Not just about Bavaria

"Conservative Millenarians" is a book by Paul Gottfried about the Romantic experience in Bavaria. In other words, the book deals with certain religious and philosophical developments in early 19th century Bavaria, a kingdom in southern Germany.

Sounds like an obscure, boring subject, does it not?

Actually, "Conservative Millenarians" has a much broader scope. It deals with the Romantic movement as a whole, especially with the influence of esoteric ideas on German Romanticism. The relationship between the Romantics and the Catholic Church is covered, as is their political ideas and entanglements. Gottfried also describes the Awakening, a pan-European religious revival after the Napoleonic Wars.

The Bavarian setting is no co-incidence, however. Many well-known Romantics lived or taught in Bavaria, and the kingdom was rocked by both the Awakening and various conflicts between Catholics and supporters of the Enlightenment. I always wondered where the Romantics got their curious religious-philosophical ideas from, so strikingly similar to Hermeticism. Apparently, a Hermetic-occultist subculture existed in Germany since the Renaissance. It's main exponents before the Romantic period were the Rosicrucians. While no leading Romantic thinker joined an actual Rosicrucian lodge, their ideas and agendas were often strikingly similar. For some reason, Gottfried never investigates the relationship between Rosicrucians and Freemasons. Unless I'm mistaken, some Romantics were Masons.

The author asks some hard questions about how "conservative" all these people really were. In many ways, the Counter-Enlightenment seems to have been a parallel development to the Enlightenment, not just a counter-reaction to it. The Rosicrucians originally recruited both opponents and proponents of the Enlightenment, before hardening to a conservative sect. The anti-Enlightenment mystic Karl von Eckhartshausen was heavily indebted to Kant, whom he admired quite openly. The Awakening in Bavaria was to some extent plebeian, and its leaders got in trouble with the Catholic hierarchy. The author also points out that to many intellectual seekers (including the Bavarian king Ludwig I), Catholicism and Romanticism was pretty much the same thing. A final chapter is devoted to Franz von Baader, who attempted to create a conservative-worker alliance and called for Christian labour unions!

When the Enlightenment challenged Christian confessionalism, it simultaneously unleashed the Hermetic-occultist stream. With Church interference gone, the stage was set for Pietistic revivals, as well. (Of course, similar processes had been at work already during the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation.) Both Romantics and Pietists were opposed to Enlightenment rationalism, but in their own way, they were the unnatural children of the Enlightenment itself. Even their millenarianism was probably a mimic of Enlightenment belief in progress. Hence the strange phenomenon of "conservative millenarians".

To sum up, "Conservative millenarians" is an excellent overview both of Romanticism in general, and of its Bavarian experience.