From Aesthetic Religion to Universal History of Salvation

Friedrich Schlegel’s Catholic Turn and the Metamorphoses of His Philosophy of History

Abstract

The present article aims to analyze the metamorphoses of Friedrich Schlegel's conceptions of history following his conversion to Catholicism in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Through a comparative reading of his works Ideen (1799), Vorlesungen über die neuere Geschichte (1811), and Philosophie der Geschichte (1828), as well as of the impact and influence of Novalis’s Europa (1799) on his philosophy of history, the study seeks to understand how Schlegel’s intellectual trajectory evolves from a view of human history as the culmination of an aesthetic religion—characteristic of early Romanticism—to the formulation of a Universal History of Salvation grounded in theological premises. In this trajectory, the article examines the shift from an immanent philosophy of history, centered on human aesthetic experience, to a providentialist vision of history as the revelation and fulfillment of the divine plan. This transition not only expresses the author’s Catholic inflection but also exemplifies the epistemological crisis of modern thought in the face of the loss of universal metaphysical foundations. The research is situated within the field of the Theory of History, problematizing the relations between Romanticism, religion, and the philosophy of history, and contributing to the understanding of continuities and ruptures between modern historical thought and Christian historical thought at the beginning of the nineteenth century.