Religion Page 1 of 27 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Duke University; date: 04 May 2016 Religion Thomas Pfau The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism Edited by Paul Hamilton Abstract and Keywords This chapter studies religious, moral, and political thought that, between 1780 and 1840, generated some of the most profound and searching critiques of modernity which partially overlap with with the genesis of modern conservatism. The central objective is to identify several strands of conservative thought that emerge in the course of the Romantic era. Of these, one is indeed genuinely reactionary, implicitly secular, and Machiavellian in nature (Burke, Gentz, Müller, de Maistre), even as its exponents strenuously advocate the rights of the church and, in some instances, overtly espouse ultramontane positions. Of greater intellectual substance (and especially pertinent to my argument) will be another strand that draws on Catholic, pre-modern theology in order to undertake a comprehensive critique of political, economic, and moral assumptions and aspirations of the modern era to the French Revolution and beyond. Keywords: Catholicism, Conservatism, modernity, counter-modernity, theology, critique T O explore the diverse and unsettled religious landscape of the Romantic era, we might want to begin by offering some working definition, however provisional, of Romanticism. For only so, it would seem, can we avoid sliding into a purely immanent treatment that considers specific religious movements, practices, and controversies strictly on their own terms—a procedure sure to deprive us of a genuinely critical standpoint. The matter is rather more complicated, however, since to suppose that the contours and claims of Romantic religious culture ought to be assessed from an extrinsic, ‘critical’ point of view would itself appear to beg the central question. For it presupposes (but notably fails to argue the point) that Romanticism and, indeed, our own historical moment today must abide by the (Kantian) Enlightenment axiom that the only legitimate form of knowledge is that of ‘critique’. In his attempts at delimiting the scope and authority of rationalist Print Publication Date: Jan 2016 Subject: Literature, Literary Studies - 19th Century Online Publication Date: May 2016 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199696383.013.37 Oxford Handbooks Online