The German Genius

fullest expression in Germany. 1
    The dimensions of this renaissance need underlining. In 1832 Wilhelm Schlegel said that his own century had produced more knowledge of India than “the twenty-one centuries since Alexander the Great.” (Schlegel was, like Jones, a linguistic prodigy. He knew Arabic and Hebrew by the time he was fifteen and, at seventeen, when he was still a pupil of Herder’s, he lectured on mythology.) The German translations of the Bhagavad Gita and Gita Govinda, published in the first decade of the nineteenth century, had a tremendous influence on Friedrich Schleiermacher, Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, Schiller, Novalis, Goethe, and, eventually, Arthur Schopenhauer.
    The poetry of the Bhagavad Gita, its wisdom, and its complexity and richness brought about a major change in attitudes toward the culture of India and the East. In Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier , Friedrich Schlegel discussed the metaphysical traditions of India on an equal footing with Greek and Latin ideas. This was more important than we may understand now, because, against a background of deism and doubt, such an approach allowed that the Indians—the inhabitants of the far-off East—had as thorough a knowledge and belief in the true God as did Europeans. This was quite at variance with the teachings of the church. The sheer richness of Sanskrit also went against the Enlightenment belief that languages had begun in poverty and grown more elaborate. This helped to launch—in Germany first, and then elsewhere, as we have seen—the great age of philology. Many religious souls at the time remained convinced that the earliest (and most perfect) language had to be Hebrew, or something like it, because it was the language of the chosen people. Franz Bopp (1791–1867), who had studied Sanskrit manuscripts in Paris and London, turned his back on these preconceptions and showed how complex Sanskrit was even thousands of years ago, throwing doubt on the very idea that Hebrew was the original tongue. Friedrich Schelling took the ideas of Jones one step further. In his 1799 lecture, Philosophie der Mythologie , he proposed that, just as there must have been a “mother tongue,” so there must have been one mythology in the world shared by all peoples.
    One final, fundamental way in which the discovery deeply affected people was in the notion of “becoming.” If religions were at different stages of development, and yet were all linked in some mysterious way—only glimpsed at so far—did this mean that God, instead of just being , could himself be said to be becoming , undergoing a process of Bildung ? God came to be seen, not in an anthropomorphic sense, but as an abstract metaphysical entity.
    A N A LTERNATIVE TO C LASSICISM AND THE O RIGINAL L ANGUAGE OF E DEN
     
    The Oriental renaissance played a vital role in the origins of the Romantic movement. The strongest link was between Indic studies and the German form of Romanticism. Indic studies proved popular in Germany for broadly nationalistic reasons. It seemed to German scholars of the time that the Aryan/Indian/Persian tradition linked with the original barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire from the East and, together with the myths of the Scandinavians, provided an alternative (more northerly) tradition to the Greek and Latin Mediterranean classicism that had dominated European life and thought for the previous 2,500 years. Furthermore, the discovery of similarities between Buddhism and Christianity, together with the Hindu ideas of a world soul, seemed to the Germans to indicate a primitive form of revelation, the original form, out of which Judaism and Christianity might have grown, but which meant that God’s real purpose was hidden somewhere in the Eastern religions. Such a view implies that there was a single God for all mankind, that there was a world mythology, the understanding of which would be fundamental. In Herder’s terms, this ancestral mythology was “the childhood dreams of our species.”
    A further factor that influenced Romanticism was that the original Indian scriptures were written in poetry. The idea became popular, therefore, that poetry was “the mother tongue,” that verse was the original way in which wisdom was transmitted from God to mankind (“Man is an animal that sings”). Poetry, it was thought, was the original language of Eden. 2
    The range of poets, writers, and philosophers who came under the influence of these