late antiquity), and Providence (with Christianity). In Providence God became objective in Christ. The Bible is superstitious and opposed to reason.

Religion is both myth that comes from spontaneous apprehension of God, and revelation, God imparting himself to mankind.

Christianity manifest the inner truth of religion.

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Reardon (German Catholics and R.'s thesis)

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Well into the 19th C. catholic theologians and philosophers like Hermes and Günther perpetuated the Aufklärung (Enlightenment), despite their efforts to conform to the romantic style of present thinking. They relied on rational proofs. Other romantics rose up.

Franz von Baader--Reardon doesn't expound any significant romantic ideas.

Johann Drey--wanted to return to Medieval catholicism when theology was threaded with the Christian life. He wanted to return to a time when sentiment was primary over reason. "The true Spirit of Catholicism Drey claimed was mystical, seeing the finite always in the context o the divine infinity and eternity" (136). Protestants errantly set aside tradition and based authority on the subjective interpretation of the Bible. Yet, RCs divorced religion from experience.