The romantic school of theology, literature, and music was characterized by several common commitments. In the first place, a thoroughgoing subjectivity characterized the movement. Truth was seen to be a function of the inner world of ineffable self-consciousness. The romantics stressed the aesthetic rather than the intellectual side of human nature. Human imagination, feeling, and intuition disclose that there is more to reality than a mechanical universe operating according to fixed physical laws. In this regard, Wordsworth could speak of “sensations sweet, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.” The almost sensual beauty of the natural world was an important theme in romanticism. Mountains, rivers, seas, clouds, and flowers represent a richly variegated phenomenon pulsating with life and splendor.
Secondly, the romantic spirit focused on the element of mystery in experience. The summum bonum was posited in life’s intangible realities that defy rational formulation. The romantic commitment involved an intuitive sense of nature’s grand mysteries.
Romanticism, thirdly, played on the fringes of pantheism. God was envisaged as “the vital Spirit immanent in all things, the creative eros in which everything moves and has its being.” The Infinite was perceived in every impulse of human consciousness, in every relationship and action.
Finally, following the older deism, the romantic movement conceived of religion as variegated and diverse in its manifold expressions. Whatever the external shape of his creed or religion, man’s most fundamental drive was to be in communion with the infinite Spirit of the universe.
From: General Revelation: Historical Views and Contemporary Issues by Bruce A. Demarest (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1982), p. 94.
