Myths for a desacralized age is exactly right. They gave us a template of what it means to be heroic in an industrial, secular society. Not always the most achievable or productive template. We can't all be pastoral poets or byronic vampires or revolutionaries, but they did show it was possible to stand for something, even in the post enlightenment era.
Interestingly, I'm reading Karen Armstrong's A History of God right now, and she devotes a significant amount of space to the English Romantics. None of them were really atheists in our sense of the world, but they all pushed for an otherworldly, ethereal part of existence that was not related to Christianity or God in the conventional sense of the time. In that way, they did pave the way for contemporaries atheism, but also for the spiritualism that so many religious believers embrace
Myths for a desacralized age is exactly right. They gave us a template of what it means to be heroic in an industrial, secular society. Not always the most achievable or productive template. We can't all be pastoral poets or byronic vampires or revolutionaries, but they did show it was possible to stand for something, even in the post enlightenment era.
Interestingly, I'm reading Karen Armstrong's A History of God right now, and she devotes a significant amount of space to the English Romantics. None of them were really atheists in our sense of the world, but they all pushed for an otherworldly, ethereal part of existence that was not related to Christianity or God in the conventional sense of the time. In that way, they did pave the way for contemporaries atheism, but also for the spiritualism that so many religious believers embrace