The idea of the world soul is a distinctive Platonic doctrine. It is particularly significant in late Antique thought, the 12th century Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance. It is transmitted via the Cambridge Platonists, mystical pietism, Cabbala and the Spinoza revival to German Romantic period and the great age of Russian literature. Historically, it has been either loosely associated with or even identified with the Divine Sophia. This Divine Wisdom itself has a complex reception history, and constitutes a conspicuous feminine image of the Divine, and is relevant to recent discussions about the intellectual inheritance of Western Christian thought and the ecological crisis.

This chapter explores the protean character of Christian Platonism in the Romantic Age. If the Enlightenment was frequently shaped by a critique of dogma, tradition and superstition, the Romantics were concerned with the loss of culture, the exaltation of abstract reason, and a longing for the transcendent. Platonism offered a means for revitalizing Christianity, caught between the cultured despisers of religion in the Enlightenment, and the annexation of creation to the mechanistic thought of the emergent natural sciences.

The predominant position of nineteenth-century philosophy of religion was conciliatory. Its main figures set out to confront, absorb and pass beyond the radical Enlightenment's critical assault on Europe's religious and metaphysical tradition by developing philosophical syntheses that, to a great extent, assimilated the main lines and presuppositions of these critiques, while simultaneously preserving the most important features of Europe's religious inheritance. This spirit of conciliation is as evident in the metaphysical systems of mainstream German idealism at the opening of the century, as it is in the neo-Kantian inspired division between fact and value that dominated philosophy of religion at its close. In the long term, however, this synthesis turned out to be as fragile as it was subtle; although it managed to weather the stormy changes and extremes that buffeted it for the greater part of the century, its elements were eventually torn apart by the extreme intellectual and cultural conditions that emerged with the killing fields of the First World War.

THE RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT: SPINOZA AND HUME

The Enlightenment inaugurated a fundamental upheaval in the European tradition of philosophical reflection on religion, for it was during this period that philosophers developed perspectives on the theological inheritance of the West, and methods of analysing its main themes, that dispensed with the assumptions and sources of the great works of late medieval scholasticism, such as the Disputationes Metaphysicae (Metaphysical disputations) of Francisco Suàrez (1548–1617) (see Vol. 3, Ch. 6).

British security, power and imperial expansion between Waterloo and 1914 meant that many English writers saw the period as a golden age. However, even Englishmen were deeply worried throughout this period about radical upheavals. Europe was convulsed and lacerated by revolutions and wars throughout the nineteenth century: the unsatisfactory rule of the reactionary Metternich; the revolutions of 1848, followed by the unification of Germany and Italy; the Prussian-Austrian and Franco-Prussian wars, up to the diplomatic tensions which eventually incited the First World War. The industrial revolution, vast improvements in travel and communication, and the great prosperity of the latter part of the nineteenth century all coincided with a shift in thought towards understanding those natural forces that were being utilised so dramatically. Philosophy and theology moved from an Idealistic-Romantic to a more materialistic and pragmatic ethos: the impact of the pessimistic doctrines and sombre spirit of Charles Darwin upon this development is undeniable. The apocalyptic mood of the early twentieth-century mind has many precedents in the previous century.

Art and theology were more explicitly related in the nineteenth century than ever before in the history of Christianity. Schleiermacher was at the centre of the Romantic movement in Berlin; Tractarianism was forged in the atmosphere imbued with the nostalgia for medieval Christendom in the novels of Walter Scott; and Ruskin and Morris pursued the explicitly religious aesthetic of Novalis, Chateaubriand and Scott. Artistically the beginning of the period is profoundly visionary Romantic – influenced by the noumenal seas, mountains and lakes envisaged in the Romanticism of the Ancient Mariner, through the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, to the fin de siècle Impressionists between the cafes of Montmartre and the great boulevards of Proustian Paris.