somehow. But unlike Schiller, he does not believe that art is, above all,
supposed to replace religion in the sphere ofmorals. For Schlegel, the
weakness of traditional Christian faith in modernity does not amount to
a loss of moral guidance and orientation that art has to compensate. Art
is not an instrument for the moral and political self-education of the
enlightened human race, as Schiller suggests. If art is to replace tradi-
tional religion, its task is immense: Religion does not only give us a
moral outlook on human life but a whole worldview, a ‘mythology’, an
understanding of world and nature as a whole, that is including human
culture. So, if modern art is to replace traditional religion, it has to
develop into some kind of Kunstreligion, an artistic religion itself.^18 It
has to develop a new worldview, a ‘new mythology’. Schiller follows
Kant in reducing religion to morals. Schlegel and Novalis reject this
move. For them, religion is both metaphysics and morals, and so must
be any Kunstreligion. What we moderns lack, according to Schlegel, is
not morals but “a mythological view of nature”.^19 This is the major task
for the new mythology.
The term ‘new mythology’ sounds rather utopian. However, the kind
of mythology that the early romantics were talking about is not meant to
be absolutely new, either. The idea was rather, first, to unite Christian
faith with ancient, especially Greek, thought and, second, to unite this
new, ‘mythological’ way of thinking with modern philosophy and sci-
ence. What F. Schlegel intended was a kind of reunion of science and reli-
gion in one, overarching project that he labelled ‘progressive universal
poetry’ (progressive Universalpoesie). The term poetry is well chosen
here because Schlegel believed that only the arts—and especially
poetry—were capable of overcoming the incommensurability between
the language of religion and the language of science. If this sounds even
more fantastic we have to keep in mind some peculiarities of the modern
novel. The modern novel, as the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and
Schleiermacher frequently remark in the Athenäumfragments and else-
where, is not a homogenous literary genre. Novels are formally complex.
They consist of narrative passages as well as dramatic and even lyrical
ones. Some novels contain diaries, philosophical fragments and even
whole scientific treatises. Sterne’s Tristram Shandyand Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meisterare striking cases in point. These novels and Shakespeare’s plays
were those most extensively discussed by the early Jena Romantics.^20 But
one might think of Cervantes’s Don Quijoteor Diderot’s Jacques le fatal-
isteas well. The romantics did not regard the formal complexity of the
modern novel as evidence of a lack of coherence and harmony, but rather
as a powerful expression of the possibility of unifying heterogenous60 Henning Tegtmeyer