Early German Romanticism sought to respond to a comprehensive sense of spiritual crisis that characterised the late eighteenth century. The study demonstrates how the Romantics sought to bring together the new post-Kantian idealist philosophy with the inheritance of the realist Platonic-Christian tradition. With idealism they continued to champion the individual, while from Platonism they took the notion that all reality, including the self, participated in absolute being. This insight was expressed, not in the language of theology or philosophy, but through aesthetics, which recognised the potentiality of all creation, including artistic creation, to disclose the divine. In explicating the religious vision of Romanticism, this study offers a new historical appreciation of the movement, and furthermore demonstrates its importance for our understanding of religion today.

Introduction
Part 1 Romantic Religion: Transcendence for an age of Immanence
1. The Romantic Vocation
2. Realism, Idealism and the Transcendentals
3. Re- Contextualising Romantism: The Problems of Subjectivity
4. Re- Contextualising Romanticism: The Questions of Religion
Part 2 Give me a Place to Stand: The Absolute at the Turn of the Ninteenth Century
5. The Immanent Absolute: Spinoza and Fichte
6. Jacobi and the Transcendence of the Absolute
7. Herder and the Immanent Presence of the Transcedent Absolute
8. Moritz and the Aesthetics of the Absolute
9. Platonism and the Transcendent Absolute
10. Schlegel: The Poetic Search for an Unknown God
11. Holderlin: Becoming and Dissolution in the World
12. Novalis: The Desire to be at home in the World