The Birth of Aestheticized Religion out of the Counter-Enlightenment Attraction to Catholicism Jonathan Blake Fine * Department of European Languages and Studies, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA In this article, I argue for the consideration of the Counter-Enlightenment engagement with Catholicism as an important yet mostly unexplored influence on the development of early Romantic theories of aesthetics, religion, and the characteristic intermingling of the two called Kunstreligion [art-religion]. I specifically trace the reception of a poem by the mystic Johann Kaspar Lavater and show how Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, and Novalis portray a similar ecstatic synesthesia accompanying Catholic religious practices in their own works. In the missives exchanged between Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg, more commonly known by the Latinate ancestral demonym Novalis that he adopted as his pen name, one particular project, starting in 1798, comes to the fore: namely, the need to construct a new religion. This new religion, replete with an ersatz sacred text and reconstructed clergy, would replace the desiccated Protestantism in which they, like the other members of the group of Fru ¨hromantiker [Early Romantics], had come of age. However, a fitting name for this new faith would not arrive until 1799, when the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who, although he resided in Berlin, was nonethe- less a corresponding member of the circle of Romantics in Jena, published his U ¨ ber die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Vera ¨chtern [On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers]. In this collection of speeches, which were composed to revitalize belief for a generation that had abandoned faith after succumbing to the Enlightenment predilection for rationality, Schleiermacher foresaw what Heinrich Detering has recently characterized as a convergence between art and religion. However, Detering notes that, as an upstanding Protestant cleric, Schleiermacher’s emphasis is clearly on the latter component of this hybrid invention (18). In the middle of a lengthy disqui- sition that proffers religiosity as a panacea for the insecurity characteristic of fledgling modernity, Schleiermacher adopts a markedly concupiscent tone to describe this con- vergence. He writes, Religion und Kunst stehen nebeneinander wie zwei befreundete Seelen deren innere Ver- wandschaft, ob sie sie gleich ahnden, ihnen doch noch unbekannt ist. Freundliche Worte und Ergießungen des Herzens schweben ihnen immer auf den Lippen und kehren immer # 2015 Taylor & Francis * Email: Jonathan.B.Fine@gmail.com European Romantic Review, 2015 Vol. 26, No. 1, 43 – 57, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2014.989696