ABSTRACT
Romanticism, confronting a world it views as disenchanted into mere clockwork by the mechanisms of the Enlightenment, proposes its reenchantment by a new priest: the poet. It dialectically reacts against yet also reiterates the Enlightenment critique of religion, relocating it outside all churches and assigning god-like attributes to the poet-priest. The detachment of a notion of Spirit from the idea of 'religion' in the West- a key step in the emergence of the idea of a 'spirituality' that is not necessarily churched- is often described as precipitated by the post-Darwinian crisis of some of the key elements of orthodox Christian belief. Spirituality becomes the religion of multiculturalism, deeming all faiths equally valid. The revaluation of values inaugurated by Romanticism continues throughout the nineteenth century. Herzog's explicit neo-Romanticism is merely the extreme case of cinema's general Romanticism, its addiction to dreams.
