Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature

Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature is a work by M.H. Abrams (1971).

Core claims

• Abrams does not merely trace Romantic secularization of Christian narrative; he demonstrates that the Romantics performed a structural transposition of salvation history into a psychology of consciousness—making them, in effect, the first depth psychologists without a clinical apparatus.
• The spiral pattern Abrams identifies in Romantic thought—unity, fall, return at a higher level—is not a literary motif but the deep grammar that later animates Jung’s individuation, Hillman’s soul-making, and Edinger’s ego-Self axis, revealing Romanticism as the unacknowledged philosophical infrastructure of the entire depth psychological tradition.
• By naming the project “natural supernaturalism,” Abrams exposes the precise mechanism by which the modern West preserved religious experience after the death of God: not by abandoning transcendence but by relocating it within the creative imagination, a move whose consequences extend directly through Nietzsche to Freud and Jung.

Related questions

• How does Abrams’s account of the Romantic imagination as a redemptive faculty compare to Jung’s concept of the transcendent function, and does Hillman’s critique in Re-Visioning Psychology of ego-centered wholeness implicitly reject the very spiral structure Abrams identifies?
• Abrams traces the Romantic “circuitous journey” from Plotinus through Hegel to Wordsworth; how does this pattern map onto Edinger’s model of the ego-Self axis in Ego and Archetype, and where do the two schemas diverge?
• Tarnas in Cosmos and Psyche positions depth psychology at the intersection of Enlightenment and Romanticism; does Abrams’s thesis suggest that this intersection is more Romantic than Tarnas allows, and what would that imply for the scientific aspirations of Jungian psychology?

See also

• Library page: /library/myth-and-religion/abrams-natural-supernaturalism-tradition/

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