Religion and transmutation, a new look on romantic religiosity

Based on the painting "The Monk by the sea" by Caspar David Friedrich, Françoise Bonardel questions the common interpretation of this work which is supposed to express loneliness of man in a world which is not warranted by the faith. According to her, this lonely monk, standing on a beach between sky and sea, instead of embodying man loneliness in a world sealed by the death of God, would be the emblem of an aspiration towards a double infinite, aspiration of "romantic religiosity". Underlying a double movement: first, unconditional opening to infinite and, at the same time, return to the individual recognized as only pivot of appropriation of this opening.

At the same time, Friedrich Von Schlegel, consider that the vital center can be found by a human being who achieved his interior accomplishment. In romantic religiosity this accomplishment is the condition of transmutation. A transmutation which aims at, like hermeticism, "to the miracle of a single thing".  Facing the indulgence of a universe seen according to the materialistic optic, romantic religiosity continues and adapt the vision of the world important to Hermeticism. It tends to go beyond the opposition between faith and reason insisting on the interior experience and on the gnostic knowledge which emanates from.
The fundamental question for Françoise Bonardel is to know if the fact of awakening and exalting the sens and the taste of the infinite leads to a pantheism or if this awakening can contribute to a reevaluation to Christianism.

But how the romantics negotiate the passage, always risked, between instituted religion, catholic or reformed, towards an individuation of religious feeling ?
Who is the romantic chemist and what relations he had with traditional alchemy ? Why did the romantics want the return to primordial chaos ?

Answer by Françoise Bonardel in this 70-minutes conference organized by Jean-Pierre Laurant for  Politica Hermetica.