Political Romanticism - Cathedral of Personality

"It is only in an individualistically disintegrated society that the aesthetically productive subject could shift the intellectual center into itself, only in a bourgeois world that isolates the individual in the domain of the intellectual, makes the individual its own point of reference, and imposes upon it the entire burden that otherwise was hierarchically distributed among different functions in a social order. In this society, it is left to the private individual to be his own priest. But not only that. Because of the central significance and consistency of the religious, it is also left to him to be his own poet, his own philosopher, his own king, and his own master builder in the cathedral of his personality. The ultimate roots of romanticism and the romantic phenomenon lie in the private priesthood. If we consider the situation from aspects such as these, then we should not always focus only on the good-natured pastoralists. On the contrary, we must also see the despair that lies behind the romantic movement — regardless of whether this despair becomes lyrically enraptured with God and the world on a sweet, moonlit night, utters a lament as the world-weariness and the sickness of the century, pessimistically lacerates itself, or frenetically plunges into the abyss of instinct and life. We must see the three persons whose deformed visages penetrate the colorful romantic veil: Byron, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche, the three high priests, and at the same time the three sacrificial victims, of this private priesthood."

- Schmitt, Political Romanticism