![]() ![]() Some writers who are well-known as Romantics also firmly believe in salvation through Christ, such as the German romantic Novalis and the nineteenth-century Scottish fantasy writer George MacDonald whom he influenced, and whose novel Lilith is the subject of this essay. But in fact there is an overlap between the two areas. Simonson concludes that the two are opposites, "radical discontinuities" (Simonson 9). Simonson's Radical Discontinuities: American Romanticism and Christian Consciousness, which traces the two ideals, Jonathan Edwards' Christ versus Ralph Waldo Emerson's romantic mysticism, throughout American literature. ![]() ![]() These issues are explored in detail in Harold P. Looking at its welter of philosophy, science, and myth, one wonders if there could be a Christian Romantic, and what it would be: how could one explore the self and celebrate it, while at the same time suspecting it, finding its nature tending toward evil? Romanticism is often considered the opposite of Christianity in the same way it is thought of as the opposite of Classicism: order versus disorder, discipline versus freedom, exaltation of the self versus obedience to the law of God. Few would consider it a Christian work, yet its mysticism wells in part from Christian sources. GOETHE'S Faust is such an odd, spectacular mix of theology and Romanticism. ![]()
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